Who doesn't know about Wikipedia by now? It is probably the largest collaborative free-licensed project on the web. Now a wiki is basically a web page that many people write and edit. The whole idea s ...
I am writing this blog entry in Nicaragua. I could stay with my friend Phil, in a nice western house close to the town centre with water, 24/7 wireless internet, hot water shower, my own bathroom and ...
One project that I’ve been following quite closely lately is a project started by chip-designer Timothy Miller, called the Open Graphics Project. His goal, along with the rest of the project, known as ...
With the introduction of the GNU GPLv3, the GNU Lesser General Public License (L-GPL) has seen much less attention. This has changed with the recent GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, and I think it has c ...
My previous blog, Pay a little now, pay a lot later, generated a lot more traffic than I expected. Lots. As a consequence, it was seen by many people who probably aren’t as familiar with certain aspec ...
Probably the most frequently asked question to the docs team at MySQL from the public is “I want to translate the manual into [insert language]”. That language can be anything from one we already have ...
Ever wonder how Microsoft feels about open source? You probably remember Gates' comparison of FOSS to communism, and how the FOSS movement was threatening to undermine the vast IP empire that America ...
CALEA (Computer Assistance Law Enforcement) is quietly in the background of current news again, because the FBI is pushing congress to mandate that all future routing equipment manufactured will inclu ...
Freedom of choice is an ideal. It’s also increasingly obvious that it’s almost always the most pragmatic approach, whether involving economic issues that affect billions of people or comparison shoppi ...
The battle between individual rights and the powers of the State is reaching a frenzy across the globe. Never before has technology given us such freedom to create, to invent, and to escape traditiona ...
The issue of open source languages and the availability of development tools is a thought process I was having the other day. One of the key tools in the GNU space is the GNU C compiler. Up until its ...
Ron Gilbert can’t find any support for his new game project. Who’s to blame? Well, Gilbert cites unimaginative publishers who are too short-sighted to appreciate his concept. Perhaps it’s time that Gi ...
I noticed this piece from Johan Andersson on Writing NDBAPI programs—connecting to MySQL Cluster last week, which shows you how to use the NDBAPI—the programming interface to the MySQL Cluster system. ...
For Americans, yesterday was an important holiday. It’s the commemoration of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. There are many countries around the world that declared independence from E ...
Hi all, well it has been a long tiring week. Everyone has those weeks occasionally, the sort of week where the traffic lights are against you. You need to send editors the same documents a couple of t ...
My office runs on a hodgepodge of Visual Basic, Python, C, and FoxPro. Since we’re a small company with few programmers, this hasn’t been a problem. Each of us simply chose the language that best met ...
This week, and specifically today, marks a minor milestone in my employment at MySQL—I’m finally a full time employee, no longer on probation. It has also been probably the busiest week since I starte ...
_And it is, it is, a glorious thing to be a Pirate King_ (1) Piracy, and pirates, can conjure a variety of images. One picture it may bring to mind is that of a “Captain Sparrow” type figure buckling ...
One thing that separates free software enthusiasts from "pirates" is the desire to be the good guys. We may not agree with copyright law, but rather than break them, we've opted to subvert them—to use ...
This is a translation of a French proverb: “un Tiens vaut mieux que deux Tu l’auras”. It means that what you already have is better than what you may get—even if you may get more—because you already h ...