Despite the title, Greg Vetter's paper on open source licenses [PDF] ("'Infectious' Open Source Software: Spreading Incentives or Promoting Resistance") has less to do with a rigorous analysis of the pros and cons of infectious licenses, and much more to do with an explication of what, exactly, the GPL/LGPL mean. Vetter does a great job on this and should be a required read if you're hazy on open source licensing.

Vetter does, however, make a claim that interoperability should trump infection in open source licensing:Some estimate that infectious terms promote open source software growth by supporting community development norms and preventing proprietary poaching of the software, or converting proprietary software to open source. Even if some of these viably benefit open source, my analysis is skeptical that infectious terms, on balance, have beneficial …

This sucks. I don't know how else to put it. My friend Wyatt Ammon is no more. Gone. He left in July, to do some good for the world. He joined the PEACE Corps. So, today I get a call, saying Wyatt Ammon is no more. It's strange, I think he was two years younger than me. One of the nicest guys I ever met, a kindred spirit. He tried very hard to beat me at tennis, we had agreed to play again in two years, once he was back from Zambia. When he left, I figured it was just a temporary thing, we all thought, we'd see him again in two years. But, I guess we won't. This blog belongs to one of his friends. I guess it's good that atleast he didn't die a horrible tortured death, nor did he suffer in bed for a long time, that should be some consolation I guess. But.. Wyatt.. is gone.. no more beers after tennis, no more talks about what life …

This sucks. I don’t know how else to put it. My friend Wyatt Ammon is no more. Gone. He left in July, to do some good for the world. He joined the PEACE Corps. So, today I get a call, saying Wyatt Ammon is no more. It’s strange, I think he was two years younger than me. One of the nicest guys I ever met, a kindred spirit. He tried very hard to beat me at tennis, we had agreed to play again in two years, once he was back from Zambia. When he left, I figured it was just a temporary thing, we all thought, we’d see him again in two years. But, I guess we won’t. This blog belongs to one of his friends. I guess it’s good that atleast he didn’t die a horrible tortured death, nor did he suffer in bed for a long time, that should be some consolation I guess. But.. Wyatt.. is gone.. no more beers after tennis, no more talks about …

• Back in the land of small bosoms and pretentious girls. For a good greeting, I got massively sick - flowing nose, sneezing, tearing eyes. Its hard to believe I was born here, and yet I get all these complications everytime I rock up here.
• Oh, and Streamyx, in both my houses, suck. Its so slow in comparison to what I’m used to sitting at home via cable. And look, their QoS is hopeless too. Sigh. Flickr uploads are slow, at best. And I’m supposed to have at least 256/384kbps upload speeds here.
• Spent some time fighting the VPN, and it eventually succumbed. OpenVPN on Linux is a breeze (go Fedora!), but Tunnelblick took a bit more massaging to get working.
• I have also fixed my VoIP, so you can now reach me …

I mentioned a few posts ago about Oracle's SQL*Plus client program and how great it was at formatting output in different and novel ways, providing you know the commands to do it. One of the biggest problems is that the default linesize (the width of the screen buffer used to display rows of data in a table) is small and only actually displays something if you have small amount of columns. About 95% of the SQL I write breaks this default and displays something which is totally unfathomable.

The answer of course is to change the size of the linesize parameter, it's easily done and in fact with SQL*Plus you can set up a file to set this on log in, but I'm often connecting to servers where this file doesn't exist.

Anyway getting to the point I found a nifty way to format data in MySQL into a more readable format, this isn't some great secret but I wasn't aware of it until recently. Let's take a normal SQL statement and …

I just received O'Reilly's conference newsletter... it says
Arjen Lentz and his program committee are now sequestered, preparing the richest, most in-depth agenda for any MySQL Users Conference ever.Someone has a way with words... probably Margi Levin at O'Reilly ;-)
But yes it's true, we're hard at work wading through the over 200 (!) submissions. Only about one in every three of those can be fit in, so it's a tough gig. This year, we don't only have internal committee members, but also external. Laura Thomson keeps a particular eye out for good PHP stuff, but also LAMP in general.

First items to be released will be the tutorials (for the Monday preceding the main conf), and some of the top speakers. We aim to start early registrations by mid December. I'll also try to blog about a number of the speakers as they are selected, to give you a taste of what will be.

I just received O'Reilly's conference newsletter... it says
Arjen Lentz and his program committee are now sequestered, preparing the richest, most in-depth agenda for any MySQL Users Conference ever.Someone has a way with words... probably Margi Levin at O'Reilly ;-)
But yes it's true, we're hard at work wading through the over 200 (!) submissions. Only about one in every three of those can be fit in, so it's a tough gig. This year, we don't only have internal committee members, but also external. Laura Thomson keeps a particular eye out for good PHP stuff, but also LAMP in general.

First items to be released will be the tutorials (for the Monday preceding the main conf), and some of the top speakers. We aim to start early registrations by mid December. I'll also try to blog about a number of the speakers as they are selected, to give you a taste of what will be.

Despite years of support for open source, including the contribution of SapDB to MySQL, SAP may now be remembered more for Shai Agassi's comment on "IP Socialism" than anything else. Why does open source get compared to "socialism" or "communism" so much, and does it deserve it?

What's So Bad about Socialism?

Even the most die-hard conservatives don't mind a freebie from their governments. What people object to about "socialism" seems to be some combination of the following:

1. Forced seizure of private property through nationalization, expropriation, currency controls, or land reform.
2. Centralized control of productive assets and stifling of free competition.
3. Lack of checks and balances on the apparatchiks who control the economy.
4. High taxes levied on the rest of society.

Is Open Source Socialism?

Viewed in this light, open source …

Ever heard that citation attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum? "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Me, a truck and a server

I tried it! Not with tapes, but with a whole server full of data. Today I moved our MySQL replication slave all across Switzerland, from our main office in Zurich to our branch office in Lausanne. We just thought it was not the best idea to have the master and the slave do their work next to each other (for backup reasons). So I took the slave offline this morning and brought it to Lausanne, where (since about two hours) it's already in sync again with the master.

We hired a small truck for this task (actually still too big for this small server, but it was just too heavy to lift, so we needed a tail-lift and that was the smallest car they got at AVIS that had one). The server's equipped with 11 harddrives of 73 GB each (it's actually not all …