A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2010-02-20 through 2010-02-24:

• Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of Nearly 1,600 CIOs Shows IT Budgets in 2010 to be at 2005 Levels
  Virtualization tops the technology priorities.
• Cisco Offers Three-Year, Zero-Percent Financing to U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Businesses -> Cisco News
• Marc Alff's blog: Performance schema overview
  Really interesting stuff for MySQL developers.
• …

As usual, Michael Skok of North Bridge ventures will be presenting the results of the annual Future of Open Source survey at this year's OSBC conference, March 17-18 in San Francisco.  This is a great opportunity to weigh in and provide your perspective on some important business questions. Here are the 2009 Results as reported by Ostatic.

• Survey: …

LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany.

LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks. The Call for Papers ends today.

I am proud to be a member of the LinuxTag Program Committee. Although a lot of proposals have already been submitted, there are some topics missing that I’d personally like to see covered. So, if you’re up for a last minute submission, get your inspiration from the following list:

• Is/was the recent economic crisis an …

If the MySQL site (including documentation) isn't working for you, try a mirror site.

"But," you ask, "how do I know what the mirror sites are if I can't access the site?"

Great question! Technocation has a mirror site (updated daily) at http://technocation.org/mirror/mysql/.

Also, we have purchased www.mysqlmirrors.com which points to the official list of mirrors at http://technocation.org/mirror/mysql/downloads/mirrors.html.

read more

I met Scott McNealy several times over the last year in customer meetings and to talk about Sun's open source strategy.  He's a class act all the way.  He sent out his final email to Sun employees and partners earlier today. 

Here's an excerpt:    

    While it was never the primary vision to be acquired by Oracle, it was always an interesting option. And this huge event is upon us now. Let’s all embrace it with all of the enthusiasm and class and talent that we have to offer.

    This combination has the potential to put Sun, its people, and its technology at the center of yet another industry and game changing inflection point. The opportunity is well documented and articulated by Larry and the …

In this article I am responding to many parts of Monty’s post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html which are just plain not true, or are exaggerations.

I will give my own answers to the self-interview questions Monty provides, as I feel he is using his name and popularity to spreading fear that is not warranted.

Q: Why don’t you trust that Oracle would be a good owner of MySQL?

I cannot say whether or not Oracle would kill MySQL. However, I have already stated I believe Oracle will not kill MySQL. This is based on the fact that Oracle has had the chance to kill MySQL for several years, by making InnoDB proprietary, and has not.

Folks can debate …

The bottom line: As both a community member of MySQL, and a service provider, I am not worried about Oracle buying Sun and acquiring MySQL in the process. There is no validity to the argument that Oracle will slow down or stop MySQL development — it is not possible, with various forks already in heavy development, and it is not probable, because Oracle has owned the InnoDB codebase for 4 years and has not slowed that development down.

My bias

I use MySQL, and want to see it continue to be developed. I work for The Pythian Group, providing DBA services to clients running MySQL. Together with my MySQL colleagues at The Pythian Group, the services provided run the gamut from rotating logs, monitoring, performance tuning, designing and implementing and optimizing database architectures and schemas and queries and debugging problems throughout the full stack. The only service we do …

I’ve just published an article that explains how a PHP-based product can gain a good position in the market and be made appealing to customers by using marketing communication. The focus is on products licensed under an Open Source license. Yet, most of the recommendations also apply to proprietary offerings.

The article has initially been published in German by PHPmagazin. It has now been translated to English and is available on the Initmarketing website: Commercialization of PHP Software.

I've kept away from this debate since last April, but this eternal dragging-on is getting to me. Could we please move on already regarding the Oracle-Sun-MySQL decision? I'm a customer of MySQL, and I don't really savor the idea of becoming a customer of Oracle. Even so, I'd much rather see Oracle own it, than leave it straggling, let alone see this process drag on and on. This is helping no one.

I'm using a product from a company from which I buy commercial support, but I could switch to using a binary-compatible Open Source tool any day I chose. I am not bound to remaining a customer of the company I'm buying support from for any period longer than the current contract. I can definitely live with that obligation. I can live with the OSS-tool …

1. Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material, and I wanted to explain the knock-on effects of that: not just in terms of what I do, and the kind of code that's appropriate for that, but also in terms of how I feel as I work on these explorations. Even if the section on the code itself feels foreign, I hope that the explanation of what it …