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451 CAOS Links - 2008.05.09
Sun advances GlassFish. Red Hat announces JBoss momentum. Mandriva releases Linux update. (and more)
Sun Microsystems Announces Technology Preview of Open Source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server and New Sun GlassFish Communications Server, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)
Red Hat Continues Middleware Industry Momentum, Red Hat (Press Release)
Mandriva presents its latest distribution: Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, Mandriva (Press Release)
Hyperic Announces MySQL Performance Study Results, Hyperic (Press Release)
Sun Microsystems Joins Liferay Open Source Community, Liferay (Press Release)
EnterpriseDB Releases Java Application Generator Plug-in for Postgres Studio, EnterpriseDB (Press Release)
SourceForge Implements OpenID Technology, SourceForge (Press Release)
Reinventing OpenSolaris, eWeek, Jason Brooks (Article)
Free Flash community reacts to Adobe Open Screen Project, Linux.com, Bruce Byfield (Article)
Google?s open source problem is Affero, ZDNet Linux and Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn (Blog)
The GPL Wins Again - Welte vs. Skype Technologies SA (Germany), Groklaw, Pamela Jones (Blog)
Josh Berkus on how to destroy a community, InfoWorld Open Sources, Zack Urlocker (Blog)
The Curse of Open Source License Proliferation, Socialized Software, Mark Hinkle (Blog)
Finding the right balance - MySQL?s changing development model
I?ve already taken a look at MySQL?s changing business model and the potential business drivers behind the company considering introducing new functionality under to Enterprise customers only. One area that I didn?t dive into was the impact on the company?s development model.
This, in fact, was the focus of Jeremy Cole?s initial take on the news as well as a significant response from Marten Mickos. ?MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise,? explained Jeremy.
?As I?ve discussed before, the size of the user base for MySQL Enterprise is much smaller than for MySQL Community,? he added. ?That means these critical features will be tested by only a few of their customers. So, in effect, they will be giving their paying customers real, true, untested code. How is this supposed to work??
Marten has partially answered that question in an interview with Glyn Moody at Computerworld UK:
?GM: One issue is that you seem to be throwing away an advantage of open source in the sense that if it is closed then obviously people can’t help you make it better.
MM: That’s true ? absolutely, it’s true. That’s why for any such code we will have to hire more QA people, and do more work because we don’t get that help from the community.?
It occurs to me that this could create a vicious circle: the more QA people MySQL needs to hire, the more revenue it will need to generate to cover costs. The more revenue it needs to generate, the more value it needs to provide Enterprise users. The more value it needs to provide enterprise users, the more likely it is to introduce proprietary add-ons. The more proprietary add-ons it has, the more QA people it needs to employ. You get the picture.
This is of course different from the ?virtuous circle? which sees the community users benefiting from MySQL?s commercial activities in that they also fund the development of GPL features. In fact, the fear for some community users is that withholding new features from the community version in fact breaks that virtuous circle.
In response to Jeremy?s post, Marten pointed out that InnoDB, WebYog and indeed MySQL already have features that are only available for paying customers. ?All those products are working well and serving customers well,? he wrote, while comparing MySQL?s position to PostgreSQL-based vendors.
?The same applies to the largest group of PostgreSQL-based companies: EnterpriseDB, Greenplum, Netezza, etc. It seems to me that the situation is analogous between Postgres and MySQL: a great product under an open source license, and various commercial initiatives around it,? he added.
With all due respect to Marten, there is a significant difference between the captive open source development model for MySQL and the community open source development model for PostgreSQL.
The vast majority of MySQL development is done by MySQL employees. To date that development model, combined with the dual licensing and support subscription models, has served both Community and Enterprise users equally. As the company adds more features and services to the Enterprise product it will increasingly have to try to serve two masters, however.
As Marten told Computerworld: ?So as we do this, of course, we meet exactly the crossfire that we are now in, meaning the same solution seems to upset one market and please the other one. So then the question is: How do we ensure that we are not completely upsetting our open source users when we do something commercially, or vice versa.?
The difference between MySQL and the PostgreSQL-based vendors in this regard the PostgreSQL community isn?t dependent on EnterpriseDB et al for code.
The relationship between the PostgreSQL-based vendors and the PostgreSQL community is more symbiotic. EnterpriseDB, Greenplum, and Netezza work with the community, employ core developers and contribute code, but they are also independent of the project.
While they benefit from contributing code and improving the strength of PostgreSQL for all, the BSD license means they have no obligation to contribute their own proprietary developments. The PostgreSQL-based vendors have much more freedom, therefore, to decide based on their own business drivers when code should be open source, and when it should not.
In fact, if any dependency exists in the PostgreSQL model it is EnterpriseDB and Greenplum?s dependency on the PostgreSQL community. MySQL has no such dependency on the community.
MySQL also has no obligation to contribute new features to the open source model, but then it is then it has built a business on supplying the same code to both user groups, and has benefited from doing so.
As Zack Urlocker noted: ?While the number of customers who pay us is much smaller than the number of community users who do not, most of our paying customers first used MySQL because it is available freely under the GPL open source license. And in many cases, we know that MySQL is popular because of the work of the community who are out there using it, blogging about it, creating add-on tools, products or services.?
He added: ?MySQL is in the middle trying to make sure we are balanced in our actions and not neglecting the interests of either market. It’s not always obvious how to benefit both groups and there are few successful models to guide us at this point. So we are constantly forging new territory, experimenting, trying new things, and listening for input.?
Balance is the critical word here, and if MySQL does choose to develop closed source extensions to the GPL code it will probably have to find some way of balancing that with providing more value to the community.
MySQL Conference and Expo 2008, Day Two
Day two of the conference was a little disappointing, as far as sessions went. There were several time blocks where I simply wasn’t interested in any of the sessions. Instead, I went to the expo hall and tried to pry straight answers out of sly salespeople. Here’s what I attended.
Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources
This was a talk focused on how MySQL has made it possible for community members to contribute to MySQL. There was quite a bit of talk about IRC channels, mailing lists, and the like. However, the talk gave short shrift to how MySQL plans to become truly open source (in terms of its development model, not its license). I think there was basically nothing to talk about there. I had a good conversation about some of my concerns with the speaker and some others from MySQL right afterwards.
There was basically nobody there — I didn’t count, but I’d say maybe 10 or 12 people. I think this is a telling sign.
Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design
I was interested in this talk because I’m interested in the tension between Falcon and Maria (and between Falcon and everything, for that matter) but I left and went to the expo hall again after a bit. The talk was good but I’d already seen and/or read it, and the question-and-answer component wasn’t enough to keep me there.
The MySQL Query Cache
This was the second session I gave at the conference, and again it was standing-room-only, with nearly 300 attendees according to the person who was watching the door. The questions were frequent and added a lot to the discussion. Slides will be on the conference website when they post them.
Grazr: Lessons Learned Building a Web 2.0 Application Using MySQL
I was keenly interested in this talk because a) I am a big fan of Patrick Galbraith’s work with many different projects, and b) I had heard a lot about Grazr but didn’t know much about it. However, I missed most of the talk. About ten minutes into it, I got a call I couldn’t refuse: my wife!
However, I did sneak back into the room for the last bit too. And I gave Grazr a try. Unfortunately, I got really confused by it; I tried a bunch of different ways to import my Google Reader’s OPML. I got that to work, but then I couldn’t figure out how to read the feeds in the OPML via Grazr. Then I think I figured that out (I’m not sure) but it didn’t strike me as a very handy way to read my feeds. I’ll try taking another look at it later if I get time. (I’m all ears if there’s a better way to read feeds).
Extending MySQL
This one was mostly for fun. I knew a lot about UDFs already (I’ve created some) and I knew about the pluggable storage engine API. But I didn’t know about pluggable event daemons. Holy cow, what a great way to shoot yourself (or your server) in the foot! All the power of an atomic bomb, with all the safety of SPF 5 sunblock in a nuclear attack. Or something like that. But darn, it sure is nifty. Brian is a great speaker too — very lively.
You know, there’s another way to extend MySQL that most people don’t seem to know about, which Brian didn’t mention. That is procedures (not stored procedures). They are sort of like a post-filter for a result set, and like UDFs they’ve been around forever. I have never heard of anyone writing their own, but there’s an example in the server itself: PROCEDURE ANALYSE.
Expo hall
I went to the expo hall to meet and greet many of the companies that Percona (my employer) is already working with (doing independent benchmarks, performance verification, analysis etc) or will be in the future. I also wanted to grill some of the vendors on their technology. Usually I find them very cagey; they claim X times faster this-or-that, but won’t tell you how, and won’t tell you what their systems don’t do well. I don’t understand why they take this approach; you can’t hide your system’s strong and weak spots. There is no security through obscurity, and shrewd independent observers are going to get to the bottom of it with or without your permission.
So, for instance, I was talking with Tokutek, who claimed to be a drop-in replacement for InnoDB with 200x better performance and apparently no downsides. However, on closer questioning, I did get him to admit that the system has table-level locking. Thus it won’t give any concurrency, so saying it’s a drop-in InnoDB replacement is questionable. And the comparison against InnoDB seemed contrived to create a worst-case situation with bad tuning and a workload so it would perform terribly. An honest comparison tunes both systems to their highest performance and measures them; you can’t tune one system as badly as possible and compare it to the other’s best-case performance. I pressed on further and asked about range scans in some specific cases (they claim they’re great at range queries, and equal to InnoDB on everything else). At last they admitted they can’t perform well on some very common queries such as real-life queries InnoDB performs very well on for me. They said these are “point queries” but that’s not true; you can design indexes to support many different ways to range-query a table in InnoDB and get great performance. So it sounds to me like Tokutek’s storage format is extremely narrowly focused, and there is indeed a trade-off. I will be interested to see how their technology develops, though. It’s not done yet.
In general
There are a lot of Maatkit t-shirts walking around, which makes me happy. If I’d printed 200 of them, I probably could have given them all away. I was wearing a PostgreSQL t-shirt myself. Proudly, I might add. I’m not the only person here who’s interested in PostgreSQL. This morning I met a person from EnterpriseDB.
Yesterday was a bit slow in terms of interesting sessions, but there was a lot going on in the hallways, the expo hall, the meetings over lunch, and so on.
Brian Aker, EnterpriseDB, Falcon, Grazr, maatkit, Maria, mysqluc2008, Patrick Galbraith, Percona, query cache, Tokutek
enterprisedb
falcon
aker
galbraith
mysqluc2008
maatkit
percona
Open Thoughts: Responding to The Register
Is "Open Source" Now Completely Meaningless?
opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource
Software
document
business
opensource
article
oreilly
enterprisedb
EnterpriseDB releases PostgreSQL distribution
opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource
opensource
distros
databases
redmonkclients
enterprisedb
postressql
[from bushwald] EnterpriseDB releases PostgreSQL distribution
User:jeyrb: del.icio.us/network/jey
opensource
distros
databases
redmonkclients
enterprisedb
postressql
User:jeyrb
EnterpriseDB: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Oracle Licenses. What Is This Oracle Partner Network Anyway?
EnterpriseDB: The Best Pirated Oracle-Compatible Database Available. What Is This Oracle Partner Network Anyway?
[from bushwald] Open Notebook, Open Sources: How the GPL Grew
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oracle
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Geronimo
navy
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User:jeyrb
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