MySQL licensing redux

Published by
jeremy
at May 8, 2008 in MySQL and Sun. 0 Comments

A follow up to one of the more divisive announcements made at the MySQL Conference. From the 451 Group Blog:

After all the fuss it appears that MySQL will be remaining open source after all. As Kaj Arno and Monty Widenius report, Marten Mickos announced at CommunityOne that the MySQL Server will stay open source, as well as the forthcoming encryption and compression backup features, which MySQL had considered making available only to paying customers.

“The change comes from MySQL now being part of Sun Microsystems. Our initial plans were made for a company considering an IPO, but made less sense in the context of Sun, a large company with a whole family of complementary open source software and hardware products,” writes Kaj.

“My hope is that the experiment when it comes to closed source extensions developed by Sun is now ended. As far as I know, there is no existing plans for any closed source extensions to the MySQL server,” adds Monty.

While that seems pretty clear cut, there is still room for a little confusion. Kaj writes: “To financially support MySQL’s free and open source platform, we have a business model which allows both community and commercial add-ons, and we remain committed to it.”

Monty clarifies: “I interpret this, in the context of Mårten’s and Jonathan’s announcements, that we will continue to support and make available commercial addons to the MySQL server from third party, like the Infobright storage engine. Things that we develop ourselves at Sun, at least on the server, will continue to be open source.”

It was always made clear that the decision to ship closed extensions was made before the Sun acquisition. It’s good to see that Sun stepped up, listened to feedback and changed this. It may have made sense for a company looking to IPO, but it doesn’t make sense for Sun. While it’s now clear that Sun-shipped server code will now be open, they also made it clear that 3rd party commercial extensions will continue to be embraced. I see that as a good thing. The “at least on the server” qualifier does leave the door open for something on the MySQL periphery to be closed, but that’s been the case for a few years now (MySQL Monitor for instance). If you’d like to know more about the announcement, Monty has posted his opinion:

I was yesterday attending the “Open Tuesday” Sun & MySQL event. One of the first questions I got from the audience during my questions & answer session was what is my take of the recent MySQL proposition of having closed source parts/modules in the server.

I was very happy to be able to say that Mårten some hours earlier had announced on CommuntyOne that the MySQL server is and is always going to be open source.

It’s very good to see that Mårten is continuing to be responsive to the MySQL community and to the MySQL customers. Thanks to Mårten for doing the right thing! Thanks to the MySQL community for expressing their opinions!

Monty also posted a very good (and honest) assesment of the MySQL Conference here.

–jeremy

Share This

Microsoft Walks Away from the Yahoo Deal

Published by
jeremy
at May 5, 2008 in Microsoft. 2 Comments

Unless you were in a cave over the weekend, I’m sure you’ve seen that Microsoft has walked away from its 40B+ Yahoo acquisition attempt. I’ve largely avoided the topic, but do have some commentary now. Note that many people think this is just a posturing attempt by Microsoft and that’s entirely possible. First let me say that I think the merger would have been spectacularly bad for Microsoft. The cultural and integration issues alone would have been nearly unsurmountable. Would the mail portion of the deal even have gotten regulatory approval? How many high profile departure would you have seen? How many projects that really give Yahoo much of its street credibility would have been crushed? I’m not sure that Flickr, delicious, Zimbra and many others would have gone to Microsoft given the choice. That being said I think the deal would have been bad for Yahoo as well. Microsoft has had a terrible track record on the web and has multiple cash cows to protect. In the end the only way I saw the deal being feasible would be if Microsoft spun things out into a fully autonomous company. I didn’t see any indication that was going to happen.

On to Ballmer, I really think this underscores the fact that he needs to go if Microsoft is going to turn itself around. He seemed to have no coherent plan here. It almost seems if he woke up one day really wanted Yahoo and just didn’t think it through. Microsoft wants to compete with Google so bad they seem to be getting irrational. It’s clear they can’t do this organically, but I really don’t think Yahoo was the answer.

Next come the shareholders. There’s already a ton of speculation that this will result in shareholders lawsuits. To me that makes no sense for a couple reasons. First, as a shareholder it will distract the company and further drive down the price of the stock. The more tragic part though is the current state of the street. Everyone is so concerned with the next days closing price that very few people take the long view anymore. Unless you’re day trading, if you invest in a company you should be looking at the long term. That means trusting management. IMHO shareholder lawsuits should be reserved for gross negligence and other egregious acts. We remain far too litigious and it’s going to come back to haunt us. FWIW, the stock currently sits in the mid-24 range, which makes it down about 12%. That’s not nearly as bad as some people were speculating. MSFT is up mildly.

