Words — Jonathan Cheyer

Time moves quickly when changes occur. I’ve had plenty of changes recently to keep me busy. ¶

The most exciting news is that my wife and I have added a new member to our family! I know it’s cliche to say that having a kid will change your life, but it is definitely true in ways I didn’t anticipate. Luckily for us, he’s made it very easy on us. Ever since the moment he was born, he’s been a joy to be around. I know it is anathema to speak of it, but we’re even getting plenty of sleep. ¶

 ¶

The other news is that I’ve returned to the software engineering world. I just started a job at Yahoo! in Santa Clara and will be back in the world of enterprise Java. After spending several years branching out and learning about the mobile space (Motorola) and open source community management (Solid), It will be fun to return to my roots. ¶

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 ¶

By now, word has gotten around that MySQL has made some more changes to their process around MySQL Community Server. The changes primarily focus on: ¶

These refinements of the community server [process] are detailed in Kaj Arnö’s blog. Not everyone is happy about the new plan for acceptance of community contributions, because it means that community enhancements have to wait a long time to see the light of day. Jeremy Cole has talked about the frustrations that this causes and calls the Enterprise/Community split a failure. These refinements are interesting are definitely worthy of discussion, but I’ll leave that aside for another time. ¶

What’s wrapped up inside of the announcement about “Refining Community Server” is something not related to Community Server at all: “The current Enterprise source tarballs will be removed from ftp.mysql.com.” Perhaps it’s just me, but it feels a lot like what often happens in political bills, where a politician tries to add 4 good things and squeeze in one bad thing in the same bill. They are either hoping that no one will notice, or that perhaps it’s an easier pill to take when a little sugar is applied. Kaj responded to Jeremy with the expected response of “not much changed” and “it’s for the better anyway” message. But it’s worth taking a closer look. ¶

Placing the source tarballs behind a closed door doesn’t keep it closed with the GPL. Everyone knows (and Kaj acknowledges) that the GPL guarantees the right of any person who receives a binary to obtain and re-distribute the source tarballs to the world. So what’s the big deal about hiding Enterprise source tarballs behind a password-protected site that only customers can access? ¶

It’s about the importance of being earnest in what you do. Being an open source company is about a lot more than just slapping a GPL license on your software and handing it out. It’s about building a relationship with the community that is using, playing, testing, and improving your software. As anyone who is married knows well, this can only be done through ongoing, continual trust and transparency between the two parties. Trust is built by being dependable, and by telling the other person things that sound honest and real. Trust is improved by transparency, which is opening yourself to the other person. Adding an artificial means of inconvenience to the community in obtaining bits does nothing to help customers and only reduces transparency as seen by the community. ¶

MySQL has a goal of of positioning their software as: “Community Server for community users, Enterprise Server for paying users”. This makes sense from a marketing and sales perspective, and I have no argument with it at that level. After all, companies deserve to make money for their efforts, and customers need to understand what they are paying for when they buy Enterprise Server. They get a great deal for a cheap cost when they buy a license, because it includes all kinds of services: updates, technical alerts, technical support, troubleshooting, assistance with tuning, and many other services. They are also getting cool features and stability which came as a direct result of feedback from the community. Most of all, customers are paying for the comfort in knowing they have an experienced team to call and help when they have a problem. But customers aren’t paying for bits. The bits are Free Software and infinitely re-distributable, so there isn’t any money to be made by trying to make bits appear part of the sale. ¶

From a technical standpoint, dividing source code based on “paying customers” and “community” simply doesn’t make any sense. Customers want source code typically for one reason: “just in case” (in case your company disappears). Community wants source code to learn from, experiment with, play with, improve, fix, argue about, comment on, and many other things. The division of code drives down the quality of the Enterprise Edition for customers, and it drives down the motivation of the community to provide the necessary feedback and improvements. ¶

As the transparency decreases, the distrust increases. On the #mysql-dev IRC channel yesterday, I worried about what might happen if the current transparency continues to decrease and MySQL decides some day to release their Enterprise Server code under a proprietary license instead of the GPL. Where will that leave the community, if they know that the work they help to provide under the Community Server gets repackaged at a later date under a proprietary Enterprise Server? Kaj quickly responded by saying he personally would commit to keeping it open. ¶

Much to Kaj’s credit, he did indeed address this in his blog today. But would MySQL AB be willing to publicly commit to this as a company by placing a statement on their web site? That is not so clear. ¶

