OStatic blogs

LinuxCon Puts Out Call for Papers Ahead of Summer Event

Lisa Hoover — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:03:00 -0500

LinuxCon 2010 is just six months away, and the Linux Foundation is on the lookout for attendees and presenters alike. A Call for Participation went out last week, inviting Linux users of all types to submit presentation proposals.

Program options include individual and panel presentations, workgroups, lightning sessions, tutorials, and "birds of a feather" sessions, grouped into three tracks. The Operations track will target architecture, deployment, migration, and other areas of system administration/management, while the Developer track focuses on software engineering, core development, the kernel, and other development. Enterprise, governance, and the open source ecosystem will comprise the Business category.

The CFP page has topic suggestions for those short on ideas, guidelines for proposal writers, and submission requirements. The deadline for entries is midnight on March 31 (Pacific). Acceptance and rejection notices will go out by April 15.

The main conference will take place August 10 - 12 in Boston, Massachusetts, with mini-summits scheduled for August 9. Early registration is open until April 15 for $300, and will go up to $400 from then through August 9.

Students can register at any time for $100, and will have to show their student ID at check-in. Travel and accommodation arrangements can be made through the conference hotel, the Renaissance Boston Waterfront.

Related Activities

Oracle Cuts Affect GNOME Accessibility Work

Joe Brockmeier — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:54:59 -0500

Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.

Last week Oracle laid off two members of Sun's Accessibility Program Office (APO), including GNOME a11y team lead, Willie Walker. Joanmarie Diggs, who works with the team contributing to GNOME's Orca screen reader, says that as a result of the layoffs that "the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail," if Oracle doesn't reverse its position or if another company doesn't step up to help.

It's tempting to point a finger at Oracle alone here, but this just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened. It is disappointing to see Oracle making cuts in a11y support, but Oracle shouldn't have sole responsibility for a11y in GNOME either. Other vendors have a strong interest in supporting GNOME's a11y efforts. Mozilla recently made a second donation to the GNOME Foundation to support accessibility, but the overall support for GNOME a11y doesn't look very robust.

This may be because a11y is typically not a problem most users think about. Users who don't need assistive technologies don't think about the need for assistive technologies. Developers who don't need assistive technologies often need to be reminded to think about a11y in their applications, whether or not they're working directly on things like Orca. In addition to showing how fragile support is for a11y work among sponsor companies, it also demonstrates the need for expanding a11y awareness throughout projects. Walker writes on the GNOME list that he'd like to "work hard to put myself out of at least one facet of my job:"

What I mean is that we need to embrace accessible design, development, and testing as a complete community, much as we do for internationalization. So, whereas not everyone needs to be developing assistive technology, everyone needs to be developing for accessibility. If we can accomplish that, the overall cost of accessibility goes way down and the quality goes way up.

This has been done before, on other technologies. The GNOME internationalization efforts have been very successful in addressing internationalization throughout the project. If the same attention was given to a11y, it wouldn't require so much work now.

Users can rest easy that Walker's work will continue on GNOME 2.30, but there's a lot of work to do on the GNOME 3.0 a11y roadmap. Walker points out that the immediate goals for GNOME 3.0 are not staffed appropriately at this time, and they that may need to be re-scoped if another company doesn't step up to help fund the work. Let's hope that a solution is found, otherwise putting Linux on the mainstream desktop is going to be much, much harder.

Related Activities

Related Software

Oracle (5 alternatives, post review)
orca (add alternative, post review)

SourceForge Removes "Blanket" Block

Joe Brockmeier — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:47:50 -0500

After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site.

According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block. So it will leave that up to the individuals running the project:

We have no way of knowing exactly which projects should trigger a block. But each project’s leadership is positioned to make such determination – so we've placed that power in their hands.

