In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database. If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project.
Obviously, MySQL users and supporters will have an interest in seeing that Oracle is not able to exert its full influence over MySQL, leaving customers at their mercy, since MySQL has become such a major competitor to Oracle. No surprise that there’s now an online petition campaign to Save MySQL!
London Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux:
When it comes to business computer systems, nothing is more mission-critical than the massive trading software systems that underlie stock markets. A failure of an hour here can mean billions of dollars of lost trades. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) learned that the hard way when their .NET/Windows Server 2003 trading platform died like a dog early last September. The new LSE management is not going make that mistake again. This October, the LSE purchased MillenniumIT and will be switching its stock exchange programs to the company’s Linux-based Millennium Exchange software.
Today Microsoft released some GPL driver code for Linux for some hardware. Why? Well, so that the hardware could be better virtualized in a VM running Linux on a Windows host. Yippee. Well I’m sure this will help some people. It does mean that FLOSS is influencing them, and that is a good thing.
In contrast, the FSF made a press release last Thursday, quoted below in its entirety. So Microsoft is trying to win people over, whether it’s with really useful stuff or not, it is Free this time… and the FSF is just yelling at people. Who’s going to make more friends here?
Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it’s safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it’s nowhere near enough to make C# safe.
### Why Worry About C#? ###
Since we published Richard’s article about Mono[1] last week, some people have been asking us why we’re expressing special concern about free software developers relying on C# and Mono, instead of other languages. Sun probably has patents that cover Java. Maybe IBM has patents that cover C compilers. “Shouldn’t we discourage the use of these too?” they ask.
Esther Schindler sifts through 25 highly anticipated open-source releases coming this year which will be of interest to people in various categories from IT Admins to programmers to mobile users: “These open-source browsers, dev tools, mobile apps and more promise that ‘Oooh, cool!’ sense of discovery.”
Royal Pingdom serves up 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened. Some reasons better than others, of course. Interesting to note where the fork surpasses the original project in popularity, and where it doesn’t. Two of the listed forks were in pursuit of Mac support.
Steve Wozniak speaks out, predicting the death of the iPod and suggesting things he doesn’t like about the iPhone, comparing it with Google’s Android platform. Woz is quoted as saying that “the iPod has had a long time as the world’s most popular media player, and that it will fall from grace due to oversupply.” Hmmm. Is it a victim of its own success, then?
Mandriva’s latest release: Mandriva Linux 2009. Get it while it’s hot! Mandriva’s always been a bit of an overlooked distro, imo… but it continues to install easily and work very well. Reviews are appearing now for those who like to read before they download. Time to update my Mandriva systems…
This is amusing: apparently the roots of the iPod’s development are traced back to 1979, when “Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip.” He didn’t renew the patent in 1988, so he hasn’t seen a dime from it. “To be honest,” he said, “I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged.”
The launch today of Canada’s new DNCL has the website flooded — earlier today it displayed an error page, and when I tried again just now (noon Central), the site displays and allows you to enter a number, but is still to flooded to generate the necessary captcha to complete the registration. I imagine that Michael Geist’s iOptOut site will probably be getting extra traffic today as well — it picks up where the DNCL leaves off, since the list presently has too many exemptions. Story at the Globe & Mail and CTV’s “What you need to know about the Do Not Call List.”
iTWire claims their list of Top 10 reasons why Steve Ballmer should be certified insane is offered tongue-in-cheek, but it is vaguely possible that some people might take it more seriously than that. The list counts down, clocking in #5 as: “Ballmer can get a little quirky when Linux is mentioned. ‘Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.’ Doesn’t sound completely sane to me.
