By Tim O'Reilly

I got two fascinating emails from Jason Hunter over the weekend, both concerning MarkMail, the open source mailing list search engine created by Ryan Grimm and Jason over at MarkLogic. I thought I'd share them, with Jason's permission.

The first was a fairly prosaic announcement:

In the last few weeks we loaded the PHP and PEAR mailing lists, a sum total of about 700,000 new messages. Contained within the new load is the php-general list, now statistically our largest list at 266,000 messages, passing by the old king tomcat-users with its 225,000 messages. Third place now goes to the main MySQL list.

It's great to know that you can now search these lists with the amazing MarkMail tools, which …

I thought I'd get a chance to do some more blogging on Sun's acquisition of MySQL last week, but I was focused internally at our company meeting, spending time with employees and working on our objectives for 2008. Needless to say it was a fun, but exhausting week. We'd been working with Sun on the deal for several weeks, but only a handful of people knew about it. So there were about 400 very surprised employees Wednesday morning when we announced the news. It's a lot of information to digest and we wanted to make sure everyone got answers to... READ MORE

Q. When is a program not a program? A. When it is all the works ever licensed under GPLv3. Via the Software Freedom Law Center comes news that the Free Software Foundation has published a document clarifying its position on patent litigation related to the GPLv3 - specifically what constitutes a program under the GPLv3 for the purposes of patent infringement claims.

According to section 10, paragraph 3 of the GPLv3:

“[Y]ou may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.”

The new FSF document clarifies …

Now with MySQL AB having been scooped up (as noted by 99% of the blogosphere including myself), what about SAP and open source? IIRC SAP was one of the investors into MySQL AB (not sure how large a chunk they held). SAP really put a lot of weight behind MySQL when they handed over SAP DB (renamed to MaxDB) to MySQL and made it clear that they expect MySQL to be SAP certified any day now (has this happened?).

At the same time SAP has been sending "mixed messages" at best in regards to OSS. And they …

Kaj wrote me email yesterday asking if I was sleeping for a whole week or may be dead because I'm probably the only one of people blogging about MySQL who has not commented about announced Sun - MySQL Deal.

In fact I was just on extremely busy travel schedule last week, so I'm just finding a bit of time now to comment on it.

First it is very interesting for me MySQL choose to be bought out by Sun rather than going IPO even though as I understand majority of the steps required for IPO already were done. This could be related to current market conditions or may be 1B price tag was at higher end what was expected from IPO, It also could be getting mostly cash payment now was attractive.

If we compare price tag of MySQL to other public "Open Source" companies - we can see it being about 1/4 of RedHat or 1/2 of Novel which seems quite decent valuation for me.

As minor MySQL stake holder I would be excited to see stocks …

Jonathan has a nice post with additional explanations on the MySQL deal, seeing as one or two folks have questioned it. (Note that the second link is for your amusement via Sun's Simon Phipps blog). Jonathan writes: "Where are the revenue synergies? The more interesting question is "where aren't the synergies?" Wherever MySQL is deployed, whether the user is paying for software support or not, a server will be purchased, along with a storage device, networking infrastructure - and over time, support services on high value open platforms. Last I checked, we have products in almost all those categories. In... READ MORE

In a speech celebrating NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt urged NASA to be more collaborative with other agencies and even the general public. He suggested that Google's successes often result from opening up without knowing where the breakthroughs would occur.

While Schmidt acknowledged that government agencies like NASA can't wholly adopt Google's "shift and iterate" model whereby it throws a lot of projects at the wall to see what sticks, it

...can learn from open-software development and projects like Linux and MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies like Google, he said.

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