Ok, here’s an evil idea for you. Say Oracle wanted to hurt MySQL financially but still look like a community player.

Simply take the Oracle Linux move and extend it to an Oracle Managed fork of the MySQL GPL code. Keep the APIs for storage engines and development and throw developers at improving the internals in some areas that need it, release more regularly than the new Community Edition, only under the GPL.

Oracle could sell support for their GPL edition to make some money, though the department as a whole might operate at a financial loss. The gain is PR and control of course.

How does it hurt MySQL? Well, one of the big reasons for Community v. Enterprise MySQL is to provide differentiation to get GPL compliant users to pay subscription fees. You take away the pain the Community edition provides, you take away the incentives of buying the Enterprise edition.

Mmm, so deliciously evil… I think I need to buy …

One may have notice we were not blogging too much recently, this is because we were quite busy, mainly building BoardReader.com - Search Engine which indexes tens of thousands of forums from all over the world. This project was built by us as consulting project so too bad we do not own it completely but we're still quite excited it is live now. We did not work on crawler in this project only on database Backend and full text search engine implementation. In this part it is standard LAMPS application. I guess you know what LAMP is and S Stands for Sphinx - Full Text Search Engine which we love to use where large scale search is needed. At this point we have over 300 millions of posts indexed with only 3 search servers and still counting. I guess we'll have half a billion of forum posts soon.

To share few more technical details …

With the recent release of CouchDb 0.6.0, I sat down and updated CouchDbX, the MacOS X GUI for CouchDb. It comes with a brand-new and shiny user interface that is (hopefully) easy to understand. Thanks to Dominik Harijanto it has a set of nice buttons. The application icon is still my temporary icon, but Dom will update that as well.

What does it do? With the three buttons, you can start and stop CouchDb as well as launch the Peek admin utility. Thrilling. Since CouchDb is still alpha-quality software and is suited only for early adopters, this is all you need for now. Once CouchDb matures, CouchDbX will become a full fledged GUI to all of CouchDb's features.

It still looks like the teaser

Download CouchDbX.

I wrote a while ago about a program I wrote to export GnuCash data into a MySQL database, including a couple of queries against the resulting schema. I've made some improvements since then to allow a simple overlay of my wife's expense categories onto the GnuCash hierarchy. This article explains the improved schema, and includes some more useful tools and queries.

From me, to Ross and license-discuss:

Socialtext which wishes to find a resolution for the attribution issuethrough the proposal of a Generic Attribution Provision.  A copy ofthe following message is available in HTML format here:https://www.socialtext.net/stoss/index.cgi?attribution_memo

I look forward to the conversation,

Ross, as I commented on a ZDNet thread, you’ve earned my respect (not that it matters) by bringing your license to OSI and having a real discussion about UI attribution.  I’m one of the critics of UI attribution licenses, but I’m glad someone brought it to place where forced UI attribution can be vetted to OSD in a reasonable manner.  I do hope you receive the criticism of this provision in that light.

needs than Linux. These application products could be “lost” in thelarger distributions. The …

Seems like I'm doing a lot of revisting these days. Perhaps I'm just not making myself clear.

I have basically five types of systems in my organization; mission critical, 24x7, ancillary, QA, and Development. Below are some detail explanations of each type of system:

Mission Critical
A mission critical application is a piece of software that must be running in order for the business to continue to operate. Without the software, the business would cease to exist. An example of this is eBay's auction system or the software that executes orders for Ameritrade.

24x7
A 24x7 system is important to the business, but not essential for the business to run. If a 24x7 system goes down, customers get upset but business continues to operate. An example of this type of system would be Ameritrade's …

Indeed we are looking to extend the number of MySQL Support Engineers, in this region. Aye, plural. More than one person. And one would be focusing for MySQL Cluster.

Particularly if you're based in Australia or New Zealand and might be interested in this kind of gig, please drop me a line urgently! But if you're located elsewhere in the APAC region (Malaysia, Fiji, whereever!), that's cool too - as log as you're fluent in English and such.
Thanks.

I bought a new personal laptop a few weeks back, and I’ve been using it enough to final post a short review. I’ve run linux on several different laptops over the years, and it’s always been kind of tough. Even supergeeks endure a lot of teasing at conferences about getting wireless networking configured.

This time, I went with System 76, who offer laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled. Definitely the right choice! I chose a Gazelle, which is not quite as sleek as my previous MacBook. It is blazing fast. I was amazed at how quickly I was able to be productive with Ubuntu preinstalled and working perfectly: NetworkManager means my wireless connection works even better than on the MacBook, suspend to RAM and hibernate to disk worked flawlessly, and it compiles MySQL in about 13 minutes flat.

…

Not having a watercooler, around which we can stand and gossip, is a serious drawback to working at home. MySQL's 300ish employees are spread out over 20-something countries. Most of the people with whom I work closely are not within a few hours of my timezone.

Our primary communication medium is IRC, a kind of continuous chat system, like an agora where people group themselves together on topics, rather than like the person-to-person chat that most people know of. Outside of that, we occasionally use our telephones, which connect to the Internet directly, bypassing long-distance carriers and bills. And, of course, there's (now-ubiquitous) email. If you consider the loss of nuance in hurried textual communication and the ever-present risk of culture-shear, one would think we would have far more misunderstandings than we do.

Not having the …

Alfresco Software Inc. today announced results for the first open source JSR-170 benchmark. The results were based on a 10 million document repository and validated by 3rd party open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) experts Optaros to assure compliance with pre-determined benchmark rules.