Beginning now, every project admin can click on Develop -> Project Admin -> Project Settings to find a new section called Export Control. By default, we've ticked the more restrictive setting. If you conclude that your project is *not* subject to export regulations, or any other related prohibitions, you may now tick the other check mark and click Update. After that, all users will be able to download your project files as they did before last month’s change.

Of course, people probably won't be as quick to publicize the reversal. ArabCrunch blasted the site and questioned whether the ban was an indication open source wasn't so open after all. We'll see if they give the company props for reversing the policy as quickly as they took shots at the site for the ban in the first place.

The initial move was overkill, but the company should get some credit for listening to its community and putting the control in the hands of the individual projects. This is exactly the right solution, and it's important to realize not every company is going to get it exactly right the first time. What's really important is that companies listen to the communities they work with and continually work to improve to get to the right solution.

Related Activities

Related Software

sourceforge (1 alternative, 1 review)

Layoffs Won't Stop Project Wonderland

Joe Brockmeier — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:35:32 -0500

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle.

Despite the layoffs, Nicole Yankelovich, who was the project team lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the project has "great momentum." Nicole Yankelovich, who was project lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the team is pursuing for-profit and not-for-profit options, and things look good:

To our knowledge, there are currently three companies offering Wonderland-related products, and eight companies offering Wonderland world-building services. There are countless exciting university projects and a number of corporations that have seen the advantages of Wonderland over other platforms. We are seeing new people posting on the forums almost every day.

Yankelovich wrote that the team already has some leads, because the layoffs were anticipated prior to Oracle finally acquiring Sun last week.

Project Wonderland is a Java-based 3D toolkit for creating virtual worlds licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). According to Hypergrid Business the project compares to Second Life and OpenSim, but has a few rough edges and a few advantages over competing platforms:

For users familiar with the Second Life or OpenSim worlds, Wonderland still lacks some functionality, however. For example, it's not as easy to change the world from the inside. Wonderland users can bring in 3D objects, documents and images and move them around. But they can't create new objects from scratch or modify existing objects. By comparison, Second Life and OpenSim supports in-world editing of objects. Say, for example, an architect is doing a walk-through tour of a new building and the client wants a new color on the wall — the architect can make that change right there, without leaving the world. Enterprise users that like the flexibility of being able to change a virtual world without learning how to use a 3D modeling program may prefer another platform. But enterprises that rely on professional developers to create a world — or who are able to use a pre-made world — may prefer the Wonderland approach.

With all the worry over MySQL, it seems people overlooked a lot of other projects that were in the line of fire once Oracle completed the merger. The good news is that projects like Wonderland can continue development if there is a committed community behind them, though it's got to be disheartening for the developers who had a good home with Sun to do open source development.

The actual project will remain hosted at ProjectWonderland.com, the blogs have been moved to blogs.projectwonderland.com because the Sun blogs are only open to employees. A new release is expected in the next week or so. If the project is as good as the team is motivated, it should go far.

Related Activities

Related Software

Mozilla Studying Menu Item Use in Firefox

Joe Brockmeier — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:03:08 -0500

The Mozilla Labs Test Pilot program is studying the way users interact with the browser's menu bar. The Firefox user experience (UX) team is considering major changes of the menu bar design, at least for versions of Firefox running on "modern versions of Windows."

Mozilla Test Pilot is a Mozilla Labs project to collect "structured user feedback" from Firefox and other Moz Labs technologies. Users work with the program by installing the Test Pilot extension and then users have the option of participating in tests like the Menu Item Usage Study. All tests require user approval and data is anonymized before being sent to Mozilla.

The Menu Item test, being led by Alex Faaborg who is a principal designer for Firefox, is looking to get a better understanding of how the menu bar is being used in Firefox now. Data collected in the Test Pilot study will "directly help to inform your next version of Firefox." Users who find the standard menu preferable will be able to return to the standard menu bar.

