Linuxworld has a thought-provoking interview with Linus Torvalds that is a must-read. Linus is always interesting, but this one is particularly valuable because he addresses the role of commercial interests in making Linux better. He also talks about his personal motivations - financial and otherwise - and suggests:

The thing is, being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as being world-class pays even better....So I think I would have missed the opportunity of my lifetime if I had not made Linux widely available [rather than made it proprietary and built a company around it].

So, if you marry the wide adoption of open source with the talents of a Linus Torvalds and the commercial interests of a Red Hat or MySQL …

Hubert Depesz Lubaczewski has published the 57th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on </depesz>. Next week, J.Pipes will do LB#58, and #59 will appear on Chen Shapira’s I?m just a simple DBA…. To join the roll with these and other intrepid (!) LB editor-publishers, contact the Log Buffer admin. Hubert Depesz [...]

There has been some discussion about MySQL's recent moves to clarify the targeting between MySQL Community Server & MySQL Enterprise Server. Essentially, MySQL wants to make it clear(er) that Community Server is free and for those of us who are willing to "spend time to save money". Community Server is the version that will be made available to Linux distros and passed on to customers that use MySQL inside of their Linux distro without support. Enterprise server is for paying customers; those of you willing to "spend money to save time". The source for Enterprise Server will no longer be... READ MORE

Kaj wrote about changes in the Enterprise and Community offering from MySQL AB - by the way, I still don't understand why the Community VP delivers these announcements rather than a company press release. A Community VP's blog can't be the official publication channel of a PR department, can it?

I think Jeremy Cole summarises the issue very well. Important promises for the community ecosystem were not delivered. This is a great pity.

And no longer making the source tarballs of the Enterprise version publically available... come on. This should have been done from the start (and that's not even a 20-20 hindsight statement ;-) It's been blatantly obvious, really. It would have made sense, and is a perfectly valid choice under the GPL. Didn't …

I’ve always liked the guys at Webyog, the produce a good quality MySQL GUI called SQLYog that has evolved quite nicely over the years thanks to the fact that they listen to feedback and come back with a product that just gets better and better. They certainly produce a solid competitor to MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser, using an interface that most find more familiar.

The latest news is that they have now come back with a competitor to the MySQL Network Monitoring and Advisory Service, called MonYog.

Where the MySQL offering involves a server and a collection of agents, MonYog is designed around a desktop application that directly connects to the MySQL servers being monitored. Which solution …

Thoughts on latest changes:

• don’t think there’s really much to it.
• I rather disagree with this slashdot headline  (MySQL Closing Off Its Source) as I just don’t think it’s true.

However, I have other thoughts (that are a lot more interesting to discuss):

We should:

• Release major version every 6 months. e.g. N.0, N.2, N.
• Odd numbers are used during the 6months of development, with very frequent releases. In fact, with a strict policy of keeping pushbuild green, you could automate this. Yes, some of these releases would be utter shit due to whatever problem seeped in. Get over it - it’s called a development release.
  • No new features merged for last 3 months of cycle for release.
  • source only releases… if you …

Tonight i thought it’s time. It’s time for an upgrade for my lovely Dynamic Web Pages ;) Facing the latest stats from nexen.net, that only (already) 20% of all php-sites are running PHP5 and facing the end of life announcement of PHP4 on php.net and all those activities going on (i.e. the go-php5 initiative), i thought it’s really, REALLY time for it. So, get up and start fetching the sources … php.net … and …. oh, getting hands on, i thought migrating MySQL is a good idea, too - so let’s switch from 4 to 5 (yes, ofcourse the Community Edition ;)).

Two hours later (and remembering that …

The SHOCKING news from today's LinuxWorld is that MySQL is a business and sometimes makes business decisions, as Linux.com reports. The headline screams that MySQL is closing off source code access to the community.

The truth is completely different.

As Kaj Arno notes on his blog:

...

A

By now, word has gotten around that MySQL has made some more changes to their process around MySQL Community Server. The changes primarily focus on:

• acceptance of community contributions (5.0 and 5.1 are now locked for contributions, so any contributions won’t be available until 5.2 or later)
• release schedule of community server (”Mature GA”, meaning 5.0, will have approximately 4 source builds per year and 2 binary builds; new GA, meaning 5.1, will have a binary build once per month)

These refinements of the community server [process] are detailed in Kaj Arnö’s blog. Not everyone is happy about the new plan for acceptance of community contributions, because it means that community enhancements have to wait a long time to see the light of day. Jeremy Cole has talked about the frustrations that this causes and calls the …