Symphonious

The vote to start the motion of HttpClient out of jakarta-commons to become a fully fledged Jakarta sub-project has been declared passed. I’ve just done up an initial draft of the proposal that will need to be put to the Jakarta PMC to approve the move (they noted that it was coming and that it was most likely to pass at the meeting they just recently had). This is the first bit of Apache “politics” I’ve been involved in so I’ll be interested in the feedback.

I’m just not sure if it’s considered politics when everyone agrees as they seem to do so often on the HttpClient list. It’s good to have a team that’s working so well together.

I discovered something really quite annoying today. The JDBC drivers for MySQL have been re-licensed from LGPL to GPL (happened quite a while back actually). Now while it’s their code and they can do with it as they please, that’s really, really annoying. I’ll be moving all my development away from MySQL in the future.

Here’s the problem. I came up with a really cool new feature for a product I’m working on which involves interacting with a variety of databases and inevitably someone will want to use it with MySQL. This feature would be a small add-on to a much larger commercial product. In order to use the official MySQL drivers though I’d either have to pay MySQL or GPL my application. Neither of which is a realistic option considering how insignificant this one feature is in the overall product.

So now I’m developing the prototype with Microsoft SQL Server and it’s going great. MySQL, there appears to be a bullet shaped hole in your foot.