On to morale. Most people within Microsoft seem to be happy about the deal falling through. Many jobs have been saved and they get to keep their $43B cash horde. This happiness may wear off as soon as they realize they still are not effectively competing in the space, but with that much cash they should be able to figure something out. Things aren’t as clear at Yahoo. Yang and co are clearly happy, but the rest of the staff seems to have people on all sides of the equation. It will take Yahoo having a couple very good quarters or making a really compelling announcement for that to change if I had to guess. It’s been a long few months if you work at YHOO.

So were do things go from here? There has been talk of Yahoo grabbing AOL. I can’t see that making any sense, but let’s hope Yahoo doesn’t do it just to look like they’re making moves. MySpace seems a little more reasonable. I also see reports that Yahoo should buy back a bunch of stock. At first glance that makes a ton of sense, since the board clearly thinks the stock is way undervalued at the moment. With only $2.5B or so in cash though, they won’t be able to make a big enough dent to really make it worth while. The money could almost certainly be spent better elsewhere.

Some additional thoughts:
* This deal would have been really bad for Open Source. Zimbra is the first thing that comes to mind, but Yahoo does more in the Open Source space than they get credit for.
* It looks like Bill Miller and a couple other huge holders would have gotten behind a deal in the $35 range. If Microsoft really wanted the company, they almost surely could have had it.
* It will be interesting to see if Yahoo moves forward with the Google outsourcing, or if that will prove to simply have been posturing.
* Yahoo must have made it really clear that if Microsoft went hostile, that they would poison pill themselves to death. We don’t get too many of these in our industry and Yahoo is actually setup poorly to defend against a proxy fight, since everyone comes up for election at once.

Additional reading:
Kara
NYT
“The distraction of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal now behind us”

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on this as it unfolds.

–jeremy

Share This

The OpenSolaris Community v2: Prepare Yourself

Published by
jeremy
at May 2, 2008 in Linux, Open Source and Sun. 0 Comments

Sun is a company I plan on covering a bit more as they continue to delve deeper into Open Source. I’ve commented on the current messaging issue Sun has around its Open Source participation previously. I haven’t been following Open Solaris as much as I’d have liked, but this post by Ben gets you up to speed on the current situation:

Ian Murdock’s distro formly known as “Indiana” will be birthed as “OpenSolaris” in less than a week, being debuted at CommunityOne on May 5th. This will be a major landmark even in the history of Solaris, right up there with the BSD-to-SysV transition and release of the code. There is no talk at Sun regarding Solaris 11, when pushed the only quote I get is “over my dead body”, apparently coming from high within the organization. While no one will clarify on the situation, the current vibe seems to be that Solaris 10 will be with us for a very long time, in update purgatory, while the future revolves around the OpenSolaris distribution. Ultimately the decision will probly be made by Sun’s attempts to get ISV’s behind OpenSolaris… but this is only my hunch, I’ll continue pushing Sun to clarify the roadmap, perhaps at CommunityOne will learn more.

… Its time for a community reset. With the release of the OpenSolaris distro the last bits of the community started by Andy Tucker and Claire Giordano will be, in my view, gone away. The experiment in community official ended and replaced. Rather than the community being joint owners of Solaris it will be affirmed that Sun is firmly staying at the helm and we’re free to board the train and pitch in if we choose. Those of us fighting against the tide are now presented with a choice… give up and try to re-invent our roles in the “new reality” or continue to fight the inevitable like so many of those in our community who still whine if an OS doesn’t run on an i386 with 512K of RAM looking like a senile prick.

It seems clear to me that Sun is not going to give up full control of Open Solaris. To be fair, Red Hat didn’t go as open with Fedora as was initially assumed either. In the end, much of it comes down to how Sun perceives Solaris driving its bottom line. It used to be that Solaris sold expensive SPARC hardware. That’s not as much the case any more. Where that leaves Solaris is unclear to me. Sun is still driving innovation - you need look no further than DTrace and ZFS to see evidence of that. Does that sell enough Sun hardware to justify the engineering costs associated with Solaris? I don’t know, but at some point Sun is going to have to look very at that question and they may not like the answer they get.

While catching up on Open Solaris, I also came across two good posts by Ted. In What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris he looks into what kinds of participation Sun was originally looking for when they launched Open Solaris. His Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source follow up delves into a Brian Aker comment about projects moving between “organic” and “non-organic” (or in the case of Solaris->Open Solaris, moving between proprietary and either organic/non-organic Open Source). These kind of issues are going to be getting more and more scrutiny if I had to guess, as more and more commercial Open Source companies are going to have to figure out their business models and hit revenue goals. The commercial Open Source space is starting to mature, and I don’t think some people are going to like it.

