MySQL – Say It Ain't SCO

September 5, 2005 Leave a comment

I have to admit I was quite surprised to hear that MySQL signed a deal (any deal) with SCO. Surely it wasn't true. …and if it was true, it was probably along the lines of SCO buying a support contract and then touting it as a partnership to get PR (which would seem like an odd thing to do, until you consider some of SCO's PR moves). Then a saw the press release on the MySQL site. They must not be proud of that release, because it's not even listed on the press release index page, even though it's dated “3 September 2005”. Now, I understand that MySQL AB is a business that wants (ne, needs) to make money. But I can't imagine that the negative will generated by this deal will not far outweigh any short term monetary gain. While SCO does indeed have some entrenched install niches, it's a dying product. A quick look at SCO's number easily confirm this. As a company that depends on Open Source to survive, partnering with a company that declared the GPL unconstitutional seems like an odd move. Here's a comment from an MySQL AB employee (who made it clear that this was his and not MySQL AB's opinion: “First our users are our users no matter what platform they are on. This isn't about SCO, this is about the users of that platform who deserve to be able to get support. There are still a lot of SCO servers sitting out there and the users deserve to be treated like any other users. They didn't pick SCO's battle and many of them have legacy applications that can not be easily ported or easily rewritten. The choice of a vendor is not always an option.”
While I'm glad to see that they try to have their customers needs in mind, I don't think partnering with SCO is in anybodies best interest (an argument could indeed be made for MySQL simply resuming shipping for the SCO platform I guess). We'll have to see how this one plays out, but I can't imagine it will be good for MySQL AB. If anyone sees any official comments, let me know.
–jeremy
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LQ Radio Interview #4 – Doc Searls

August 26, 2005 1 Comment

Just interviewed Doc Searls for LQ Radio. Fairly informal, which is one thing I like about LQ radio and overall I think it's an interesting interview. We coved a variety of topics including recent OSCON and LinuxWorld trips, Cluetrain, Google, splogs, RSS, Linux Trademarks and more. More than a couple times the discussion lead into a direction that I had written down in my outline. Total running time is 1:27. Take a listen and let me know what you think.
–jeremy
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Summer Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle

August 25, 2005 2 Comments

Can this possibly be correct? Hollywood may be starting to get it…and the NYTimes is then printing it? Something seems wrong here. This exact topic was discussed recently on LQ Radio. After blaming file sharing, piracy and a whole host of other things that were obviously incorrect it seems reality may have slapped them squarely in the face. Kudos. From the article:
Multiples theories for the decline abound: a failure of studio marketing, the rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough.
..you think it's possible that the RIAA will wake up too? I didn't think so, but it's nice to dream ;)
–jeremy

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Search Engine Spam?

August 24, 2005 Leave a comment

Just a note to Tim on this. From the linked article: …and a couple of other areas, though affiliate sites such as and linuxquestions.org, which are O'Reilly branded but which we do not own, have less restrictive policies, which is why you will see ads for…. We (LinuxQuestions.org) have far more restrictive policies than the rest of the O'Reilly sites from what I can tell. To weigh in on the actual question at hand, I don't have any problem at all with relevant text links as long as they are non deceptive and done right. The way that most of them are done at O'Reilly make sense to me. As an example, many of the visitors in question are the type that go to conferences and would therefore need hotels. That seems 110% legit to me. I can't see why such a fuss was made by the original poster, especially considering that those links have been there as long as I can remember.
–jeremy

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LQ ISO Hits 1,000,000 Downloads

August 23, 2005 Leave a comment

In just over a year, LQ ISO has facilitated over 1,000,000 Linux ISO downloads. We've added a couple interesting features, such as using GEO IP data to offer you the closest fast mirror (while retaining the freedom to pick any mirror you'd like), along the way. With over 175 distribution versions available from over 430 mirrors, hopefully the site has your favorite distro available for download. If not, please use the suggest link and we'll add it ASAP. Our end goal is to have every distro in distrowatch and then some.
–jeremy
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Microsoft Leveraging iPod Patent?

August 16, 2005 1 Comment

Am I the only one who in no way understands all the recent hype over this patent issue (I'll keep my opinion of patents in general to myself for the moment, since I've made that quite known in the past). First, the Microsoft patent in no way overlaps with the iPod, from what I can tell. The patent is for AutoDJ, which “generates playlists for a library collection of media items via selecting a plurality of seed items, at least one which is an undesirable seed item.”, something I'm not aware the iPod is capable of. While it's true that Apple's patent application did get denied, I fail to see where that translates into Microsoft being able to charge money for the AutoDJ patent (which was indeed approved). To be honest, patents aside, the AutoDJ idea sounds cool. Where skynews got this $10/iPod figure from I have no idea, but I'd guess someone just made it up! Even if the Microsoft patent does somehow cover something that is in the iPod, wouldn't the fact that the patent was filed well after the iPod actually shipped mean prior art would be extremely easy to prove? Unreal – someone please clue me in here as I must be missing something.
–jeremy
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Did Firefox Lose Market Share in July to IE?

