I think the FSF has done a great job in preparing the first draft for GPLv3. “The FSF” here means Richard Stallman plus Eben Mogler, their lawyer.

The GPLv3 first draft was launched today 16 Jan 2006 here at MIT in Boston. It’s the start of a nearly year-long process with at least one more coordinated draft (in late June) published before a final release, likely in November. Those are the likely dates; earlier and later dates are possible at least in theory.

Generally speaking, GPLv3 tries to address all important GPLv2 shortcomings. Judging from what I’ve seen and examined so far, it does quite a good job of it. Let’s see where the discussions go.

Discussions now take place fully openly over the FSF GPLv3 website with those who represent special interest groups being invited by the FSF to four Discussion Groups.

• Group A is …

Contrary to popular Simpson's Cartoon opinions, the water just sinks
in the toilet.

I got in to Melborne a few hours ago and I am out to have lunch with
Stewart (another MySQL'er).

Must go find Kangaroo...

Contrary to popular Simpson's Cartoon opinions, the water just sinks
in the toilet.

I got in to Melborne a few hours ago and I am out to have lunch with
Stewart (another MySQL'er).

Must go find Kangaroo...

Would it not be great if on the MySQL website there was a page of stats (updated daily) that provided statistics like number of installations, a breakdown of versions registered (not certain I like that exact word) , OS’s, countries etc. More specifically, some useful stats on the engine types in practical use, avg number of tables per database etc. Of course the types of stats could be limitless, but with the success of MySQL as well as other open source projects, more imperial figures on installations other then just downloads I think would definitely benefit given the current momentum. (Availability of information to competitors could be both a good and bad thing.) Perhaps figures can be shown in percentages, not actual numbers.

Anyway, nice idea you say, we can all come up with ideas, but how could you implement something like this. …

I recently had the pleasure to get in touch with Kai "Oswald" Seidler from the Apache Friends team. He is one of the people behind 'XAMPP', an easy to install software distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl which is available for Linux and Windows. The project also added support for Mac OS X and Solaris recently, but these ports is still in an early beta stage.

MySQL AB today announced its second straight quarter of financial profitability and another record year of enterprise sales wins and technical achievement. In 2005, MySQL added over 2,000 new customers, who selected MySQL to power their Web sites, critical business applications and packaged software due to its superior performance, reliability, ease-of-deployment and significant cost savings.

GPLv3 Draft ? GPLv3

It’s there for you to take a read. I’ve just read through it and it does sound like a good improvement. I would certainly feel happy licensing my code under this license.

It’s also good to know that MySQL has been and will be further involved in the process (as are many other orgs and companies).

NASA's Mars Rover project has continued in its successful use of open source software. The ground systems controlling the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers are heavily based on open source technology including MySQL, the Castor data binding framework and Xerces XML parser.  According to Jeff Norris, a senior computer scientist at the Jet Propusion Laboratory, the rovers success is a testament to open source, laying the groundwork for greater use of open source inside the agency.  "It's emboldened, or increased our approach to use open source," he said.

MySQL is also now available under a US Federal GSA contract which should make it easier for government agencies to purchase MySQL Network.

• NewsForge: NASA's Mars Rover blazes open source path
• eWeek: …

NASA's Mars Rover project has continued in its successful use of open source software. The ground systems controlling the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers are heavily based on open source technology including MySQL, the Castor data binding framework and Xerces XML parser.  According to Jeff Norris, a senior computer scientist at the Jet Propusion Laboratory, the rovers success is a testament to open source, laying the groundwork for greater use of open source inside the agency.  "It's emboldened, or increased our approach to use open source," he said.

MySQL is also now available under a US Federal GSA contract which should make it easier for government agencies to purchase MySQL Network.

• NewsForge: NASA's Mars Rover blazes open source path
• eWeek: …

There has been a few posts on PlanetMySQL recently with regard to an XML, firstly the new XML functions for extracting information from XML stored in standard tables and more recently an XML storage engine.

It got me thinking, I've posted recently about working with AJAX and I've been developing some AJAX functionality for our clients. It seems to me that part of the goal with AJAX is to give a better user experience but also to reduce the amount of traffic to the server by only loading what's needed, when it's needed. Not as in our case a refresh of the page (along with the associated images). There is a balancing act between making the page functional and also keeping the amount of Javascript down, it's easy to shift alot of HTML from the initial page only to replace it with complex JavaScript functionality to manipulate XML which is returned in the xmlHttpRequest calls.

I've used Oracle's HTML DB which is an Apache …