The latest from the MySQL community

If you read this blog, you should probably sign the petition !

There is a really easy way to figure out ...

Look at the size of of the devrooms , if at all , a project gets at Fosdem
It's really interresting to see the Embedded room move to a 500 seat room which it really needed when the first openMoko talk was held there in a previous edition.

The FDO , Drupal, Mozilla, Centos/Fedora and Suse rooms stay in similar size rooms as last year.. But it seems lik the BSD and PostgreSQL room which was pretty crowded moved to a bigger location.

The Ruby room also seems to move to a bigger room. Fosdem has a couple of new rooms too it seems this freed up room for new groups such as the MySQL Crowd

Obviously these sizes aren't a real match to the size of a community, as the new rooms might need (and probably will need) a reshuffle for next year ;)

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A while ago Dries wondered about Contributing back to Drupal .

Now Inuits is not a Webshop, we are an Open Source shop, so you won't see a zillion Drupal modules being contributed by us in the near future (albeit there are a couple) , we are company assisting other organisations in their adoption of Open Source, and Drupal is amongst the projects we care for. You'll notice code from us in the different other Open Source projects, including the Linux Kernel and other core infrastructure. And not all of it was code, there is a lot of published documentation, methodologies, bughunting and also spreading the words, or talking about our experiences around different topics such as MySQL Cluster and Drupal, or different alternatives to Monitor , or to Monitor MySQL etc ..

But we've been contributing in …

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

I spent the last month taking a break from Open Source, partly due to FreeBSD 7.1 failing to hit the FTP servers as scheduled (any excuse), but mostly due to Santa’s early delivery of Ableton Live. Not really Open Source I may add but extremely cool nonetheless and a much needed break from coding!.

I find that staring too much at code can hamper the creative process (hehe), and as you know Creativity and Innovation go hand in hand with Open Source Software!.

Speaking of which, while I have been busy playing with waveforms and elastic audio, the Open Source world has been all guns blazing with cool releases like MySQL 5.1 GA, …

My MythTV store lives on an LVM volume that is spread over 2 disks, one of them is an external USB disk. So the cleaninglady seems to have touched a cable and after coming back from holiday I had a read-only filesystem that afer a remount had about 350Gb in lost+found with irrelevant filenames.

1. total 337407844
2. drwx------ 2 tv tv 4096 Dec 17 22:47 .
3. drwxrwxrwx 15 tv tv 4096 Dec 17 22:44 ..
4. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 423343556 Dec 14 07:10 I303109.RCN
5. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2990538924 Dec 13 19:05 I303107.RCN
6. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1023691768 Dec 13 08:10 I319494.RCN
7. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1023622348 Dec 13 07:45 I327684.RCN
8. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 423735892 Dec 13 07:10 I327682.RCN
9. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 466749476 Dec 12 15:43 I135169.RCN
10. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1023314212 Dec 12 07:45 I098309.RCN
11. -rw-r--r-- 1 root root …

So I wanted a fresh MySQL 5.1 release on my Fedora 10 box.
Fedora comes with a mysql 5.0 package and the MySQL community packages for 5.1 conflict with that in different ways. (to start with MySQL vs mysql)

For some weird reason libmysqlclient (in mysql-libs) is required by redland, which is required by openoffice.org-core. I probaly never need the RDF funtionalities that redland provides me but I`m stuck with them anyhow.

So Fred pointed me to

Remi repo for mysql 5.1

1. yum --enablerepo remi install mysql-server

Now gives me a very nice MySQL 5.1 to play around with.

Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …

When Monty Widenius published his criticisms of MySQL 5.1 recently a lot of the coverage that followed focused on his belief that the product had been made generally available too early and has too many serious bugs.

A solution to this problem would have been told hold 5.1 back even longer for more testing or, better still, not to have announced it as a release candidate so early. However, reading Monty’s post in full indicates that this would be a matter of treating the symptoms rather than finding a cure.

He also wrote: “the MySQL current development model doesn’t in practice allow the MySQL community to participate in the development of the MySQL server” and “I think it’s time to seriously review how the MySQL server is being developed and change the development model to be more like Drizzle and …