All right! In the past, some books seem to be delayed in getting into O’Reilly’s Safari site, but on the day that Baron announces the book’s arrival, I find that I’m able to access it in Safari right now! Sweet!

Welcome to the 102nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since it was DB2’s 25th birthday this week, as Anant Jhingran reports, let’s start with it.

From ZDNet this week came a story that IBM was considering the open-sourcing of DB2 — big news, naturally, whether true or not. Matthew Aslett of 451 CAOS Theory says, Open source DB2? I don’t think so, suggesting that it was merely theorizing on the part of one IBM …

The book, that is. My dog is already studying it. You should buy a few copies for yourself, your family, and all your pets.

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I've been at MySQL for two and a half years now as a community manager. Through this time, I've learned a number of valuable lessons about what it means to be a community manager, what it means to belong to a community of technologists, and what it means to be an open source advocate. I think back now on the attitude and preconceptions I brought with me when I joined MySQL, and reflect about the changes in my own attitude that have happened.

One of the biggest "aha" moments I have had in the past three years is the following:

It is the role of a community manager to remove the barriers — both technical and ideological — between the user/developer community and the company or group of individuals which produces the open source software

Some barriers are small. Sometimes these barriers can be overcome by a simple email to an annoyed community member who has misunderstood a poorly communicated …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray solves …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray solves …

MySQL folks have switched to Bazaar as their version control of choice.

Here is the official announcement. 

MySQL folks have switched to Bazaar as their version control of choice.

Here is the official announcement. 

I?ve been reading The Bee Keeper (also here in PDF), an explanation of the relationship between professional open source software (POSS) vendors and their communities, written by Pentaho?s CTO James Dixon. It is a very elegant explanation of the development/business model employed by the POSS vendors such as MySQL, Pentaho, JBoss and Alfresco.

James uses the analogy of the Bee Keeper to explain the model. It?s worth reading the paper in its entirety to understand just how appropriate this is but to put it very simply: the vendor is the bee keeper; the community is the bees; the open source project is the honey; and the customer …

Red Hat has been talking about open sourcing its Network for well over a year. Today, it finally did it.

However, code by itself is only moderately interesting. What we need now is a thriving community around "Project Spacewalk," as Red Hat calls the Network project.

Why? Well, because in some ways the commercial open-source community increasingly fragments as it matures financially. What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.

What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.

Now consider the power for Red Hat if its …