The test will run for five days, and will test to see how often users work with menu entries, how long it takes them to find the entries, and so on. It should be interesting to see how the UX team works with this information and what effect it has on the design of the menu. Google's Chrome team shook things up a bit when they designed Chrome without the standard application menu design. Of all the comments I've heard from users about Chrome, no one has lamented the disappearance of the old-school menu.

The previous test, A Week in the life of a Browser collected data from nearly 5,000 users and analyzed browsing session length and use of bookmarks over the study. The full analysis is not out yet, but some results are up that look at the number of bookmarks people have, use, and the number of folders that bookmarks are stored in.

Mozilla's Test Pilot program is an idea other projects ought to explore. The menu item test in particular is one that many programs would benefit from, but Mozilla is doing a range of tests to see how users interact with the browser and where there's room for improvement. It has been done before for programs like The GIMP, and companies have done more broad-based user testing, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Want to help with the menu study? Sign up soon! The test began on February 2, and should run about five days before completing.

Related Activities

Related Software

Raising Money for Open Source Projects: How Can We Improve?

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:47:55 -0500

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project.

Dave Neary writes about efforts in the GNOME project to raise money. Neary focuses on fund-raising in particular, something that community projects often struggle with.

As developers, we’ve invented our own brand of everything, from scratch. Figuring out how to run conferences, or raise money from people who like what we do, when these are not new problems. The entire learned history of typography gets thrown out the window more or less, because now everyone has complete tool of their authoring tools and Comic Sans is shipped by default, and if I need to reduce the margins to get the letter to fit on one page then by golly I will.

...One example of a place where there is a wealth of experience out there is convincing people to give money to a cause they believe in. There are dozens of organisations that do this well – humanitarian organisations, political lobbyists, political parties, universities – the list goes on.

Can we figure out how GNOME is like them, and learn the lessons from their fundraising campaigns?

Learning from non-profits is a good idea, but even better would be to recruit some of the expertise from non-profits to help with FLOSS projects as contributors or perhaps even have umbrella organizations like the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) hire one or more experts to help organizations raise funds instead of doing the work themselves. The SFC doesn't do this (fundraising) today, but it does do a lot of the work that comes with non-profit organizations so that the projects themselves don't need to do it.

Why? Because it's a waste of time for developers and other contributors who already have skills that a project needs to evolve to spend time doing things they're not so good at. I've seen too many contributors get sucked into things like managing finances or raising money and being miserable at it.

Why couldn't an umbrella organization do fund-raising and other related work for a bunch of projects like GNOME? I'm thinking in particular of things like the Linuxfests and FLOSS events that happen every year, and projects like GNOME that have a continued and sustained need to raise funds. While a lot of organizations have done an adequate job of fund-raising, it's usually quite a lot of work for volunteers and it's very hit-or-miss in some cases. When I was managing the budget for community relations at Novell, I had a lot of contact with volunteer event organizers and others raising money for projects.

The better organized the project, the more likely they were to get funds, all things being equal. (And assuming it's something that should be sponsored in the first place.) Not because they did a better job of pitching, but because they did the basics: ask early, target the right people, show value, be realistic, and know how to negotiate. How you ask is often less important than when you ask and who you ask. It takes a lot of work to coordinate with corporate sponsors (and GNOME has done well here by hiring Stormy Peters) but ramping up beyond that to reach out to a larger community is even more work.

Learning from other organizations is a good start. Even better would be for the FLOSS community to do more to recruit experts on fund-raising and let contributors with skills in other areas get on with running projects. Neary talks about taking the first steps of "building and maintaining a list of GNOME fans and supporters, by any means possible, and ensuring they are made aware of what we're up to" to touch them for funds. GNOME is a powerful project with a lot of dedicated users and contributors, but finding bodies to do that sort of grunt work is going to be a steep challenge. Much better if GNOME and other projects had professionals to fall back on.

But, failing that, it would be a good idea to study other groups carefully and realize that this is a solved problem that doesn't need a new approach. The steps to rasing money successfully for projects that people care about aren't a mystery. It just requires coordination and a lot of legwork.

