Marten Mickos said something last night during the OSBC Executive Town Hall that was both provocative and profound. Asked whether the acquisitions of Sleepycat and InnoDB were a threat to MySQL, Marten suggested that no one can successfully acquire the life out of a successful open source company:

"Trying to kill MySQL by acquiring open source is like trying to kill a dolphin by drinking the ocean."I'm not sure I got it exactly right, but that's about it. His point? Successful communities are not subject to one or two dependencies, people-related or technology-related or otherwise. Successful communities grow, self-heal, and adapt. I agree.

But then, I don't think (and I somewhat doubt if Marten thinks this - he's certainly never said so) that Oracle is attempting to kill MySQL through its acquisitions. Its intentions are elsewhere....Where? I'm not yet 100% sure.

With Oracle Corporation purchasing InnoBase, the company providing the InnoDB Storage Engine, and now reliable rumors of the acquisition of SleepyCat, the BDB Storage Engine, both key transactional storage engines for MySQL are effectively owned by a competitor.

While the is a strange and probably unchartered territory for both organisations, I’m personally concerned. I use InnoDB extensively, however if there was a comparable alternative within MySQL I’d consider switching out of principle. Is Oracle purchasing these organisations a bad thing? We don’t know. That’s the problem. While MySQL will undoubtly continue to provide these storage engines as part of the MySQL Database I believe a call to arms is needed.

It’s true that Oracle helped more general adoption of Linux …

So, my data on $1.3 billion raised in open source venture capital is already old....MySQL just announced that it has raised $18.5 in a Series C round of funding. Investors included Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), which led the round, and corporate investors Intel Capital, Red Hat, SAP, and and Presidio STX.

Keep on rockin' in the free world, Marten! (You and Neil Young.)

Previously:
MySQL 5.0 hits 1 million downloads-Interview with Zack Urlocker
A happy new year for MySQL
…

Last year saw a record number of acquisitions by Oracle Corporation. Of note was in October 2005 InnoBase (Read Press Release) which had a direct relationship with MySQL providing the InnoDB Storage Engine. It’s too early to tell what the impact to MySQL will be if any.

I’ve been in Singapore, and have not read any news in the past few days, but all information I’m receiving from those collegues in the know is that Sleepycat Software (the company behind Berkley DB, and the MySQL BDB Storage Engine) is now firmly in the sites of Oracle Acquisition. The rumors of JBoss is also definitely on the …

The Department of Commerce's United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has created a partnership with the open source community to ensure that patent examiners have improved access to all available prior art relating to software code during the patent examination process.

In December the USPTO representatives met with members of the open source software community, which provided an opportunity for members to discuss with the USPTO prior art access issues related to software patent quality. The meeting focused on getting the best prior art references to the examiner during the initial examination process.

As a follow-up to their December 6th meeting, USPTO representatives will hold another meeting on February 16th, 2006. This meeting will be open to the public and will focus on further developing previously discussed initiatives as well as any new prior art initiatives offered at that time.

All members of the open …

Yesterday I ran into an old collegue that now runs quite a successful computer store chain and highly successful web store here in Australia. Long story short he was having some MySQL problems, so I offered to pass my eye over it. Now, given that they had some data corruption in stock levels not being correct (e.g. getting to an inventory count of -1), my first split second thought was inappropiate transaction management.

In thinking last night, what would I do as part of auditing an existing MySQL Installation and application quickly for reference and also to highlight issues etc, assuming I would have no access to any administrators or developers.

So what would you do? I made some preliminary notes, here’s the full account of what I did do.

Audit Steps

OS Specifics

$ mkdir /tmp/arabx
$ cd /tmp/arabx
# keep a quick copy of stuff
$ script
# Linux generals
$ hostname
$ uname -a
$ uptime
$ …

What with the hoopla around the possible JBoss (and other) acqusitions in the near term, it set me to thinking about how open source companies should be valued. Once they "grow up," of course, like Red Hat, they're valued in a somewhat rational (P/E) fashion.

But how does one value the frontier of open source business models? How does one value downloads? (I remember Kevin Harvey of Benchmark and David Skok at Matrix both telling me that part of their investment calculus in open source companies/projects hinges on downloads, but how do these factor into an acquisition?) Do downloads equal "community" and, if so, is "community" something that can be valued? (In my conversations with IBM, they certainly seemed to think so, though they didn't share with me how they'd do so.)

And what about …

These are my first impressions of MySQL WorkBench 1.0.1. Rant and rave you may say, but a new user, or an experienced modeller would probably observe these points. Also, given that (with a poll?) I suspect a good number of users will be previous DBDesigner users, some level of functionality that may not be considered initially in a new product, should be considered for this migration path of legacy users.

I’ll take the time to review the Forums adding my points, and review Bug System but for now, just blogging is easier.

Conclusion

Note: Generally a conclusion is at the bottom, but I’d suspect most readers will switch off …

Still in "ponder" mode on the possible Oracle acquisition of JBoss, and came across this interesting tidbit from the Enterprise Open Source Journal (worth a read, if for no other reason than to see Julie in "pensive mode :-). Mark Driver from Gartner writes [PDF download]:

"The [Oracle acquisition of InnoBase] has left many of us scratching our collective heads. On the surface, the motives seem obvious. Oracle, with a clear history of aggressive acquisitions, buys out a critical component of MySQL in order to kill off its commercial support channel. The problem is, we don't actually know the motive yet because Oracle has been mysteriously silent about the acquisition, citing "license negotiations" as the reason. By the time you read this, the issue may be resolved, but I fear it's a lose lose situation for …

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 …