First up, I want to say, I’m truly impressed with Brazil. One day I will visit this amazing place, and spread the good word of open source with projects that are close to my heart: MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Fedora, and in due time, a lot more. This is a live-blog, from a most interesting talk, at JavaOne 2008. As I wrote on Twitter, “Brazil, simply impresses me. Their use of open source in government, makes me think that the rest of the world has a lot to learn from them”.

Free and Open Source Software: Use and Production by the Brazilian Government
Rogerio Santana <rogerio.santanna@planejamento.gov.br> +55 61 313 1400, Logistics and Information Technology Secretariat
Planning, Budget and Management Ministry
Brazilian Government

Households with Internet access: 70% in the US4k household income range. …

Note: these are live notes. It was a great talk, I’d rate it as excellent (and I’m not just saying that because Josh and I work in the same group at Sun). I’ll have to also comment on his thoughts and talk, in due time. MySQL, as an open source project, has a lot to learn.

Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community
A How-To Guide
Josh Berkus, Community Guy

Part 1: The Evil of Communities

• you may attract and will be unable to get rid off a community
• they mess up your marketing plans, because the community goes out and does its own marketing and PR and distributes your software in places you didn’t expect to
• they also mess up your product plans, because they contribute to code and features to your project, with unexpected innovation!
• communities are never …

It seems that open source maven, Matt Asay along with well-known Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley have come to the conclusion that Microsoft doesn’t need open source. Asay contends that Microsoft’s open source activity has more to do with regulators than best practices and user collaboration.

Microsoft’s open-source charade is not about customers. It’s about regulators. Until Microsoft can convince U.S. and European regulators that its market power is not as bad as it once was, the company will need to hide behind expressions of openness.

Hence, Microsoft “opens” up its protocols (i.e., lets everyone read but not touch…without forking over cash). It inks “open” interoperability agreements with Novell …

Ever since I did my original post on Crippleware I have been getting a lot of feedback from individuals about how the intersection of open source works with closed source extensions.

Open Source that is not crippleware but allows for third party extensions allows for the following:

Open and documented APIs with stable interfaces.
The ability to compile or load the software without "secret sauces".
The consumer right to always have access to the data they have entered.

The first two really deal with the issue of whether or not the vendor has created a "level playing field". Third party vendors who write modules expect an even handedness when dealing with APIs.

This means that there are no special tools required that cannot be obtained by …

I've been thinking about this statement from Sun/MySQL's Marten Mickos: "There's a difference between organizations that have more time than money and organizations that have more money than time." I coming to realize that OSS users split into three, not two, categories: A] An organization that has more time than money B] An organization that has more money than time but is used to getting what they need for free and is comfortable enough with OSS to rely on their own skills C] An organization that has more money than time While Marten has grouped categories "B" and "C", I... READ MORE

That week at the conference was a busy week for me - as busy as any developer meeting I have had with MySQL in recent years. I had a great time seeing old faces again and it was much like old times talking, chatting and coding with them. In particular, I spent much of my time with Patrick Galbraith, Eric Herman and Arjen Lentz.Great progress was made: I worked with Patrick getting my ancient

In a unique display of mass hysteria, one blogger after the other and even slashdot (no, I’m not going to link) managed to take the completely innocent message that certain new enterprise features might get released as closed source only and turn it into an ongoing bad press onslaught about “MySQL closing down source code”.

Why don’t you all give MySQL a break here please?  The rule is always the same for everybody: the one that writes the code gets to pick the license.  Listen, I 100% believe in open source and I consider myself to be a big advocate, but commercial open source companies like MySQL (and Pentaho) are commercial entities.  At lease try to put yourself in their position for a second.  For example, if a customer asks you to NOT to release a piece of software they paid for, you don’t release it, it’s that simple.

In the end, what MySQL is doing is simple: they are experimenting with a …

Final slides from keynote delivered this morning at the MySQL user conference. Topic was protecting live MySQL databases.

(Slides render well in both OpenOffice and PowerPoint)

At the MySQL Conference and Expo this week, we've seen new storage engines popping out of the woodwork and it caused me to wonder at what point MySQL went from being a product to a platform. From a technical perspective, you could argue that MySQL has always (e.g. for at least 5 years!) been a platform, since it's enabled plug-in features and storage engines since the early days. Heck, Arjen wrote about it back in 2004! The pluggable storage engine API become increasingly important in recent years as people began extending MySQL in many different directions. The virtue of the... READ MORE

In 3 words:

They already do.

MySQL Enterprise is more than just a binary. http://mysql.com/products/enterprise/ has the details on the other features MySQL Enterprise includes.

One of these features is the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, which is closed source, proprietary alerting software.

So when bloggers make statements such as:

MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model ? previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being …