–jeremy

Share This

OLPC’s New President & Negroponte: Its a Laptop Project Now

Published by
jeremy
at May 2, 2008 in Linux and Open Source. 0 Comments

It’s a bit sad to see the new direction the OLPC project may be taking. The Open Source community has put a lot into the project, not only from a technical standpoint but from a marketing one as well. I think many of us thought that Open Source was baked in and part of what was needed for the project to obtain its goals. It’s becoming clear that’s not the case and the project has already seen some high profile departures. For my part, LQ was one of the first “give one get one” customers and we promoted it fairly heavily at conferences and online. I really agreed with the original goals of the project. It seems things are starting to unravel a bit and it will be a shame if things don’t work out as originally planned.

–jeremy

Share This

Gratis Ubuntu Live 2008 Conference Pass

Published by
jeremy
at May 1, 2008 in Ubuntu and UbuntuLive. 0 Comments

Are you interested in attending the second Ubuntu Live conference? It’s my pleasure to inform you that LQ is able to give away one $895 full conference pass absolutely free of charge. I attended the event last year and it was a very good one. With all that’s happened in the Ubuntu community since, I’m looking forward to attending again this year. If you’re interested in the gratis pass, head over to this thread for more information. Good luck.

–jeremy

Share This

/back

Published by
jeremy
at April 28, 2008 in LinuxQuestions.org. 0 Comments

The travel madness that was April is mostly behind me now and both blogging and podcasting should return to their previous frequencies. Thanks for the patience.

–jeremy

Sidenote: I think I liked the posting interface in WP pre-2.5 much better, but maybe I just need to get acclimated to the new look.

Share This

MySQL Expo - Day 2

Published by
jeremy
at April 16, 2008 in MySQL. 0 Comments

Day 2 of the MySQL Conference and Expo is well under way. The opening keynote started with Rick Falkvinge, whose Swedish Pirate Party seems to be making quite a bit of progress since the last time I saw him speak at OSCON. The history he presented on copyright was interesting, I suggest you check it out once the slides are posted. Next up was Scaling MySQL - up or out, a panel that included participants from MySQL, Sun, Flickr, Fotolog, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube (Google is still quite secretive about many numbers-related items it seems). Good coverage of the numbers presented (Colin was plogging, so that document should be released soon and the video should be available on YouTube as well). It was interesting to get some different perspectives from multiple larger companies that are doing things much differently in some cases.

The tracks I attended today included MySQL Sandbox, Falcon, Maria, scaling and frameworks. The different fundamental design approaches Maria and Falcon are taking, combined with the internal competition that was created by having multiple internal engines should be beneficial for everyone. MySQL 6+ looks compelling and will certainly be a step up in many ways, not only from a transactional perspective. I wanted to look into federation and partitioning further, and the talks at the conference should be the motivation I needed.

I’m actually flying out tonight, which is a shame as a couple really great talks are tomorrow. Hopefully slides will be posted, but I don’t think they’re doing audio or video for anything expect the keynotes. I thought that would be standard for all conferences by now.

–jeremy

Share This

MySQL Expo - Day 1

Published by
jeremy
at April 15, 2008 in MySQL. 1 Comment

(As with most of my conference posts, this is a bit more stream of consciousness and a bit less proofread than is typical. Such is the result of posting during small coffee breaks.)

With the recent Sun acquisition of MySQL, I expected quite a bit out of the MySQL Conference and Expo this year. With a record setting 2,000+ attendees, it looks like I wasn’t alone. Marten kicked things off this morning (The 8:30 start was a snap back to reality after the 10:45-11 start of LRL) explaining a bit about the acquisition, including the fact that he felt Sun and MySQL AB had an “alignment of culture and vision”. Marten is always both entertaining and forthcoming, so the comment he joking made about now having a bunch of Sun PR reps and lawyers listening to what he said was quite apropos. He did not cover the recent announcement that moving forward some feature will only be available in MySQL Enterprise. I’m sure I’ll cover more on that later, but it looks like more and more companies are moving toward what is usually called the RHEL/Fedora model…and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’d be curious if this change was already in the pipeline or if it was a result of the Sun acquisition (if I had to guess, it would be on the former). Another interesting fact I picked up, is that all Sun database initiatives are now under Marten. This includes Postgresql.