MySQL AB has been working with the open source community for a long time and a lot of good things have been accomplished as a result of that. There is much to applaud. Along the way, there have been occasional mistakes, and this is one of those times. MySQL risks alienating a community that has been very supportive of them by a misguided move in in their quest to “get more customers”. Make money, make as much as you can, but while you do, don’t forget the lesson of being earnest in your endeavors and staying true to your community. ¶

Spammers continue to find new ways to do their business and new ways to cause frustration for those of us who administer software that fosters small, open communities. These communities are fragile and grow up in a delicate environment. The environment needs to remain open: self-registration, the ability to post content, and the option of remaining anonymous is the key to success. Unfortunately, it is also a ripe environment for spammers to abuse. ¶

Spammers have now discovered that bugzilla is one of those environments. For those who don’t know, bugzilla is one of the most common open source bug tracking tools. It is used by many open source projects to allow the community to assist in reporting bugs on and enhancement ideas for each project. The original version of Bugzilla was first created at Netscape in the mid-nineties (back when I was working at Netscape). It was rewritten in 1998 and made available as open source). After AOL bought Netscape, it became one of a number of projects released by the Mozilla Foundation. Although bugzilla continues to be used by many projects, development of bugzilla itself became somewhat stagnant over the years. It hasn’t kept up with the times and as such, has practically no support for handling spam in the 2007 world. (Version 3.0 just came out in May 2007, nine years after version 2.0 came out.) ¶

At Solid, we’ve been using Bugzilla to track bugs for our solidDB for MySQL product. Around April, people from other open source projects such as Samba, XFCE, and Eclipse started having problems with spammers adding spam as attachments to existing bugs in their bugzilla bug tracking databases. I didn’t notice the problem until Solid got its first bugzilla spam last week (July). I was used to cleaning out spam every day from Solid’s forums, but dealing with spam in Bugzilla is extremely difficult and annoying. ¶

I first tried to upgrade to the new Bugzilla 3.0 in our development instance to see if that would be able to help with the spam problem. Although 3.0 does have support for deleting attachments (finally!), it still takes too many clicks to delete attachments. Spammers can create attachments automatically, and I get stuck with the manual work. In addition, Bugzilla still doesn’t support deleting comments, which spammers can also easily create and place inappropriate content into. Deleting bugs is also not supported, which is also an easy target for spammers to hit. Even trying to delete a user (the spammer) gives a scary message that warns you not to do it or risk causing referential integrity problems in your database (what kind of choice is that?). ¶

After some testing, I decided it wasn’t worth upgrading to 3.0 for the minimal help it would give. It seems like it should pretty easy to write a small script that automatically deletes all data associated with a spammer, while still keeping referential integrity intact. So that’s what I decided to do. I now have a bugzilla_spammer.rb script (written in Ruby) that helps me keep spam in Bugzilla in check. ¶

What Bugzilla really needs is full application support for protecting against the increasingly sophisticated methods that spammers use to bypass applications. It would be much better to stop spam from getting into Bugzilla in the first place. My program does not help with that at all. It does, however, provide a simple way for you to remove the junk created by spammers that gets entered into your Bugzilla, once it is there. This should be a good enough workaround until the Bugzilla developers add some serious spam protection that will help protect again current-day spammes techniques. If you want this feature, please let them know it’s important. And if you’re interested in doing some coding, offer to help! A bug has already been filed against Bugzilla about this problem - bug 380489. ¶

Update: Several people from the Bugzilla team (thanks, Max Kanat-Alexander and Frédéric Buclin!) have pointed out that it is possible to delete a bug in Bugzilla. I should have been more clear, but what I meant was that it is not easy or practical to delete a bug. Deleting a bug requires creating a new product and component and then moving the bug into that product and finally deleting the entire product. And it still doesn’t help in the case that the spammer adds a comment to an existing bug. ¶

I’ve had the following quote on my blog for a while: ¶

It was pointed out to me that the attribution of that quote should have been to Mark Twain, not Abraham Lincoln. I started wondering if that could be true. I certainly did not want to propagate a misquote. Even after doing some searching on the web, I still was not able to determine the answer to my satisfaction. Bartleby, where I usually go to check quotes, did not have the quote at all. A number of sites attribute the quote to Lincoln, and just as many attribute the quote to Mark Twain. Still other sites attribute to someone else altogether. I was not able to find any reliable citations on any site. Even Ask Yahoo came up empty. ¶

