Author Archives: Tim

Two Weeks of Big News at MariaDB

MariaDB LogoLots of big MariaDB news these last couple of  weeks:
  • Last week Wikimedia foundation fully migrated their English and German Wikipedias over to MariaDB.
  • As reported here on Meshed Insights, we also heard that the MariaDB Foundation has appointed an interim board to oversee the election process of a new board in July.
  •  This week brought the exciting news of a merge between SkySQL and Monty Program Ab. This is especially good for the core MariaDB developers as it assures them ongoing backing.
  • Along with the above announcement, SkySQL joined the MariaDB Foundation as its first Platinum member.
  • Matthew Aslett  highlights the growth of MariaDB and importance of  the MariaDB Foundation during his Percona Live keynote.

Open Source Awards

Which Open Source contributors do you think deserve recognition? The Open Source Awards at this years OSCON are now open for nominations. Previous winners have included developers, activists and commentators, so your nomination could come from any area of open source contribution.

 

Community vs Technical Debt

OpenJDK CommunityOracle’s Java technical chief recently admitted that dealing with long standing security issues has hampered the release of the latest Java instalment. The issues didn’t necessarily originate with Oracle, they’ll have been accumulating over many years, first at Sun and then at Oracle. The problem has been that until now these issues have been on a continual back burner, the “tyranny of the urgent” focussing developer attention onto business considerations as the priority.

Dealing with this technical debt is clearly a time consuming affair, but eventually it catches up with a project and needs to be handled. Some long lived projects don’t seem to gather this sort of flotsam though; the key is in the community. Proprietary projects are often forced to be solely feature focussed, but open projects with a healthy community are in a much better position to bypass the problem of technical debt, as community members will often pour enthusiasm and expertise into resolving the backlog. Continue reading →

Free Software Needs Support

This open letter from the director of Bytemark Hosting is a call for other hosting companies to help financially support the development of a new free email client. It asserts that by supporting this particular project the industry as a whole can progress, becoming better able to compete with propriety software giants.

The principle seems valid enough, if you want a project to succeed, adding value to your own product, you need to give that project your support. Hopefully hosting companies will see this call, respond, and take its underlying principle on board. Read more in today’s CWUK article.

ORGCon2013

Open Rights GroupORGCon is the UK’s largest digital freedoms conference. This year’s edition will include sessions and workshops on net filtering, open data, the Communications Data Bill and copyright, to name a few. The event takes place in London on the 8th of June but tickets are already available and going fast (last year’s event sold out)!
 
If you’re new to the Open Rights Group and their work campaigning to preserve digital freedoms, you can even get a free conference ticket if you take this opportunity to start supporting their work. It’s a good time to join as they’re throwing in a free copy of headline speaker Tim Wu’s book “The Master Switch” too.

Options in Place of New Foundations

For the majority of projects a software foundation is not the next step. There are plenty of other options available to developers looking for a way to protect the interests of their project and contributors. Using existing fiduciary hosts and fiduciary and governance hosts allows you to take advantage of proven approaches and experienced stewards. Read more in today’s InfoWorld article.

International Free and Open Source Software Law Review

Are you aware that among the large body of international law research there’s some dedicated solely to the legal issues surrounding free and open source software? International Free and Open Source Software Law Review covers topics ranging from licence interpretation to open standards to statuary changes and relevant case law.

Recently it published its seventh issue, aiming to inform the legal community about FOSS issues. This leading, peer reviewed, academic treatment of legal issues in this field follows the principles it analyses and debates, making the review freely reproducible for commercial or non-commercial use.

 

Patent Defences For The Rest Of Us

The patent system as it stands today could use a general overhaul. We need to see fundamental shifts in society’s understanding of the reasons for and uses of patents. But in the mean time there are all manner of companies, (from the small to the very large) facing patent threats right now.

What defences can be mustered against the trolls and the corporate aggressors defending their legacy control? Open Invention Network plays the broken system to protect the open source community from software patents. Read more in our InfoWorld article today.