In studying and/or promoting web-technology, the phrase Web 2.0 can refer to a trend in web design and development — a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies) which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.

This sounds nice but what is it really all about?
Web 2.0 means openness that can mainly be explained due the fact that open-source in itself describes openness. Complex and expensive in production products are more and more deployed as open source software solution.

Open interfaces make it easy to share data and interact between different systems. For example Flickr, a currently well-known Web 2.0 product, makes it possible to access its data structure via an API (Application Programming Interface) from outside.
That’s why new services can be developed which use Flickr data. Finally that brings new users to Flickr.

Flickr is just a single example in a big “cloud” of platforms. I think Web 2.0 mostly is about connecting data from different platforms.
For example having blog with an plugin from amazon to publish your wishlist and additionally showing photos to your friends which are hosted by Flickr.

Another important aspect of Web 2.0 is the compliance of regulations concerning web-standarts like XHTML and CSS. This is significant ’cause the movement of the desktop application into the internet is straigt on forward. Nowadays websites are not just shown on our home-computers also on cellphones and palms. Also fancy frameworks like AJAX, for nice effects and better user-friendlyness, take place in Web 2.0.

But why not just calling it “Nice looking - interacting, independent platforms” - or something similar.
Let’s do a bit of time travel:

Web 0.5
Time before WWW: from 1988 to 1995, near the point the Internet became really popular and easy to use for everyone. The usage was restricted to the share of simple data and email communication.

Web 1.0
It was born in 1996: static html pages, one-way communication, classic websites.

Web 1.5
Web 1.5 came up in the time of the so-called dot.com-boom between 1996 and 2001.That as also the time when websites became dynamic. The major things were hits & eyeballs (pageviews) und visual eye-catchers. Interactive websites were for the most part shops, boards and other community places in the web. Their disadvantage was that they were always stand-alone solutions because the battle for users had began. The used technogies were huge and expensive (CMS, Community Software, E-Commerce) but users were strictly bounded to them.

Web 2.0 brings a broad variety of different applications all based on modern Internet technologies. But is everything new? I don’t think so. According to my opinion Web 2.0 is just a upgrade of 1.5 that is a bit more free than closed software platforms some time ago.

Is this the end of development on the web? Besides the fact that in computering there’ll be never an end, I think concerning the engineering progress Web 3.0 will not need a long time coming. But more about Web 3.0 soon…

With 50,000 copies downloaded daily, MySQL has nothing to prove and is probably one of the most popular open source applications. In the acronym LAMP or WAMP, the M is MySQL (L=Linux, W=Windows, A=Apache and P=PHP). LAMP is the most popular web development system as it’s included in every Linux distro (apart from the smallest).

MySQL powers millions of websites from small to very large as well as network servers on many platforms. Following announcements from January 16^th (yesterday) MySQL has been acquired by Sun MicroSystems for the sum of $1 billion. 800 million in cash and 200 million in equility options.

Who says Open Source doesn’t make money? Of course MySQL was always dual licensed and had been selling commercial licenses and support for years. It’s how they grew to 400 employees.

I’ve been using MySQL in websites that I’ve developed mainly and also in desktop applications. Of course it’s not the only database in town; PostgreSQL and SQLite are amongst the better known open source alternatives. For me things are vague what will happen to MySQL in the future…

Sun promises to all users of MySQL that things won’t change that much - they’d even will become better (would you tell your customers anything else?). Anyway, Sun says that the same people, the same community will keep on managing MySQL. Finally Sun refers to its experience concerning Open Source products.

Many software products are released as so called OpenSource but how do the different kinds of OpenSource software licenses differ from each other?

For example Firefox is licensed under MPL/GPL and LGP. But what’s the Mozilla Foundation Licence? Often heart about that…

VLC media player makes it easy to me it’s just released under GPL which says something to me.

If you are the same way confused as me you might be interested in O’Reilly’s Openbook called “OpenSource & Free Software Licensing”

“This book will show you the licenses, explain how they can be used, and give you the information needed to make informed decisions. Knowing the details, the factual ones and not the FUD, will make you the ‘go to’ person when these type of questions arise.”
–Brian Turner, Free Software Magazine

Although a lot of questions I had got answered there are still serveral licences which are a mixture of others or explecit remoddeled.
A good example might be my beloved boost libraries which stand under a “Boost Software License”.

All links are to PDF documents:

• Chapter 1: Open Source Licensing, Contract, and Copyright Law

• Chapter 2: The MIT, BSD, Apache, and Academic Free Licenses

• Chapter 3: The GPL, LGPL, and Mozilla Licenses

• Chapter 4: Qt, Artistic, and Creative Commons Licenses

• Chapter 5: Non-Open Source Licenses

• Chapter 6: Legal Impacts of Open Source and Free Software Licensing

• Chapter 7: Software Development Using Open Source and Free Software Licenses

I hope it’s useful for your aims.