Oracle Acquires Innobase OY

October 10, 2005 Leave a comment

Oracle recently announced that is has acquired Innobase. For those who have never heard of Innobase, they are lead by Heikki Tuuri and develop InnoDB. InnoDB brings transactions, row-level locking, foreign keys and other ACID features to MySQL. Who uses InnoDB? Sites like Yahoo! finance, Wikipedia and Google among many many others. LQ has been looking into it quite seriously lately too (the one thing holding us back was the lack of FULLTEXT support, but we can work around that). Until now, InnoDB and MySQL were fairly tightly coupled. You have to think this will soon change and there will likely be at least one additional front end for InnoDB released by Oracle at some point. Beyond that, Oracle is clearly not going to be as receptive to MySQL AB as Heikki was. Despite their public comment, MySQL can't be too happy about this one. They are now beholden to Oracle to supply their only transactional backend. That's not a good position to be in. I have no idea why MySQL didn't acquire Innobase a long time ago, but I'm sure there's a story there. The Oracle press release does state that “InnoDB is not a standalone database product: it is distributed as a part of the MySQL database. InnoDB's contractual relationship with MySQL comes up for renewal next year. Oracle fully expects to negotiate an extension of that relationship.” At a minimum, I'd guess the terms won't be as good for MySQL AB as the current ones. You have to wonder what the Oracle play is here. Will they release an “OSS” or “community” Oracle with InnoDB as the backend? Did they do this to crush a competitor, as with the Peoplesoft and J.D. Edwards acquisitions? Or is there more to it? This could be a move to attempt to hurt SAP, which recently aligned itself quite closely with MySQL AB with the MaxDB release. SAP is really one of the only main competitors Oracle has left in some spaces. I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical on this one and I hope MySQL AB comes out alright, as I really like the product and the company. Sure, InnoDB is GPL – but that just gets you the current code. With something this complicated, you still need the expertise to continue to develop that code and much of that will surely be locked up at Oracle now. You have to assume this acquisition had something to do with the recent “MySQL wants to be Ikea of the database market” comment from Marten Mickos. If anyone has any more information on this one, be it on or off the record, I'd love to hear about it.
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–jeremy

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LinuxWorld UK Wrapup

October 8, 2005 Leave a comment

With LinuxWorld come and gone, here's a quick wrapup. London was once again a great time. While I was extremely late the first day, I still had a full day to explore the city. Between this year and last year I got to see a fair bit of the city, and I must say I quite like it. One thing I did find odd was how early most things close, but this year we were able to find the spots you need to go to avoid that. Both David and Chris stayed in the same hotel as me, which I think worked out well. Ray and Peter both made the trek from outside of London each morning.
The .Org Village this year was much better than last year as far as the layout goes. While last year we had to stand in the aisle, this year we had a proper booth. As usual the .Org was busy. Overall, the show definitely has a much different feel than either of the US ones (although, to be honest those have a much different feel from each other). The one thing lacking this year was any kind of usable wifi, though that's not for lack of trying. As usual we got to meet some current LQ members and also meet some people who never heard of the site. Both are fun IMHO. We ended up getting a ton of feedback. Once again the pub ended up also being a great place for feedback. Any time a bunch of mods get together in person and start chatting I always learn a lot – both on the LQ topic (some brilliant ideas spawned in the pubs of London will certainly eventually make it into the LQ code) and just in general. A huge thanks goes out to all the mods who were able to attend. I have every intention of making LWE UK a yearly trip, as long as UKLinux and IDG make the generous offer.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxWorld, Main Page, Open Source

Returned from LinuxWorld

October 8, 2005 Leave a comment

Back in NY from London and as you probably noticed the blog wasn't uploaded once. Unfortunately, the wifi in London was either extremely poor (at LWE) or fairly expensive (about $11/hour at the hotel). When you couple that with how busy things were, the blog just didn't get updated. The next couple posts will be LWE UK updates though, so all is not lost. I'll start things off in this post with a link to the Flick LWE UK 05 photo album. Once again the show and London were fantastic. More to come later today.
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–jeremy

Filed under Linux, LinuxWorld, Main Page, Open Source

London Bound

October 2, 2005 Leave a comment

My plane leaves in a couple hours, so it's time to start packing. Remember, if you'll be anywhere near London on October 5-6, make sure to stop into LWE UK in Olympia2. I'll be stationed in the LQ booth, which is located in the .ORG village. It's always great to meet LQ members and I'll be joined by at least 4 LQ mods. I'll be sure to update my blog from the expo.
–jeremy
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Massachusetts Finalizes Plan to Use the OpenDocument Standard II

