Our speaker this month is an expert on legal issues relating to open source software and intellectual property; instead of a specific pre-planned formal presentation, we’ve decided to do a Q&A session, so read up, think of some questions (interesting, hard, you’re just curious, whatever…) and bring them to the meeting with you. Or you can email legal-questions@nblug.org and we can ask your questions for you.
Larry Rosen is the founding partner of ROSENLAW.COMLLP, a law firm that specializes in intellectual property matters for large and small companies and individuals. He is also the general counsel and executive director of Open Source Initiative, an organization that reviews and approves licenses for open source software. His articles on legal issues relating to open source appear monthly in Linux Journal. Before he became an attorney, Larry taught computer programming and managed several computer departments at Stanford University. He then worked in private industry, managing computer and applications development. At one large firm he guided the design, implementation, manufacturing and marketing of successful products for data and voice communications.
Augie will be covering both PostgreSQL Database Administration and MySQL Database Administration. So if you’ve just been dying to set up a database or you have one of these databases and aren’t quite sure how to configure it or add users or just don’t quite know what to do with it, come to the meeting with your brains ready. We’re hoping some of you will be coming with questions ready so that Augie can be properly grilled.
MySQL and PostgreSQL are the two leading open source SQL Relational DataBase Management Systems (RDBMS); both run on Linux as well as a variety of other platforms, mostly *nix. They are used to power many websites, including slashdot.org, freshmeat.net, SourceForge.net, quickfacts.census.gov, finance.yahoo.com, mail-abuse.org, and more projects than you can shake a stick at. MySQL is a lightweight database engine that does most of what you want; PostgreSQL is a bit heftier but also provides all of what’s in the ANSISQL92 standard. Both can be used from C, C++, Perl, PHP, Java, ODBC and Python.
Augie is a regularly attending member of NBLUG who is currently majoring in Computer Science at Sonoma State University and working for the Sonoma County Water Agency, primarily doing web and database development.