Joining A Community Means Accepting Its Norms

The progress of Microsoft towards acceptance into the open source community continues. The Azure team is definitely a force for good in the company, constantly pushing Microsoft’s developer teams to understand how important the Linux platform and open source developer components and tools are to the success of Microsoft’s cloud business. After the partnership with Red Hat, the news they will release SQL Server for Linux, while not surprising to me, was very interesting, as was the news they are joining Eclipse. Continue reading

Too Much Power?

In InfoWorld this week, I’ve reprised my views about contributor agreements. The trigger for this was seeing Oracle erroneously change the license for the MySQL man pages from GPL to something nasty. Once they were told, they fixed the error (which had been public for two months), but the fact their build system even has an option for proprietary relicensing that can be accidentally enabled is cause for thought.

Why can they do that? Contributor agreements have given them ownership of all the copyrights, including for things they didn’t make. With those copyrights comes the power to change the license without asking anyone (even by accident).  In an age of OpenStack, Eclipse and Apache, why should we still have important open source projects under the control of unaccountable entities?

MySQL FUD Claim Needs Action, Not Words

 

A chance encounter at the OFE Summit in Brussels, coupled with a provocative statement by an Oracle VP, lead me to believe it’s time for Oracle to come out of hiding and start working with the MySQL community – including MariaDB, Percona and other competitors  After all, that’s how open source works. Read more at ComputerWorldUK.

 

✍ OpenSolaris Governing Board

OpenSolaris Logo§ I am standing in the election for the OpenSolaris Governing Board one last time (this would be my third consecutive term if elected, so it has to be the last time). Each term has been quite different to the others, and I have no doubt this next year will be very different again for the OpenSolaris community.

Since I no longer work at Sun, I’d like to make clear what my “platform” is in this election in addition to my candidate statement. Continue reading