I saw the news today on Euronews: Oracle president appeared on billboards with his lover. The relation to the EU is not straightforward though. Another not-so-public news’ relation to the open source community is more evident. Just a few days ago Maven changed its policy regarding projects upload to the central repository. Until recently Maven allowed for two ways to upload an open source project to the central repository. One could file a request for a manual addition which would take forever to get fixed (the last time a batch of manual requests was processed happened two months ago) or, alternatively, one could setup an rsync repository and request an auto-sync — which was the preferred way. The auto-sync procedure was covered in this blog entry by Torsten Cudt. That changed. Their Guide to uploading changed wording regarding the auto-syncing from This is the preferred process to This used to be the preferred process but we are no longer accepting rsync requests on a per project basis. The recommended way of uploading to the central repository is doing it via Sonatype Forge known as Nexus. Not THAT Nexus, but this one. Google guys have either run out of names for their phones or just have a great sense of humor. This means that the only way to upload an independent (neither Apache nor Codehaus) open source project to the central repository is to receive an approval from guys managing Sonatype Nexus. Not sure if that limits anyone’s freedom, but it definitely makes Maven more restrictive. The only way to distribute a non-approved-by-Nexus open source library to the masses now is to set up your own repository. I will try to create some simple guide on that later. Oh, and the third news that is directly related to the open source community is certainly the approved Sun-Oracle (or should I say Oracle-Sun?) deal. The Commission’s investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL Is it a reference to my blog post I made on September? I don’t think so, but if they were reading my blog their investigation could be completed much earlier. And a philosophical question — are these three news related to each other? Please feel free to answer it in your comments 🙂 Technology Industry