Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Jul 20, 2010
Yes, you read the title correctly — there are three editions of MySQL available, according to http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/server.html. Well, that page names two, and then of course there is the community edition….
From the manual page:
MySQL Enterprise Server is available in the following editions:
* MySQL Enterprise Server – Pro is the world’s most popular open source database that enables you to rapidly deliver high performance and scalable Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications.
* MySQL Enterprise Server – Advanced is the most comprehensive edition of MySQL. It provides all the benefits of MySQL Enterprise Server Pro and adds horizontal table and index partitioning for improving the performance and management of VLDBs (Very Large Databases).
How is “horizontal table and index partitioning” different from the regular partitioning available in MySQL 5.1?
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Posted by Yanick Champoux on Sep 28, 2009
On Monday August 31st, Gowlings hosted a debate on open source licenses organized by the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre (FOSSLC).
The debate was conducted between the proponents of three major Open Source licenses: Mike Milinkovich for the EPL, Matt Asay for the GPL, and David Maxwell for the BSD license.
It was organized into three rounds: first the panelists had ten minutes to sell us their license of choice. Then they were given five minutes to rebut points made by the two other panelists. A final one minute was given to rebut any rebuttal. After those three rounds, the audience—both the live one and that watching the feed—asked their questions.
From what I could estimate, between 50 and 70 people physically attended the event. Andrew reported that between 25 and 50 viewed the live feed. Videos of the event are available on the FOSSLC site.
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Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Jul 23, 2009
I think many people truly realized how much they take the MySQL documentation for granted during the recent multi-hour outage from mysql.com’s data center. Apparently there is a lot of FUD floating around about the legality of mirroring the documentation, as presented by Justin Swanhart and asked by Mark Callaghan.
The manual page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/copyright-mysql.html says:
You shall not publish or distribute this documentation in any form or on any media, except if you distribute the documentation in a manner similar to how Sun disseminates it (that is, electronically for download on a Web site with the software) or on a CD-ROM or similar medium, provided however that the documentation is disseminated together with the software on the same medium.
Now, I am not a lawyer, however, to me this means that you can indeed mirror the documentation, so long as you mirror the binaries as well. Giuseppe commented on Mark’s post (linked above) saying “There is no license restriction to mirror the docs.”
Note that I played a part in unknowingly spreading the FUD — I thought special permission was needed to mirror the documentation (and binaries) and indeed, it is not.
As a postscript, what are everyone’s favorite site mirror programs? Searching http://www.ohloh.net for an open-source website mirror did not reveal anything very popular, though I am sure there are a few “standard” mirroring tools that folks use. (Perhaps I should have searched for spiders, and seen which spiders have sync/download capabilities?)
Posted by Sheeri Cabral on Apr 29, 2009
By now many folks know that MySQL documentation is not changing its license. This is an issue with many sides, but before I go through them, I want to address a comment made by Masood Mortazavi:
People who are interested in forking the server — and potentially interested in creating what is in effect separate communities of their own — should probably develop their own docs for their own forks.
(There is a cost involved here, I know. However, it should be a cost worth paying if developers of forks really believe in their work. MySQL AB certainly paid that cost in developing the docs while it had already made the code itself freely available under GPL. So, the playing ground among all forks, etc., and including MySQL itself, is actually quite level.)
MySQL AB paid the cost in developing the *software* as well. Why is it that the cost of writing documentation from scratch is acceptable, but the cost of writing the *software* from scratch isn’t?
I totally understand the concern that if people have the same rights to fork the documentation as they do to fork the code, confusion may arise. Many do not agree that the risk is high enough to warrant keeping the documentation “closed”. However, even if that is the case, Section 2 of GPLv2 states:
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