The spirit and intent of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GPL license are right on target. However, we must be careful to ensure that the GPL license is interpreted in a manner fulfills the spirit and intent behind its framing. Richard Stallman and associates set out to draft a license agreement that ensures that free software remains free. They didn’t want to see open source become corrupted with the insertion of proprietary code that would eat away at the freedoms they envisioned.

To protect the eternal purity of the open source software, they created constraints on how proprietary code can interact with the GPL code. Their one weapon in this battle is the automatic and forced expansion of their GPL license to any code that integrates with the base GPLed code. I often refer to this process as acting like a virus. I don’t use this term to infer nefarious intent any more than viral marketing infers nefarious intent. On the …

Peter Zaitsev at Percona has an interesting post today talking about how large companies warp the open source development process, resulting in an increasingly isolationist development model from their corporate benefactors. He rightly highlights one motive driving this behavior, namely the desire of marketing to make a big splash with a critical mass of enhancements/fixes that, when bundled together, become worthy of media attention. He rightly bemoans this situation from the perspective of the developer.

There are a few more factors influencing this process and their root causes are found in the maturation of the project and the demands of both users and the different groups inside a corporation. Much of this can be mapped to the stages defined in the book Crossing the …

About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, …

As I write this, my friend (and eLiberatica chair) Lucian is packing up to fly to Bucharest for this year’s instance of the eLiberatica Electronic Frontier/Free Software/Open Source conference. Sadly, I won’t be participating this year – a commitment to less travel and a new venture make doubly sure that I’m staying home.

Despite the downturn, it looks like this is going to be a great year for the conference: 400 people have registered and the list of speakers is formidable, including: OSI board member Danese Cooper, FSFE founder Georg Greve, MySQL founders David Axmark and Monty Widenius and Zbigniew “Gandalf” Branecki from Mozilla Europe.

If you are in or near Romania, you should try to …

Recently on a client site I had to fight the pain of having no way to confirm loss of data integrity when optimizing data types. Due to MySQL’s ability to perform silent conversion of data, when converting a number of columns we enabled sql_mode to catch any truncations as errors.

sql_mode=STRICT_ALL_TABLES

This ensured that should any data truncations occur, an error is thrown not a warning. The following shows an example case study for converting an INT to TINYINT UNSIGNED and shows that without sql_mode silent conversions occur.

mysql> drop schema if exists tmp;
Query OK, 25 rows affected (0.40 sec)

mysql> create schema tmp;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> use tmp
Database changed
mysql> create table t1(i1 INT NULL);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.15 sec)

mysql> insert into t1 values(1),(2),(3),(256),(65536),(NULL);
Query OK, 6 rows affected (0.06 sec)
Records: 6  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0 …

As the recipient of the 2009 MySQL Community Member of the Year award I received a MySQL crystal ball. While it looks good in my bookcase, unfortunately the best advice I can offer during this time of uncertainty is “watch this space”.

A number of topics where information is still very much unknown and I’m either asked about, or am following includes:

• The Oracle acquisition of Sun, owner of MySQL.
• MySQL 5.4 Alpha release and schedule for production release
• The end of MySQL 5.0 Community/Enterprise split
• The future of Falcon in MySQL 6.0?

Thanks to Julian Cash of the Human Creativity Project of his photograph at the 2009 MySQL Conference.

…

The announcement last month of Oracle to acquire Sun continues to warrant a lot of discussion over exactly what Oracle will do with MySQL. Only time will tell what will happen with the official product, however it is important to remember that MySQL is GPL, there will always be a free version of MySQL available for popular LAMP stack products such as WordPress and Drupal and new and existing startup’s will continue to use MySQL.

This announcement will see Oracle resources begin to better understand and evaluate MySQL. As a resident MySQL Expert, I also have a strong background in Oracle having also worked for Oracle Corporation. I have also delivered several successful one day and half day workshops on MySQL/Oracle related content including:

• 2009 - Best Practices …

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Over the past two weeks I've been mostly focused on MySQL, but the big-ticket item in the Sun/Oracle deal is not databases, it's Java. However, it's also the domain which is far less clear to predict. It was a big deal when Sun decided to open source Java, but the fact of the matter is that the first fully open source release isn't out yet, and Sun has been keeping the testing and certification kit off-limits for open source communities. This means it would still be far too easy for OpenJDK to be killed off.

I've been keeping clear of Oracle for several years, and can't even begin to guess what their position on this is. Oracle has been a pretty active contributor to Linux in particular for several years, and I'm sure their open source strategy and how it works together with their business is pretty well established within at least the engineering …

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled Dear IBM , I was too late .. I was on holliday last week when people started sending me text messages , such as .. "Game Over MySQL , Long live Ingress" or "No Eclipse for IBM", etc ...

I had ideas regarding the future of certain Sun products at IBM, now the game has changed .. it'ss how they will live on at Oracle :)

Similar Questions arise .. like indeed the future of MySQL, the future of Solaris etc ...

So regarding the future of MySQL , I don't worry at all, on the contrary ..
Oracle tried buying mysql before they already have Innodb .. they didn't kill it .. the MySQL offering is complementary to the Oracle offering, now they can tackle both markets.
And as already mentionned when writing my IBM letter ..

As for MySQL, Jeremey has some good insights.. the fact that …