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" …

It felt like the right time for us to look back at some useful commands for table maintenance that some of us may not have mastered as much as we might like to think.

In my post about gathering index statistics, I referred to OPTIMIZE TABLE, ANALYZE TABLE, and REPAIR TABLE — but I never explained in depth what the different commands do, and what the differences between them are. That is what I thought I would do with this post, focusing on InnoDB and MyISAM, and the differences in how they treat those commands. I will also look at different cases and see which one is right for in each case.

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If you've requested to join the MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn Group and haven't heard back, I do apologize! I've been swamped, and haven't had the free time to manage the group lately. I've approved all the remaining requests, so welcome! We've reached 140 members in the group.

For future requests to join, please include a link to your corresponding certification starting from here: http://www.mysql.com/certification/candidates.php. This will greatly help speed up the approval process.

This MySQL Certified Professionals group is for certified MySQL professionals, technical recruiters, hiring managers or human resource managers to help locate MySQL Certified Professionals in their area.

MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

If you've requested to join the MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn Group and haven't heard back, I do apologize! I've been swamped, and haven't had the free time to manage the group lately. I've approved all the remaining requests, so welcome! We've reached 140 members in the group.

For future requests to join, please include a link to your corresponding certification starting from here: http://www.mysql.com/certification/candidates.php. This will greatly help speed up the approval process.

This MySQL Certified Professionals group is for certified MySQL professionals, technical recruiters, hiring managers or human resource managers to help locate MySQL Certified Professionals in their area.

MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

Welcome to the 107th edition of the Log Buffer. My name is Keith Murphy and I am a MySQL database administrator for the Pythian Group. In addition, I am the editor of MySQL Magazine. This is my second go for the Log Buffer, so I must be doing something right!

This week for the open source world brings OSCON in Portland Oregon. There are plenty of MySQL people present and there have been more posting this week from these realms than normal. Also, Lewis Cunningham, among others, posted news that EnterpriseDB released the results of their open source survey at OSCON. The 451 CAOS Theory …

Linux desktop users: this post is probably not for you. You've got like a gazillion of these tools available.

Windows users: If you're like me, and use PuTTY all the time to manage your Linux MySQL servers, you'll appreciate this gem. It's called PuTTY Connection Manager and it, obviously, manages PuTTY connections. Not a very creative name, but a fine piece of software.

It's actively developed (latest alpha version out about two months ago), and boasts these features (taken from the developer website):

• Tabs and dockable windows for PuTTY instances.
• Fully compatible with PuTTY configuration (using registry).
• Easily customizable to optimize workspace (fullscreen, minimze to tray, add/remove toolbar, etc...).
• Automatic login …