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Quoting IT: IT Executives

"The best IT execs I've run across are the ones who skip the complaining about management and go in and do a job that seemed impossible in the face of immature technology, indifferent management and throttled budgets."

- Eric Lundquist, "IT success knows no boundaries", eWeek, September 4, 2006

As you may have noticed, we have changed our "IT Quotes of the Week" to "Quoting IT". I found that I do not always come across a good quote worthy of posting here at CMS Report. Also, there are times I just don't have the time to catch up on my trade magazines and the quotes are not really valid this week.

BerkeleyDB support dropped from MySQL 5.1

Although MySQL 5.1 is still in beta, I have a feeling it will be making the headlines this week in many of the IT related publications. MySQL has officially dropped support for the BerkeleyDB engine. The following release notes for MySQL 5.1.12 (beta) may be of interest to BerkeleyDB fans:

Functionality added or changed:

  • Incompatible change: Support for the BerkeleyDB (BDB) engine has been dropped from this release. Any existing tables that are in BDB format will not be readable from within MySQL from 5.1.12 or newer. You should convert your tables to another storage engine before upgrading to 5.1.12.

However, Brian Aker of MySQL has already responded in a few blogs letting users know that the changes do allow for the BerkeleyDB engine to be returned to MySQL through a third party plug-in:

CiviCRM 1.5 released

I should have put something out about the new version of CivicCRM (1.5) last week, but it got buried with other priorities. My apologies to all the CivicCRM fans out there. I have not loaded CivicCRM myself, but my understanding is that CivicCRM is now based on the Drupal 4.7 code.

For those that do not recognize what CRM stands for, try customer relationship management at Wikipedia. Here is how CivicCRM describes the software in their announcement:

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

New features and enhancements you can expect in CivicCRM 1.5 include:

  • A new membership management component
  • Search Builder - a new tool for building complex search queries
  • Significant memory and speed optimizations

Should Microsoft Financially Support Open Source Projects?

A series of posts and questions on the CMS blogs are asking whether Microsoft should help finance the costs of open source projects. I have no opinion to give that would add value to this topic. However, I'm happy to give the rundown so far of the posts that speak the loudest regarding Microsoft and open source projects.

The thread of blog posts seems to originate with a post at Dave's Tech Shop. In that post, Dave talks about the need for Microsoft to better support open source projects. Dave's reasoning: