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Content Tagged with miscellaneous + MySQL
LDAP is not relational
Continue reading "LDAP is not relational"
Changing everything
Mail has, for some reason, always been playing a big role in my life. I have been running mail for two, my girlfriend and me, in 1988. I have been running mail for 20 and 200 people in 1992, setting up a citizens network. Later I designed and built mail systems for 2 000 and 20 000 person corporations, and planned mail server clusters for 200 000 and 2 million users. And just before I became a consultant at MySQL I was working for a shop that did mail for a living for 20 million users.
Mail is a very simple and well defined collection of services. You accept incoming messages to local users, you implement relaying for your local users with POP-before-SMTP and SMTP AUTH, you build POP, IMAP and webmail accesses, and you deploy spam filter systems and virus scanners for incoming and outgoing messages. This services collection does hardly change when you go from 2 to 20 million users maybe the larger systems will also provide additional services such as portal services, a news server or other more directed stuff, but that is just fluff outside of the scope of the mail system. The solutions, though, are very different, and very much dependent on the scale of your operations.
Continue reading "Changing everything"
Fortune Cookie
What is the difference between MySQL and Postgres?
Lifecycle Reminder
The official MySQL Lifecycle Policy calendar terminates the end of the Active Support Lifecycle for MySQL 4.1 at the end of this year. The product is then entering the Extended Support Lifecycle. Please click on the image and read "What is the difference between Active Lifecycle and Extended Lifecycle support?" to understand the implications of this.
GPL 3: FSF should stand firm on patents no matter what HP and other large corporations say
I just saw this article on how Linus Torvalds on the one hand and Hewlett-Packard on the other hand reacted to the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) second draft of its GPL v3 license.
Just like Linus, I, too, have said all along that digital rights management (DRM) is not categorically illegitimate and thus must not be ostracized as a whole. While Linus still seems dissatisfied with the FSF’s proposed GPLv3 in this respect, the aforementioned article quotes Hewlett-Packard (HP) saying that based on a preliminary analysis, there’s been a lot of progress on that front.
But the article also reports that HP wants the FSF to soften its stance on patents. I can only hope that the FSF will continue to stand firm on this issue. It’s obvious that certain companies with huge patent portfolios have a certain agenda, but you can’t please everyone.
I actually think it’s good if companies like HP, and even more so IBM, are forced to come clean. So far there is a lot of ambiguity, or I should say self-contradiction, in the strategies of those organizations. They claim to support the idea of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) whenever it’s useful to them from a sales, marketing or public relations perspective, but it’s still infinitely more important to them to have tens of thousands of software patents. They support initiatives such as the OSDL Patent Commons and make useless patent pledges that don’t help open source in any way (in fact, those initiatives are even counterproductive).
The GPLv3, if the FSF stands firm on patents, could become a litmus test: those who are sincere and really want Free Software and a competitive software market will support it sooner or later, and those who have a hidden agenda won’t.
Considering that even the deputy general counsel of the world’s largest Linux distributor tried, together with IBM, to keep the EU software patent directive alive last year, the FOSS community needs a lot more clarity as to where certain key players truly stand. By key players I mean corporations as well as individuals. At some point it will also be interesting to see with whom Linus sides. Let’s not forget that he’s on the payroll of the OSDL, an organization that gets most of its funding from a few large corporations such as IBM and HP.
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Patent infringement suit filed against Red Hat
The Patently-O blog reported yesterday that a software company named FireStar has sued Red Hat over an alleged patent infringement. Patently-O also provides the complaint and the patent document, and quotes from Red Hat’s patent policy. The FireStar suit relates to a piece of software that Red Hat acquired as part of JBoss Inc.’s intellectual property.
It seems to me that the FireStar patent is quite broad, and if it is upheld, it will affect other companies as well. While I know that certain parts of the free and open source software (FOSS) community don’t like to hear this, I have repeatedly stated that FOSS projects and products are particularly threatened by software patents. In this specific case, however, the fact that an open source program is at the center of a patent infringement suit appears to be a coincidence.
Red Hat was one of the three companies who provided the initial funding for my NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign. I will always be grateful for that, and naturally I can’t talk in public about confidential aspects of the working relationship I had with Red Hat at the time. Suffice it to say that the working relationship ended, and while the other two sponsors (1&1 Internet AG and MySQL AB) continued to support me on a couple of other occasions, things didn’t work out with Red Hat again.
I have since watched Red Hat’s role in the political debate on software patents. At first sight, Red Hat appears to continue to take an anti-software patent position. Also, Red Hat made an effort last year to convince some of the large FOSS-friendly IT companies such as Sun to dissociate themselves from some of the pro-software patent propaganda spread by certain lobbying entities.
However, a few months after the European Parliament’s historic vote against the software patent directive, an adviser to a key MEP (Member of the European Parliament) told a private FFII mailing list that Red Hat’s deputy general counsel Mark Webbink lobbied him on the day before the decisive vote and tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the rejection of the software patent directive by the parliament. Yes: A Red Hat executive lobbied for the EU software patent directive at the 11th hour (on July 5, 2005, to be precise), alongside such companies as IBM and against the position taken by the anti-software patent movement. That’s a fact. It doesn’t mean to say that Red Hat as a whole is in favor of software patents, but it says a lot about the person who did this.
Red Hat has meanwhile been at the forefront of all sorts of placebo initiatives designed to alleviate patent-related concerns of open source developers and users, such as the OSDL’s Patent Commons. Depending on how the FireStar suit evolves, Red Hat may have to answer the question whether it grossly overstated the benefit of those initiatives to open source developers and users. Apparently, the patent projects supported by Red Hat haven’t really discouraged FireStar from suing.
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phpvikinger.org - an unconference
PHP is used differently than for example Java. Successful PHP projects use different strategies. If you have listened to what Rasmus has been telling you in his speeches during the last two years, you might get an idea of how PHP is different, and why. If you are comparing the approach MySQL has been using in the Dell DVD webshop benchmark uncontest with the other PHP approaches, you can see some of these principles applied.
Unfortunately, for many of these principles and methodologies no fancy names exist. So in my untalk on the PHP unconference at PHP Vikinger I invite you to describe the principles that you think make PHP different, and then we will try to find fancy names for them in order to be able to discuss them, and promote them.
I think this is important - nobody would have taken "put procedure call parameters into CGI parameters and just call them instead of building large XML requests to encapsulate everything" serious before it was called RESTful. And few people can understand Rasmus "scale by request and not by session, build lightweight and frameworkless pages and use the language and its modules as a framework instead of including tons of classes per request" before we can find a number of fancy acronyms for these things.
What else can you find that PHP does differently? Can you build cases for these patterns? And can you find good names for them?
