Google and Microsoft trade patent claims. Actuate announces Q2 results. And more.

# Google accused Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies of organising a hostile patent campaign against Android. That prompted Microsoft executives to claim that Microsoft invited Google to be involved in the CPTN purchase of Novell’s patents. However, Google explained that joining CPTN might have decreased its ability to defend itself against potential patent claims.

# Actuate announced its Q2 …

It's my turn to apologize. Andrew and I apparently really angered people by being upset about something last week, and for that, as he already has, I apologize. I don't like making people angry or upset.

I believe Henrik made an excellent point, which is that for various different reasons, there are those of us who were upset when Oracle bought MySQL and yet felt complelled to not communicate this publically. To be honest, emotions related to a business transaction ARE a little weird, so I'm not sure it's completely odd that people don't know how to appropriate express them. But as Henrik rightly pointed out, the Oracle takeover has been the elephant in the room (sorry Postgres - it's not you) and we've all been spending a good amount of energy NOT talking about …

There's been quite the thread on Google+ (my how technology changes quickly...) over a comment Andrew Hutchings made on an Oracle MySQL Blog Annoucment for their new "Meet The MySQL Experts" Podcast. I should have ignored it - because I honestly could not give two shits one way or the other about Oracle or any podcasts that they may or may not decide to broadcast. But to be straightfoward about it ... the title of the podcast is ludicrous. In case you were wondering, "The" in English is the definite article and implies a singular quality to the thing that it describes... effectively implying that Oracle's MySQL Experts are, in fact, the only MySQL Experts. We all know that's false- Percona and SkySQL are both full of experts as well - likely have more MySQL Experts per-capita than Oracle does, as if a per-capita measure were important. Of course, as Matt …

I have a strong professional and personal relationship with Kosovo. Before and after the war, from 1998 to 2002, I was part of the OSCE-UN mission that helped 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 you may or may not know, long long ago (in this universe) I used to be the MySQL documentation team  Yes, a team of one. This was 2001. It was a great and interesting time. The current much extended team is doing a great job with the now much bigger set of docs!

Today, I find myself disagreeing with my former colleagues on one particular aspect, namely its licensing. You see, the documentation has never been released under an open license, it used to be plainly copyright all rights reserved, and later some rights were granted to distribute the docs together with the server.

Statements made earlier by Karen Padir regarding possible opening up of the docs license filled us with hope. Then, Stefan Hinz (the current docs team lead) wrote a blog entry MySQL documentation: no license change. Some of the arguments there we can …

Refining the Beekeeper model. Investment opportunities. Schooner, Gear6 and Virident line up memcached appliances. The launch of the Open Source Channel Alliance. Is source code necessary? And more.

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Of bees and trees
We noted last week that James Dixon, CTO of Pentaho, had updated his Beekeeper model for understanding the commercial-community relationships employed by vendors to engage with open source. Roberto Galoppini quickly followed up with some feedback, as did Tarus …

Consider me a tomato.

Savio posted a MySQL needs to reconsider closed source article yesterday. I’m sure anyone who knows me knows that I’m one of the ones who is likely to be very vocally outraged if they do. I agree that the mythical “point #3″ is the hard part of the general Open Source business plan … although I’d put forward that #3 is always the hard part, Open Source or no. However, before I rant uncontrollably about that, I was struck by this:

Can you think of a better testament to the power of the open-source business model than saving Sun Microsystems?

Short answer:

Yes

First let’s quibble over words again. If I answer the question the way it’s intended to be answered (semi-rhetorically), it would be glossing over the gross error …

I would like to add two follow up thoughts to yesterday’s post about Free Software.

First, I was speaking with giuseppe on IRC who said:

however, the economy of free software goes beyond passion. You can make money with services, as you have done, personally, for years!

Giuseppe is, as usual, right on. I hope I did not imply that I thought it was impossible to make money or to make a living around Free Software, or that to endeavor to do such a thing was folly. What I was trying to get at is that pursuing the writing of software with the goal of becoming rich was a bad idea. It might happen, but if it does it will likely be due to luck.

I am currently paid by Sun Microsystems to write Free Software. I am thrilled about that, and think Sun are wonderful for supporting me. I would also love to have some chunk of Free Software that I write make me rich - but neither my employment by …

I’d say I normally don’t respond to idiots… but I think we all know that’s a lie. Our fine friends at Slashdot pointed out an “interesting” article which opines that the downturning Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping. There’s a bit in the middle that points out that people still don’t get it.

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

The disconnect seems to continue to be an idea that we’re doing the Free Software in hopes that it might turn a profit one day. The people who share this disconnect seem to think Free Software is a “gimmick” of some sort.