fonz.net weblog

So now that MSFT has been fined 280m Euros, where will that money go?  Can OSS projects get a hold of some of that cash? 

Which OSS projects could benefit from a large cash infusion?     What kind of support do OSS developers need? OpenSSH had a funding crisis recently.  What other projects are in that boat?

What other funding methods exist for OSS projects?  LinuxFund tried to fund individual projects with microgrants, but determined it was too hard to find quality projects.  Now they  fund larger OSS supporting organizations.  Hundreds of OSS developers are employed each summer via Google’s summer of code.

I wonder which of the methods is a “better” method to fund OSS. While programs like SoC give structure and ensures accountability / results.  I’d be interested in hearing what developers prefer  straight grants with more flexebility or sponsored development of specific features. 

What needs could grants fill, that SoC style proejcts cannot?  Do projects still need funds for things like hosting?  Or do the various SourceForge, Savanah, etc style sites fill that need?

technorati tags:msft, fines, oss, fl/oss, grants, linuxfund, summer, of, code, SoC, google

Kaj Arno writes that MySQL is dropping support for 3.23 and 4.0. Luckly I just finished our slow and painful upgrade from 3.23 to 4.1. Unfortunately, it looks like we should probably have gone straight to 5.0, because he mentioned they’re discussing dropping 4.1 support too 🙁

From what I’m reading in the docs, the upgrade from 4.1 to 5.0 should be much less painful. Most of our issues were related to huge differences between the older and newer versions of the connector/J JDBC driver, not the database server. Now that we’re on the latest driver I think the hard part is over.

Anyways, at this point we’ve almost entirely migrated to postgres anyways for our in-house software. Only a few old apps still use MySQL these days.

technorati tags:mysql, eol, lamp, postgres