September 27, 2005 Leave a comment

A follow up to this post. I was more then a bit perturbed when I read this “open letter”, from Alan Yates. It seems some people within Microsoft just aren't ready to compete fairly. He is brazen enough to bring up words like due process and acts as if Microsoft is the only one looking out for the good of the people. He insinuates somehow that Microsoft software is standard and that anything else is odd, non-standard and unprecedented. He claims that the OpenDocument format is “untested in the marketplace” while ignoring that the Microsoft XML format hasn't even been released yet. He flat out lies and says that all the office suites that support OpenDocument are derived from the same codebase. 30 seconds of due diligence would have cleared that up, but the response from KDE is here. He also insinuates that Microsoft is the only one that could possibly innovate and even brings into question the government procurement process, which has heavily favored Microsoft in almost every case I've seen. He somehow misses the fact that only Microsoft can officially support their current format and the future format is patent encumbered. He also leaves out that Microsoft is more than welcome to both join OASIS and implement the OpenDocument format into MS Office. I don't have time to tear this piece down line by line, but luckily some others have. The amount of shear FUD in this is astounding though and it'll be interesting to see how MA responds.
–jeremy
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Massachusetts Finalizes Plan to Use the OpenDocument Standard

September 25, 2005 Leave a comment

It's great to see that Massachusetts has finalized its plan to stop using proprietary document formats and standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format. This wasn't about “ditching Microsoft”, as many outlets seem to be reporting. In fact, it's not about a specific vendor at all. It's about using a document format that ensures that state documents are available via an open spec. It's about ensuring that a single vendor doesn't control how a state government can access its own data. It's about state government allowing its citizens to choose how they can access data without worrying about patents and without dictating platform. In the end, it's one of the most sound decisions you'll see a US state government make. State documents need to be available for hundreds of years. That's something Microsoft cannot possibly guarantee. And it should be obvious why requiring a citizen to purchase a single application that only runs on two platforms and is only available from a single vendor to access data that is critical is not just silly, but asinine. I say good job MA – first the Boston tea party and now this ;) Hopefully we'll see some follow through here. The odd part is that the response from the Microsoft rep seemed to be of the “the customer does not have the right to define their own requirements” attitude, insinuating that you should just be happy with what Microsoft offers for a format. This attitude runs contrary to some of the reform we've seem from Microsoft recently. Maybe they won't be able to ditch their predatory monopolistic practices. Maybe they can't be trusted.
–jeremy
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The LSB and its Current Implementation

September 19, 2005 Leave a comment

Ulrich has some problems with the LSB standard. He makes some outstanding points and is clearly an extremely smart guy. The problem as I see it is that the current LSB is broken and badly broken at that. When the answer to a bug report is “use a slow uni-processor machine, it is known to work there”, someone should be fired. A certification with a date of 15-Sep-2005 should not be done on a 300MHz Pentium as it's not indicative of what people are running. Is all lost though? Should the LSB just be completely dropped? Maybe this particular group/spec should be, since they are clearly not doing a good job, but it should be clear on why companies like Oracle want to ship a single binary that works everywhere. If we're serious about mainstream Linux adoption, this is something that I think has to happen. Requiring companies to build for each distro is dumb. It means multiple build environments, additional testing, additional resources. In the end, it means that either the company won't ship on Linux or the company will only support a specific distribution or two. That's bad for everyone. I don't have a solid answer (and from the looks of it, no one does) but this is a problem that needs to be solved.
–jeremy
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Dell Releases its First Linux Consumer Product with Mandriva

September 17, 2005 Leave a comment

“Dell releases its first Linux consumer product with Mandriva”… or at least that's what the press release says. As I've mentioned on this blog many times in the past, a real OEM deal is critical to the success of Linux on the mainstream desktop. While this press release is a start, I don't think the title is 100% accurate. Look at the page for the 110L on the Dell site. It's not in the Home section, but the Business & Education section. A closer look at the press release seems to confirm this: Mandriva worked with Dell to certify this first consumer laptop, which is now being sold direct to students by Dell. Notice also that the Dell page does not list Linux as an option (even worse is the huge “Dell recommends Microsoft Windows XP Professional.” on every page). So, if this deal is only available to students, and a normal “consumer” can't just go to the Dell site and order Linux what makes it a consumer product? I'm not sure. In the end, while a deal like this is a great start and kudos should go to Mandriva for attempting to break ground on this, the press release title seems a little optimistic and more needs to be done. I'm still looking forward to the day where someone can go to a major PC manufactures website and simply see Linux as an option on any arbitrary model. I may be waiting a while…
–jeremy
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Microsoft Admits to Learning from Open Source

September 16, 2005 Leave a comment

It was great to see that Microsoft actually publicly admitted that it learned something from an Open Source app. From the article: “We've learned from Apache,” acknowledged Bill Staples, product unit manager for IIS. Version 7.0 takes the IIS feature set and breaks it down into individual components, or modules, that can be loaded on an as-needed basis. The result is a Web server with much less overhead.
IIS will also gain .htaccess-like functionality. It has always amazed me some of the things that you just can't do in IIS. That being said, I hope Apache isn't resting on it's laurels, since it could learn a couple things too. The management interface is almost non-existent and a nice API to enable easier scripting of certain tasks (such as adding and deleting vhosts) would be a welcome addition. To me the story here is not what will or will not be in IIS7 though. It's in the fact the Microsoft has reached a point where they will openly admit in a public forum that Open Source produced software that they'd like to learn from. That's a big step and to me speaks volumes This absolutely would not have happened even a year ago.
–jeremy
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