Related Activities

MySQL Founder Monty Widenius On What to Expect Next: Part 2

Sam Dean — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:46:56 -0500

MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who left Sun Microsystems early last year, remained very vocal throughout the long machinations leading up to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, even mounting a letter writing campaign. With the Sun acquisition going forward, we reached out to Monty for an interview and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with us. In this second part of this two-part interview he adds to his thoughts on the Oracle acquisition of Sun, and more. You can find the first part of the interview here.

OStatic: What advice would you give the CTO of a startup that is making technology decisions?

If he is going to need commercial licenses for the database (for example to distribute his closed source application with MySQL), before considering MySQL he needs to do a contract with Sun/Oracle that will secure the license prices for the future.

For in-house use or open source use, MySQL is still the most used open source database and will be a good choice for many years. MySQL still has unique features, like stable well working replication, that makes it the best choice for web usage.

I would however recommend that the CTO take the precaution to ensure that this application works with more than one database to never get a database locking. (This is something that I have told CTOs since the beginning of MySQL).

In addition, he should consider putting some limited development source in the open source projects that he is using, for the benefit of all open source projects. It's only through active participation in those projects that one uses that the projects can be kept truly free!

OStatic: If you are an alternative Open Source database, how will this affect your product?

There will certainly be a much higher than normal conversion rate away from MySQL than ever before, because of the uncertainty that Oracle will bring to the market (if Oracle doesn't adopt the recommendations I mentioned before). There are some people that decided on the database because of the license, and others decided based on feature set or market share.

If Oracle decides to close up MySQL, then the users that care about the license will have to consider a MySQL fork or another open source database and this is a golden opportunity for everyone.

For users that are depending on the MySQL features or users who use a lot of programs that only work with MySQL, they are more likely to go with a commercial offering from Oracle or a MySQL fork, because switching databases completely would have too high costs involved. So everything depends on Oracle's next steps.

Related Activities

Related Software

MySQL (14 alternatives, 10 reviews)
Oracle (5 alternatives, post review)

Eben Moglen Live in NYC on Friday: Freedom in the Cloud

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:04:36 -0500

If you're fortunate enough to live near New York City, you can catch Eben Moglen at the NY Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-NY) on Friday, talking about "Freedom in the Cloud." Specifically, Moglen will be talking about the implications of "cloud computing" on software freedom, privacy, and security.

Cloud computing does pose quite a few challenges for software freedom. In addition to software licensing, users have to worry about privacy, data portability, and more. Just having the source is no longer enough, when users do have the source. Software freedom in the cloud is possible, however. For example, as this report of a talk by Aaron Williamson of Software Freedom Law Center points out, the Identi.ca microblogging service is an example of how to provide a "cloud" service and maintain user freedom:

It's licensed under the AGPL v3. The service's ToS specify which data is private and which is not – private data isn't shared, but is only used to provide services to users, and Identi.ca will only turn data over to the government under a court order. The service also describes exactly what it does with the public data it stores, constraining its freedom with regards to that information. Finally, Identi.ca has an API (a clone of the Twitter API, evidently) that lets users get their data out of the service.

This isn't a new topic for the SFLC or Moglen. He spoke about similar topics at the MySQL Conference & Expo in 2007, and it should be interesting to hear how his views have evolved over the intervening years.

Sponsored by ISOC-NY, NYU ACM, and the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Clinic, the event is open to the public. More information is available on the ISOC-NY site, including links to the flyer and handbill, and Webcast for those who can't make it to NYC on Friday. The SFLC says that the Webcast will be online "almost immediately" as Flash, and higher quality audio in Ogg and video in MP4 and Ogg will be posted a few days later.

Related Activities

Wikimedia Hires Danese Cooper as New CTO

Lisa Hoover — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:29:24 -0500

Cnet's Stephen Shankland reports that the Wikimedia Foundation has hired open source advocate Danese Cooper as its Chief Technical Officer. She'll oversee the foundation's technical strategy and tech team, including the Wikipedia. The move makes Cooper the only female CTO in the top ten Web sites.

Cooper credits the open source communty as a whole for helping her secure her new job. "I've been working for so long on awareness of the gender imbalance in Open Source, but I've always thought of my own career as a collaborative effort (as in, 'It takes a village'). In fact, when I was interviewing at Wikimedia Foundation and described my approach to solving technical challenges, I said something like 'I rely on taking in as many well-informed opinions as I can find, digesting them collectively, and reaching an essentially collaborative conclusion.'"

A former employee of Intel, Sun Mircosystems, and REvolution Computing, Cooper also serves on the board of the Open Source Initiative and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. "As a long-time Wikipedia enthusiast and supporter of Open Knowledge worldwide, I'm thrilled by the opportunity to invest directly in the evolution of the Wikimedia Foundation, " she says. "I'm joining a great team, both at the Foundation itself and in the communities it supports, and the challenge is both exciting and daunting. I can't wait to get started!"

“Danese has the perfect mix of open source commitment and managerial experience, and her background as an evangelist is particularly important to the Wikimedia Foundation. In order to continue successfully serving hundreds of millions of readers in hundreds of countries and languages, Wikimedia depends on an active community of volunteers to develop and localize the software. I'm counting on Danese to grow and develop that network,” Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner said in a statement.

Related Activities

Related Software

wikipedia (add alternative, post review)

Facebook Friends PHP: Introducing HipHop

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:01:03 -0500

Are you a fan of PHP? Facebook is. The company has been working behind the scenes to create HipHop, a runtime compiler for PHP to improve the language's performance on Facebook's servers. The company is also friending the rest of the PHP community with its work by releasing its project as open source.

Rumors have been flying for a while, and the news was confirmed on Monday by ReadWriteWeb. Facebook gave a talk on Tuesday night about HipHop to introduce the technology at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

HipHop is a just-in-time (JIT) compiler for PHP that converts PHP into C++, which is then compiled. HipHop provides a Web server and doesn't require a separate server, though it can work in conjunction with another. There is some functionality missing from HipHop compared to PHP 5.2, so existing code may need to be rewritten. Though Facebook says that it's "beta-quality" Facebook already appears to be using HipHop on production servers to handle much of their traffic.

Marco Tabini, co-founder of php|architect says he was invited to Facebook early to get a look at HipHop, and gave him a copy to play with before the announcement. Tabini says that HipHop has "the potential to be an incredibly disruptive product in the PHP landscape." Tabini also notes that it might make Facebook a major player in the development of PHP itself. "You have every incentive to make sure that your application runs with HipHop—which could give Facebook a unique opportunity to exert significant control over the way PHP evolves."

If you're running a standard PHP-based site, don't get too excited just yet. According to PHP developer Brandon Savage it's good for large-scale Web applications written in PHP, but not so much for single-server Web sites using PHP. "Since HipHop runs one web application at a time (with a built-in webserver), it’s impossible at the moment to run more than one website on a box. This is obviously less than optimal for most folks, and will limit adoption." He also notes that it doesn't support PHP 5.3 as of yet.

Facebook has been participating in several open source projects as it grows. The company sponsors or participates in a number of projects including snapshots of its own platform (Facebook Open Platform), and Thrift, a software framework for cross-language service development.

HipHop is being released under the PHP license and will be hosted on GitHub when code is available.

Related Activities

Related Software

Funambol Readies v8.5; Demos "Build Once, Deploy Everywhere" Framework

Kristin Shoemaker — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:19:05 -0500

February is a great time to visit Barcelona -- the sights, the culture, the history, and of course, the Mobile World Congress. As an astute mobile enthusiast, you've probably noticed that open source platforms, applications and services are cropping up all over the mobile industry. It's no secret that a few of us here are fond of Funambol, thanks to its cross-platform functionality and community involvement.

