There is more than new versions and acquisitions happening in the MySQL world. A vendor-neutral consortium, Open Database Alliance, has been formed to become a hub for all activity related to MySQL. The open source community has been anxious about future of MySQL since Oracle’s aquisition of Sun was announced. [Continue]
The Oracle-Sun deal seems to be the new weapon in the hands of advocates of proprietary software. It was recently used in a presentation at a friend’s company, to prove that even the open source software was prone to lock-ins. The logic was that, just like proprietary products, MySQL’s future was in danger because of its company. [Continue]
Oracle buying Sun Microsystems is already stale news. However, this merger news will keep ringing for a while. It is not only products that are changing hands here, they are huge and deep ecosystems which have impacted most of the programming world, across products, corporates and competitions. [Continue]
Microsoft has open sourced the Common Compiler Infrastructure (CCI) via CCI: Metadata and CCI: Code and AST components. Like other Microsoft’s open source entries, these two are offered under the Microsoft Public License. The metadata and code components together can write CLR assemblies and debug (PDB) files. [Continue]
Microsoft has opened up ASP.NET MVC under its Microsoft Public License, a valid open source license. As Miguel de Icaza says, Microsoft contributing to open source is a good news for everyone. And with Mono, ASP.NET can go cross platform as well. [Continue]
Of course the Web is free, for the average user. But Richard Stallman wants to make it more explicit for the Web. Just the other day some of us were trying to apply the open source philosophy to the Web technologies. [Continue]
The FOSS Manifesto for India. I firmly believe that open source has special applications in countries like India. I have seen educational institutions use decade old software, either because of budget restrictions or because their vendors do not have updated information. [Continue]
Chris Tyler has setup Teaching Open Source, with an aim to establish a collaboration point between various efforts around open source education. Why do we need another open source advocacy site? Like David Humphrey says, If you’ve spent any amount of time working in open source and education you’ll know what I mean when I say that there is currently too much duplication of effort: everyone has their own mailing list, wiki, planet, etc (I’m registered on about a dozen). [Continue]
My friend works with a local pharmaceutical firm. They used only one license of Microsoft Office on a single machine and everyone would remotely connect to that machine to use it. A while back, I had recommended OpenOffice as an alternative. [Continue]
Bruce Perens talks about simplifying the mesh of open source licenses created. The open source licenses are driven more to protect the open source world from the proprietary world by applying various levels of strictness. I wonder if we will be control the number of licenses, as every developer might have his/her own idea of strictness. [Continue]