As I reported via Twitter late last week, we encountered an issue that got some of our mail delivery delayed by about a day and a half. I’ll explain more about what happened as I believe in openness on these matters, and also the experience has educational content for others.

Our mail server doesn’t have direct external interaction, it’s shielded by two relays that handle both the inbound MX and the outbound queue. This setup works remarkably well in terms of exposure to spam and other malicious activity. As previously discussed, it appears that it’s more difficult to make mail server infra more resilient without expending lots more time/effort and infrastructure expenditure. Just because of the way the common tools for mail delivery and imap are built, having two or more of each in a semi-active setup gets quite complex. Complexity is in itself a risk so it has to be considered in relation to the costs and risks of the …

There are many questions that arise out of Oracle’s copyright and patent infringement complaint against Google regarding its use of Java in Android. There are several things that make the suit significant to the entire industry: it centers not just on software copyright, but also software patents (an increasingly and hotly debated issue), the quickly-expanding smartphone market and open source software. The first question is: what is Oracle doing?

Many are speculating that this is simply an effort to further and more effectively monetize Java, a storied program language that has move more toward openness and survived several supposed death sentences as newer languages arrived. Still, with all of the open source parts — GlassFish application server, MySQL database, OpenOffice.org suite — is Java the most significant to Oracle? It may be, but regardless of what Oracle is doing, its legal moves here may certainly have an impact on the …

Topics for this podcast:

*Jacobsen v. Katzer and open source impact
*Intel, Nokia team up for MeeGo open source OS
*Open source continues in embedded space
*MongoDB and the advent of the NoSQL databases
*Copyrights, complexities, control and conflict

iTunes or direct download (21:48, 6.07 MB)

As part of a project of Technocation, Inc I took a whole bunch of videos at OSCon 2008. The conference was about a month ago, and about 2 weeks ago I’d finished processing and uploading all the videos, but it was only today where I had the 5-6 hours I needed to finish posting all the video, and making this matrix of video.

The video may not be the quality that the O’Reilly folks took and put up on blip tv’s OSCon site, but all the videos here are freely downloadable or playable in your browser.

(more…)

Two month have passed since the close of the Sun-MySQL-Deal, two months of uncertainty whether it's a good idea to join Sun or not but after consulting my ElePHPant, who read the 18 pages of the contract and related documents (including MySQL termination agreement, data privacy agreement, ...), I'm quite optimistic and look ahead to a sunny future. Therefore I'll be a true Sun employee as of tomorrow, May 1st.

In 2002, a short while after I started at MySQL, I saw Lawrence Lessig present at OSCON. The presentation was extraordinarily good and Lessig is a tremendously passionate, genuine and compelling orator.

I immediately revised my presentation style. I stole what ideas and style I could. While I was mostly presenting about MySQL and PHP at the time, the ideas served me well (though the style has at times fit me about as well as a young child fits their parent’s clothes.)

Five years have passed since then, and I have given a hundred or more presentations. Never have I presented as well as Lessig that night, but I still keep trying. In a few days, I am going to have to try a lot harder.
…

I just received word that my proposal (which was to present my Age of Literate Machines presentation) for FrOSCon has been accepted.

I’m pretty excited - the event should be fun and it will give me a good chance to see friends (including a good number of my German MySQL colleagues)

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 …

Unfortunately, I had to skip out on my presentation at this year’s MySQL Conference.

Thankfully, my friend Mike Hillyer was able to pinch hit for me. I had planned to do a podcast of the session, but - as he is totally awesome - Mike even recorded the session.

Summary

A good week - we made progress on the Internet as Public Good Symposium, which is the major task on my Mozilla plate right now. However, an unexpected event at another client meant that my Friday was a bit messed up. Will work on reviewing bugs and other missed responsibilities over the weekend.

Activities

• Worked with Berkman and Harvard Business School teams to help plan and present the Internet as Public Good Symposium.
  • Event wiki now online, but still private. - started putting in content. Will make public after panel participants have a chance to review.
  • Conf. call with available IPG team members to sort out logistics, invitations and distribute tasks.
  • Set up database to store info on who’s invited, who’s coming and so on.
• Minor bits of work helping Mozilla Corp. team plan their OSCON presence …