At the Mobile World Congress, Funambol will unveil new products to interest mobile users and developers.

Funambol v8.5 improves and extends its mobile cloud push and sync services to accommodate more rich media and social networking sites -- and devices. Sure, the usual smartphones are supported -- including Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms -- but Funambol v8.5 can push and sync with some digital picture frames, ebook readers and tablets (no magic required!).

Face it, if syncing all that information between devices isn't complicated, it's at least time consuming. If you are a mobile developer, you know this all too well -- in an even more poignant way. It's a challenge to develop mobile apps from the start, for all the wrong reasons. What platform will get my app to the most users? Which platform will it run best on? How much time can I dedicate to maintaining and updating on all of these platforms? What platform or potential user group am I just going to have to exclude because of time and technical constraints?

That's where November's announcement of Funambol's Zapatec framework comes in to play. The new framework allows developers to use AJAX and JavaScript to create applications that can be deployed on (and make the most of) popular platforms -- in one place.

Funambol's v8.5 is scheduled to release in the next ninety days. Developers interested in taking a closer look at the new "build once, deploy everywhere" framework can request a demonstration at the MWC or stop by Funambol's booth.

Related Activities

Related Software

FSF Adds to Objections on Google Book Search Settlement

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:19:55 -0500

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has filed a new objection to the court about the amended Google Book Search settlement and has asked the court to reject the settlement unless it does a better job of addressing authors who use the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and similar Free Software licenses for docs. According to the FSF, the proposed amendments to the settlement place an unfair burden on authors to ensure license compliance.

The settlement is a lot to plow through. It comes as a zip file with a main 173 page settlement agreement and 16 attachements, and a separate folder with the same files listing changes from the original settlement. Pity the folks at the FSF that had to sift through that mess. The short of it is that authors are expected to visit a settlement Web site and claim their works, and then opt out of the settlement.

The stated mission of organizing the world's information and making it "universally accessible and useful," is nice and all, but it's not Google's information to dish out as it wishes. In the case of GFLD'ed works, the authors expressly support spreading the information through their choice of license — but the book search doesn't respect their choice of license according to the FSF release:

Google would generally have permission to display and distribute these works without abiding by the requirements to pass the freedoms guaranteed under the GFDL on to Google Books readers. Authors who wanted to use the GFDL or another free license would be required to designate that license in a Registry -- and the Registry would determine which licenses could and could not be chosen.

Google seriously needs to re-think its book search methods. Requiring authors to opt-out, rather than asking their permission, is ridiculous. While I sympathize that finding and notifying each author would require a great deal of legwork, placing the burden on the copyright holder is unreasonable. If Google can't abide automatically by the terms of a license, such as the GFDL then it should withdraw the works from the book search. Google has the technology to automatically categorize works by license, so there's little excuse for the company to require authors to opt-out rather than asking them to opt-in.

The full text of the FSF objection is available as a PDF from the Free Software Foundation site. A fairness hearing will be held on February 18th.

Related Activities

MySQL Founder Monty Widenius On What to Expect Next

Sam Dean — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:23:09 -0500

MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who left Sun Microsystems early last year, remained very vocal throughout the long machinations leading up to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, even mounting a letter writing campaign. With the Sun acquisition going forward, we reached out to Monty for an interview and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with us. In this two-part interview he speaks candidly about MySQL and Sun, and we will run the second half of the long interview tomorrow.

OStatic: Now that the acquisition is going through, what do you think the future of MySQL is going to be?

It's clear that Oracle is in the game for the profit and it's in their interest to get out as much money from MySQL as they can over the long term. There will be less development of the Community version of MySQL. MySQL Enterprise will over time be only available as closed source and with a different feature set than the Community version. By keeping the price very low in the beginning for MySQL Enterprise, they will have a high conversation rate as it will be much easier to move to this than to another database.

