A Happy New Year to all of you! About a month ago we posted our initial Call for Papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. We already received several great submissions and we'd like to thank the speakers who contributed their suggestions so far. But we would like to get some more!

Therefore we decided to extend the deadline for a few more days: you can still submit your talk proposals until tomorrow (Wednesday, 6th)!

So if you think you have an interesting MySQL-related topic to talk about, we'd like to hear about it! Thanks.

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual licensing and the GPL.

In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news stories in chronological order.

Part one took us from the announcement of the EC’s in-depth investigation up to the eve of the communication of the EC’s Statement of Objections.

…

Red Hat’s Q3. Google’s definition of open. Copyright assignment. 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.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Red Hat reported third quarter net income of $16.4m on revenue up 18% at $194m

# Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president, product management, presented Google’s …

Here are CAOS Theory’s top 20 posts of 2009, in terms of page views:

• The Open Source Initiative’s corporate status is suspended: a CAOS Theory Q&A

October – Our take on the potential ramifications of the suspension of OSI’s corporate status.

• Commercial open source business strategies in 2009 and beyond

January – An overview of the open core and embedded open source strategies that we expected to dominate in 2009.

• Looking for …

Topics for this podcast:

*2009 review and 2010 preview
*New CAOS survey and report – Climate Change
*Ups and downs in new round of GPL lawsuits
*Oracle-Sun-MySQL saga continues

iTunes or direct download (30:00, 6.9 MB)

On the 24th of November I attended a talk given by one of of Sun's benchmark specialists , Dimitri Kravtchuk, at the Sun Solution Center of Paris.

The talk was simply called MySQL performance, and I was expecting, as many I suppose (the auditorium was packed !) tips and tricks on how to optimize a MySQL database. However I was quite positively surprised since the 3 hours session wasn't just a long list of tricks and “how to's” but was actually a journey through one and a half year of improvement of the InnoDB engine.

InnoDB could easily scale horizontally but not vertically. Horizontal scaling is the fact to put many small servers with each running a MySQL server (typically in a Master-Slave mode) where vertical scaling would be to put a unique MySQL server on a bigger server, expecting to get better performances. The latter is more and more needed given the multiplication of cores and threads within the CPUs even in entry level …

On the 24th of November I attended a talk given by one of of Sun's benchmark specialists , Dimitri Kravtchuk, at the Sun Solution Center of Paris.

The talk was simply called MySQL performance, and I was expecting, as many I suppose (the auditorium was packed !) tips and tricks on how to optimize a MySQL database. However I was quite positively surprised since the 3 hours session wasn't just a long list of tricks and “how to's” but was actually a journey through one and a half year of improvement of the InnoDB engine.

InnoDB could easily scale horizontally but not vertically. Horizontal scaling is the fact to put many small servers with each running a MySQL server (typically in a Master-Slave mode) where vertical scaling would be to put a unique MySQL server on a bigger server, expecting to get better performances. The latter is more and more needed given the multiplication of cores and threads within the CPUs even in entry level …

A new round of GPL-based BusyBox suits has been filed, targeting big names in electronics and IT. We’ve long covered these series of GPL-based suits and settlements, but this latest round comes at an interesting time for open source software and its licensing.

First, we have the backdrop of the Oracle-Sun-MySQL acquisition, with opponents arguing to the world and the European Commission, which is reviewing the proposed merger before approving it, in part that the GPL is, ironically, granting too much power to its user, in this case Oracle. I’ve been quoted in the press and honestly agree with …

There was much rejoicing recently as Google announced a change of heart and decided to release the source code to EtherPad, which it had previously acquired along with AppJet and had planned to shut down.

Krishnan Subramanian at Cloud Ave was certainly happy as it supported his theory that SaaS vendors should offer their software under an open source license or at least open source their app before they shut down.

I’m not going to argue with Krishnan’s first point – in fact I agree that there is a lot of value in SaaS vendors reducing risk and encouraging adoption by making an open source version of their software available. However I am less convinced by the latter argument. There is a fine line between life …

Recent non-Oracle/EC/MySQL news.

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

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Novell reshuffled its Linux business into Security, Management and Operating Platforms business unit.

# HP partnered with Red Hat, Novell and Microsoft to target Sun migrations.

# The US DoJ …