In Through The Out Door

Hack MySQL …. It all started because Perl DBD-mysql dies after calling a stored procedure.

…to MySQL,“ I decided to write a MySQL sniffer and see if I could figure it out (and I did).

why anyone else would have use for a MySQL network protocol sniffer, I don’t know.

less, here is a MySQL protocol sniffer.

Today, free software is a large body of high-quality code on which much of the internet depends for critical functions. But free software is much more than a collection of programs. Karl Fogel examines free software under three different lights: as a political movement; as a programming methodology; and as a business model. Karl is the author of Producing Open Source Software.

Open Source Business Models: Daryl Taft, star reporter over at eWeek, has written a series of excellent articles in their latest Open Source report.  Daryl managed to round up a very broad cross section of open source ISVs in order to show that the business model has to be sustainable for open source to work.  No arguments there.  What CIO wants to be their career on an unsupported open source project?  There’s got to be a company to provide ongoing support, maintenance, indemnification etc.  So no surprise that the more successful open source companies have a business model that generates revenues.  Some offer subscription services, like Red Hat Network or MySQL Network, others sell support and services, like JBoss, and there’s a newer breed of companies that have open source products that deliver 90% of the solution but also sell closed source add-ons upon which they build their business.  A few years ago, I think these hybrid business models would have been risky, but nowadays as open source has become more mainstream, there’s less religious fervor on this and people are a lot more pragmatic in accepting the "pay more get more" model.  It may not be as "pure" as the services only model, but it’s getting traction and seems to be accelerating the adoption of open source. Back to eWeek… Daryl has also done very good interviews with the ever-quotable Marc Fleury and his polar opposite, Steve Mills from IBM.  Daryl tells me they have a lot in common though: they are both great salesmen!

JBoss & Microsoft: JBoss & Microsoft have teamed up to work together on various technical initiatives around ActiveDirectory and web services.  This was quite a surprising move, but it demonstrates that we’re moving into an era of greater cooperation between open source and closed source, rather than an "all or nothing" proposition.  While the early proponents of open source have been driven by a sometimes religious-like devotion, for many users of open source technology, it’s simply that open source is better: it’s easier to use, faster, cheaper, more secure.  But they don’t always get to chose all the software in their environment, so there is still the need to co-exist with various closed source pieces.  Still, I imagine there are probably a few people in Redmond who are pissed off about this, since J2EE competes directly with .NET as a runtime environment. We’ve always taken a pragmatic approach to platform vendors at MySQL.  We support more than two dozen platforms and while Linux (and Red Hat in particular) is the number 1 platform, MySQL is very popular on Windows and we have great support for .Net, VB, C# etc.  We see more growth on LAMP than any other platform, but we do not chose sides; we are happy to run on any platform a customer happens to select, whether it’s Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X, Netware, AIX, HP-UX, SCO, Solaris or whatever.Anyways, good on JBoss and good on Microsoft for putting the customer first.

.Oracle, the database, already supports PL/SQL…. Using ODBC, JDBC or OCI, it supports most other languages. So why make a big deal out of PHP support?… I think I am at the expert level using PL/SQL. I have pretty extensive experience with Java, both in and out of the database.

MySQL 5 Replication:Justin Bastedo on Planet MySQL . . . Well we had to setup some hefty realtime backup solution for a database server here at work. After much research i decided hotcopy and mysqldump would not suffice, its too load intensive across the system and ties up the tables with LOCKs for too long. So in walked replication, my beautiful angel of salvation!

How CodeZoo is different:In the comments on my language request blog post, I wrote up some of the ways O’Reilly has made CodeZoo different from other open source repositories…. Here are the ways we’ve tried to make CodeZoo different from the existing resources: We only list components (code meant to be called by other code) and development utilities (test frameworks, etc.)…. Many sites try to be comprehensive, and they are useful for other reasons, but for people trying to get work done, we believe having editors and reviewers helps avoid wasting time with dead projects…. We do not simply provide a raw data dump about a project, but instead try to provide key metrics (average rating, download) and information (O’Reilly and Safari books, articles, blogs, and conference sessions) that will let developers choose a tool quickly and use it easily…. You don’t have to dig through a huge list of releases, files, and file formats, and you don’t have to click through three pages of mirrors and redirects to get the file you want.

Google Office: Here and now?:Filed under: News, Google, OfficeSure, the rumors about Google Office, GoogleOS, etc. have been flying fast and furious for a while. But the latest is certainly worthrepeating: tomorrow Google and Sun will be holding a joint press conference, the subject of which is said to be the roadmap for theGoogle version of Star Office/OpenOffice. Will this be an online, "Web 2.0" version of OO.o?… Only time (and very little of it, apparently) will tell, but it’s clear that Google is interested in OO.o; they recently hired Joerg Heilig, a Sun developer with a long history in Star Office and Open Office. One thing is certain: All eyes will be on Mountain View tomorrow, when Google’s Eric Schmidt and Sun’s Scott McNealy make their big announcement.

FeedTree:The FeedTree P2P syndication system launched while I wasn’t looking. If this gets built into aggregators and content management systems, it could solve the RSS bandwidth problem and route around the ping crisis.

What’s New in MySQL 5.0:Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Open Source, DeveloperMySQL’s popularity has been owed mostly to two things, its speed and its ubiquity. It has been much-maligned by database purists, however, for its lack of hard-core features like views, stored procedures, and triggers. Version 4.0 added sub-selects, transactions, and little else of note, but the newly-unveiled MySQL 5.0 release candidate is poised to put down those criticisms with malice.

JBoss entering the Evil Empire:JBoss Inc. and Microsoft announced a partnership of some sort.

Open Source CMS – Test Drive Content Management Systems:Filed under: Business, Blogging, Design, Developer, Internet, Productivity, Text, Web servicesThis is a site I’ve taken for granted for so long, that it almost didn’t occur to me to post about it. Open Source CMS is a site that is dedicated to providing test environments of as many open source content management solutions as it possibly can. It can help immensely when you’re going through that process of trying to decide which CMS is right for the website you’re building – you can actually try the back-end of almost any CMS. The site gives you administrator privileges so you can really explore the features of the system you’re testing. The only way they’re able to do this is by over-writing each installation with a vanilla install once per hour but an hour is more than enough time to get a sense of whether a given CMS (and this includes blog engines) is right for you.

IBM’s potential MS-Office killer to roll out by year’s end:Putting two and two together wasn’t very difficult.  IBM has practically been joined with Sun at the hip in applying a full court press on the recently OASIS "ratified" (OASIS isn’t really a standards body) XML-based Open Document Format for saving files produced by productivity applications such as word processors and spreadsheets.  The two [...]

IBM’s potential MS-Office killer to roll out by year’s end:Putting two and two together wasn’t very difficult.  IBM has practically been joined with Sun at the hip in applying a full court press on the recently OASIS "ratified" (OASIS isn’t really a standards body) XML-based Open Document Format for saving files produced by productivity applications such as word processors and spreadsheets.  The two [...]

Multi-core licensing and virtualization promote open source:More flexible licensing is one of the biggest draws open source software has for enterprise users, and the current shift toward dual-core and multi-core processors and use of virtualization technologies may give Linux and open source software even more of an advantage, say analysts and open source project leaders.

Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org:With OpenOffice.org so important in the adoption of Open Source on the desktop, a shorter release cycle and more contributors is essential. Anyone can open up the potential of everyones favourite office suite.