This will create an efficient lock-in and make it very hard for a MySQL 'fork' to survive or get traction, as it's almost impossible to keep things compatible. When Oracle finally raises prices, most users just have to pay.

Oracle is also likely to market MySQL as something that is only usable for testing or 'low end' usage, and if one needs a 'real' database, then one should use Oracle's other commercial offerings. You should also expect to have a hard time finding salespeople that will sell you a MySQL database offering, especially when they could instead sell you a Oracle high end database.

My company, Monty Program Ab, will continue to work actively on our MySQL branch, MariaDB. We will do what we can to ensure that there is always a free choice for those that can use MariaDB under GPL, in other words inhouse use and by the open source community.

When it comes to development, there is very likely to be very little development done on the MySQL storage engine side, as no storage engine vendor can long term expect to make any profit on this. There is also not going to be a fork of MySQL cluster, as I don't see anyone in the community willing or able to take care of this.

OStatic: Do you think Oracle might devise ways to extend the MySQL business so that MySQL users can convert to its databases--kind of an on-ramp strategy based on open source?

What we can expect is a lot of tools and marketing to get people to convert from MySQL to Oracle's higher end products. Oracle is, however, now in such a dominant position that it doesn't really need the MySQL business to get people to turn to Oracle for their database needs.

OStatic: What role do you think MySQL should play vis-a-vis Oracle's database products?

Oracle will probably keep around MySQL for a couple of reasons: 1) as a limited free (not necessarily open source) entry level database for people to use until they have to upgrade to a commercial offering; and 2) to stop anyone other (open or closed source) database from growing market share; For this they don't need to do a lot of development on the community version. Just keeping it around at the current level should be more than enough for a long time.

Oracle could also position MySQL enterprise (the closed source version) as their offering for the web space (but not much more).

OStatic: Some people say it doesn't matter in the long run what Oracle does with MySQL. It's open source, so it will just succeed in forked versions if Oracle does nothing with it or kills it? Are they right?

No, a fork is not likely to save MySQL long term. I have outlined the reasons in detail in my blog.

In short, the GPL only guarantees that the code will be available, not that it will be developed. If things are not developed fast enough (according to the needs if its users), it will very rapidly be uninteresting for the masses and slowly die.

A good example of this is RaiserFS, which at one time was one of the most popular file systems for Linux, but when the author was not able to work on it anymore, its usage died very rapidly.

What makes MySQL so hard to fork is that it's, from the closed source users aspect, a GPL library. These users, who traditionally are paying for open source development (like they do for Linux), can't use MySQL under GPL and are thus not willing to participate in development of a fork. So whatever happens, a fork of MySQL will never be able to satisfy all users. As it's these users that bring money into development, there are many problems.

I don't know of a single successfully forked GPL library (in reality, there are very few GPL libraries, just because GPL is not a very good license for a library).

What is needed to keep a fork of MySQL alive is that a lot of vendors that benefit from the MySQL infrastructure (but don't need commercial licenses) should come together and put a lot of money (we are talking about many millions of dollars per year) into some entity that develops a fork, and should do this without getting any direct revenue for this. I am doing my share in this, but I can't continue to do that forever.

OStatic: What advice would you give the folks at Oracle, now that they have MySQL in their control?

If Oracle is truly sincere about keeping and developing MySQL as an open source product, it should make some public, iron-clad promises (that hold in a court of law), about their intentions. If Oracle would do this, they would be able to deal with a lot of the mistrust in the community and in the market about the future of MySQL.

Oracle did have a chance at doing this when they negotiated with the Department of Justice and the European Commission about the merger, but then the company decided to prolong the deal instead of giving any binding promises for MySQL. I sincerely hope that Oracle will reconsider it's position, to gain the trust of all MySQL users.

See the rest of this interview tomorrow.

