Colin Charles Agenda

• I’m thrilled to naturally be at Percona Live Europe Amsterdam from Oct 3-5 2016. I have previously talked about some of my sessions but I think there’s another one on the schedule already.
• LinuxCon Europe – Oct 4-6 2016. I won’t be there for the whole conference, but hope to make the most of my day on Oct 6th.
• MariaDB Developer’s meeting – Oct 6-8 2016 – skipping the first day, but will be there all day 2 and 3. I even have a session on day 3, focused on compatibility with MySQL, a topic I deeply care about (session schedule)
• OSCON London – Oct 17-20 2016 – a bit of a late entrant, I do have a talk titled “Forking successfully”, and wonder if a branch makes more sense, how to fork, and what happens when parity comes?
• October MySQL London Meetup – Oct 17 2016 – I’m already in London, I wouldn’t miss this meetup for the world! There’s no agenda yet, but I think the discussion should be fun.

We’re at OSCON and today has been fabulous – I’ve just been connecting with old friends, and making new friends, and all this is what makes the travel experience completely worthwhile. If you’re at OSCON, why not come to a couple of BoF’s:

1. MariaDB: The Community Fork of MySQL at 8pm on Monday 19/07/2010. Great for a general overview of MariaDB, for beginners to the advanced folk to come to.
2. MariaDB: Features In-depth at 9pm on Wednesday 21/07/2010. Great if you’re a more intermediate to advanced user of MySQL/MariaDB and want to know more about the additional features MariaDB has to offer, and what else it might offer in the near future (i.e. what are you requesting).

Robin just wrote a new article, titled A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0’s New Backup, and I thought, that maybe you’d like to also see this in presentation/video format…

At OSCON, Giuseppe actually gave a quick talk at the Sun booth, about our online backup. He also showed how to use it. All examples there, were done with the test-db sample database.

(MySQL Online Backup in Practice, video if the above doesn’t appear)

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the MySQL + Maria Storage Engine branch on Launchpad.

Sparse notes, from An Open Source Project Called “Failure:” Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid. Both lists of panel members are inaccurate (and I seemed to have forgotten to take the list down, myself).

Blocking anti-pattern
feature you really want implemented, someone blogs it saying they’re going to do it, and a few years later, there’s nothing done

Docs? We don’t need no stinkin’ docs!
Look at SQL-Ledger and their documentation… this is our hero… Project around for 10 years, and most people end up using a fork of it instead.

Don’t screw around with licenses. Licenses are a social contract defining what people can do with your code and what you expect from them when they use it. Most open source license enforcement is done via peer pressure, not court order.

Community members have emotional attachments to licenses and responses to changes in them.

Sparse notes from the talk, I noticed Sheeri recording some video, so sitting through that at some stage might make sense. There were no slides, this was a panel discussion. Suggested reading: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source.

Does Open Source need to be “Organic”?
Brian Aker, Rob Lanphier, Stephen O’Grady, Theodore Ts’o

Taking code, and slapping a certain license on it, doesn’t a successful software project make.

Blurring the distinction, by marketing. Not doing any work to get external contributions.

Open sourcing a product one plans on “genociding”, its really bad.

“Corporate sociopathic Druckerism” — Brian Aker

“As long as the source code is open, let the market decide. MySQL is largely inorganic, and its a success. Much of it comes down to choice.” — Stephen O’Grady

Mark Shuttleworth has pushed the idea that forking is OK. Look at Launchpad: take a project, fork the project, make your change, and you can publish your tree that people can use. The wonders of distributed version control.

Its up to a company to decide if they want an organic or an inorganic project. Its your code, do what you want with it. In the future, an organic project may outstrip your inorganic project.

Netscape: inorganic piece of open source (with Mozilla). Firefox: forked the code, turned it into an organic model, then there was success.

Is Firefox really the best example? Look at what it did for Netscape Corporation or AOL? This won’t work well with the Pointy Haired Boss.

What was your goal of releasing the product under an open source license? If marketing buzz, then you make lots of PR, etc… then go home. If your goal is wanting to cut your development cost, you’re going to be disappointed with an organic model. If your goal is ubiquity, you aim for an organic model.

Commit access actually means you’re a worker bee. It doesn’t mean a free wheel to push features, it means you’re the garbage man – you collect everything, you sort everything, and so on. Let’s rethink what it means to have commit access.