Links for today:

Community Rights and Community Wrongs
The Launch of the Document Foundation and the Oxymoron of Corporate Controlled "Community" Projects

Andy Updegrove makes observations of the trend in hosting Open Source projects in non-profit foundations rather than one company, much boosted by Oracle's acquisition and abandonment of Sun's software assets.

Knowing that an organization is “safe” to join, and will be managed for the benefit of the many and not of the privileged few, is one of the key attributes and assurances of “openness.”

But there’s another risk, which is even greater. Recently, we have seen Oracle acquire companies with properties of great community significance (e.g., MySQL, OpenOffice, Java, and more), and Novell, custodian of OpenSuse and vendor of Novell Linux (one of the three most successful Linux distributions), has been put in play by a private equity firm. What this highlights is the reality that even companies with excellent credentials as stewards for open source projects cannot control the future of these not so public after all projects when they are themselves acquired.

Standards developers realized this danger over 100 years ago.

A report from OpenSQLCamp

LWN.net has good coverage of the recent OpenSQLCamp. The above is a promotional link which allows you to read the subscriber-only content.

This year's event included database hackers who work on MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, VoltDB, Tokutek, and Drizzle. In contrast to the popular perception that the various database systems are in a no-holds barred competition for industry supremacy, most people who develop these systems are more interested in collaborating with their peers than arguing with them. And although it's OpenSQLCamp, programmers from "NoSQL" databases were welcome and present, including MongoDB, Membase, Cassandra, and BerkeleyDB.
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The conference days were held at MIT, rather ironically in the William H. Gates building.