All posts by Monty

Business Source (A software license with some Open Source aspects)

Post Syndicated from Monty original http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2013/06/business-source-software-license-with.html

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed on ZDNET about how to create successful software company in todays world.

I assume that because the original article also mentioned my other project, MariaDB, some people jumped to the wrong conclusion about my intentions or what I was trying to achieve.

For those that want to know more about Business Source, there is now an academic article in TIM (Technology Innovation Management Review) that one can read. The article is written by Linus Nyman and me.

To clarify some misunderstandings, here is a short list of what the Business Source license is all about:

  • Business Source is not an Open Source license. It’s a commercial software license that offers the users many of the benefits of an Open Source license.
  • Business Source means that all source code is available from day one and that most (but not all) users can use it any way for free. After a time delay the software becomes Open Source.
  • Business Source was never intended for the MariaDB server. MariaDB is GPL and will always be that. I could not change the license for the MariaDB server even if I wanted to (and I never wanted to make MySQL or MariaDB closed source or Open core).
  • I truly belive that Open Source is a better way to develop software. However as an entrepreneur I recognize that it’s very hard to create a software development company around Open Source. Dual licenses works for some cases (especially for infrastructure and embeddable software like MySQL), but doesn’t work for a lot of software. It’s also very hard to fund development with services (support, development, consulting…) as the profit from these (typically 30%) are not enough to maintain a development organization in many cases.
  • For a software company that wants to do development and compete with closed source companies on similar economic terms, Business Source offers a viable alternative to closed source or open core. For a user of the software, Business Source is always better than Open Core as Open Core doesn’t offer for it’s user ANY of the advantages of Open Source.
  • While searching for companies that my investment company, Open Ocean Capital, can invest into, I have been talking with a lot of entrepreneurs about how to make money on their software. In some cases where the entrepreneurs would like to release their software as Open Source but don’t know how to make enough money to support development, I have told them to take a look at Business Source. As an Open Source/Free Software advocate it feels a bit bad to have to turn away some companies from Open Source, but I think that in the long run it’s better that the companies succeed and produces good software that is accessible to anyone under reasonable terms. Compared to other license models, at least with Business Source the software will eventually become Open Source.

The article should hopefully explain any other questions you have about Business Source. If not, feel free to comment on this blog and I will do my best to clarify things.

By the way, I am not totally happy with the term “Business Source” as there is already a company that uses this name. Business Source (or Source for Business) is however the best term I have come up with for this license so far. If you have a better suggestion for the name, please write me a comment!

MariaDB Foundation at the Percona conference

Post Syndicated from Monty original http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2013/04/mariadb-foundation-at-percona-conference.html

The MariaDB Foundation have just issued press release about the new Governance in the Foundation.  A lot of the new things that is happening in the MariaDB adoption comes thanks to the work we have done in the Foundation.

The Foundation is also happy to announce that is has now 2 senior MySQL (now MariaDB) developers on board, Alexander Barkov and Sergey Vojtovich and a documentation writer, Ian Gilfillan.

The foundation is also helping founding the new Connect engine, which allows you to use MariaDB with a lot of different formats (XML, CVS, DBF,…), and connections, including ODBC. (Documentation will appear shortly here).

If you want to know more about the MariaDB Foundation, you can find me and a lot of MariaDB developers in the MariaDB foundation boot at Percona conference in Santa Clara.

Monty Program Ab, SkySQL and Antony Curtis has also a lot of talks at Percona live about MariaDB and related things:

We have also a MariaDB BOF at 6:00 pm on the 23’th of April in Ballroom F. Anyone who ever been on one of the MySQL/MariaDB BOF’s with me knows what to expect. This time there will be even more surprises…

Hope to see a lot of you next week!

MariaDB-Galera 5.5 released as stable

Post Syndicated from Monty original http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2013/03/mariadb-galera-55-released-as-stable.html

It’s now about one year ago since we released MariaDB 5.5. That proved to be an important release for MariaDB as it became popular with the users and ultimately also has been adopted by several important Linux distributions. But we have not stopped working since then, and now the MariaDB project is happy to announce something new again: the immediate availability of MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29 stable release (GA).

As soon as we had released MariaDB 5.5 stable, we started planning with Codership Oy how to integrate their Galera replication technology with MariaDB 5.5. We have then worked together to merge their Write Set REPlication API into MariaDB, and gone through a rigorous testing program with beta and RC releases leading to today’s a stable release.

Elena from Monty Program and people from the MariaDB user community have tested those releases and provided feedback if they have found any bugs. Seppo Jaakola from the Galera team is a MariaDB Captain, which means he not only has commit rights to the MariaDB trunk, he also can participate in the MariaDB decision making together with other core contributors. (Note that MariaDB Galera Cluster currently still has it’s own branch in the MariaDB project on Launchpad. But I think it is likely that in the future this will become part of the main MariaDB branch and releases.)

