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 â 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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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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Open source has many good uses.  Beating up one's competitors shouldn't be the primary one.
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Some enterprise database users and industry analysts with whom BetaNews spoke today believe the purchase of open source database producer MySQL by Sun Microsystems could have an across-the-board effect on the entire database market.
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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On the Windows Skills blog, there's a new post that talks about the use of a SQLite database (via PHP) to handle the assault that Digg.com can dish out to a popular webiste.   Physical memory was limited and Apache and MySQL soon started to fight for every remaining byte and eventually the page was unavailable. After this experience I started to look for a alternative for the database storage and I found an interesting one: SQLite.   He mentions some of the features the database has including zero-configuration, a simple API, and the portability of having a single database in a single file. The next step was getting it to work with his Apache/PHP5 installation and to run some statistics on it. The results show SQLite pulling ahead of MySQL (INNODB) by a bit and MySQL (MYISAM) by a good bit.
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Sun Microsystems will pay $1 billion for Swedish software company MySQL, whose open-source database is used for some of the most widely visited Web sites in the world.Sun said the deal will augment its position in the enterprise IT market, including the $15 billion database market.MySQL&#39;s product line will help Sun give further support to the open-source Web application platform known as LAMP, the acronym for the Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySQL database and the PHP/Perl programming languages.Sun will pay $800 million in cash and $200 million in options.&#160;(More to follow.)
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Letter Can collective database licensing cure this tragedy of the commons?
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They are curious about the growing number of open source database products on the market, but some SQL Server DBAs say they remain doubtful that companies will adopt it for the long haul.
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In a new blog entry, Michael Kimsal points out a driver that Microsoft has released (during the end of last year) that allows PHP5 applications to connect directly to a SQL Server database.   This isn't replacing freetds any time soon.  I guess I'm still wondering what the market for "PHP apps deployed on Windows talking to SQL Server" really is - most of the shared hosting accounts I've seen, even on Windows, offer MySQL or Access as the database.    He also points out a video that was shot of the development team talking about the driver (here's their blog too).
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Gone are the days when free software could blithely ignore what was happening in the world of proprietary code.  The two approaches are now inextricably intertwined as more and more users and companies choose to run both.  One paradoxical consequence of this is that as free software becomes more widely deployed, Microsoft's impact on it becomes greater.  Against this background, a recent shift in Microsoft's public statements about open source assumes a particular importance.
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Open source is changing the game by making software free.  About time.
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This is what the future looks like.  Heavy adoption of open source at the core of commercial software so that developers can focus on pushing the envelope on innovation, not reinventing wheels that provide no discernible differentiation.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Developers at open-source player MySQL are hard at work on a project code-named "Merlin", which isÂ designed to make it easier for customers to manage and maintain the company's database software, a source close to MySQL says. Merlin is a server-based database monitoring and advisory service which continually scans a user's database network for any likely system crashes, bottlenecks or security vulnerabilities, the source said. Under development at MySQL for 22 months, Merlin is due to debut late in the fourth quarter of this calendar year or early in the first quarter of 2007. It's unclear whether Merlin contains any third-party software or if MySQL developers have modeled the offering on any existing database monitoring and advisory service. The aim of Merlin is to simplify MySQL database administration for both small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and enterprises. While SMBs often can't afford to employ database administrators (DBAs) to look after their MySQL implementations, larger firms are running into difficulties trying to find sufficient DBAs with specific MySQL skills. Customer demand was a strong factor in the vendor deciding to create Merlin, the source added. In an interview Friday, Marten Mickos, chief executive officer at MySQL, declined to comment on the project. However, he said that one of his company's main focuses in the coming year will be to provide tools and other offerings to make life easier for MySQL DBAs. "Our first wave of users in the '90s were not database developers," Mickos said. "In the twenty-first century, we've been enabling database developers. Now, we're thinking of ways to help DBAs and take care of them." Merlin acts as a "virtual DBA" or "a constant MySQL consultant," the source said, alerting users to potential system issues before they become critical and offering fixes, tips and tuning options to improve the performance of the MySQL database. So far, Merlin has 50-plus database rules that it can check and provide advice on, with the expectation that both MySQL and its customers will build more customized rules in future. Merlin, now being beta-tested at 24 customer sites, will be rolled into the MySQL Network subscription service, the source said.
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Christopher Jones has a note on his blog today about the Orcale Develop Conference happening in San Francisco October 23rd through the 25th and some of the PHP involvement there.    First on my ToDo list is Oracle's user conference. PHP is well represented at Oracle Develop. This is a new part of the huge Oracle OpenWorld event running in San Francisco in a few weeks.   Registrations are still open for Oracle Develop. You can register separately or if you register for the full OpenWorld you get the Develop conference gratis, I was told.  Check the fine print on this.    Talks for the conference include:  Rasmus Lerdorf's "Getting Rich with PHP" "Hands-on Lab: Developing and Deploying Oracle and PHP" from a representative from Oracle and Christopher Jones giving a talk on "The PHP/Oracle Experience: Building for Scalability"    Check out the conference website for more information and to register today.
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Sun Microsystems' purchase earlier this month of open-source database maker MySQL may have been pennywise and pound-foolish, with many observers suggesting that Valley stalwart Sybase was in fact the smarter buy. The logic is compelling -- but won't someone stand up for the cussedly independent?