Sunday morning, and I couldn't help but ponder Michael Tiemann's excellent note on Microsoft's revised (and improved) Open Specification Promise and "what Microsoft can do for open source."

Michael rightly notes that Microsoft's Promise, while certainly improved, still leaves much to be desired. No surprise there, which leads Michael to a thoughtful, probing analysis of what Microsoft could do to fully engage with open-source communities:

Let's think big. The open-source community already has more than a billion lines of source code at its disposal, and it's doubling every 12.5 months, so I think it's fair to say "we don't really need your code." And we also know that money alone is no substitute for the freedom to innovate that we so crave. So what big thing could we do with Microsoft's …

Looks like the guys over at Amazon had fun this week:

We’ve now determined that message corruption was the cause of the server-to-server communication problems. More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single bit corrupted such that the message was still intelligible, but the system state information was incorrect. We use MD5 checksums throughout the system, for example, to prevent, detect, and recover from corruption that can occur during receipt, storage, and retrieval of customers’ objects. However, we didn’t have the same protection in place to detect whether this particular internal state information had been corrupted. As a result, when the corruption occurred, we didn’t detect it and it spread throughout the system causing the symptoms described above. We hadn’t encountered …

So it seems MySQL got on the radar of the monopolist, but the quotes that came from that event are more interesting .

Over at Oscon2008 Oscon people started realizing that the old monopolist definitely isn't the one to be afraid of.. there's new ones out there..

I already got quoted in a local magazine on the fact that new startups are more looking to Google than to redmond, but it also seems that Apple is the new kid in town to envy.

However, when looking at the Linux desktop I think we shouldn't be trying to imitate anybody .. we should be trying to head the pack, just as we have already done with Vitualization and other technologies.

Julian Cash is well known, among other things, for being the photographer of the open source communities, as you can see from his photo stream, or this picture of his newest book.

For more books, you can look at The human creativity project.
At OSCON 2008, participants could attach one or more ribbons to their badge, to state their affiliation with a project or an idea. When the sought ribbon was not available, there were blank ones that users could fill with their favorite topics.
As you can see here, I made free use of the ribbons. Julian Cash, instead, stated his affiliation with Perl quite strongly.
…

At OSCON this year, MySQL's Brian Aker made this bold statement:

Microsoft is irrelevant....We're more worried about Apple.

Perhaps he was taking a cue from MySQL's Zack Urlocker, who has been buying Macs for family members, but I understand the sentiment. Microsoft still dominates the desktop, but the momentum is Apple's.

Perhaps this is why the Free Software Foundation, which wants to protect everyone's freedom (except, oddly, on the web), has gone on another Quixotic campaign to save the world from Apple's DRM (Digital Rights Management) by …

I was reading Colin Charles' write-up of Does Open Source need to be “Organic”? (with Brian Aker, Rob Lanphier, Stephen O’Grady, Theodore Ts'o). I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm going to put out a hypohesis here.... see what you think:

I think that overall, dual licensing as a large scale business model has failed. So, this is about either selling non-GPL licenses for certain uses, or having a "professional/enterprise" version of a product which contains more feature, one way or another. On a small scale, it has worked very well, and for decades. Think of shareware with extras for registered users. I used to run my business in The Netherlands along those lines for some products, and it was doing just fine, for years. But it was a "small" operation, not a huge growth business.

Mind …

Sparse notes from the talk, I noticed Sheeri recording some video, so sitting through that at some stage might make sense. There were no slides, this was a panel discussion. Suggested reading: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source.

Does Open Source need to be “Organic”?
Brian Aker, Rob Lanphier, Stephen O’Grady, Theodore Ts’o

Taking code, and slapping a certain license on it, doesn’t a successful software project make.

Blurring the distinction, by marketing. Not doing any work to get external contributions.

Open sourcing a product one plans on “genociding”, its really bad.

“Corporate sociopathic Druckerism” — Brian Aker

“As long as the source code is …

Today was the last day of OSCON and I'm in the mood to think about the conference and share some of my random observations that didn't make it into any of my other blog posts.

First up is a comment that Brian Aker of MySQL fame made during the "Tim O'Reilly Interviews Monty Widenius & Brian Aker" interview:

Microsoft is irrelevant. ... We're more worried about Apple.

Woah. That's a tall statement! One that resonates with me since just a few weeks ago I realized that my life is now fully free of Microsoft. And I used to be a full time Win32 programmer 10 years ago. While Microsoft may not be fully irrelevant in all scopes, a comment like this shows that the open source movement has made an amazing amount of progress in the last 10 years. Consumers have a lot more operating choices today than they did 10 years ago. And to think that …

This article is not meant to malign hosting providers, but I want to point out something you should be aware of if you're getting someone else to build and host your servers for you.

Most hosting providers -- even the big names -- continue to install 32-bit GNU/Linux operating systems on 64-bit hardware. This is a serious mistake.

You have to tell them to install a 64-bit operating system. If you don't then you will come to a point where your needs grow and you want to use more memory -- and they will gladly install 8 or 16GB of memory for you, but MySQL can't use it because it runs in a single process, which is limited to about 2.5GB of memory. And then you have to rebuild the whole operating system from scratch. But you don't want any downtime, so you have to buy another server, set it up as a slave, switch your site to use it, and then rebuild the old server. That 32-bit OS turned into a pretty expensive mistake.

I do …

In my 14 years in development I learned that outside of poor schema design, nothing drains the performance of an application more than poorly performing SQL code. Even code that ran well on day one of production would sometimes come back to bite at the worst possible times. Even worse, as a DBA I was consistently asked to bail out a development team that was either tuning their code before the rush to production or that was trying to finger code that had fallen victim to a dropped or changed index. Never fun.

As a Product Manager with MySQL I have learned from meeting with friends/customers that this experience hasn't really changed much since I left the field. I hear things like:

- MySQL is not well instrumented for tracking code level performance metrics
- Logs are OK, but not centralized and too low-level for easy navigation
- We need help identifying "good code gone bad" and "bad code gone worse" …