Related Activities

Related Software

MySQL (14 alternatives, 10 reviews)
Oracle (5 alternatives, post review)

Open Source Bridge Dates Announced

Lisa Hoover — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:29:04 -0500

Portland seems to be where all the cool kids are gathering to meet and discuss opens source this summer. O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) is , and the organizers behind Open Source Bridge 2010 announced their conference will take place in Portland, June 1-4, 2010.

The all-volunteer event is run by open source developers and also aimed at developers. "Session tracks are technology agnostic, based instead around shared community experiences and focused on similarities between projects, not differences. The geekery doesn’t end when the sessions do. There will also be a 24-hour hacker lounge for code sprints, bug bashes, session deep dives, bouncing ideas, starting new projects or just mingling and taking in the vibe."

Planners are scheduling five different tracks: Chemistry, Cooking, Hacks, Business, and Culture. The collection of informational sessions are meant to cover all major aspects of the open source ecosystem. Individual programming languages and tools will be discussed within each track, as well as an exchange of knowledge and ideas among attendees. Sessions will take place the first three days, with a full day of unconferencing the final day.

If you want to get involved in planning this year's event, organizers would love to have you. To get started, sign up on the volunteer page, join the mailing list, and let the planners know how you'd like to help. Be sure to also check out the slide deck from last week's inaugural Town Hall Meeting that kicked off the planning. A request for proposals is expected within the next several days.

Related Activities

Related Software

events (add alternative, post review)

Akademy Call for Papers Opens

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:17:41 -0500

The KDE Project is accepting papers for the Akademy conference, held this year in Tampere, Finland. Primary topics for this year's gathering are centered around making it possible for users to connect with their data and other users in new ways. The event is being organized by COSS, the Finnish Center for Open Source Solutions, and KDE e.V..

The two tracks for 2010 are "Expanding Our World: KDE Beyond The Linux Desktop" and "Connecting Our World: Social Desktop." The first track will focus on KDE technologies on mobile devices and netbooks, and the other topic centers around integrating KDE apps with social media applications and sites like Twitter, Identi.ca and services like Telepathy and Akonadi.

COSS is Finland's industry group for free software vendors and user organizations. COSS was founded in 2003 and promotes development and adoption of FLOSS in industry and the public sector. The group claims more than 130 member organizations, and is run by a steering group of sponsoring members.

This year's Akademy follows a joint conference with the GNOME Project, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, held in July 2009. Both projects reported that the combined event was largely a success, but have decided that a combined conference should not be a yearly event. Akademy will run from July 3rd through July 10th.

Other KDE-related topics are also welcome. Submissions should be emailed to akademy-talks@kde.org, and the deadline is Friday, April 23rd. See the call for papers for full details. Papers from last year are online and might serve as a good example what the organizers are looking for.

For KDE contributors who aren't able to make it to Europe, the KDE Project also puts on Camp KDE, which was held recently in January in San Diego.

Related Activities

Related Software

conference (add alternative, post review)

OStatic blogs

LinuxCon Puts Out Call for Papers Ahead of Summer Event

Related Activities

Related Blog Posts

Oracle Cuts Affect GNOME Accessibility Work

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

SourceForge Removes "Blanket" Block

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

Layoffs Won't Stop Project Wonderland

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

Mozilla Studying Menu Item Use in Firefox

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

Raising Money for Open Source Projects: How Can We Improve?

Related Activities

Related Blog Posts

MySQL Founder Monty Widenius On What to Expect Next: Part 2

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

Eben Moglen Live in NYC on Friday: Freedom in the Cloud

Related Activities

Related Blog Posts

Wikimedia Hires Danese Cooper as New CTO

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

Facebook Friends PHP: Introducing HipHop

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

Funambol Readies v8.5; Demos "Build Once, Deploy Everywhere" Framework

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

FSF Adds to Objections on Google Book Search Settlement

Related Activities

Related Blog Posts

MySQL Founder Monty Widenius On What to Expect Next

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

Open Source Bridge Dates Announced

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts

Akademy Call for Papers Opens

Related Activities

Related Software

Related Blog Posts