My parents instilled upon me many values that I keep with me today. My twin brother and I are the youngest of four children, coming from a lower-middle class background. We children had the inevitable fights over material possessions, screeching “Mine! Mine!”

My father’s response to this was to look at us and say “These toys are mine; I bought those toys with money I worked for. What’s yours is what you make with your bodies.” While the sentiment is arguably harsh, crude and bordering on vulgar, I cannot argue that he had a certain point.

If you do not truly own something, you will be left squabbling like a child when your perceived ownership is threatened. When you assumed you owned something and the truth comes to light, you will be massively insecure and have a sense of injustice.

A few points from OSCon are haunting me and getting me to think about what FLOSS means to me, and what I want from it.

— Open source is important even if you never read one line of source code or make one modification. The fact that anyone can read and write the source code is critical even if nobody besides the original engineer(s) ever does.

(more…)

Liveblogging from OSCon 2008: Going Open Source, The 20 Most Important Things to Do - by Martin Aschoff of AGNITAS AS.

Firstly I have to extend a heartfelt “thank you” to Sun Microsystems and Monty Widenius, as I would not have been able to attend OSCon without their assistance.

AGNITAS AS makes e-marketing software, 25 employees, no venture capital, from Munich, Germany. The municipality of Munich runs entirely on Linux desktops and on infrastructures with open source software.

This session is about the nuts and bolts of an open source company. Aschoff kept a journal of the key learnings of the company when it went open source, and has become a board member of the Open Source Business Association in Europe.

Before deciding on going open source:
(more…)

At last night’s event, a lot of the questions were really implicitly asking, “Is open source better? Why?”

The first answer everyone comes up with is that it’s free, and that’s better.

However, that is neither necessary nor sufficient to deem it “better”.

If MySQL did exactly the same tasks Oracle did, but was free, there’s still a huge amount of money involved when migrating. Merely staffing the migration costs a lot of money.

Companies using open source technologies because they are free are (probably) making the right software choice for the wrong reason.

Firstly, open source does not have to be free — MySQL proves that. Their Enterprise source code is free to paying customers (and whoever paying customers distribute to, but that is not the issue).

Secondly, open source’s benefits far outweigh mere license costs, though the license cost is definitely the most tangible benefit.

I realized while the benefits of open source were being touched upon that the benefits are not lacking in the closed software world, they are simply much harder to come by. For instance, there are companies that reverse engineer solutions, develop their own in-house solutions without being able to read a line of original code. Surely it is easier to build a home-grown solution when the code is readable to begin with.

As well, the talent pool for open source is greater, because there is a lower barrier to entry. It’s still just as difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff as it is in a closed source world, however if your company is willing to hire the top 10%, I’d rather try to find the top 10% from a pool of tens of thousands of people than from a pool of thousands.

The oft-quoted “you can hack it yourself if you want” still applies, and moreso the idea that “even if the company goes out of business, or the core developers stop developing, others can pick up where the previous developers left off.”

One issue we did not touch upon was that open source tends to follow a popular concept in “extreme programming” — the idea that the software is always working. It may not have all the features, maybe it’s not much more than “hello world”, but it works. A feature is added, the code integrated, and it still works, now with +1 feature.

I think the issue is that in general, it is *easier* to reap these benefits from open source than from closed. It makes the argument more difficult, because it’s *possible* to reap similar (or the same) benefits from closed source, but it’s easier with open source.

In 3 words:

They already do.

MySQL Enterprise is more than just a binary. http://mysql.com/products/enterprise/ has the details on the other features MySQL Enterprise includes.

One of these features is the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, which is closed source, proprietary alerting software.

So when bloggers make statements such as:

MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model — previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.

source

All they are doing is showing their lack of knowledge about what MySQL Enterprise really is. Complaining that MySQL will likely charge for online backups is a valid one, but currently InnoDB Hot Backup is for sale only. There are solutions out there that do not cost anything, but nothing that MySQL produces. The only free [mostly] online backup product is mysqlhotcopy, and that has limitations such as “for MyISAM tables only”.

While I have said that software should be open source and free, where “free” means “free as in water”, that does not mean that we should take it for granted that free software will always be there. The path to that is to have a contrast of software one pays for, and software one does not.

Of course, that is not why MySQL charges for the software. They charge for some of their products because without money, they cease to exist, and then even the free version stops being developed on.

“A necessary evil” is a dangerous phrase, and can lead to a slippery slope….but in this case, I do not envision that it is a big problem. Maybe I will regret saying this if things keep getting more and more closed, but I do not believe so.

