It always surprises me how knee-jerk we can be in the open source world. If someone writes a glowing report of Project X, we slobber all over ourselves to salute them, however inaccurate they might be. If someone indicates a need for improvement, we slam them.

My recent post on OpenOffice is a case in point. I just don't think it's very good, and I also don't think it matters that it's not very good (because my goal in life is not to beat Microsoft at its game, but rather to make Microsoft play on my turf. Here are a few reasons OpenOffice is weak, and is not likely to ever attain Apache/Linux/BIND/etc. status.

• OpenOffice isn't a piece of software that most developers care about, and developer-aligned open source software is much more likely to be superior software. If there's no itch to be …

The Linux Format magazine is having it’s annual reader awards in a number of categories.

These include (I’ve include my picks after each category):

• Best Desktop Application (Gnome)
• Best Distro (CentOS 4.2)
• Best Development Tool (Eclipse 3.1)
• Best Hardware Support (NVidia for my Dell Laptop)
• Free Software Project of the Year (Gaim)
• Embedded Linux Award
• Best Server Software (MySQL 5.0)
• Best Office Software (Open Office …

Sometimes I don't know whether to consider Laura Merling, Executive Director of SDForum, a friend or a foe. She and the SDForum team (in alliance with Andrew Aitken and the Olliance team) are putting on what looks to be an excellent open source event in January. Confound her for staging a quality event right before OSBC! :-)

SDForum's Open Source Think Tank

Seriously, I like the idea, and it's something to which my recent blog entry speaks: we need more intelligent discourse between members of the open source business community. SDForum's event is designed to be just that: a think tank for leading open source executives.

I've been fortunate to be friends with the executive teams at MySQL, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, and others. Talking …

I took the chance today to order some books from Amazon today to add to the library. Of course I’m still reading 2 current books Spring in Action and the MySQL Certification Study Guide in order to site the second MySQL Professional Certification Exam.

As with most things, you start off looking or reading on the web for something and you end up completely somewhere else. In this case, it was looking at Linux Software Labs (Australia) at the price of their Linux Distribution CD’s, which lead me to the book Beyond Java listed on their site. …

Linux Insider has a great story on Nessus' move to closed source with its 3.0 product. The article has some wringing their hands about the decision, acting as if open source were going to shrivel and die because the code's primary developer decided he couldn't make a living off free-loaders.

And so Nessus is facing complaints from users like Alan Shimel, Chief Strategy Officer for StillSecure:

"Here's the danger we are running into," he said. "People contribute resources to these communities, whether it be time, money, or code. When they see everything they give converted for the commercial success of an individual rather than as a community as a whole, how long do you think they are …

In case you haven't heard, Linus Torvalds had a bit of a rant at the GNOME developers regarding quality user interfaces. In the course of the exchange, certain nasty words and comments were thrown about — to put it nicely.

Now, I'm by no means a saint, and every once in a while I might get my knickers in a twist about something or other, but this kind of behaviour, on both sides of the coin by various folk, does nothing to further the FOSS movement. In fact, it deeply hurts it. Why? Well, for one thing, the black & white back-and-forth bantering which inevitably follows such outbursts (like this recent well-meaning post that turned into comments about the age-old PostgreSQL/MySQL debate) does little to inspire confidence in …

While this may be old hat to those of you out there who, like me, regularly scour through the source code commits on the internals (and newly forked commits) lists, however, in the past few weeks, a couple of documentation and code commits have caught my attention. Things catch my attention for any number of reasons. Most often, the commits that I flag for a later look at are those things which I suspected would change in the near future when I wrote chapters of Pro MySQL that dealt with the source code, architecture and storage engines. Other times, I catch something about a particular bug that I've run into has been fixed. Other times, I just notice some really cool idea that's going into the code and decide to investigate. Of course, besides the few things below, there …

Flexible, Scalable Key Mapping Solutions

In working to answer questions on the MySQL forums, I've noticed a few questions that repeatedly come up on a number of the forum areas. One of these particular questions deals with how to manage -- construct, query, and maintain -- many to many relationships in your schema. I decided to put together a two-part article series detailing some of the common dilemmas which inevitably arise when tackling the issue of relating two entities where one entity can be related to many instances of another, and vice versa.

Hopefully, this article will shed some light on how to structure your schema effectively to produce fast, efficient queries, and also will illustrate how key map tables can be queried for a variety of different purposes. I'll predominantly be using standard SQL, so although I'm using MySQL as the database of choice here, …

Who has the most downloads? Mozilla FireFox, with MySQL not far behind. (Thanks for pointing out the picture, Zack.) Here's the chart from the WSJ:

Now, keep in mind that this chart doesn't include all major open source projects (the article in which it appeared focuses on Sun) - no Linux there, nor Apache. But I think it's interesting to see who has volume.

More interesting, though, is what companies are doing with that volume. MySQL is on a $40 million run-rate for this year, last time I checked. The big question for them (and for every commercial open source provider) is how to turn downloads into dollars. That is, how to improve conversion rates.

MySQL had some 10 million downloads (give or take 2 million) in 2003. It also had ~$10 million in revenue. That's (very) roughly $1/download. (See Christof Wittig's excellent Stanford GSB paper …

Roland Bouman sent me an email yesterday alerting me to an idea presented by Giuseppe Maxia on the MySQL Stored Procedures forum a couple days ago. The idea, in a nutshell, is to create a repository or library of tuned and tested MySQL stored procedures, similar to something like CPAN for Perl modules.

Frankly, I think it's a great idea. A project like this, given a good head of steam, would propel the movement of MySQL 5 into the mainstream and encourage hosting companies and others to adopt the newer technology. If there is enough demand for this kind of thing (which I think there would be, considering both the hype about MySQL 5 and the communities on the web alrady set up for other RDBMS vendors who support stored procedures) it will force …