It was my pleasure to work with Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL for about a year during 2005 and 2006. I was astounded by how involved he is with the employees and how well he keeps abreast of the goings-on in the company. He seems to be of the rare set who are not only strong supporters and evangelizers of the company and software, but are also technically familiar with it. With great folks like Mårten, Brian, Arjen, Zack and Ulf, MySQL AB has been and continues to be one of the most important Open Source companies that exists.

Go read the slashdot article here:
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Some years ago (as penance for working at MySQL during some temporary corporate brain-damage about Free Software licensing) I began volunteering at the Free Software Foundation.

For the most part, I have spent my time providing support on Free Software licensing questions for the FSF Compliance Lab and helping out on the GPL v3 effort.

While both activities are quite rewarding, the work at the compliance lab tends to be most interesting. We serve a wide variety of people and organizations who have a correspondingly wide range of experience, views and questions. This leads to rewarding experiences, as well as experiences that are more …

The 3rd international conference on GPL v3 will take place in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd. The international GPLv3 conferences are part of a year-long public consultation process to update the GNU General Public License.

Speakers include Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, chairman at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Georg Greve, President of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). Expert panelists from all parts of Europe, and from around the world will lead discussions on licence internationalisation, DRM, software patents, and adoption of the finished licence.

The current draft of the GPLv3 and resources explaining the background to the update are availble at http://gplv3.fsf.org/

The Conference’s schedule and further information will be published soon at
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At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …

The organizers of the PHP Québec Conference were gracious enough to give me an unedited copy of my Copyright, Contracts and Licensing for PHP Developers session.

I cleaned the audio up last night, stripping out some of the more odious filler words (I seem to say “Umm” rather often), shortening pauses as I switched slides, removing redundant asides (like asking if there are any questions, when no questions then follow) and excising the introduction and applause.

After a good deal of consideration, I did chose to leave the errors and other flaws in the content presented. These flaws were presented to the audience and they should stay in the recording.

Of course, I don’t want people to be mislead by any of the flaws; to prevent this, I am transcribing the entire talk, …

Slides from my presentations at the PHP Québec Conference are below:

• Copyright, Contracts and Licenses for PHP Developers (PDF, 650KiB)
• SQLite: A fast, transactional DBMS embedded in PHP 5 (PDF, 55KiB)

I will make the audio of the licensing session, along with a transcript, available as soon as possible.

Update:

Transcript now available.

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I sent mail to RMS the other day asking what he thought of MySQL's licensing scheme:

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Note. The following is my own opinion. Yes, I mention my employer. But keep in mind that I'm just writing my own opinion about my employer.

Have you read this?
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/esr_interview.html




People who do what the GPL tries to prevent (e.g., closed source forks of open source projects) wind up injuring only themselves


Eric, I don't think you understand what the GNU GPL represents. It protects us from corporations absorbing the project into itself. If MySQL the software was licensed under the BSD license, MySQL the company would have no reason to contribute back to the original source.

After a while, MySQL the …