Dear Commissioner Kroes,

Last week, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos wrote you a letter urging approval of Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems1, asserting that Oracle’s ownership of MySQL (as part of the Sun acquisition) will increase competition in the market.

As a long-time MySQL user, a former MySQL AB staff member2 and a participant in or consultant to a wide range of other open source and free software projects3, I found Mårten’s conclusion to be optimistic at best.

Oracle’s ownership of MySQL will lead to what the commission fears – greater costs and less choice in the DBMS market.

In making this point, I’ll challenge the three …

Repost from our corporate blog

Last monday some Inuits quickly crossed the channel for a day of speeches and talks regarding Open Source and its Adoption, the event organised at BT brought together a mixture of techies, legal persons and management to listen to and discuss about the current state of Enterprise Open Source adoption

The short introduction was done by JP of Confused In Calcutta , who mainly introduced Mark "I`m from outer space" Shuttleworth. Mark keynoted about Ubuntu .. he talked about Aubergine being the new Brown ... ranted (as everybody) about the Cloud , talked about a stronger focus to services rather than product building , talked about the ecosystem of "people close to you" for supporting solutions .

Steve Bouch, of the Synapse Project at BT …

The NoSQL event in New York had a number of presentations on non relational technologies including of Hadoop, MongoDB and CouchDB.

Coming historically from a relational background of 20 years with Ingres, Oracle and MySQL I have been moving my focus towards non relational data store. The most obvious and well used today is memcached, a non persistent distributed key/value pair store. There are a number of persistent key/value stores in the marketplace, Tokyo Cabinet, …

1. Brown Cloud Marketing -- advertorial "interviewing" GM of a company offering "DNS in the cloud". This might be a worthwhile service, but the way he markets it (by saying open source is "freeware" and the market leader is "legacy") reveals a rich vein of bozo. Freeware legacy DNS is the internet's dirty little secret (actually, it's the reason we have a functioning DNS), Nominum software was written 100 percent from the ground up, and by having software with source code that is not open for everybody to look at, it is inherently more secure. (security through obscurity is equating clothing with being naked yet blind). The Internet kindly did the poor man's homework: screenshot of a cross-site scripting …

It has been more than a year since my self-imposed hiatus from serious MySQL development started and I think it is about time that I get back into the saddle. I have a handful of working prototypes but I should get the code out there, back into the community.I learned a bunch of stuff during the past year at Google but in the end, working on JavaScript, HTML/CSS and Google proprietary languages

A couple of days ago, Baron Schwartz posted some simple load and select benchmarking of MyISAM, Infobright and MonetDB, which Vadim Tkachenko followed up with a more realistic dataset and interesting figures where MonetDB beat Infobright in most queries.

Used to the parallel IEE loader, I was surprised by the apparent slow loading speed of Baron's benchmark and decided to try and replicate it. I installed Infobright 3.2 on my laptop (see, this is very unscientific) and wrote a simple perl script to generate and load an arbitrarily large data set resembling Baron's description. I'm not going to post my exact numbers, because this installation is severely …

With thousands of votes from the Zimbra community submitted to our product management database, and tens of thousands of hours logged by our engineering team, we are excited to officially announce Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.

ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later …

1. Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography -- This resource provides a comprehensive view of the history of cartography, with examples of maps created throughout the ages and background information about the contexts within which those maps, visualizations and map making technologies were created. Explore each time period, click on the images and stories found throughout each time line, and read more about the history of creating thematic maps as a means of visualizing data. (via Titine on Delicious)
2. Interview with Larry Ellison (Infoworld) -- Asked about MySQL, "No, we're not going to spin it off," even if asked to by the EU, Ellison said. Lots of detail and …

There is once again a lot of fuzz going on about Open Source Business models,

First on my eyballs was the article that Customers don't seem to like openCore what a big surprise ..

So that's not the one that makes the customers happy ,

Then there is the other side of the coin, the people that create open source
Authors realize the dual licensing model comes hunting back at you after a merger or a hostile acquisition, yes they still have the source code to build on but they can't sell commercial licenses to their customers anymore they way they used to. …

I've been meaning to post some real-world data on the performance of the Infobright 3.2 release which happened a few weeks ago after an extended release candidate period. We're just preparing our upgrades now, so I don't have any performance notes over significant data sets or complicated queries to post quite yet.

To make up for that, I decided to address a particular annoyance of mine in the community edition, first because it hadn't been addressed in the 3.2 release (and really, I'm hoping doing this would include it into 3.2.1), and second, simply because the engine being open source means I can. I feel being OSS is one of Infobright's biggest strengths, in addition to being a pretty amazing piece of performance for such a simple, undemanding package in general, and not making use of that would be shame. Read on …