Devis just lost its bid on a big US government software contract through the GSA (General Services Administration). That's just competition. But how it lost that contract is exceptionally frustrating if you're a US taxpayer:

GSA told Devis at its debriefing that contractor risk was not a determining factor in the award decision, despite the fact that a majority of the evaluation panel found the [winning] Symplicity proposal to be "unacceptable" and offering "little confidence" of successful performance.

I'm all for a software proposal that stinks at the outset. How about you? :-)

Taking this one step further, I'm positive that the US federal government is also not taking into account just how risky every purchase of proprietary software is. Every dime of my tax dollars that is spent locking up government files (Microsoft Office) …

The Linux Business Campus Nuremberg (LBCN) presents annual awards for innovative ideas, well-considered concepts and promising business plans in the field of Open Source and Free Software.

The European Open Source Business Award is presented for innovative business concepts after detailed examination by an expert jury comprising LBCN campus coaches and selected figures from the venture capital scene. The annual award seeks entrepreneurs with innovative open source software business ideas which can revolutionize the markets and set new

This award was presented for the first time in January 2007 as a highlight at the Heise congress on ?Open Source Meets Business? (http://www.heise.de/open/news/meldung/84306).

The next award presentation will take place in the old city hall in Nuremberg on Wednesday, 23 January 2008.

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MySQL AB is building on its European organisation with a new sales office in Milan, Italy to focus on supporting corporate customers.

On November 8 in Milan, the database vendor's first public event in Italy will take place. The Italian MySQL team invites users and customers to learn about the company, its products and services.

More information about the 'MySQL in Italia' event is available here (in Italian).

Last week I wrote about my efforts to measure MySQL’s replication speed precisely. The most important ingredient in that recipe was the user-defined function to get the system time with microsecond precision. This post is about that function, which turned out to be surprisingly easy to write. The manual section on user-defined functions provides very good instructions on how they work and how to build them. But just for the record, on Ubuntu 7.

In the spirit of the MySQL Pluggable Storage Engines the proxy has a plugin infrastructure now.

The main goal was to cleanup the code so what the admin part and the proxy itself can be loaded at runtime.

The new code-layout looks like

• mysql-proxy.c (codename: the cauldron)
  • takes care of the command line options
  • signal handling
  • win32 service handling (not done yet)
• libmysql-proxy.so
  • provides the mainloop and everything for the socket and protocol handling
• libadmin.so
  • the old admin interface
• libproxy.so
  • the well known proxy itself

Now you can plugin your own modules if you like and only load those modules that you really want.

The next step is making the …

These days everyone is looking for a MySQL DBA or MySQL Architect. I am regularly contacted by recruiters, Proven Scaling customers, and other contacts, and they all have the same question: “Where do we find MySQL people to hire?” Most of them have had requisitions open for 6+ months (I know of a few in the 12+ month range), they haven’t found anyone, and they’re feeling desperate now. Since I get this question so often, I thought I’d consolidate my advice on the subject and post it.

They don’t exist on the market today.

Currently there are many more job openings for MySQL people than there are qualified people to fill them. Many of you reading this and trying to hire someone are working for startups and are probably relatively “unknown”, perhaps you don’t have a lot to offer. This makes it even harder for you, as you must compete …

There was an article this week in InfoWeek entitled How Linux is Testing the Limits of Open Source Development which really hit home. In many ways, it's reflecting some of the issues that our much smaller opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM project is going through as well, and it made me realize that there may be a natural, self-correcting mechanism which limits the growth of open source projects.

Let me give you an example of how I think this works: Imagine a really smart developer sat down and started an open source project. She starts writing code, and pretty soon the software is useful. More and more people download it, and soon some other contributors/developers show up. The rate of development increases, and more features show up, leading (hopefully) to more developers. …