August 16, 2005 Leave a comment

Looks like NetApplications thinks so. A .64% drop, with a sample size of only 40,000 sites and not a single mention of expected error margin don't mean a whole lot to me though. I posted LQ's numbers a while back. If I have time later I'll re-run stats to see if the indicated trend is apparent on LQ. Speculating on why this happened would be tenuous at best at this point, but it could be anything from a sampling error to the fact that all the new “back to school” PC's come preloaded with IE. I've even heard rumors that some Microsoft patches have the side effect of re-enabling IE as the default browser. I'm going to wait until next month to see if this trend continues next month before I expend too much mental capacity on this one, but I have to admit that I've been wondering where Firefox's natural market share would stabilize at. No opinion from Asa on this yet.
–jeremy
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Did Firefox Lose Market Share in July to IE Followup

August 15, 2005 5 Comments

As you could probably tell, I seemed a bit skeptical in this post. I decided to run some stats on LQ and compare them to the ones I did in July. It turns out that LQ has also seen a small drop in Mozilla/Firefox usage and a small increase in IE usage. I have to admit I'm quite surprised. I'm interested to do this same test again next month to see if a pattern is emerging. We all knew that the growth of Firefox had to slow down a bit at some point, but I thought that plateau would come after 10%. Let the speculation begin on why it's happening. I don't think the fact that all the new “back to school” PC's come preloaded with IE should be underestimated. Given a little time to become infested with Spyware, will the Firefox number start to rise again? Any other speculation? The numbers below are for the first two weeks of August (I've included the July numbers for comparison).

Browser %
Firefox/Mozilla 57.7 -> 56.8%
Explorer 27.9 -> 29.1%
Unknown 5.2 -> 5.2%
Konqueror 4.1 -> 3.9%
Opera 3.3 ->3.2%
Safari 1.2 -> 1.2%
Galeon 0.3 -> 0.3%
Links/Lynx 0.2 -> 0.2%

–jeremy
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HP Calls For Sun and IBM to Remove OSS Licenses

August 11, 2005 Leave a comment

You have to love it when one large company calls for two other competing companies to do something. In this case Martin Fink calls for Sun and IBM to depreciate the CDDL and CPL, respectively. First, having just attended the OSI BOF at OSCON, I am acutely aware of the problem with license proliferation. Beyond being aware of it, I agree that it really is a problem and have even offered LQ's help to the OSI in helping with the problem. That being said, this is just a pot shot and was clearly posturing. Considering one of the main mantra's of the OSS community is that choice is good, it seems odd to try and force everyone to use the GPL. The GPL is a good license for some cases, but it's not for everyone. It's not multiple licenses that are bad, it's the proliferation of needless licenses that is bad. Remember that for instance the CDDL is mostly Mozilla's MPL, with a few changes that Sun felt were necessary. In fact, the CDDL announcement clearly states:

We have carefully reviewed the existing OSI approved licenses and found none of them to meet our needs, and thus have reluctantly drafted a new open source license based on the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1 (“MPL”). We do appreciate the issue of license proliferation, however, and have worked hard to make the Common Development and Distribution License (“CDDL”) as reusable as possible. Additionally, we have attempted to address the problems we perceived in existing open source licenses that led us to conclude that reusing those existing licenses was impractical.
Also, I don't know if it was Martin or the journalist who said “In contrast, an open-source license, like IBM's, is copyrighted”. This insinuates that the GPL is not copyrighted, which is obviously incorrect. The bottom line is, use the right tool for the job and then license that tool under the right Open Source license. Yes, it's a shame that all code is not compatible. The driving reason behind why people open source code is different though. Don't forget that neither of the two products that are quickly becoming the backbone of the web, Firefox and Apache, are GPL'd. Perhaps the biggest irony here is that IBM and Sun have both done significantly more for the Open Source community than HP has (not to detract from the legitimate contributions HP has made, but let's get some perspective here). He did get the crowd to clap though, and to some I guess that's all that matter.
–jeremy
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OSCON and Gnomedex Reflection

August 9, 2005 Leave a comment

It's clear having attended both OSCON and Gnomedex that the excitement is coming back to the web and Open Source communities. The good news is that the irrational exuberance of the bubble has been replaced with rational exuberance. People are excited again. And for good reason – exciting things are happening. Whether you like the Web 2.0 meme or not (Tim Bray doesn't, while Tim O'Reilly does), it's clear that things are changing. It's still not clear where all this will end up, but it's great being part of the ride. On the conference note, the first LinuxWorld without an LQ booth in a long time started today. It's a shame we couldn't be there and I'm going to miss the chance to meet so many members at once. I remain hopeful that we'll be at LWE Boston and LWE London though.
–jeremy
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