And I, too, am frustrated that we have been told that “online backups are coming” only to find out that they may not come in the means I expected. However, software is not bug-free, often does not come out on time (MySQL 5.1 itself is a year late!), and sometimes, promises get broken.

My faith in MySQL is unbroken, and I hope most others reading this feel this way as well.

Open Source means that the source code is open. There are many inferences that can be made from this, and many stereotypes that can be applied, but in the end, all it means is that you can read the source code as well as use the binaries.

I am not a developer. I fully admit this. What I mean by this is that my strengths do not lie in engineering new code to do things. Give me some Lego™s or some Wedgits™ and I look at the instructions to see what to build.

However, I am an engineer.

One of my team’s current tasks is to restore a backup (using InnoDB Hot Backup, and compressed) from a client’s production machine to a development instance…..

Weekly — thus we want to automate it……

And did I mention the development machine has 5 different MySQL instances on it, running all on 127.0.0.1 on different ports?

The steps are:
0) stop the desired mysql instance
1) move the development datadir and logs to a backup directory
2) copy the most recent production backup to the development machine
3) uncompress the production backup and apply any logs (with ibbackup)
4) start the desired mysql instance
5) check and celebrate

Being smart, and knowing my own limitations, I delegated the task to another team member. Remember, I am not a good developer! But my team member is smart, and he got everything going well, except step 3. The problem was with running:

ibbackup --apply-log --uncompress ./restore-my.cnf

(more…)

I’m sorry that I haven’t commented on the BEA acquisition. It’s just been too obvious for too long, I can’t get excited even though it’s really really big. Manifest destiny manifested, that’s it.

On the other hand…

Tip of the hat to Lucas Jellema at AMIS who posts his own commentary on the acquisition and also provides this great find where
Springsource CEO Rod Johnson comments at length on the deal. Rod leads an open-source software company and I agree with Lucas that there is a hint of jealousy hidden inside all that enthusiasm!

Take-away:

Another link between these acquisitions are that Sun and Oracle now appear to be on a collision course. Oracle history shows their utter determination to crush any competitors in the database space, and their ability to do so. Sun is now a competitor in that highly profitable core business. With the loss of momentum from JBoss, the Java EE application server market now looks set to be a two-horse race between IBM and Oracle. Glassfish gives Sun a dark horse in this race, but it’s unclear whether this market category will show the growth to accommodate a new entrant, given the growing predominance of Tomcat as a production platform.

Hello!

I am happy to present the very first post to my new group blog, where I will be inviting Pythian DBAs with interesting thoughts to contribute to prepare blogs of their own. You can read the group blog either one author at a time, by clicking the author’s name in the right-hand side of this column, or if you prefer, you can see all the posts on one page by going to the main group blog page.

My subject for this first posting: DBD::Oracle. If you have used perl to interact with a database, you are aware of the DBI that Tim Bunce and his collaborators first developed in the 1990s in order to interact with a database abstraction layer. DBD::Oracle is one of the database layer drivers that allows the DBI to communicate with Oracle. Pythian is a big user of perl and DBD::Oracle internally, as our problem tracking groupware, Support Track, and our availability monitoring software, avail, are all written using the DBI to communicate with the underlying database.

Late last year, Tim posted to the DBI users’ mailing list looking for a volunteer that would become the maintainer for DBD::Oracle. He explained that as he was no longer a user of Oracle, the task of keeping the software current was becoming increasingly difficult and distracting for him. Pythian volunteered and I am proud to announce that we made our first release, DBD::Oracle 1.17 last month. This release adds support for Oracle XE, Oracle’s free low-end database, and for installation using the Oracle Instant Client, as well as troubleshooting a variety of installation gotchas and bugs in the makefile.

Seah Hull at the Oracle Open Source blog interviewed me on the subject of Pythian taking on the stewardship of DBD::Oracle and even has a podcast of the interview available on his site.

We cover the following material:

1. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself, and your company?
2. When a perl programmer wants to interface with a database, what
technology do they use?
3. How did that DBI project get started, and by whom?
4. How does the DBD::Oracle component come into play? What language is it written in, and how does it interface with Oracle’s own libraries?
5. What has Pythian’s role been with this project in the past, and how has that changed recently?
6. From a business perspective, why would a company like Pythian want to contribute to this project for free? What is the advantage?
7. How have Open Source technologies benefited Pythian?
8. Do you have any other comments on Open Source, benefits, industry
threats, myths, and so on? Is everything really just free? And
furthermore won’t everyone eventually go the way of a free database?

Check it out!

Cheers,

Paul