Reaction to the iPhone concept

I find the new iPhone to be conceptually very interesting. Now, I am very new to the world of PDAs— I have only just started using one, a cast-off Palm Pilot from someone, and already I am thinking of things that it should be able to do but doesn't, or I haven't learned how yet. I suspect that very shortly I will be wondering how I got along without a PDA all these years.

Now, this new iPhone from Apple (I hope that they win the name from Cisco, as I have never ever heard of a Cisco iPhone but the name seems to naturally fit alongside iPod and other Apple products) will apparently be running a version of OSX. I find this very intriguing, because it opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, including perhaps being able to run MySQL on it, or at least a client, perhaps a small database replicated from a fixed or not-as-mobile source.

At first glance and after hearing various reports, it sounds like a very capable device even without getting under the hood and finding out what makes it tick. Of interest will be what CPU it uses, getting stuff to compile for it, etc.

A Fork In Progress

It looks like MySQL AB is going about the code fork in a very methodical, gradual, and thoughtful fashion. The latest Community release seems evidence of this. It was released as source-only, as promised, however it was announced that since no community contributions have been made to the community tree, the release was made from the Enterprise tree. In effect, the actual fork has not taken place yet. There is a community tree in evidence in BitKeeper, but it appears to be a placeholder only so far. The changes to date have been with regard to policy and procedure, not code.

I see this as a good thing. This gives MySQL time to evaluate reactions to these changes while implementing them in a gradual fashion. The changes appear well thought out and sound, and reflect changes in the community, the marketplace, and the customer base. It's important to balance all of these factors since they all play a part in the life of the product.

Knowing who the community user is, and who the enterprise user is, is important too. The focus should be on prioritizing catering to the needs of larger groups first, with the knowledge that some may not see their needs met directly. But this is an open-source product, so surely someone can rise to the occasion and fulfill a niche need.

New Bitkeeper client, old one broke

As has been pointed out, there is a new version (2.0) of the free BitKeeper client, and furthermore the old one (version 1.1) appears not to work anymore. At first I suspected my daughter's hogging of available bandwidth as the culprit when all of my daily pulls of MySQL source trees failed, but that soon proved not to be the case. I am once again pulling source code successfully.