In 2000, MySQL co-founder David Axmark first told me about having met with Eben Moglen. His descriptions of Eben were always filled with respect and admiration — respect for a person who can keep his integrity and views of how software law should shape the world, and admiration for Eben’s pragmatism and ability to make a difference in the real world.

Over the years since David’s first encounters, Eben and his later estabished Software Freedom Law Center have repeatedly …

Sun advances GlassFish. Red Hat announces JBoss momentum. Mandriva releases Linux update. (and more)

Sun Microsystems Announces Technology Preview of Open Source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server and New Sun GlassFish Communications Server, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Red Hat Continues Middleware Industry Momentum, Red Hat (Press Release)

Mandriva presents its latest distribution: Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, Mandriva (Press Release)

Hyperic Announces MySQL …

As reported yesterday from CommunityOne:

• MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source,
• so will the MySQL Connectors, and
• so will the main storage engines we ship.

In addition:

• MySQL 6.0’s pending backup functionality will be open source,
• the MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
• the encryption and compression backup features will be open source,

where the last item is a change of direction from what we were considering before.

The change comes …

I was just reading Fabrizio Capobanco’s take on the MySQL excitement (”this move is clearly into the right direction”) when it occurred to me that the situation is related to the comments recently made by the former CTO of Kaplan Test, Jon Williams, at the recent OSBC conference.

As I wrote at the time: “Another point Jon made was that the subscription model helps keep open source vendors on their toes as every year he gets to decide whether they will received another payment.”

In other words, as …

In a vortex. That's the only way to describe the past thirty days, during which we closed out our second quarter, and put together the transaction to acquire MySQL. How'd it all start?

"That'll never happen, I've been trying for years." That's what I told Rich Green (EVP, Software at Sun) about six months ago in response to his assertion, "if there were one company I'd love to acquire, it'd be MySQL. They're an amazing company." Why'd I say it was impossible?

For nearly five years, I've been getting together for dinner with Marten Mickos, MySQL's CEO, catching up on the industry, chatting about trends and business models, and just as the dessert was about to be served... I'd say, "geez, we have so much in common, Marten, we …

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
…

I’m surprised to see so little being said about the First Discussion draft of the Affero GPL v3. I see only 9 comments as of 9PM PDT 6/13. That’s not very many.

Perhaps the reason is that the only difference is the single paragraph in Section 13 which states:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must give all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

Fabrizio here seems bullish on the new license and goes on to say:

Bottom line: if GPL v3 and AGPL v3 are exactly the same document and are 100% compatible, why would an open …

We’re on the verge of releasing our code and we’ve spent a lot of time looking at other projects to see what works what doesn’t as far gaining widespread adoption and building a vibrant developer community. There were some obvious differences in the way some projects are managed: Some have paid contributors others do not. Some use OSI approved licenses, others do not. Some had rigid roadmaps set by a small group (or even a single individual) others were more consensus oriented with their planning. Outside of the obvious, it was all terribly confusing and difficult to glean any useful insight from our ad hoc analysis.

Last month when we were at the mySQL conference I was talking to Tony Wasserman of CMU West and he mentioned to me his work in this area. He sent me a draft of his paper titled: A Framework for Evaluating Managerial Styles in Open Source Projects (I don’t have a link yet). In it he analyzed 75 commercial and community …

Eben talks at length of the modern Memory Palace and how on-line email and photo services have the potential to undermine our privacy and freedoms.

Here are the links….

Download and direct play

Matt’s post on managing the ‘No Open Source’ clause cites stats from the recent Forrester report that shows a perniciously high percentage of respondents are concerned with ‘legal liabilities for copyright and patent infringement” (43% if I read the data properly), and how a dual license strategy takes this issue off the table.

That all makes perfect sense.

But what if the reason dual license open source companies like mySQL are successful is because Enterprises overstate the real risk of using open source software!

Wouldn’t that be ironic: As Enterprises gain awareness and sophistication about open source licensing issues and IP, they become …