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Michael Widenius certainly has his concerns about the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Michael is the original developer of MySQL and worked on the project for more than 27 years. It is worth reading his posts about the importance of the GPL in MySQL licensing and even goes on to tie the fate of MySQL to the free nature of the Internet. What I find facinating is that his argument is that the open source project requires a strong corporate master invested in making it competitive with closed source databases. (more…)

This is sad and simple. Ad networks sell ads, either page views or click throughs. The Ad network compensates partners that host ads on their sites. Those partners can include intellectual property thieves. The thief posts your intellectual property on their site, or on another site with which they are affiliated (or actually own themselves and just pretend to be a ‘visitor’).

Legitimate search engines go ahead and search sites that, had a human actually visited the site, they’d know immediately is a warez site. They index the stolen material.

Next, more thieves come along, do legitimate searches, then go to the pirate site after they’ve found what they are looking. They download the intellectual property, and they also view the ads. The site owners benefit from the click throughs and page views (however the ad network compensates) generated by the pirate activity. The search engine provider benefits because they are being used to track down the stolen property and get to show ads in the process.

The double losers are the advertisers as well as the intellectual property owners. Advertisers lose because their expectation is that their ads will be matched to sites that are not engaging in theft. Those who use pirate sites may not be the demographic they are looking for when they set up their ads.

The intellectual property owners lose in many ways. There is the actual theft of the intellectual property itself. Secondarily, because their stolen property is being indexed and receiving lots of hits through search engines, the appearance of stolen versions in search engines can make it harder to find the legitimate versions of the product.

If you think this is just a bunch of kids ripping off big music companies you aren’t taking into account the small art and design houses that also create music and designs for a living. Just check out all of the models listed on sites such as DAZ 3D, Content Paradise or Renderosity, created by singular artists; now search for individually named models.

Is there any news source that hasn’t weighed in on the Google Chrome OS, even though there is next to no information available? There are a few tantalizing clues already. (more…)

As president of Paradigma Software with its columnar database technology Valentina, I would like to think that the announced acquisition of Sun By Oracle is about the database market and a response to innovation in the field of databases. Indirectly, I think it is, but it isn’t about the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun. More so, it is about Oracle’s big iron position in the computer industry and what it learned from the failed shopping trip by IBM. (more…)

President Obama’s inauguration speech finished a few minutes ago, and while I do not like to interject politics into my public writing, I would like to share a few thoughts on American unity, race and progress. President Obama’s message was entirely devoid of blame or rancor, either in the political sense of the last eight years or in the subtext of progress in race relations in the United States. (more…)

As a consumer, I will not miss Circuit City as it closes its remaining 567 stores in the United States. But all software industry professionals should mourn its passing. Here’s how its closure impacts software industry professionals. (more…)

Mirye Software Publishing is moving to a new release format for Runtime Revolution, modeling it on a highly successful issue format. This method includes the standard updates to the base software, but also extended benefits to customers that are eligible for software updates. Our first release in this format is Issue 808: What to Do With Your Summer.

Benefits of Mirye Runtime Revolution Issue Format

The new release format offers the following benefits:

• Additional, Permanent Benefits. These are benefits that customers receive regardless of when they are announced. With this first issue, Studio and Enterprise customers receive Valentina for Revolution 3.1 ADK Advanced, the ultra fast database toolkit for Revolution.
• Limited, Timed Benefits. These benefits are only available if you download them within the limited time. With this first issue, Media, Studio and Enterprise customers receive the Business as Unusual Volume 1 collection of 20 royalty free soundtracks.
• News and Articles. With each release, there will be news, articles and tips offered to help enhance your use of Revolution.
• Special Offers. You can get special member offers for other, or third party products that will enhance your use of Revolution.

The Why Behind Mirye Runtime Revolution Format Change

Mirye Runtime Revolution is a professional tool for creating and deploying cross platform applications on all major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In many respects, it overlaps and competes with the likes of Adobe Director, REAL Software REALbasic, MS Visual Basic, Java and even Adobe Flash or Microsoft’s .net framework.

Mirye Runtime Revolution overlaps with REALbasic, Java and .net framework in that it can deploy to multiple operating systems using mostly the same code base. But that simply describes features in the last step of a work flow pipeline – not the entire pipeline of a release.

Designers that have experience with Adobe Director, Flash or Microsoft’s new Expression more likely to recognize the pipeline, because these products also excel in aggregating combinations of audio, video and graphics assets. These are elements that are usually developed by someone else and upstream in the workflow pipeline.

Teams though can share more than just assets – but the knowledge of how to best exploit the use of those assets at each point in the work flow.

This brings us back to the format change and the question: Is Mirye Runtime Revolution only a deployment technology, or does it encompass the aggregated assets and knowledge? Even if you are a weekend developer and you wear all the hats of artist, layout designer, sound technician and coder, an additional benefit at any point in your work flow pipeline provides benefits to the entire project.

This brings us back to our new issues format. By providing ongoing knowledge and benefits in an magazine-like issue format – expanded beyond a software only update – a release can deliver benefits that are more timely, and benefit your entire work flow.

I am glad to see that there are better and better articles appearing on wikipedia – especially this description of nominative use – the defense against trademark infringement. This is extremely relevant in a world where companies trademark their product names then tell the world you can’t use that name in statements of compatibility. If there’s simply no other way to express compatibility then according to nominative use, you can use it in very specific way. (more…)

Yet another slam against Javascript – this time in Dan Morrill’s blog vs Javascript 2. Dan names AIR, Silverlight, and JavaFX as successors to Javascript because of his prediction that the browser based application of today is destined to be replaced by open standards apps of some other kind. (more…)

A new reason has come up to be swearing at MySQL rather than swearing by MySQL.

The MySQL Performance Blog reports that MySQL Community Edition has not been upgraded since November 2007, whereas it previously received twice-a-year updates. This product is the free and open source version of MySQL (The M in LAMP) that was MySQL’s source of success.

What is bothersome is that the MySQL Community Server page lists version 6.0, however if you follow that link, you are directed back to the 5.0.x version and also directed to their per server/per year license, which has an enticing per server/per year license starting at $595 but quickly stepping up to $4999 per year.

I’ve had a few folks point out to me that this is a better price than Valentina, until they figure out that Valentina initial pricing is for two years of updates, not one, bringing the price down to about the same or below MySQL pricing. That is intentional.