The future of MySQL. The SCO Group terminates Darl McBride. And more.

The future of MySQL
Monty Widenius urged Oracle to give up on MySQL in order to land Sun while Richard Stallman, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and the Open Rights Group sent a letter to the EC urging it to block Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. All of which prompted Florian Mueller, who it should be noted is working with Widenius as part of his campaign, to claim that there is growing public opposition to Oracle owning Sun’s MySQL.

Meanwhile The VAR Guy reported on rumours that …

A controversial issue in the UK this week is the BBC’s decision to invite the British National Party - the far-right, whites-only political party - to appear on Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political debate programme.

Critics fear that the move will legitimise the BNP’s far-right views, while the BBC has defended the invitation on the grounds that its role as a politically neutral public service broadcaster would be undermined if it excluded the BNP - which won its first European Parliament seats this year with an estimated million votes.

To me it is clear that no matter how abhorrent the BNP’s policies on certain issues may be the BBC has a duty to invite it to participate as it is a legitimately recognised political party. We live in a society …

The complaints and concerns over Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems and open source MySQL database grew this week to calls for the acquisition, or at least the relatively small MySQL part of it, to be blocked. The Open Rights Group calling for such blockage was joined by none other than the father of the free software movement, Richard Stallman. However, I have to once again question how free and open are these free and open source software advocates? Is the movement and FOSS open to all (except Microsoft, Oracle or anyone else the Open Rights Group, Richard Stallman or any …

Larry Ellison promises funds for MySQL, commits to community. The “open source vendor” debate in a nutshell. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Larry Ellison promised MySQL will receive more money for development and research, while Oracle maintained that it is committed to Java and open source developer communities.

# GroundWork raised $5m series D funding from Canaan Partners, Mayfield, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.

# InformationWeek reported that Motorola has vacated …

On Thursday the 8th, we delivered the most successful italian MySQL webinar ever. We had about 350 registrations, thanks for your support and constant participation!
We also awarded a wonderful MySQL t-shirt to the one who first answered correctly to a trivia question, congratulations to the winner.

Looking into the story of italian webinars, here is the ranking in terms of registrations:

1. Getting Started with MySQL on Windows
2. Scalable MySQL High Availability Architectures
3. A guide to Scaling MySQL
4. MySQL Performance Tuning - Top 5 Tips
5. Introducing MySQL 5.0

If you were unable to participate you can click here and listen to the on-demand …

Funding for Engine Yard and DataSync. Red Hat and Microsoft joint support. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Engine Yard raised $19m in Series C funding from the likes of Benchmark, DAG, Presidio and Amazon.

# Red Hat and Microsoft are now providing joint support for virtualization interoperability options.

# DataSync raised $1.2m and announced a partnership with SugarCRM.

# Simon Phipps began building a scorecard to …

A survey of more than 400 developers showed that MySQL is closing the lead Microsoft's SQL server has in emerging markets. More than 50 percent of developers in the emerging market countries said they are using Microsoft's SQL Server, but 46 percent said they are using MySQL.

This is another great news, after the results coming from the european SMBs survey. The adoption and usage of MySQL is still growing despite the economic downturn. Go MySQL!

Patents. M&A. Adoption. Business strategies. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

This bumper edition of 451 CAOS Links is brought to you courtesy of the Open World Forum’s temperamental wireless connection.

Patents
# Red Hat urged the Supreme Court to to make clear that it excludes software from patentability, while the SFLC and the FSF also filed briefs with the US Supreme Court arguing against software patents.

Investment and M&A
# The WSJ …

I know that you may have read about it before, but I want to summarize some interesting evolutions of MySQL and the Open Source adoption in Europe.
I will reflect on it with a specific focus on Italy, for two reasons: Italy is my home country and is of the territories where I work as a Sales Engineer (together with Iberia and Emerging Markets).

MySQL has just released survey of 637 small and medium-size businesses (less than 500 employees) in Europe documenting open source usage. According to the survey the future will be full of satisfaction for MySQL.

You can read the comments in Zack's post …

At the Open World Forum event in Paris this morning I presented a quick overview of the state of free and open source software in 2009 and a look at the trends shaping FOSS into the next decade. The presentation was just 10 minutes rather than the 20 I had originally understood it to be, so I wanted to use the blog to expand a little on the discussion and my thinking.

War is over (if you want it)
Aside from the ongoing adoption of open source, one of the trends that has defined FOSS in 2009 has been the numerous declarations …