that is all.

err… okay, a bit more. Breakfast this morning consisted of doing the dishes (good first step), some toast with jam and vegemite and a mango. Yum. All the time listening to the recording of the company-wide conf call from the other day (2am was just a little bit late that night).

These conf calls are really good actually - being able to throw questions directly at the top (and have them answered) is a great thing. Also getting to know what is going on from a higher perspective is really valuable.

There is a myth out there that open source offers a convenient way to save a dying company's proprietary product, or provides a way to head off the eventual bleeding dry of a successful closed-source product (like Oracle's database, for example). The 451 Group has news for you:

Nope. Sorry. Not going to happen.

In its Cashing in on Open Source report, they make the following point:

Pure plays commodifying new sectors and offering professional support may be profitable - some are remarkably so. Examples include the Linux distributors, JBoss and MySQL. Traditional companies, however, should not expect open source initiatives to contribute substantially to the bottom line. The cost of building a developer community (Eclipse, OpenSolaris, openadaptor, eBay) is a sunk cost. Returns are intangible, such as grassroots …

The 451 Group's Cashing in on Open Source report contains an off-hand comment that I think deserves more comment. It says:

Because human-readable programming languages compile to machine-readable binaries, it'?s possible to sell usable software without the source code attached.What The 451 doesn't point out is that the inverse corollary is also true: because most people don't care about source code, and because compiling from source to a binary executable is work/drudgery, you can make a business out of distributing free and open source code and charging customers a fat fee for a "certified" binary.

Don't believe me? Take Red Hat as an example. It makes its money by charging customers to get the magical, certified Red Hat. In truth, it's the same RHEL you can download for free, but the assurance of certification …

Open source advocates should read Winning the Linux Wars in this month's Redmond Channel Partner magazine. Emblazoned with tanks and missiles, the feature article boldly proclaims that "[Microsoft] partners should relish the opportunity to compete with Linux, and they should win every time."

How? By making total cost of ownership comparisons which highlight the following advantages of Microsoft products:

1. More complete feature set, which could be very costly to develop in their open source equivalents.
2. High cost and difficulties of finding or training people with Linux skills.
3. A clear and coherent future for Microsoft products, thanks to its size, dominant market share, and research budget.

Some of the article's arguments are …

I’ll be speaking tonight at the Lethbridge MySQL Meetup Group on the subject of Querying 101. I’ll be talking on the basics of creating a select query, then advance into  joins, aggregates, self-joins, and all sorts of fun.

Anyone in the southern Alberta area can get more info at http://mysql.meetup.com/88/events/4826222/ and those who can’t make it can watch for the flash recording I hope to put online tomorrow.

Microsoft’s file system patent upheld: ZDNet Australia: News: Software

Saying any part of the FAT file system is “novel and non-obvious” is rather like saying being stabbed in the eye with a fork is “novel and a good way to spend a sunday afternoon”.

Seriously - what the?

I’m really glad I work for a company that opposes software patents.

Thanks to Pia for the links.

The process for starting up a cluster is pretty interesting. Where, of course, “interesting” is translated to “complex”. There’s a lot of things you have to watch out for (namely you want one cluster, not two or ten or anything). You also want to actually start a cluster, not just wait forever for everybody to show up.

Except in some situations. For example, initial start. With an initial start, you really want to have all the nodes present (you don’t want to run the risk of starting up two separate clusters!).

Bug 15695 is a bug to do with Initial Start. If you have three nodes (a management node and two data nodes) and break the network connection just between the two data nodes, and then reconnect it (at the wrong time - where the wrong time means you trigger the bug) the cluster will never start. A workaround is to restart one of …

Bright and early Sunday morning, I will be flying off to Boston to attend the GPL version 3 launch at MIT.

I am betting on heated discussions and a wild mix of Free Software fanatics, FSF staff from around the world, the Free Culture crowd (EFF, the super awesome Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons staff, ...), corporate lawyers from major vendors (IBM, Intel, Novell, Sun, HP, Microsoft, ..), the Open Source business crowd (MySQL, RedHat, SpikeSource, ...), Open Source people, academics, etc. with one or ten trolls thrown in for good measure.

I am also more than a wee bit curious to see how radical (or not) the first public draft of the GPL v3 will be. …

The Vancouver PHP User Group has kindly offered to be a guinea pig for my session on copyright, contracts and licenses for software developers. I appreciate the opportunity to refine the presentation, as it will be a bear to get right - first, I have to sure that the audience clearly understands that I am not providing legal advice; second, the topics are complex and difficult to explain concisely.

The session is particularly important to get right, as I may be (or am, in a few cases) presenting variants of the session at these events:

• Orbital Lunch and Learn (private event) (confirmed)
• Open Source CMS and Blog Tool Summit (confirmed) …