The quote is clearly derived from a much earlier quote found in Proverbs 17:28 in the Míshlê Shlomoh in the Tanakh. ¶

A few randomly selected sites showing one or the other: ¶

Alas, we’ll have to make do enjoying the quote without proper attribution. ¶

A few of us from Solid are up in Portland at OSCON. We’ll be showing off a new prototype of our high availability (HA) option for solidDB for MySQL. The HA option allows solidDB for MySQL to act in a hot-standby configuration where there is a primary and secondary server. The data in the primary is automatically synchronously replicated to the secondary. In the case that the primary fails, our HA Manager automatically performs a failover and the secondary server becomes the new primary. The secondary is also always available for read-only requests. ¶

We’ll also be talking about DorsalSource, a community-focused Web site whose goal is to provide developers with easy access to builds of MySQL and related products. Come by booth 820 on Wednesday or Thursday if you want to hear more. ¶

Solid has released 5.0.41-0073. This release has a number of bug fixes and performance improvements. For the full detailed list of bug fixes and enhancements, please see the ChangeLog. ¶

This is the “collation” release! 5.0.41-0073 supports the UTF8 and UCS2 character sets. In particular, the following collations have been added: {utf8,ucs2}_{bin,general_ci,unicode_ci,swedish_ci} ¶

There is also now full support for all collations in the latin1 character set. ¶

Check it out at http://dev.soliddb.com/download ¶

Eugene Kim, Brad Neuberg, and I will be meeting at my place this coming Saturday, May 12, at 10am for an ad hoc HyperScope sprint. Please join us! This will be an outstanding opportunity to meet the team, learn about HyperScope, and help us move the project forward. If you’d like to participate either face-to-face or remotely, please RSVP on Upcoming.org. Hope to see you there! ¶

There has been some ongoing discussion since the end of last year about MySQL’s decision to change how often they release binaries for the MySQL Community Edition. ¶

For those that haven’t been paying attention, at the end of last year MySQL decided that they will no longer commit to releasing binaries for all versions and platforms of their Community Edition. Instead, some versions of their Community Edition are labeled “source-only” releases. For example, 5.0.33 Community Edition was a source-only release. ¶

People have realized that this means they will either wait longer between MySQL-released community binaries or else they need to build the binary themselves. Peter Zaitsev blogged at the time that he is hoping the community will establish trusted sources of MySQL builds for developers. ¶

That’s exactly what we’ve decided to do. ¶

Jeremy Cole, Dhiren Patel, and I have worked some late nights for the last few weeks and put together the DorsalSource site just in time for the MySQL Conference. ¶

DorsalSource is a community-focused website whose goal is to provide builds of MySQL and related products. It will be maintained and run by the community. Solid Information Technology and Proven Scaling took the initiative to launch it, and we will add additional contributors over time. ¶

DorsalSource currently offers builds of solidDB for MySQL and MySQL Server for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. In the future, DorsalSource will host additional MySQL-related products on a variety of platforms. ¶

We are actively soliciting the participation of other contributors to help grow the community. If you’d like to learn more, please check our FAQ and Forums. ¶

http://dorsalsource.org ¶

As folks on several MySQL blogs have already noted, Solid will be hosting informal “Meet the Experts” discussion sessions during lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday at the MySQL Users Conference. We at Solid are quite excited to engage with so many smart folks from the community. We’ve initially set the discussion topics to “Migrating from MySQL 4.0 to 5.0″ for Tuesday and “Replication in the Real World” for Wednesday. However, the format is open, so people are free to discuss any other interesting topics that come up. ¶

In addition, Solid is allowing people to use the discussion space in their booth on a first-come, first-serve basis for their own discussions. If you have an interesting topic on which you would like to host a discussion, come on by our booth and sign up for a free timeslot. ¶

Dhiren Patel is coordinating the Meet the Experts sessions, so if you have a question about it, stop by the Solid booth and he can probably help you out. We have a few additional open slots left, so if you want to sign up for a time to give a talk, come by the booth and put your name on the schedule. ¶

The following people have graciously agreed participate in the lunchtime Meet the Expert sessions: ¶

We may also have Jeremy Cole from Proven Scaling participating in either or both of these sessions. We’re looking forward to everyone’s participation. ¶