Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Geert pinged me to let us know he pinpointed a date for the next MySQL user group.
Next month Tuesday, March 18, 2008 around 1900ish Cafe Sport Leuven

Ack here

He promised to provide free Sun workstations to all women who were at all the previous editions if they show up again.

Over the past couple of days Sun has been getting a lot of feedback on it's behaviour with open source.

So there is Amanda McPherson trying to teach Sun that the L in LAMP really stands for Linux.

And then there was Roy T. Fielding quiting the Open Solaris community.
I'm still wondering why a company that once bought StarDivision because it was cheaper to buy the company than to pay licenses for similar functionality, keeps maintining their own kernel stack rather than contributing to one that is way more popular and as a much larger userbase.
Its not like they have a die hard community they will loose, it's not like they will loose customers over it. When Sun says that Linux is the new Solaris their customers will just follow.

Personally I stopped working with Solaris ages ago... when we ocasionally run into a customer that wants us to deploy things on Solaris we always have to spend extra time GNUifying the box, which is yet another pain.

Sun had to learn the hard way from the JAVA crowd that they do care about Licensing and a community only starts to build when they like what they see. and it's exactly that community that Solaris is still lacking.

Virtualbox also is in the same boat, they have a good user community, but they don't have a lot of contributers as they require contributors so use the MIT license and even sign some papers.

In a way MySQL used to be the same , altough lots changed during the last couple of years , but back a couple of years ago nobody outside of MySQL was contributing code, there was a gigantic user community, but not really a developer community.

The big difference here is in community.. not customer base, these people are actually using MySQL because they are freely choosing so. Not because their boss or corporate policy tells them to.
But MySQL learned, and is changing, it currently has also non employees contributing .. often ex employees but also other people , people that form a real community.

Today .. if you really want to cash out ... create an product open source it ,create a user community around it but don't allow contributors, my bet is Sun will buy you :)

I told it before.. I really really hope one day Sun will understand .. but from the past couple of acquisitions.. they seem to be taking the same path over and over again.

While posting about my talk on MySQL Cluster and Drupal I realized something very important about Open Source and how it differs from proprietary software.

Looking at a traditional software and infrastructure consultancy shop you will see that they carry a broad range of products which they care about and which they are actively offerering to customers. For this products they have formal arrangements with suppliers that will both give them licenses, support but also incentives to sell those licenses.

So when a sales guy or a consultant arrives at a customer they are already biased to plug a certain product, and they will try to convince the customer that the product they are selling is the right fit. Even tough when it's a total Misfit.

With the Open Source consultant he won't be plugging a product, he will be listening to his customer and will use the right tool for the right project .. afterall there is no vendor pushing him to plugg a certain solution, there is no higher margin if he chooses the red box over the green box (as he isn't choosing boxes) The opensource guy will be open and explain to the customer why product X does not fit his needs and product Y does, he will give his customer some honest advise. He will help the customer to solve his problem, not create more.

I was pretty surprised yesterday that even the guys from MySQL were supportive when I stated that MySQL Cluster was not a fit for Drupal. I can't imagine people from Oracle or IBM agreeing on one of their product being a misfit for their customer ..

So yesterday I presented my findings on MySQL Cluster (ndbd) and Drupal.

I`ll be writing them out in a more detailed document some day soon ..
But the short summary is that MySQL-Cluster and Drupal are not a good fit.
One has to realise that MySQL cluster isn't always a good solution and that every problem has it's own solutions. The nature of the tables of Drupal means that you need enormous amounts of memory.

I was a bit afraid that the present MySQL crowd woudln't really appreciate my findings, however I was wrong I got some good feedback from the present MySQL crowd , they too seem to want to promote the idea that Cluster is not a fit for every problem, and they were great help in answering some of the audience questions.

The presentation is here here

Fosdem is over .. and it was ... overcrowded :(

Honestly trying to squeeze into an overcrowded bar, then on saturday overcrowded rooms, or even not being able to enter that room (Mozilla and Embedded) , Fosdem is starting to become the victim of it's own success.

Some people are suggesting Fosdem to move to the Arenberg campus in "Brussels-East" dunnow if Leuven can actually host enough beds for Fosdem :)
However the Beer event problem would be solved but Philip will have to make arrangements with 'The greatest bar of Western Europe"

The talk about Xen on ARM was interresting however the grande finale missed, the MiniOS just didn't boot :( Kettle was interresting and I should start spending time with it :) But then again .. so are a zillion other things Too bad the SWOT analysis between Postgress and MySQL got cancelled.
but it left me some breathing space :)

The evening ended with a mixed crowd of local Linux geeks and Drupal folks in the restaurant on walking distance.

On sunday morning I realized it must be the Fosdem weekend when you are on the E19 direction Brussels around 0900 and there is no traffic :)

I was right on time for the Drupal 6 and 7 talks from Gabor and Dries , which off course meant I was going to be too late for Ian's talk. Luckily I catched the important parts. The virtualbox talk disappointed me .. this was a marketing talk for endusers, not a talk suitable for Fosdem :(

Pascal learned that integration Amazon basically is a fine dns problem :) Then after some chatter with the MySQL crowd I headed into the Conary talk.. I was expecting a bit more information around their rbuilder system
I wondered into too much talks on sunday afternoon . the MySQL Proxy talk , the end of atogs talk which he didn't want to repeat :) Karan's talk .. etc.

I had to miss Simon's talk about Posgtress HA on sunday for the obvious reason , but luckily I could catch him on saturday to get a short sneak preview..

But more about those obvious reasons in a separate post :)

My Pics are over here. You'll be recognising Jan Kneschke, LVB , Thomas Bonte , Geert Vanderkelen, Dries, Gabor,Matt Casters and others.

Darkreading has a report on the next big dns threat according to Paul Mockapetris. DNS corruption. When a user connects to his ISP, or to a Wifi port, certainly a free one.
He has absolutely no idea about the state of the DNS server.

So a user working off a public WiFi port, for example, is at the mercy of the DNS servers it uses, which "could easily be malicious,"

Indeed it might be hacked, it might be modified on purpose, pointing your browser to somesite totally different than you want to .. while you're not expecting it.

Anyway

[sdog@mine ~]$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 127.0.0.1

Last friday at the Fosdem Beer event Ywein asked me ..
hmm.. there is nobody Twittering around here. Nothing really strange. I haven't seen anyone twittering at an Open Source event yet. At the place where probably the highest percentage of open source geek/m2 was measured we didn't see anyone twittering.

So when The 451Group announced they just launched The Pulse of Open Source I wonder .. what's the use. Do we really care about people sleeping in late, or having forgotten their powercords ? So nope.. not subscribing to that feed... I don't think the core of the open source community is going to jump on twitter anytime soon ..

Sorry Raven, but I won't be subscribing to that feed any time soon..

Luc just pointed me with to his recording of my talk about Drupal and MySQL HA yesterday at the Drupal Room at Fosdem

He also uploaded some other video's from the Drupal room.

More about my Fosdem 2008 experience later :)

Over at Virtualization.com my good friend Matt Rechenburg of openQRM fame got interviewed. Enjoy his insights..

but you have to read them :)

Please do NOT reinvent the wheel

Repeat after me