bazaar vs. cathedral

You might be surprised to learn that Microsoft licenses are nearly twice as expensive in Brazil in absolute terms. I imagine Microsoft charges about the same and Brazil's brutal tax burden makes up the rest (the taxes are built into the price). But the interesting result is the relative price of licenses in each society, captured as % of GNI per capita. As a proportion of national incomes, business licenses are nineteen times more expensive to Brazilian society and home licenses are fifteen times more expensive. While GNI per capita is not a perfect figure, it reflects the incomes people make, how much they spend to live, and how much they pay in taxes. It is a crucial number when it comes to public policy; it's not hard to understand why rational policies must dodge licensing costs when possible. If there's any hope of widespread computer access, then surely we can't expect people to spend 7.8% of their annual income on Microsoft software licenses alone. The burden on small businesses is also prohibitive. This order-of-magnitude difference is a fundamental problem that can't be solved by piecemeal license giveaways. Suppose Microsoft gave out Windows and Office wholesale to all schools. Then what happens if those kids need a computer at home or in their parents' business? License costs are simply out of whack with respect to most of society. Using Linux in public schools, rarely attended by richer kids, seems inescapable.

• MySQL 6.0's pending backup functionality will be open source,
• the MyISAM driver for MySQL Backup will be open source, and
• the encryption and compression backup features will be open source,

where the last item is a change of direction from what we were considering before.

Today, vb reported on the Drupal Forums, the SMF Forums and on his own website that he will no longer maintain the Drupal SMFforum Integration module.

According to vb, SMF's Project Manager Michael "Oldiesmann" Eshom told him he was in violation of SMF's proprietary license because he failed to obtain SMF's permission to distribute or change a file named smf_api_subs.php containing SMF functions, some of which had been modified to work with Drupal.

...

Sadly, this story is far from over. I think SMF is starting to realize they are in a bit of a pickle. There are dozens of other SMF bridges leading into GPL environments that have been initiated, discussed and distributed (by sharing links) right inside of the SMF forums in the *exact* same way the Drupal bridge was done.

Sounds like an awful lot of foot shooting going on.

We had just closed the acquisition of MySQL, so before I wrapped up, I asked, "And would you like a quick update on the newest addition to our family, MySQL?"

The CIO responded categorically with "we don't run MySQL, we run [name withheld to protect the proprietary]." The CISO said, "We can't just let developers download software off the net, you know, we've got regulation and security to worry about." The CTO smiled. Everyone else appeared to be sitting on their hands. I was going to leave it at that. Thanks for the business.

Until a (diplomatically) assertive Sun sales rep piped up, "Um... no, I connected with a buddy of mine over at MySQL, and had him check - you've downloaded MySQL more than 1,300 times in the last twelve months."

After a profoundly awkward silence, one of the individuals from their internal development team piped up, "Actually, everybody uses it. Why bother hassling with license agreements when MySQL's got you covered. We're stoked you bought them."

Things like this, plus all the embedded linux devices out there, mean that open source will be ubiquitous, even if people don't want it to be.

MySQL will start offering some features (specifically ones related to online backups) only in MySQL Enterprise. This represents a substantive change to their development model -- previously they have been developing features in both MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise. However, with a shift to offering some features only in MySQL Enterprise, this means a shift to development of those features occurring (and thus code being tested) only in MySQL Enterprise.

Also, a clarification on slashdot.

Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It

The report is packed with all kinds of interesting information like the following:

• The Linux kernel is growing about 10% per year. Glyn Moody is not so happy.
• 26 developers contribute more code to the kernel than Linus
• The Linux kernel averages 2.7 months between releases.
• On average, there are 2.83 Linux kernel patches accepted each our
• Canonical doesn't appear on the list of around 30 companies sponsoring Linux kernel development in a substantial way. I don't know why that is.
• The number of kernel contributors per release has grown to over 1000 very recently, but was under 700 just two and half years ago.

Acquia plans to ship a commercially supported distribution of Drupal, code-named "Carbon." The Carbon distribution will include the Drupal 6 core release and essential extension modules for rapidly assembling compelling social publishing sites and applications. With Carbon in hand, web developers will have fully integrated and tested building blocks for user management, web content management, single or multi-user blogs, wiki collaboration, discussion forums, user-generated content, social networking, and more. In keeping with the spirit of the open source development model, all Acquia-developed Drupal code will be freely licensed under the GPL v2 license and the company will work continuously to merge new features and patches into the main line Drupal project through the established community process.

Yahoo's stuff is almost all written in PHP, and runs on FreeBSD and Red Hat Linux servers. I don't think Microsoft has ever bought -- and maintained -- a significant software product that wasn't written against Microsoft technology. E.g., when they bought Hotmail, the migration from FreeBSD/Apache to Windows 2000 was painful and difficult. Hotmail was just one product (albeit a popular one). Yahoo has hundreds of properties, several of them, I'm guessing, more popular than Hotmail was back in 2000.

I was just wondering this on the way home. Microsoft would also own flickr, too, wouldn't they? Interesting to see how that works out.

This also makes me think that if Microsoft can't do it right themselves (msn.com for search) then they'll buy someone else who gets it right.