I took this picture at
Hamburg Airport while waiting for
Kaj to arrive for our meeting last week. I was browsing through the magazines in a news shop in the arrival area and was pretty impressed about the amount of available magazines about Linux and Open Source Software. It amazes me how they all manage to produce enough content to fill a magazine on a frequent basis. I take this as a very positive sign - Linux has become a mainstream OS. I wonder how many people consider switching to Linux instead of going with MS Vista - the numerous CDs/DVDs that are included in these magazines significantly reduce the acceptance threshold for new users. Live CDs make it easy to give Linux a try without having to touch the installed operating system. The support and automatic detection and configuration of hardware in Linux has become much better nowadays, too. Granted, there is still a lot of room for improvement (especially when it comes to video card and WLAN chipset support, it seems) - but Linux distributions have reached a level of maturity that make them a viable alternative to Mac OS X or MS Vista for the most common use cases. And all the required applications are already included out of the box and are free (as in beer)! So what is missing to world domination?
I just stumbled over Sebastian's blog entry:
The second Free and Open Source Conference "FrOSCon" takes place on August, 25th and 26th 2007 in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, Germany. The conference is once again hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin.
I attended FrOSCon last year and found it a very pleasant conference to be at. I gave two sessions about MySQL Backup and Security and the MySQL Business model, which both had a good audience and went quite well. I will definitely consider going there again this year, still pondering about the topics of my talks... The CfP ends on June, 4th, so make sure to turn in your suggestions in time!
If you are looking for a very well organized OSS event with lots of good technical content in a relaxed atmosphere, consider visting FrOSCon this year! I look forward to being there again.
Long time no blogging! I hope PlanetMySQL finally picks up my posts again, I really miss the additional audience
We recently received a request from the OpenISR project about adding the Eclipse public license to our FLOSS License Exception. As it turns out, it is almost identical to the Common Public License (CPL), which was already included in the exception. So the decision was fairly easy - version 0.6 of the FLOSS License Exception now also covers the Eclipse public license.
What is the FLOSS License exception all about anyway? Our intent:
We want specified Free/Libre and Open Source Software applications to be able to use specified GPL-licensed MySQL client libraries despite the fact that not all FLOSS licenses are compatible with version 2 of the GNU General Public License.
In other words, we want to make it possible for more non-GPL applications that are licensed under any of the listed OSI-approved licenses to link against the MySQL client libraries. The term
exception may be misleading here, what it really does is widen the scope of the client license and make it more compatible to applications that are not under the GPL.
