Before I even start this post I am going to repeat our view that Oracle is well aware that it has little to gain from killing off MySQL and that we expect MySQL to become the scale-out database for non-transactional web applications and to compete with SQL Server in departmental deployments.

That said there has been some interesting discussion on Twitter this week in response to the European Commission’s investigation of Oracle-Sun about whether Oracle could - in theory - kill off MySQL. Here’s a Q+A explaining my view as to how Oracle could kill MySQL but probably won’t, and why MySQL AB’s choice of dual licensing and the GPL has come back to haunt Monty Widenius.

Q. Oracle can’t kill MySQL even if it wants to, because its open source. Right?

A. …

By now you are probably aware that the European Commission has decided to launch an extended investigation into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun based on concerns over MySQL.

The new has prompted a lot of criticism of the EC, much of it suggesting that the delay will do considerable harm to Sun (and therefore Oracle). This argument is valid - Sun’s already declining revenue has been in freefall since the deal was announced and one wonders how far it will fall in another 90 days of stasis.

Other criticism, (such as this from Matt Asay) focuses on the suggestion that the delay will do little to help MySQL or its users, and that the EC fails to understand open source.

This also has some …

Last week we ended the first Monty Program Ab company meeting in Mallorca, Spain. Even if many of us have met before, there are a couple who had not met everyone before and it was great to be together. Even for myself, since I was in the Sales org at MySQL and Sun, I wasn't that close with all the oldtime developers, so it was great to finally spend several days with them.

Since it was the first meeting both for the company and MariaDB project, we spent a lot of time on the "vision, strategy" excercises. Btw, for future MariaDB meetings we will in the future always invite all the Maria Captains and other community members, it is not intended to be a meeting of one company at all. For this meeting, we had 3 non-employees present and they gave valuable input, so it already works, even if we will do more of it in the future.

…

OIN offers cash for patents. CentOS crisis averted. Microsoft denies GPL violation. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Open Invention Network offered individual inventors cash for patents, and acquired patents from V_Graph.

# The H Open reported that the management problems at CentOS are now resolved.

# Sam Ramji told Network World in detail why Microsoft believes its Linux IC code did not violate the GPL (from 15m 30s).

# Canonical delivered an on-premise version of …

If you do not follow MariaDB development, I want to head up XtraDB has been commited to MariaDB server and will be included in binary releases of MariaDB (scheduled on end of August - September) as replacement of InnoDB storage engine. MariaDB will also include PBXT storage engine, Sphinx storage engine and few our non-InnoDB related patches (extended stats into slow-log)

Entry posted by Vadim | One comment

Add to: | …

Like so many others, I got interested in the Drizzle project when it started. Some good ideas, lots of enthusiasm, and just pure GPL license, no "yes, we will take your work for free and sell proprietary licenses to it" SCA.

I even started contributing some development, fixing a number of Valgrind-detected bugs in Drizzle. I am proud that we kept the MySQL code 100% free of Valgrind errors, and wanted to help keep the same in Drizzle. So I debugged and fixed quite a few of the Valgrind-detected bugs that had crept in since forking from MySQL.

As I remember, I got down to two or three remaining or so. However, I it did discourage me somewhat to see how quickly these bugs had been allowed to enter the code. I remember one case where there was a Drizzle patch that had tried to simplify some field types. As I remember, the patch tried to simplify the code by eliminating some of multiple variants of string types. All well and good, but …

We've been mingling here for 4 days already, but today the official part of OSCon kicks off. At Monty Program we've been a bit late in preparing for this conference - busy getting started with the company and everything. But even if we were a bit late, we succeeded in lining up a good set of sessions.

read more

First day at the Community Leadership Summit. Kurt will blog about our being here separately soon. I just wanted to say this quickly tossed together unconference is a huge success, with a lot of the Community leaders and intelligenzia present and networking. We get all the time questions about what is happening with MySQL, so even though we hadn't planned to, we did a session What's up with MySQL where we tried to explain our plans for the MariaDB community and Open Database Alliance, but also as objectively as possible answer any questions that came up. (The unconference rules strictly prohibit promoting any company, which Monty Program of course goes out of it's way to obey.)

…

Open SQL Camp will be organized in St Augustin, Germany on the weekend of 22-23 August. Unfortunately, at Monty Program, it looks like we have already scheduled a company meeting at the same time and all of us will be in Spain instead. Consequently, there are now no MariaDB talks proposed for the conference, which is a shame.

read more

Among other things, these past few months I have been working on setting up Buildbot, including adding various enhancements and bug fixes that are needed to properly build and test the MariaDB and MySQL code base.

Since Buildbot is written in Python, this means I have also had to learn Python. I am an old-time Perl hacker, so this exercise feels a bit like living in enemy territory ;-)

Anyway, Python is often touted as a more "pretty" language. And in many ways it is. Still, it is not without its own gotchas. Think "scope rules". Obviously someone haven't been reading up on the subject before implementing things in Python, causing the language to behave stupidly (and certainly different from what one expects) in the following three cases that I hit during my Buildbot work.

First …