MySQL, YourSQL, OurSQL

Jeremy Zawodny, ex-Yahoo, currently at Craigslist, is generally regarded as one of the gurus of the MySQL world. His recent thoughts on the evolution of that project – called, significantly, “The New MySQL Landscape” - are therefore particularly interesting, not least because it uses the “f”-word: fork....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Sun's Open Source Appliances

When Sun announced at the beginning of this year that it was buying MySQL for the not inconsiderable sum of a billion dollars, the question most people posed to themselves was how Sun was going to recoup its investment. I was initially worried that Sun might try to push Solaris over GNU/Linux in the LAMP stack, but Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz was adamant that wasn't going to happen.

Now, nearly a year later, we're beginning to see what exactly Sun has in mind....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Under the Aegis of AEGIS

Accessibility rarely figures in the headlines – unless there's some competitive angle, as there was with ODF's supposed lack of accessibility features that Microsoft was quick to trumpet. Against that background, it's good to hear of a thoroughgoing project to improve accessibility, like this one, announced by Sun's Peter Korn....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Want to Open Flash? Ask Sun How

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Flash, but there's no denying an open version would at least be better than a closed one. Here's why that's not happening:

Now whether we would publish the entire Flash Player as open source is something that first of all would be somewhat challenging in that there are some codices in Flash that we don't have the rights to all the source to. That's one challenge with that. The other is that I think in terms of what's best here for consistency of Flash on the web, having multiple implementations and having forking and splintering of that code would be a big loss for the web in terms of that consistency. So we're really working to be a good steward of Flash and making sure that it runs across operating systems on the web. And we really want to make sure that we don't end up in a situation where it's fragmented and loses the value that it has brought to the web so far. That's really what we're working to do is to maintain the consistency, but we're very inclusive of open source and involved in open source to enable that innovation of the open source community to be part of the success story with Flash.

Now replace the word "Flash" with "Java", and you have *precisely* the argument that Sun used to give for not open-sourcing Java. Which is now available under the GNU GPL.

Adobe, are you listening...? (Via Aral Balkan.)

The Sun Shines on Asus

What struck me about this article in the Sun about Asus was how it took its readership's acquaintance with GNU/Linux for granted:

Interestingly, it runs Windows XP as an operating system to keep the costs down rather than Vista and a Linux version is on the way.

If that is laid out in menu terms like the Linux EEE laptops, then it's well worth a punt on one as a second PC in a bedroom.

Signs of the times....

Where Sun Doesn't Shine

Pamela Jones has been digging through SCO stuff again, and doesn't like what she finds:

We learn two primary things from Jones' testimony: first, what a cynical role Sun played in the SCO saga, and second, that all the time SCO was calling on the world, the courts, the Congress -- nay heaven itself, if I may say so -- to sympathize with it over the ruination of its Most Holy Intellectual Property by it being improperly open sourced into Linux, not that it turned out to be true, it had already secretly given Sun the right to open source it in OpenSolaris. Remember all that falderol about SCO being contractually unable to show us the code, much as it so desired to do so, because of being bound to confidentiality requirements? What a farce. SCO had already secretly given Sun the right to open source Solaris, with all the UNIX System V you can eat right in there.

The simple fact is, I gather from Jones' testimony, Sun could have prevented the harm SCO sought to cause by simply telling us what rights it had negotiated and received from SCO prior to SCO launching its assault on Linux. Yet it remained silent. When I consider all folks were put through, all the unnecessary litigation, and all the fear and the threats and the harmful smears, including of me at the hands of SCO and all the dark little helper dwarves in SCO's workshop, I feel an intense indignation like a tsunami toward Sun for remaining silent.

Extraordinary to think that the SCO circus is still running; even more extraordinary if, as PJ suggests, Sun could have stopped all the FUD directed at Linux with a word.

Erwin Is A-goin'

Erwin Tenhumberg has been one of the closest observers of OpenOffice.org's growing strength. So his announcement that he is moving from Sun - a company that, for all its faults, really seems to get open source - to SAP, a company, for all its strengths, seems utterly witless in this area, surprised me.

I suppose it would be too much to hope that SAP has finally got a clue....

Opening the Floodgates

One thing I've never understood is why more low-cost PC manufacturers don't routinely include free software with their offerings. After all, it's the perfect way to provide all the capabilities most users need without increasing the price, or, indeed, taking away the possibility of adding certain other non-free software later.

Perhaps it's simply that PCs haven't been cheap enough for it to matter so much given Microsoft's deep discounts for hardware companies. That's another great thing about the ultraportables: they really do take down prices to new levels.

Against that background, maybe this interesting news will finally signal the opening of the floodgates: a German review of the new Asus Eee PC 900, running Windows XP, that comes not only with the utterly useless Microsoft Works package, but also StarOffice, Sun's supported version of OpenOffice.org. (Via Erwin Tenhumberg.)

A Licence to Print...Licences

Licensing lies at the heart of free software. Indeed, it could be argued that Richard Stallman's greatest legacy is the GNU GPL, since that first showed how to preserve the essential liberty of free software, and how to deal with free-riders. But as well as a boon, licences are also a bane: there are too many of the damn things, which is why I was a little unkind to the Honest Public Licence idea, good in itself.

In a way, it's surprising that it has taken the open source world so long to do some navel-gazing and look closely at the state of open source licences. The result, a draft of the License Proliferation Committee Report, makes fascinating reading.

Originally, the LP Committee started to divide the OSI approved licenses into "recommended," "non-recommended" and "other" tiers. As we met and discussed, however, it became apparent that there is no one open source license that serves everyone's needs equally well. Some people like copyleft. Some don't. Governmental bodies have specific needs concerning copyright rights. As we discussed which licenses should be "recommended," it became clear that the recommended licenses were really the same as licenses that were either widely used (for example the GPL), or that had a strong community (for example Eclipse). Thus, we switched from the "recommended"/"non-recommended" terminology to a more descriptive terminology of:

-Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities

-Special purpose licenses

-Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses

-Non-reusable licenses

-Other/Miscellaneous licenses

We thought that these more descriptive categories may help people initially picking a license to use one of the more popular licenses, thereby helping to reduce the numbers of different licenses commonly used. We realize that the majority of open source projects currently use the GPL and that the GPL does not always play well with other licenses. We also realize that the GPL is a great license choice for some people and not so great a license choice for others. Thus, we can't just recommend that everybody use the GPL.. While such a recommendation would solve the license proliferation problem, it is not realistic.

We encourage new licensors to use licenses in the "popular and strong communities" group if any licenses in that group fit their needs. There are only nine licenses in this group and if everyone considered these licenses first when choosing a license for their project, some of the issues relating to license proliferation would diminish.

What's particularly interesting is that there are just nine licences in the "popular and strong communities" group, and that they are mainly the ones you'd expect:

- Apache License, 2.0

- New BSD license

- GNU General Public License (GPL)

- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)

- MIT license

- Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)

- Common Development and Distribution License

- Common Public License

- Eclipse Public License

Most of these are well known; the only "strange" ones are the Common Public License, an early IBM choice, and Sun's Common Development and Distribution License.

Also of note is the Wizard Project:

The wizard assists new licensors in choosing which licenses meet their goals. The wizard also lets licensors find licenses that almost meet their goals. We hope that being able to generate a list of existing licenses that meet defined goals will lessen the need for people to create their own new licenses.

This is very similar to a tool available on the Creative Commons site. Indeed, it's hard not to get the feeling that on this occasion the open source world is generally following developments in the open content world - not necessarily a bad thing, and a sign of the growing maturity of the latter.