I can comment on these rumors, because that's all they are to me: rumors. I have no inside knowledge on this. But there has been a growing cacophony of noise that JBoss is going to be acquired. What started out as an HP rumor, turned into a Novell rumor, and has comfortably settled in to stay as an Oracle rumor.

So, let's just pretend Oracle buys JBoss. What would be the result?

On the Oracle side, it's a chance to shore up the company's open source credentials. It's also the opportunity to pillage IBM, something which Oracle is wont to do. (JBoss, of course, makes money for itself, but it also takes money from IBM and BEA - lots of downloads that would otherwise be forking out cash to these BigCos.) Oracle also would get the chance to lower …

BusinessWeek delivers an online-only report on Open Source this week.

Taking On the Database Giants
Can open-source upstarts compete with Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft? It's an uphill battle, but customers are starting to look at the alternatives

Nuclear War over Software Patents?Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation wants radical rule changes for open-source code. Others disagree. Can diplomacy save the day?

Linux Everywhere?
It's quickly -- and usually quietly -- spreading into more and more services and devices, from e-mail to cars

…

One reason that I'm an Apple fan is that the customer support has almost uniformly been exceptional (as was IBM's when I used to use ThinkPads). When I call Apple technical support I almost never wait on hold, always get someone who actually uses a Mac and can answer my questions, and get a fast turnaround on any repairs that are needed.

Except this time. My laptop has been stuck in technical support limbo since I called Apple on January 21. My PowerBook sat, as near as I can tell, at Apple for days before they formally began to work on it, and now they've ordered a part and I've been waiting for that to come in. I'm not happy (nor is my wife, as I'm using her PowerBook in the interim).

The experience reminded me of a recent technical support experience where I was on the delivery side. We bumped into a problem in the Alfresco system which, upon further analysis, turned out to …

I’ve never used Federated. I’m waiting for the JDBC version capabilities so I can connect to a non MySQL Server (specifically Oracle). In reading the docs, I see that the syntax includes a CONNECTION String.


CREATE TABLE federated_table (
id INT(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
other INT(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
PRIMARY KEY (id),
INDEX name (name),
INDEX other_key (other)
)
ENGINE=FEDERATED
DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
CONNECTION='mysql://root@remote_host:9306/federated/test_table';


I’m surprised in the state of the syntax for two reasons.

• First, there are hardcoded variables in the string, this sort of breaks the rules of seperating syntax from authentication specifics
…

Let’s review the problem. I’ve got this on a number of occasions and different libraries. Here are some typical error conditions.

./mysql-workbench-bin: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.5' not found (required by ./mysql-workbench-bin)
Error: Missing Dependency: libstdc++.so.6(GLIBCXX_3.4.6) is needed by package glibmm24

Special thanks to my new Guru friend Alfredo who put me on the path.

$ su -
$ cd /src/rpm
$ wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/extras/4/SRPMS/libsigc++20-2.0.11-1.src.rpm
$ rpmbuild --rebuild libsigc++20-2.0.11-1.src.rpm
$ cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/
$ rpm -Uvh libsigc++20*.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:libsigc++20            ########################################### [ 50%]
   2:libsigc++20-devel      ########################################### [100%]

Woot! It was that simple, download the rpm source, …

Since joining Alfresco in November, I've been surprised by the quality (and size) of the companies trying out our products. That said, I've also been equally surprised by the sometimes negative feedback the company gets. This is typical of any company, but the difference in open source is that you get it earlier, louder (perhaps), and more publicly (on the company's forums, etc.).

It's aggravating at times - of course as a human being, you want to hear the positives, not the negatives. But I've actually come to appreciate the "grousers" as much, and in some cases, more, than the silent majority that love us and buy from us without logging a single complaint. One example is a Fortune 1000 company that I'm not sure will ever buy from us, and has "cost us" a fair amount of time/resources. The upside of that engagement is that we've had fantastic feedback from a large company that is using Alfresco in a quasi-production environment. Excellent …

I talked with a prominent open source developer - Gianugo Rabellino of Apache/Cocoon fame - today, getting his feedback on the business models of Red Hat, Alfresco, MySQL, SugarCRM, JBoss, and others. He made it clear that the open source development community (if it, in fact, exists) strongly prefers pureplay open source projects, rather than "mudblood" open source companies.

No surprises there.

I then spoke to a group of architects (quite senior) from Fortune 500 companies at a recent OSDL advisory meeting. I asked them the same question: do you care if your software is open and, if so, how open is open? Almost universally, I was told that everything should be 100% open (and they …

Well this is low. I’ve just been spammed on my Wiki. And it was cunning, I just found it by accident. An enterprising hacker embedded into my Home Page hidden links that were not visible via normal page view, but ultimately would be via a search bot or some other means.

Even better the pricks even deleted content on one page. Here is an example diff of pages. I even posted a few days ago What makes your blood boil? and that was just an article on a news site with misleading dated information. I could see the opportunity for more blood boiling articles, but it doesn’t solve the problem. The problem is, I don’t know how to solve the problem.

So what can you do other then clean up this hacker …

Just a friendly reminder. The Columbus area MySQL User Group Meetup is scheduled for Thursday, February 2nd. I will be there and would love to see as many local MySQlers as possible! Also, I'll be going to the PHP User Group meetup on Thursday, February 9th. Hope to see you there!

Peter Zaitsev, a Senior Performance Engineer at MySQL, recently let me know about Andrew Aksyonoff, an open source developer who has written a high performance FULLTEXT indexer and query engine called Sphinx. While not (yet!) a pluggable MySQl storage engine, Sphinx does include native support for querying MySQL databases. A while back, Peter blogged about Sphinx. I'm extremely impressed with Sphinx's performance characteristics, and I'll be interviewing Andrew sometime in this coming week, so look out for the interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. I'm very interested to hear Andrew's thoughts on the new MySQL 5.1 Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture and how he …