communities

MySQL and "commercial extensions:" Core, complements, and semantics

MySQL has placed itself in the middle of a rising furor over its allegedly diminished commitment to open source. To be fair, it has only itself to blame.

It all started with a disgruntled ex-MySQL employee, Jeremy Cole. Cole declared that MySQL's sky was falling because it was to be releasing certain parts of the next version of its database as closed-source software. Marten Mickos responded that he had misunderstood (when, in fact, he had understood very well), it went to Slashdot (where it was of course misconstrued even further), and we're left with a somewhat tepid defense by Marten in the comments section of Slashdot to the self-addressed question, "Why is MySQL now producing some proprietary software?":

The reason is that we have an ambition not only to produce FOSS [free and open-source] code, but also to be a profitable business that can exist for a long time. Each time we make more money, we hire more developers to develop GPL code.… Read more

Google: Model citizen of community development?

John Mark Walker, Hyperic's community lead, has an interesting take on whether Google deserves to be loved or loathed for its open-source community outreach.

John Mark is in the former camp and, increasingly, so am I. Google is the Teflon open-source company, contributing selectively and strategically...and winning kudos across the board.

Self-interested Google? Absolutely. But then, how many companies do you know that aren't self-interested contributors to open source? Walker notes:

I didn't say they were altruistic, but rather that they knew what they were doing with respect to community development. They invest in communities, many … Read more

Your chance to feed the Ubuntu Brain(storm)

Ubuntu has launched a new site - Ubuntu Brainstorm - where anyone can submit and vote on ideas for the popular Linux distribution. It's a bit like Dell's Ideastorm (which, perhaps not coincidentally, led Dell to start offering Ubuntu systems for sale).

The difference here, however, is that it is the Ubuntu community that will take the feedback and build a better Ubuntu, rather than submitting ideas into a corporation which will weigh its quarterly objectives against the community's ideas. This is yet another way that Ubuntu continues to demonstrate its community credentials.

It's a way … Read more

Apache co-founder quits Sun over its alleged culture of control

Over the years, Sun has been progressively pushed by the open-source community to open up. OpenOffice, Java, etc.: the company's efforts to embrace open source have never been quite enough for some.

For Valentine's Day this year, Sun received another arrow, this time from Roy Fielding, co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project, who quit Sun to protest its alleged inability to relax its control over OpenSolaris and truly forge a community around it. As Fielding notes:

Sun didn't just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. … Read more

Fedora and the art of creating an inclusive community

Earlier this year Fedora got a new community project leader. In February 2008 Paul Frields replaced Max Spevack, bringing a different perspective to Fedora's community management. Paul, you see, is not a developer. Nor is he based in Raleigh (Red Hat's headquarters). His background with Fedora has been mostly on the documentation side, and he's been working remotely.

This gives Paul an interesting perspective on Fedora and its community, and how Fedora connects with Red Hat.

I spent a half-hour with Paul today and probed into Fedora and the art of community, as well as some of the innovations in the pipe for Fedora 9.

What is your background? How did you get involved in Fedora?… Read more

The new digerati: connected for a reason

Steve Rubel wonders if "the Interruption Economy sacks prosperity:" "Conventional wisdom says that technology -- and nowadays the Internet -- will always continue to advance and bring with it productivity gains and prosperity. That's certainly been the case for years. However, historically there are pauses. After the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were fully realized it took awhile for the next big era to begin. I wonder if we're about to enter a similar lull now that the Information Age is arguably almost 30 years old." Rubel demands "we need new tools for … Read more

The rules rule eBay's infrastructure

As technology observers, it often seems most natural to view the strengths or weaknesses of some online service through an infrastructure lens. For example, the virtualization layer underlying Amazon's EC2 very much shapes the nature of the offering. On the one hand, virtual appliances of a sort let you quickly fire up a virtual machine (VM) instance. At the same time, VMs are, in a sense, ephemeral--which has implication for the way you store data permanently within the Amazon framework.

Other examples simply involve trading off service levels against costs. Want double-redundancy? You get what you pay for.

However, … Read more

Novell upgrades its SUSE marketing and community

Joe Brockmeier, editor-in-chief of Linux.com, has left the world of Linux evangelism to join the world of...Linux evangelism. However, instead of doing so as the "neutral" voice of a journalist he'll have a bit of an OpenSUSE slant this time around as the OpenSUSE community manager..

And that's just fine.

I've long respected Joe and think this is a good move for Novell, which seems to have a predilection for the analyst and journalist community that covers it. (It hired Bill Claybrook from Aberdeen a few years ago.) One of Novell's core problems in the past two years has been a lack of vocal DNA that will focus on the value of Linux, rather than the value of shacking up with Microsoft. Joe isn't a zealot but he also knows which side his open-source bread is buttered on.

Indeed, he noted that his goal is to help move people from Windows to Linux, rather than from Linux to Linux (which is an unfortunate fetish of other areas of the company):… Read more

RIM upgrades the BlackBerry, but not much--the case for opening up

Though Research in Motion continues to keep the BlackBerry a frustratingly closed platform (with precious few applications--my biggest complaint about an otherwise great device/service), it is upgrading its software to add some interesting new features, the Wall Street Journal reports:

With the aim of making mobile e-mailing more like e-mailing from a desktop computer, RIM said BlackBerry users will soon be able to edit documents directly from the handheld device and to view messages in their original formatting...[RIM] also said the changes will enable users to retrieve e-mail messages that aren't stored on the device and to check the availability of a colleague before sending a meeting request.

To wait so long...for so little. At this pace, Apple's iPhone will leapfrog the BlackBerry. Already, I've noticed scads of new iPhones being used in corporate settings. But for the lack of a keyboard, I'd be on an iPhone, too.

RIM makes great hardware and decent software. It needs to recognize, however, that it's not the center of all original thinking. Once it came up with its idea and implemented it, it hasn't done much in the way of innovation.… Read more

Linus Torvalds on "community" development

Linus Torvalds has sage advice for those companies looking to get involved with "the community." You don't. You join it by contributing code or you hire someone who already is doing so.

This has been Stephe Walli's counsel to Microsoft for years. For companies looking for a shortcut, Linus has a suggestion:

...[T]he easiest way is to find a person who is already a member of the development process or maybe not a very central one, but really - central enough that he's been involved and knows how things works and basically bring that … Read more