open

MySQL does not scale

Well, not very much. I mean, who wants to only scale to hundreds of millions of page views?

Aside from Oracle, that is? ;-)

As Tim notes, MySQL is in the middle of its "12 Days of Scale-out," which is designed to show how MySQL, that little database that could, is delivering monster-sized performance for some of the biggest names on the planet.

Like Wikipedia, for example, which uses MySQL to service:

More than 154 million annual visitors More than 5 million articles More than 290,000 contributors Nearly half a million edits each day 25,000 SQL … Read more

What's behind Microsoft's open-source deals?

Microsoft views its string of deals with Linux vendors--the latest being Linspire, announced this week--as part of a broader companywide push to improve interoperability.

That's the word from Tom Robertson, Microsoft's general manager of interoperability and standards, and Jean Paoli, its general manager of interoperability and XML architecture (and a co-creator of the original XML standard). On Friday, the pair published an open letter, again calling on the industry to give the Office Open XML document format a fair shake as a standard.

Technology and legal pacts with open-source companies serve dual purposes, they said in an interview … Read more

Linus Torvalds wakes up on the wrong side of the bed

Linus is in a dither about apparent Free Software Foundation politics that remain in GPLv3:

You claim that I "misunderstood" the"spirit of the GPL".

Dammit, the GPL is a license....

The beauty of the GPLv2 is exactly that it's a "tit-for-tat" license, and you can use it without having to drink the kool-aid.

I've said that over and over again. It's the "spirit of the GPLv2". It's what has made it such a great license, that lots of people (and companies) can use, is very fundamentally that … Read more

Lies we tell ourselves about IP infringement

Glyn Moody has a disturbing post on the latest attempt to stave off the IP hemorrhaging the industry apparently suffers. Quoting from Glyn's post:

"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year."...

This is clearly total poppycock: the figures for the supposed losses … Read more

One more clue to Microsoft's dysfunctional open source relationships (Groklaw)

PJ writes a probing piece on just what Microsoft is up to in its patent deals and interactions with Linux vendors. By tracing back Microsoft's interaction with Novell to Brainshare 2006, she comes up with an interesting conclusion:

So. What does it mean for FOSS that Mundie says it wants a similar bridge with Open Source businesses? I think it means Microsoft would like to pick your brains and have you code for them for free, and it will sprinkle some money on vendors who sell your code, so they'll go along. The patent deals keep Microsoft in … Read more

Digital music imitating open source?

Just read this in The Independent. I admit to never having listened (knowingly) to Ash, a Northern Ireland band, and the band's decision to move all new releases to the web probably won't change this. As in open source, the fact that someone releases their code as open source (or songs on the web) doesn't necessarily make them a good company/band. It just means they have the right licensing model, though perhaps no talent.

What I find interesting about Ash's decision is, however, just how closely the band's thinking mirrors much that we see in open source:

Frontman Tim Wheeler said that Ash... would be "dedicating ourselves wholly to the art of the single for the digital age." By abandoning traditional recording and publishing methods, Wheeler said fans would be able to download new music as soon as it was recorded.… Read more

Open source: returning dignity to the developer

I was watching the BBC's production of Elizabeth Gaskell's wonderful North and South on my flight home from London today. What a powerful production! One of my favorite lines from the movie (and book) comes at the end of the first segment. Margaret Hale, the protagonist, reflecting on the working conditions in England's northern cotton factories (textile mills) says,

I have seen Hell. And it is white. Snow white.The cotton trade enslaved workers to an almost bestial existence in Gaskell's time, though her words also reflect the factory owners' servile dependence on the same labor. … Read more

Microsoft's bloatware problem (and how open source could help)

Fake Steve takes a swipe at Microsoft's bloatware problem, and strikes true:

For years people have been begging Microsoft for leaner, simpler products with fewer features. Not just befuddled and baffled consumers but CIOs at big companies, guys who manage tens of thousands of PCs, who are considered "thought leaders," and who definitely have Microsoft's attention. They've been screaming this from the rooftops: Fewer features, greater ease of use, greater reliability. They've done everything but put up billboards on the roads around Redmond saying, "Small. Fast. Cheap. Easy." They don't want slightly fewer features. They want a lot fewer. Like 90% fewer. So what does Microsoft do? It rolls out a huge new OS and a new version of Office with a 10x gain in features. Then it hires an army of MBAs to go "unlock value" and get customers to use all those features that they've already told Microsoft they don't want.... Microsoft seems to have lost sight of the fact that its rise to power came as a result of Bill Gates positioning Windows as smaller, cheaper, easier and faster than OS/2 Presentation Manager. Windows 3.0 was lean and mean and, relatively speaking, open. OS/2 with PM was big, bloated, expensive, and all about locking you in to IBM. IBM was the big monolith trying to protect its market share and suck everything into its maw. Microsoft was the disrupter, using a little toy weapon to attack a fortress. Amen.

It's not simply Microsoft's problem, of course, but pretty much all of enterprise software's. Enterprise software has worked so hard to justify itself that it has lost sight of the normal customer's needs.… Read more

OSI and the value in holding firm

I was reading The Economist on my flight home from London today, and came across this paragraph in an article that resonated with me, because it reminds me of the various non-profit "lobbies" within the open source software movement.

Too many Brussels think-tanks accept large chunks of their funding from EU institutions and national governments. Others depend on big corporate sponsors, so that the lines between research and lobbying becomes queasily blurred....Nobody seems able to change the default formula for Brussels policy seminars: good coffee and croissants, dull speeches and a brief exchange of conventional wisdom. The painful comparison is with Washington, DC, where the best think-tanks refuse public money, compete to set the agenda with provocative ideas, and enjoy extraordinary access to administration and Congress alike. (June 9, 2007. 45) Open source software has the OSI, the Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, he Linux Foundation, various conferences (OSCON, OSBC, LinuxWorld, etc.), and various other overtly open source or friendly-to-open source organizations. How effective they are in promoting open source is, to my mind, directly proportionate to their independence.

I thought it was a net negative to see the Free Standards Group merge with OSDL. FSG was a "bottoms-up" organization, despite its corporate funding. OSDL was never more than an attempt to rein in Red Hat. I think very highly of Jim Zemlin, and think he bleeds more FSG (his original home) than OSDL, and believe he can do much good. But he has his work cut out for him to ensure the community's voice is heard in the Linux Foundation.… Read more