Sat, 30 Jan 2010
On MySQL and Oracle
I think Monty has well and truly lost it.
The European Commision, after careful consideration, has cleared Oracle's purchase of Sun:
The Commission's investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market.
I'd go one step further, and would say that MySQL is not a credible alternative to PostgreSQL. But whatever. Hopefully, if MySQL fails, then PostgreSQL will (finally) get the attention that it deserves. I'll have a real database every time over this piece of... anyway.[1]
This is a fair argument, and to be sure it is certainly not a problem for anyone to migrate from MySQL to a MySQL fork, or (with some work) from MySQL to PostgreSQL. But Monty seems to disagree, and now tries to get Russia and China to block the merger.
What's next, Andorra?
[1] comments on this blog item in defense of MySQL will be vigorously moderated away. MySQL is a POS that falls over if data is corrupt, that corrupts its own data (most distributions call 'mysql_recover' in their initscript for a reason), and whose C API does not properly support cursors unless you want to block concurrent access until the cursor is closed (paragraph 3). Every time a customer asks me about MySQL, I vigorously recommend against it, because it's a bad idea.
Sat, 08 Apr 2006
Crypto law in Belgium.
I've always thought that I live in a sane country regarding crypto law—or, at least, one not as insane as the US. Apparently I was a bit too optimistic.
According to this page, or more specifically, the Belgium-specific bits, you need a special license to be allowed to export cryptography outside of the Benelux. This is in relation to the Wassenaar Arrangement, an international agreement on cryptography laws which allows "public-domain" software, but not necessarily other types of software. If I can assume that the term "public domain" here really refers to software of which the source is freely available, then there is no issue; otherwise, I may be doing something illegal.
I guess I'll have to investigate that.
Moreover, and this is really a surprise to me, law enforcement officials in Beligum can, after an order of an investigation judge, order me to "make accessible [...] data in the form ordered by the judge", which might involve decryption; or they can also order someone whom they reasonably suspect to have special knowledge of encryption services to give information on "how to get the data at stake in intelligible form"—how to break the algorithm, if that can be done.
Failure to comply with this might get me between 6 months and a year of imprisonment and/or a fine between 26 and 20 000 BEF (1EUR = 40.3399 BEF)
I had no clue.
