Nowadays you can buy small network attached boxes to function as small home-office disk servers so cheaply, that most of the time I take backups by having a couple of those lying around the house. But for many years I used to backup my personal Linux desktop by burning CD's and then DVD's.

The challenge with backing up to a CD/DVD is that you easily have more data to back up than fits on one disc. The TAR utility was created for tapes and completely lacks any capability of splitting itself into parts. What's more, with TAR you create the archive first, and then compress it, so it is not possible to know in the TAR phase when you've actually reached the size of your CD or DVD, and in the compression phase it is generally too late.

2 weeks from now I'm giving a talk How to Grow Your Open Source Project 10x and Revenues 5x at OSCON (in Portland, Oregon). It is based on the article with the same title I published last year. The talk is scheduled to end a one day sub-track called IT Leaders Summit. I'm glad it is categorized as a business talk rather than community talk - things I write usually are problematic in that I typically cover both business and community and see them mostly as harmonious topics, whereas most other people see them as opposites.

This year was the first year the public could nominate candidates for these awards. We got in many nominations and this really helped the panel to get an overview of everything that is noteworthy in the MySQL ecosystem right now. Thank you to everyone who participated by sending in nominations.

In the first category the panel received and debated over a dozen suggestions. There are so many great people in this community, it is easy to think of people who truly deserve to be awarded. There were however two persons who clearly stood out with a track record of years and years of broad and really key contributions to the MySQL community. These two persons also clearly stood out both in number of nominations and number of votes. Therefore, the...

I finally did the migration to Drupal 7 for the Footnotes module this weekend. See Release notes and project page for more information.

With this release I also announced my intent to hand over the module to a new maintainer. Since I'm now increasingly active with affairs in the MySQL community, both hacking as well as other community tasks, it is prudent to not let old projects dangle without attention but to formally hand them over to fresh minds.

This is the final part in a series of posts about the MepSQL build system known as MepSQL Bakery. MepSQL is a (yet another) fork of the MySQL database server, with the server based on the MySQLatFacebook code and the build system based on the MariaDB build system.

In this final post I wish to draw a high level picture of the complete process of building TAR, DEB and (eventually) RPM packages from the source code. There's not much more technical details to add to the previous posts, instead I'm going to make some, shall we say "archeological", observations which imho are interesting given how the build system has evolved when being passed from one project to another. Perhaps more importantly, I will also say a few words about where I think the future direction lies.

This is the first part of many posts in a series of blog posts where I want to document how the MepSQL packages were built. By doing that, I will also end up covering the MariaDB build system (which this is based on), some of BuildBot, Amazon EC2 cloud and packaging DEBs and RPMs just in general, so it could be interesting from many perspectives. In this first part I'll simply scribble some notes about reviewing the OpenSuse Build System, Launchpad PPA service vs using your own servers and automating the builds with BuildBot.

Originally I just wanted to work on some new ideas on the automated build and QA system used by MariaDB. But since leaving Monty Program I didn't have access to any of those servers anymore, so as a first step I had to look into what alternatives there are for building binary packages for many operating systems and hardware platforms. In fact, this was another thing I had wanted to learn more about for a while. For instance Michal Hrušecký uses OpenSuse Build Service to build both MySQL and MariaDB packages for all RPM based distributions in the blink of an eye - I was interested to find out what's behind that magic.

After another week of hacking on MepSQL the DEB files for Ubuntu are now available.(MepSQL is my new "just a hobby" MySQL fork project.)

The Download page has instructions on how to install the packages with a simple apt-get install command. Debian packages will appear soon as they are now easy to add - I mostly just need to add new Amazon images for each.

In November a Mark Schonewille posted a blog on when you can't and cannot use the GPL version of MySQL together with your closed source application. The post was a result of actually talking to an Oracle lawyer which makes it valuable information. Unfortunately Mark's blog is now offline (it seems he didn't renew his domain registration?)

This is just a repost of the disappeared blog post. (The small print allows me to copy it verbatim.) There is no commentary from myself, except that what Mark wrote is the same I also heard Oracle say a year ago. That Oracle is being consistent on this point is very welcome and deserves to be kept available online.

Update 2011-06-23: Mark comments that his blog is still online, but at a new address: https://qery.us/tl

Some time ago I was asked to do a study of our most popular open source projects to assess 1) what governance models are out there and 2) if the governance model has any effect on the project's success (such as size of developer community) on the one hand and on the other hand on the business of the related vendor(s). Some of the results are quite remarkable and have general applicability, so I wanted to share them here:

(Small updates done on 2011-07-14. OpenJDK size clarified on 2012-05-21.)

On Saturday I wrote a review about 451 Groups excellent report on commercial adoption of open source, "Control and Community". There was one more thought inspired by the report I thought I'd better blog separately as it is kind of R-rated:

"Continuing to maintain the right balance of functionality between the freely downloadable open core and the commercial extensions is both art and science. It's critical to get that right so the model continues to grow and advance."

(Anonymous vendor)