Infoworld has an article "
The fight over open source 'leeches', about the failure of enterprises to contribute the changes they make to open source software back upstream to the project.
"When it comes to open source communities, individuals are much better citizens than institutions. The enlightened self-interest that causes individuals to send back bug fixes, contribute ideas for new features, and write documentation is much harder to find in institutions," Dan Woods, CTO of Evolved Media, wrote in Forbes earlier this year.
I have a very old article in my german language blog about
Open Source Software and companies, and the infoworld article triggered me now to translate it:
Many companies do use open source, and that is a good thing. Most of that software is well suited to the task, and usually it is much easier to understand, more flexible and also easier to debug than their closed source equivalents. But open source requires that enterprises adjust their process with regard to changes and deployment of software in order to be successful open source users.
The fact that you can change open source software lures many companies into making changes to the software. But making the changes is just a small part of the work, and the most inexpensive one.
What usually happens is often this:
Continue reading "Open Source 'Leeches'"
This is the translation of
a text I wrote for my german language blog two days ago.
Now Sun has been bought, and not by IBM or Cisco, but by
Oracle. In the aftermath everbody is asking themselves - what happens to MySQL?
Well, firstly MySQL and InnoDB are now part of the same company. Oracle has been maintaining InnoDB pretty well in the past, and that can only improve.
Will Oracle let MySQL die and try to push their on products into the market? Hardly so. Why should Oracle do that, and if so, using what products?
Continue reading "MySQL, Sun and Oracle"
Right now I am in Skien, which is somewhere in the middle of the dark forests of Norway. Skien, a bustling town of a whopping 45.000 people is the seventh largest municipiality in Norway, and also the home of the PHP Vikinger Unconference.
My part on this Unconference was to hold a Nontalk, a session where I asked the audience to come up with things that they think are typical for Everyday PHP use and that currently do not have a name.
The following stuff are the slightly edited and commented notes I made in front of the audience while moderating our session.
Continue reading "phpvikinger.org: Things that have no name"
PHP is different. Unlike Java for example, there is no formal community, and no formal community process. PHP does not see itself as controlled by a company, or even large corporate players. PHP is not developed, it kind of grows. People using other languages see this as a weakness, but I actually think of it as a strength of the language, the platform and the community.
PHP is used differently than for example Java. Successful PHP projects use different strategies. If you have listened to what Rasmus has been telling you in his speeches during the last two years, you might get an idea of how PHP is different, and why. If you are comparing the approach MySQL has been using in the Dell DVD webshop benchmark uncontest with the other PHP approaches, you can see some of these principles applied.
Unfortunately, for many of these principles and methodologies no fancy names exist. So in my untalk on the PHP unconference at
PHP Vikinger I invite you to describe the principles that you think make PHP different, and then we will try to find fancy names for them in order to be able to discuss them, and promote them.
I think this is important - nobody would have taken "put procedure call parameters into CGI parameters and just call them instead of building large XML requests to encapsulate everything" serious before it was called RESTful. And few people can understand Rasmus "scale by request and not by session, build lightweight and frameworkless pages and use the language and its modules as a framework instead of including tons of classes per request" before we can find a number of fancy acronyms for these things.
What else can you find that PHP does differently? Can you build cases for these patterns? And can you find good names for them?
These are the slides I have shown at my security talk (Room F at 11.50am today).
Security and the real world (PDF, 1.4 MB):
Continue reading "Security and the real world"
Back in the days, when the middle "C" in "CCC" still stood for "Communication" and not for "Commerce" and the annual Chaos Communication Congress still happened at the Eidelstedter Bürgerhaus in Hamburg, such improvisation was common and necessary.
(by Gerardo Narvaja)
We do run on all platforms supported by Microsoft, embedded platforms not tested. We do support all communication protocols supported by Windows. Minimum disk space: 200MB, basically enough to unpack, install and create a few test DBs. We do run on all filesystems supported by Windows, for tables larger than 4GB NTFS is necessary. We do support a lot of DB access frameworks: ODBC, .NET (1.1 or newer), JDBC (1.4.2 or larger to develop, 1.3.0 or newer to run).
Packages are named a bit differently than on Unix.
Continue reading "MySQL on Windows for DBAs"
Session by Laura Thomson.
Less than 7% of the sites currently using PHP are using PHP 5. Why is everybody skipping it?
PHP 5 has a few central cool features, and is much less incompatible than you may think. Try it. Watch out for the mysqli and PDO extensions and the new OO model. Also handy: Exceptions, Improved XML Handling, SOAP, Iterators and more.
Continue reading "MySQL UC: Upgrading to PHP 5 - Why and How?"
Ok, this is my highest post so far: I am on the way to the UC 2006 and I am posting this using in-flight internet from 30,000ft height. The connection is not too bad. Ping times look like this:
kris@linux:~> ping -c 3 193.98.110.1
PING 193.98.110.1 (193.98.110.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 193.98.110.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=237 time=609 ms
64 bytes from 193.98.110.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=237 time=709 ms
64 bytes from 193.98.110.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=237 time=640 ms
--- 193.98.110.1 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 609.600/653.176/709.380/41.702 ms
That's not too bad, I believe.
Right now all of your MySQL Developers are busy at
MySQL Devcon 2006 in Sorrento. Each day is bracketed in the early morning and evening by the ritual of "Showstopper Bugs review", wherein the remaining showstopper, P1 and P2 bugs are reviewed, verified, assigned and the progress on their elimination is being tracked.
So far we are seeing a lot of progress - long standing and neglected bugs are suddenly going very easily, because people here can see each other and just talk about the problems they are seeing.
So more Sorrento means less lemons for all of you!
Sourceforge.net notes:
New project database service, based on MySQL 4.1.x has been launched. The existing MySQL 3.23.x service will be deprecated in November 2005 (prior notice will be sent to project administrators). Projects are responsible for migrating their data and applications to the new service. New services allows projects to create multiple databases, and supplies three user accounts (one each with read-only, read-write, and administrative permissions). Launched 2005-09-29.
The new database server shall enhance database performance for Sourceforge projects greatly.
Arjen Lentz of MySQL operates
Planet MySQL, an aggregation of blogs pertaining to MySQL.
I'd just like to draw your attention to planetmysql.org
The site had been around for a while already, but had some quirks. It has now been replaced, and already tracks many more feeds including news announcements from the mysql site. It also uses a filter on uncategorized feeds to pick only mysql-related posts.
If you have a blog yourself and write about MySQL-related stuff, please submit your feed URL using the form at: http://www.planetmysql.org/newfeed.php
Thanks!
(via
Kai)
