The latest from the MySQL community

Last Tuesday when I was walking the show floor at the MySQL conference, I ran into a familiar name,  Jennifer Venable.  I had never met Jennifer before but we had traded mails and had spoken on the phone.  This was about 18 months ago when we were negotiating the renewal of Sun's contract as an Authorized Distributor of Red Hat.  At that time, Jennifer was the Red Hat lawyer working on the contract.

Well since that time Jennifer has escaped from the Red Hat legal ranks and has joined the business side where, as of a couple of months ago, she took over as head of the Red Hat Exchange. 

Take a listen.

My interview with Jennifer (12:25)  Listen ( …

I was just reading Fabrizio Capobanco’s take on the MySQL excitement (”this move is clearly into the right direction”) when it occurred to me that the situation is related to the comments recently made by the former CTO of Kaplan Test, Jon Williams, at the recent OSBC conference.

As I wrote at the time: “Another point Jon made was that the subscription model helps keep open source vendors on their toes as every year he gets to decide whether they will received another payment.”

In other words, as …

I went by the MySQL Users Conference on Tuesday and it looked good, plenty of energy and attendance. Check PlanetMySQL for reports, the bloggers are doing a good reporting job; SlashDot is not, though - see below. A quick pass through highlights:

“Sun to Begin Close Sourcing MySQL” screamed the headline on Slashdot last night. The headline is not entirely accurate (although slightly more accurate than the bizarre statement that “Sun has had a very poor history of actually open sourcing anything”).

So what is going on at MySQL? To get to the bottom of that you have to weave together a number of posts and comments from a number of sources. First the article behind the Slashdot headline:

“Just announced: MySQL to launch new features only in MySQL Enterprise,” states Jeremy Cole, which is a much more accurate description of the state of affairs. “MySQL …

The solidDB for MySQL database engine for MySQL may have lost its sponsor following IBM’s acquisition of Solid Info Tech but events at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo prove the certified engines program is alive and well.

Not only has Oracle announced that its Innobase subsidiary has updated InnoDB transactional storage engine, but there is also a new member of the certified engines program.

Kickfire has recently …

“The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source,” wrote Matt Asay earlier this week. It was a throwaway point but one that I think deserves more attention.

It occurred to me that “how” rather than “why” is the most significant question that open source vendors and projects should be answering right now as they try to encourage greater adoption of open source software.

There can’t be a CIO or IT director left on the planet that hasn’t either asked or been told why they should deploy open source software. They are either inclined towards believing the claims of theoretical benefits or they’re not. How many have asked or been told how they can take advantage of open source software?

Certainly those that are convinced or intrigued by the potential benefits will have gone on to explore …

Yesterday I chatted with Jay Pipes at his home in the Buckeye State.  Jay is the North American community manager for MySQL and very recent Sun employee.  We chatted about whats up in the world of MySQL and all about the MySQL Conference thats coming up in 10 days (April 14-16, in Santa Clara).

My interview with Jay (10:01)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

 
Photo by Sebastian Bergmann

It is interesting to read RedmondDeveloper News’s take on Oracle’s attitude to open source this morning, especially this paragraph quoting Monica Kumar, Oracle’s senior director for Linux and open source product marketing:

“”We haven’t seen our customers asking for open source databases,” she told me. “Not many customers are interested in looking into the code and mucking around with it, and making changes to it. All they care about is ‘give me the best support, give me the lowest price of entry’.” For that Kumar pointed to Oracle Express.”

It is difficult to disagree with the second part of Monica’s statement. Cost savings are routinely cited as the biggest driver for open source database adoption, while the lack of robust support is the biggest barrier to open source adoption.

Certainly these were the findings of our …

As I mentioned a couple of entries ago, last weekend I was in Boston to attend the Free Software Foundation's annual members  meeting. 

It kicked off early Saturday morning amidst a flurry of wet snow.

It was 95 degrees in Austin on this day. 

The event was a day long affair held on the MIT campus and featured a dinner that evening at the Middle East.

 
The crowd mills about waiting for the event to start.  There was a very impressive buffet of fruit, juice, danishes etc to get things started right  -- Can't talk Free Software on an empty stomach.

Matt and Josh campaign to eliminate both DRM and yellow …

I'd call this the 3rd strike and everybody knows what happens next

Marc Fleury has some good answers to the most clueless industry reporter around, starting with:
Spring is touting itself as a JBoss replacement. Smart PR, but false. Spring is a development framework comprising wrappers and dependency injection on top of Hibernate and Tomcat runtimes, both developed, and monetized by JBoss.

You can drop some balls, no one can keep track of what's going on in Open Source land, it's difficult enough to track what's going on in MySQL, Drupal, Virtualization and Distribution land but if you realize you don't have the whole picture (like not …