Next up was Jonathan Schwartz. He has an extremely good sense of humor, especially for a CEO of such a large company. He opened with a comment like “OK, enough of this Open Source stuff”. He briefly covered some of the conspiracy theories around why Sun made the acquisition, but the real reasoning he cited looks sound to me. He commented on a recent trip to the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which among other items houses the 62,976 CPU core Ranger Sun Constellation Cluster. There is not a single piece of proprietary software in the entire stack. When Jonathan asked one of the researchers if any proprietary software remained in the supercomputing space, he couldn’t think of a single instance. As Jonathan pointed out, the Constellation Cluster (which consists of Sun hardware) didn’t come cheap. Contrary to the comment I heard at LRL, he also alluded to the fact that a GPL version of ZFS may not be far off. He also mentioned the possibility of Sun doing something in the mobile space. It’s clear mobile is going to be a hot topic for the near future. Also interesting to me, he mentioned a single Linux distribution by name. It was CentOS.

Last up in the morning was Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. He explained some of the history of Amazon, including the origin of obidos in the URL and a screenshot of the very first version of the site. He covered the technology progression that lead Amazon to release AWS and noted the absolute importance of incremental scalability. Amazon really is doing some cool stuff.

The rest of the sessions I attended have been interesting, with topics including memcached, PDO, performance and replication. “The future of MySQL” covered what we can expect out of 5.1, 6.0 and 6.x. 5.1 definitely contains some items that will be useful to LQ and the new storage engines in 6.0 (Maria and Falcon) should be beneficial to everyone. There seems to be a tacit distancing from Innodb, but that really comes as no surprise. The MySQL monitoring piece that’s part of MySQL Enterprise looks quite good. I’ll have to see if I can get my hands on it. EC2 and SOA will likely round out the rest of my sessions for the day. I think I’m off to the Exhibit Hall Reception and Mindtouch party after that. If you’ll be attending either, see you there. More to come tomorrow.

–jeremy

Share This

Lug Radio Live US

Published by
jeremy
at April 15, 2008 in Linux and Open Source. 0 Comments

The first Lug Radio Live in the US was held over the weekend. I was both an attendee and a sponsor, and think the event went extremely well (especially when you consider it was a first and put on by 4 people that reside on a different continent). I’d guess Cat and Leslie from Google had a lot to do with that. The speaking lineup was both interesting and entertaining, with some presentations that I don’t think you’ll see at any other event. LRL is fairly informal, which gives it a pretty unique flavor all its own. I’d met two of the LR team previously and it was great to meet the other two - they’re an extremely fun group. I unfortunately didn’t do any blogging during the event, but here are a couple of comments/highlights/random facts from memory:

* Samba resulted from a grep of /usr/dict/words. This came as a result of a company sending a cease and desist over the previous smbserver name. That company later went out of business and admitted Samba was a much better name :)
* Miguel during a presentation that wasn’t going as planned - “Oh, I see - I F&*@’d up line 58″
* I should really have some custom LQ mod shirts made for the next time we exhibit.
* “I was actually feeling pretty good about Microsoft before OOXML” –JA
* “OOXML is *not* implementable by anyone other than Microsoft”
* Sun really doesn’t seem to want ZFS and Dtrace on other platforms - they see them as “differentiators”. (NOTE: I wish I remember who said this…but I don’t)
* Interesting point that was brought up. “One day CIO’s woke up and Linux was everywhere”. We all knew this, but it got me thinking. I’d guess a lot of the rapid success companies like RHT are seeing is due to the fact that CIO’s felt pressured to get support for this unknown influx of Linux. Now that they know and are addressing the issue, I assume much of the low hanging fruit, from a sales perspective, is starting to clear the queues. It’s unclear to me how this will impact growth in a couple years. We’ll have to see.
* The women in Open Source issue is an interesting one, and one I’ll need to think more about.
* Miguel and Jeremy should probably not share a mic.
* “What does Open Source mean when software is no longer deployed”
* Android looks really cool - I’ll almost certainly ditch the iPhone for this.

I hope the event comes back to the US next year and certainly plan to attend the event in the much ballyhoed Wolverhampton, UK. If you weren’t able to attend the event, the videos should be up soon (and are Creative Commons licensed). I’m in Santa Clara for the MySQL Expo now and hope to do a little better job about blogging that as it’s going on. The morning has already been interesting.

Cheers,
–jeremy

Share This

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

Published by
jeremy
at April 10, 2008 in Linux, Linux Foundation and Open Source. 0 Comments

As I mentioned in the podcast, I had planned to attend the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit but had to cancel due to a last minute conflict. Since I wasn’t able to attend I’ve been keep a close eye on the coverage. It looks like I’m missing a great event. Here’s a couple links if you’re also interested in the event:

LF YouTube Channel
InformationWeek
Amanda McPherson on the VA announcement
SJVN live
Dave Jones
LWN

If you have a good link that I missed, feel free to post it in the comments.

–jeremy

Share This

« Previous Entries
Close
E-mail It