This is one reason today’s release makes me very happy, because this is a great example of what we always wanted the MariaDB project to become. It also shows how we operate with many other companies and individuals. We want to be open and inclusive to anyone who can contribute great code, so that MariaDB can continue its MySQL heritage of being the most popular open source database. We want MariaDB to always include all the great innovation happening in the MySQL ecosystem.

About synchronous multi-master clustering

In the past weeks I have traveled in Germany, Korea and Sweden to speak about MariaDB, and it is clear to me that a lot of people have already heard of Galera and are already trying it out. But if you didn’t yet know about this technology, let me tell you why it is important.

MariaDB Galera Cluster provides synchronous multi-master replication. A simple way to explain what this means is to compare it with other alternatives that we have used for MariaDB high availability until today:

If you compare it to the traditional master-slave replication, it means that your data is safer in a Galera cluster because it is replicated immediately as part of the commit, without any delay. (This is why it is synchronous.) Also, in traditional master-slave replication you can do read-only scale-out, but with Galera you can read and write to any node. This makes life easier for application developers, because you don’t need to separate read-only transactions and write transactions. (This is why it is called multi-master.)

You can also compare it with DRBD, which is another popular High Availability solution for MariaDB and MySQL. The reason people use DRBD is usually because it is also synchronous replication, only it happens on the disk driver level. So it is used by people who want to be 100% sure they don’t lose a single transaction if they do a failover. But DRBD doesn’t give you any scale-out, since the spare node is so called cold standby, so you cannot use it for anything else but disaster recovery.

With MariaDB Galera Cluster we now provide “best of both worlds”: it is both synchronous, and you can use it for scale-out. And not just read-only scale out but multi-master scale-out.

Automatic node provisioning

There are many other benefits to Galera too, and you will be able to read more about them on the MariaDB blog. One nice little feature I think is also worth mentioning is the automatic node provisioning. One reason MySQL master-slave replication has become so popular is that it is quite easy to setup and understand. But Galera takes this even further, they completely automate the node provisioning process. My philosophy when I created MySQL was always to make everything very easy to the user, and I’m happy to see Galera shares this philosophy.

But it is not only nice, it is actually an important feature especially if you run MariaDB in the cloud. In the cloud you can save money by adding nodes to a cluster (scale out) when needed and then removing them (scale in) when you need less performance. You might do this every day, or every week depending on what kind of traffic your website gets. But to add and remove MariaDB nodes every day, you of course cannot do it manually every time.

For example many NoSQL systems talk about automatic node provisioning in their marketing so that they will sound “cloud compatible”. But MariaDB Galera Cluster does it too, so there is no reason to abandon SQL just to have automatic node provisioning.

Commercial support

When you have tested MariaDB Galera Cluster and decided that you like it, and want to run it in production, you of course want to make sure you have proper support in place. This is also important so that the developers can continue to work on the project and make it even better. Codership operates with a similar model like my company Monty Program, they develop the technology and do bug fixes, and they partner with SkySQL and other companies that support MariaDB in order to provide a complete and seamless support experience. You can contact SkySQL to discuss commercial support for both MariaDB and MariaDB-Galera.

You can also support MariaDB Galera Cluster development directly by donating via the MariaDB Foundation. If you specifically want to support Galera development, you should target your donation to “MariaDB Galera Cluster”.

MariaDB living in interesting times

Post Syndicated from Monty original http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2013/02/mariadb-living-in-interesting-times.html

An old Chinese curse says “May you live in interesting times“.
Fortunately this can be taken both as a curse or as a blessing.

For MariaDB this has definitely been a blessing the last few months.

Since we announced the MariaDB foundation in December 2012 a lot has happened:

We will soon be able to announce that also some of the other very big Internet companies have moved to MariaDB. (stay tuned 🙂

The above means that the installation base of MariaDB will increase from about one million to 5-10 million within this year. You can find here a full updated lists of all distributions that supports MariaDB.

We are really living in interesting times!

Happy Chinese New Year to you all!

Attending Percona Live Conference in London 2012

Post Syndicated from Monty original http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2012/11/attending-percona-live-conference-in.html

I am attending the Percona live conference in London on 4’th of December.

I will there hold a keynote about State of MariaDB & its growing Ecosystem and a session, together with Colin Charles, about Using NoSQL Techniques with MariaDB.

During the keynote there will be announcements that many of you should find exciting…

Sergei Golubchik will be there and talk about the new features in MariaDB 5.5 and MariaDB 10.0

Colin Charles will also have a talk about MHA: Getting started and moving past the quirks.

I am looking forward to again meet many of the hard core MariaDB and MySQL users in London!