(I promise not to try to bring too many alerts to you, but this one seemed spot-on)
If Oracle buys MySQL as part of Sun, database customers will pay the bill.
In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.
If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project. In fact, for most open source projects (such as Linux or Apache) there isn’t any comparable way for a competitor to buy even one tenth as much influence. But MySQL’s success has always depended on the company behind it that develops, sells and promotes it. That company (initially MySQL AB, then Sun) has always owned the important intellectual property rights (IPRs), most notably the trademark, copyright and (so far only for defensive purposes) patents. It has used the IPRs to produce income and has reinvested a large part of those revenues in development, getting not only bigger but also better with time.
If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle’s products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle’s salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.
Who is driving the petition and what are your motivations?
This petition is driven by Monty Program Ab, which was founded by the creator of MySQL, Michael “Monty” Widenius, and consists of many of the original core MySQL developers.
The short answer is that we want to ensure that MySQL can’t be killed by Oracle and we also want to ensure that MySQL is also in the future actively developed under an Open Source license in a way that meets the needs of all market segments.
A more detailed answer can be found in Monty’s blog that explains his motivations and intentions.
I also like the detailed reporting that appears to be available via http://www.php-web-statistik.de/ – I’m looking for the ability to host all of this locally on my own mysql instances, of course, to avoid having data elsewhere that may go down / away for some reason.
separate options for cached content vs. page removal.
I’d recommend being exceptionally specific in your text, and not submitting separate tickets if you want both the page removed, as well as cached content. You could ask me how I know, but . . .
The W3C is really the de facto standard : here’s some great tests and info from them :
The Basics – what you should run on all your web pages
The MarkUp Validator. – Also known as the HTML validator, it helps check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML, SVG or MathML.
The Link Checker – Checks anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links, etc.
The CSS Validator – validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets.
The above three can be used all-in-one by running the Log Validator. Unlike the others, this tool helps improve the quality of a whole site, step by step, by finding the most popular documents that need to be fixed in priority. Learn more about this method in the Web Standards Switch document.
Developing mobile-friendly content? The MobileOK checker is a one-stop service to check your Web site and improve its mobile-friendliness.
Also in the works is the Unicorn, our project to build a Universal Conformance Checker for the Web.
Specific Tools – for Specific Needs
Semantic Extractor – Sees a Web page from a semantic point of view. Extracts such information as outline, description, languages used, etc.
We also have developer several human-centered test tools: the Mobile Test Harness (code) is Web-based harness for browsers test suites, that offers users the possibility to record results on whether the browser they’re using passes or not a set of test suites; and MUTAT – an (older) human-centered testing framework developed in perl (code)
Open Source
All software developed at W3C is Open Source / Free software. Which means that you can download and use them for free, if you like. It also means that you are welcome to participate in making them better, cooler, more useful for you and everyone.
Check each project for instructions on how to download their source code, and install them on your system
All the QA tools are maintained by the volunteer developers of the QA-dev group. Why don’t you join?
“I am governor Jerry Brown” (this is what happens when you blog while listening to ‘