Is MySQL's Fate the Future of Open Source?
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion ??? helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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Open-source advocates and industry watchers saw benefits to Sun's acquisition of MySQL that could mean greater use of open-source software in enterprise IT and more financial security to MySQL.
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Sun Microsystems hopes to make MySQL's open-source database more attractive to enterprise customers. But some existing MySQL users say Sun has a lot of work ahead of it.
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Open source has many good uses.  Beating up one's competitors shouldn't be the primary one.
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Open-Xchange plans to embed the MySQL database in its opens-source server.
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On his blog, Ian Bicking has posted some of his thoughts on a positive look at PHP - what he thinks PHP has done right.   With the recent talk on the blogosphere about deployment (and for Django, and lots of other posts too), people are thinking about PHP a bit more analytically. I think people mostly get it wrong.   He points out that PHP, in essence, is a CGI-style execution and, in being so, makes it more flexible. Both sides, web and command line, can work with the language equally well. He also mentions the developer/administrator split he sees in PHP's structure and how the language facilitates it.
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Is open source the best bet in a recession?
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MySQL has laid out its software road map through 2009, including some code contributed by Google and security improvements that are due in MySQL 7.0.Earlier this year Google signed a Contributor License Agreement, which provides the legal framework under which MySQL can include code from another company in its database, MySQL co-founder and Vice President David Axmark said on Tuesday.Google is secretive about the distributed architecture underlying its services, but it&#39;s known to be one of MySQL&#39;s biggest users, running hundreds or even thousands of its databases worldwide.The search company has done a lot of work customizing MySQL to meet its special needs, which include better database replication, and tools to monitor a high volume of database instances, Axmark said in an interview at MySQL&#39;s user conference in Paris.MySQL will include some of those capabilities in future versions of its database, probably in point upgrades to MySQL 6.0, which is scheduled for general availability in late 2008, Axmark said.Google benefits because the add-ons become part of the official MySQL product and are included in big fixes and future upgrades. MySQL could benefit from some of Google&#39;s custom software -- although it requires considerable work by the database vendor.&quot;It takes time to analyze what&#39;s relevant for everyone, what&#39;s doable, and how can we work it into a new version,&quot; said Kaj Arno, MySQL vice president for community relations. &quot;There&#39;s huge potential, but there&#39;s also lots of work.&quot;Google develops the add-ons only for the operating system it uses, Linux, so MySQL will need to port, test, and document the additions for the 15 or so OSes it supports.The features in MySQL 6.0 are already fairly set, Axmark said, so the Google code won&#39;t appear before version 6.1, due in early 2009. Some Google code is already in the source code for MySQL 4.1, he said, but not in a supported MySQL product.The companies are in close contact, Axmark said. The Google engineer in charge of its MySQL deployments spent several days at MySQL&#39;s internal developer meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, last month. Google has also released source code for some MySQL tools it developed.At its developer event in Paris, MySQL laid out an unusually long roadmap stretching to MySQL 7.0, which will be generally available in late 2009 and focus on security improvements for enterprise users.&quot;Many of you have told us you want better security in the database, and we have listened,&quot; Robin Schumacher, MySQL director of product management, told developers.Many of the features are standard in more mature databases from IBM and Oracle, Schumacher acknowledged in an interview. MySQL positions itself as a low-cost alternative to those products, with less sophisticated features that are sufficient for most users, most of the time.Schumacher said version 7.0 will support role- and group-based security, which allows administrators to set privileges for groups of users centrally instead of individually. It will also have &quot;transparent data encryption&quot; built into the database, so developers don&#39;t have to include it at the application level.MySQL hopes the security features will win it financial, government and retail customers, some of whom add the capabilities themselves. &quot;If we get the door slammed in our face in an account, this is one of the reasons it happens,&quot; Schumacher said.In the nearer term, MySQL 5.1 is scheduled for general availability in the first quarter next year. Advances include table and index partitioning, which should boost data warehousing performance, and the option of row-based replication, which lets companies create more exact back-up replicas.The big change in 6.0 will be the availability of&#160;MySQL&#39;s storage engine, Falcon. The most popular storage engine for MySQL has historically been InnoDB, but two years ago Oracle acquired InnoDB&#39;s developer, Innobase. Oracle continued to license the software to MySQL, but MySQL wanted an alternative.Falcon will do crash recovery and roll-back operations faster than InnoDB because they are done from main memory, Schumacher said, but some InnoDB features, like foreign key support and full-text indexing, won&#39;t be supported until MySQL 6.1.6.1 is due to go into beta in mid-2008 and start to ship widely in 2009. Improvements include better prepared statements and server-side cursors, Schumacher said.Despite all the buzz a few years ago about native XML (Extensible Markup Language) support, Axmark said he&#39;s still waiting for a clear signal about what customers want. Until then it&#39;s not a big priority for MySQL, although there are some XML capabilities in 5.1, he said.
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Does Ubuntu point the way to the real future for desktop Linux?
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Now for some real Apache code Column As I write this, I'm on the Eurostar train, just returning from O'Reilly's OSCon (Open Source Conference) in Brussels. Some fascinating insights there; and even my own talk generated some interesting discussion. Some of the delegates, including O'Reilly himself, are promoting opensource ideas going beyond software and into society more generally. I've touched on that in this very column before now, but a related argument that's new to me is that the open/closed debate in software could become largely sidelined, as the industry focuses on software as a service (such as Google's offerings) more than as a product.â¦
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At work we're mostly an OSS shop.  Partly because I have a strong bias towards OSS but cost, reliability, security, etc are all leading factors.  For the last several months now I've been in an interesting position to prove the benefits of OSS in a real-world environment.  We've had to extend a number of OSS tools to fit into our production environment.  These are significant additions and non-trivial.  Open Source allows you to STAND on the shoulders of gods.  For example we've been having a problem with the Jakarta DBCP  connection pool.  It was running out of connections in highly threaded environments and is slow.  Certainly slower than would be necessary.  Long story short.  Last night  ...
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It seems that the proprietary world is doing just fine in the face of open source.  But for how long?
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By paying $1 billion to purchase MySQL, Sun seems to be giving a pretty clear signal about the centrality of the popular open-source database to the company's planned open-source software stack. But users and vendors of the many other databases Sun supports and sells insist that they're just fine, thank you, with the new sibling. Really.
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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As Alexey Zakhlestin points out today, Lukas Smith has made the announcement that the MySQL group is finally recognizing the efforts of the PDO developers and supporting them:   Ok, it seems that MySQL AB is finally committing to fix up PDO_MySQL and  to generally accept the fact that PDO is the future. Of course mysqli  will also be actively maintained. But they will also make mysqlnd play  nicely with PDO etc.   There's budgets and time lines for the project so things are already moving along and developers to the project will soon be assigned. Lukas also mentions updated on PHP's side - validating that the documentation for the extensions (mysql and mysqli) are up to date and correct.
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Analysis: Sun broadens its open source stake, while MySQL enjoys Sun's standing and budget.
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Sun's acquisition of MySQL has broad implications for the software industry.