There is no one-size-fits-all rendering, the "official" mapnik style is but one of many ...

e.g. JOSM has icons for benches, waste_baskets and signposts, none of them show up on the "main" map though ... but they are rendered just fine on the more topic specific hike&bike map

That's why our mantra is: "We don't map for the renderer!"

Local to the machine i'm working on, or to the machine in front of me that runs the ssh client?

> Is it truely drop-in replacement as in "you can develop to MySQL, then run MariaDB in production without worrying"?

yes, unless you use some of the non-GPL extra features like e.g. authentication plugins or pool-of-threads. For these MariaDB has GPL replacements but the implementation and configuration may differ ...

> Does it require converting current tables?

Data format of MyISAM and InnoDB tables is the same, so "no" in general. mysql system database may differ a bit, but nothing the mysql_upgrade tool can't fix, and you'll have the same issues when develop against an older MySQL version and deploying to a newer one ...

> Will it take a 10GB database all day to convert or will MariaDB just use the raw MySQL data files automagically?

It will use existing raw files just fine. mysql_upgrade may take a few minutes max., but not all day ... (unless you're migrating from an older MySQL version and mysql_upgrade needs to recreate some indexes ... but that would happen when upgrading to a more current MySQL release, too, and wouldn't be MariaDB specific

The only point where it isn't a simple "try and revert if you don't like it" drop in replacement is if mysql_upgrade changed mysql.* system tables and you want to roll back to regular MySQL ... but then again this is also the case when trying to upgrade to a more recent MySQL release and then deciding to roll back to a previous older one again ... so you should always have a backup to restore the original system tables from ... but you'd do a full backup before any version migrations anyway, wouldn't you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter - made it about as far as building a small blimp-size prototype and a nice large assembly hangar for "the real thing" ... which is now used as a large indoor beach resort instead

And even back then it was pretty clear that their planned fleet size whould totally exhaust available Helium supplies ...

we're all in violation as far as i can tell ...

* Unknown CD Distribution (don't remember the name, lost the CD), came with a small paper note with a few line diff to make a broken floppy driver work again
* Slackware repackaged by SuSE, then their own Distro stuff
* SuSE all the way until 2006 or so, some attempts to switch to Debian always faild due to driver issues
* short MacOS/X detour, most stupid window manager ever ...
* Ubuntu until last year
* Short Mint detour, regrettet when it came to version upgrades
* back to Ubuntu (with XFCE) for now ...

See this Chaos Communication Congress talk for all the security mess around these things ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOArwu3lziQ

> MySQL Cluster used to be a pay-only product. Is it free now?

there's always been a GPL version of it, only the optional management tool MySQL Cluster Manager that was added later is not open source

you may have confused things with the fact that you could only buy
cluster support contracts for the commercially licensed version only
while the general MySQL support offerings covered both commercial
and GPL binaries ...?

> prior to NDBCLUSTER 7.2 if you performed any join whatsoever the API node had to pull the complete tables from all data node groups ...

no, but it had to do lookups for the joined table for every row in the first table one by one and had to transfer the join matches to the mysqld/API side,
this has now changed so that the data node can resolve the join condition itself in certain situations and can so determine and deliver join result rows
for both joined tables after receiving only a single request from the API/mysqld side instead of having network round trips for every single joined row

Does it rule out PostgreSQL from being released with Debian as there are commercial/non-oss extensions to it like EnterpriseDB?

Sure, the non-GPL "Enterprise Edition" will not make it into any distribution, but for the GPL edition licensing would not be the reason for not distributing it any longer (although other reasons may lead to one of the forks becoming the default and Oracles GPL version only an alternative, but this will for sure be not for license reasons alone if/when it happens ...)

As if PostgreSQL didn't have it's own ecosystem of commercial-only extensions, too (EnterpriseDB, GreenPlum, just to name a few) ... the big difference here is that in the MySQL ecosystem Oracle is the only one that can do such dual-license stunts while in the PostgreSQL ecosystem anybody can ... (whether that's good or bad is a different story)

For "improvements"/"what's been added":

* lots of multi CPU scalability work (although part of it came from Google/Facebook and other sources where Sun/Oracle 'just' did the integration work)
* MySQL Cluster got a *lot* better in Sun/Oracle days
* the InnoDB plugin improved InnoDB affairs a lot (and this has been Oracles baby even in the Sun days)
* connectors, e.g. PHP/mysqlnd
* more interesting InnoDB improvements (e.g. fulltext indexes, finally) are in the queue, how these are going to be licensed remains to be seen though

It's not that everything is going into the optimal direction with MySQL under Oracle (i'm not working for them anymore for a reason), but saying there has been no development ever since the Sun acquisition is not fair, and i don't see any reason to believe that things will radically change on day 1462 either ...

> (do I have a right to stop someone making public a photo of my home on the Internet?)

by German law:

* If it is not visible from public ground (street, sidewalk) then you have
* if some temporary copyrightable installation (e.g. a piece of art, a banner) is part of the picture then you have
* if the picture does not only show your home but also yourself you may have (unless you are just part of a crowd)
* if none of the above applies then the right to take pictures of things visible from public ground ("Panoramafreiheit") kicks in

What is still being debated though is whether making such photos public in the form Google Streetview does, with fully geo referenced lookup capabilities, is still covered by "Panoramafreiheit" or not.

So you may have a right to stop Google from publishing the pictures of your house on StreetView,
but you would have no right to stop anyone from publishing pictures (even with GPS location information)
who doesn't do this in a large scale systematic way in Germany.

The background of the "Panoramafreiheit" law is simple: without it you could hardly publish *any* picture taken on a public street as avoiding to show any houses on these would be next to impossible in most cases. So it was decided that your copyright on the look of your house is a less important right than the freedom to take and publish photographs, whereas your personal privacy takes precedence as soon as you yourself are part of the photo (again: unless you're just part of a crowed, or can't be recognized...)