Back in October last year a corporate accountability group called As You Sow attempted to persuade Oracle to detail its commitment to open source by publishing an Open Source Social Responsibility Report.

Oracle resisted the proposal but did promise to share more details on its use of open source in the next version of its Oracle’s Commitment social responsibility report. I just noticed that the renamed Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report (Pdf) was recently published (in late November as far as I can make out) and does indeed include a section on Oracle’s commitment to open source.

In the section “Open Source and Accessibility” Oracle notes that …

When Monty Widenius published his criticisms of MySQL 5.1 recently a lot of the coverage that followed focused on his belief that the product had been made generally available too early and has too many serious bugs.

A solution to this problem would have been told hold 5.1 back even longer for more testing or, better still, not to have announced it as a release candidate so early. However, reading Monty’s post in full indicates that this would be a matter of treating the symptoms rather than finding a cure.

He also wrote: “the MySQL current development model doesn’t in practice allow the MySQL community to participate in the development of the MySQL server” and “I think it’s time to seriously review how the MySQL server is being developed and change the development model to be more like Drizzle and …

Topics for this podcast:

* Open source getting, and going without VC investment
* Oracle contributions to Linux and open source
* Sun’s latest moves with MySQL database and version 5.1
* Linux in high-end computing

iTunes or direct download (25:50, 6.0 MB)

My CAOS colleague Matt Aslett wrote recently about how we expect to see an uptick in open source merger and acquisition activity given the current economic conditions and bargains for the larger, mostly proprietary players. Matt also discusses the difficulty of further VC funding, though we have seen some significant investment announcements, such as Open-Xchange, Infobright and others. Still, Matt is probably right that funding will be harder to come by for any company, open source or not.

I also continue to see a number of startup and younger open source vendors — would-be fundees — that are opting to hold off on venture funding and stick to building up business, customers and …

I just noticed that Sun/MySQL has dropped SCO OpenServer from its list of supported operating systems for MySQL 5.1 and higher (along with Mac OS X 10.3 and QNX).

It is not a massive surprise to see MySQL doing this given SCO’s current position but MySQL teamed up with SCO in the midst of its controversial legal claims against IBM et al, so I thought the end of the deal warranted a quick mention.

At the time Marten Mickos defended the deal by claiming that he hoped working with MySQL would educate SCO’s executives:

“In a partnership you exchange thoughts,” he said. “If you exchange thoughts hopefully the other side will listen to you. We understand …

…is the title of this post written by Tim Bray a few days ago in which he outlined the directions he would like to see his employer take to improve its fortunes.

He also invited others to continue the thought process. Many have already done so (I’ll include the best in tomorrow’s CAOS Links post) and given my recent constructive criticism of Sun’s open source strategy I feel compelled to provide some answers as well as questions.

I’m sure there are lots of things Sun should be doing with relation to storage and servers and processors and client devices, but I’m going to stick to what I know. What would I do?

Light a fire under MySQL
When Sun announced its acquisition …

Commercial Open Source is a game changer, but it is also a game of balances between different interests: the free user and the paying customer, the individual developer and the partner and the corporate developer, short-term adoption and long-term revenue. There are a number of different business models for OpenSource that attempt to navigate these interests and Sun follows a combination of support, services, hardware/systems drag, and Add-Ons.

Recently I burned a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 and used it with Songbird (using pkg install SUNWsongbird)  and Fluendo MP3 Decoder (which is free for OpenSolaris),  Flash and soon I had a setup in my bedroom which I love to call OpenSolaris Home Theatre Edition that I used to listen to my songs collection and watch online shows that I controlled via Remote Desktop  which to me was a serious contender to those Media Centers out there. 

However I realized that while I wanted to …

Recently I burned a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 and used it with Songbird (using pkg install SUNWsongbird)  and Fluendo MP3 Decoder (which is free for OpenSolaris),  Flash and soon I had a setup in my bedroom which I love to call OpenSolaris Home Theatre Edition that I used to listen to my songs collection and watch online shows that I controlled via Remote Desktop  which to me was a serious contender to those Media Centers out there. 

However I realized that while I wanted to …

Recently I burned a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 and used it with Songbird (using pkg install SUNWsongbird)  and Fluendo MP3 Decoder (which is free for OpenSolaris),  Flash and soon I had a setup in my bedroom which I love to call OpenSolaris Home Theatre Edition that I used to listen to my songs collection and watch online shows that I controlled via Remote Desktop  which to me was a serious contender to those Media Centers out there. 

However I realized that while I wanted to …