The latest from the MySQL community

As of today, the third, final and largest code release for Open High Availability Cluster has been made available.  This now means that all of the Open HA Cluster code is available as free software.   This will allow developers and admins to access and build complete HA solutions built on source code from the OpenSolaris project.

Right before the launch I grabbed some time with Meenakshi Kaul-Basu, the engineering director at Sun responsible for Availability products, and whose group the Open HA Cluster falls under.  Take a listen to Meenakshi's explanation of the event and her insight:

My interview with Meenakshi (9:29)  …

SourceForge announces quarterly earnings. Linux server growth strong, says analyst firm. Talend adds support for MaxDB. (and more)

SourceForge Reports Third Quarter Fiscal 2008 Results, SourceForge (Press Release)

Worldwide Server Market Shows Resiliency with Solid First Quarter Results, According to IDC, IDC (Press Release)

Talend Announces Data Integration for MaxDB, Talend (Press Release)

How everyone wins with open source software, Linux.com, Lisa Hoover (Article)

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On Monday this week I attended the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Prague.  The summit which just ended today, was intended to drive plans and decisions for the next Ubuntu release "Intrepid Ibex" which is due out on October 30th.  (Check out the reports from the summit here.)

Mark welcomes the masses while Jono scans the crowd for hecklers.

Sun had about 12 folks there representing GlassFish, Open JDK, NetBeans, Hudson, …

I just got around to reading Stephen O’Grady’s post on the relative openness of open source vendors and realized I had failed to be as clear as I could have been in my original post on the subject.

Responding to my note about Milking the GNU’s suggestion that a new independent organization could be formed to judge vendors on their level of openness, Stephen wrote:

“Those in the industry that might care have, I would argue, already formed their opinions on whether or not a project such as MySQL?s is or is not open source. And those outside the industry, well, I don?t expect they?d care. At all. Most of the enterprises I speak with are …

There was some interesting discussion following my post last week asking whether there is a growing rift between commercial open source software vendors and some aspects of the open source user community.

Amongst the comments, Chris Marino of SnapLogic suggested that some of the tension might be eased by open source software vendors being more upfront about their intentions via the publication of social contracts. Examples include the Debian Social Contract and also Funambol’s Open Source Project Social Contract.

Last week, at the end of JavaOne day one, I was able to grab the JRuby dynamic duo for a podcast.  Tom Enebo and Charlie Nutter turned out to be really nice guys, must be their midwestern roots, and were a pleasure to talk to (I also learned a lot :). 

My interview with Tom and Charlie (14:19)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

Charlie Nutter and Tom Enebo -- the JRuby dyanmic duo (and wearing the shirts to prove it).

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Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software.

The question itself might be innocuous but Matt’s use of the term “free-riders” prompted a couple of angry responses. Storm in a tea-cup stuff really.

Meanwhile, in a unrelated …

The 451 Group’s Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service now has a podcast (iTunes or RSS feed).

A month or so ago, I was having a conversation with The 451 Group’s Vice President of Research Services, Simon Carruthers, about ways to expand the offerings of the CAOS Research Service. The CAOS Research Service includes aspects that are public (such as this blog), but the majority of the work that we do is accessible only to our paying clients, namely our research articles and reports, as well as our advisory service.

We made the decision to add a biweekly conference call …

As promised, after individual presentations at last week's CommunityOne I brought together the community leaders of three of the top GNU/Linux distros (Zonker Brockmeier, OpenSUSE; Jono Bacon, Ubuntu; Karsten Wade, Fedora), threw in Glynn Foster of OpenSolaris and moderated a no-holds-barred panel.  (It took them three hours to clean up the blood afterwards!!)

Although the panel itself wasn't recorded, immediately after it concluded, the five of us headed to the make-shift podcast studio we had set up at the event …

Update: I’ve been suffering some ungly and stupid bugs today, so I’ve fixed them and released version 0.2. It also includes a new script wp-update-home.

I’ve just published some scripts that help me manage my personal wordpress installations, and publish some plugins I’m working on.

Warning: these are early versions which I use for small tasks. If you find
a bug or have suggestions, contact me at jbernal@warp.es

Download version 0.1 …