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Last week I finally uploaded to Drupal.org the Vineyard theme - ie the theme I created and use for openlife.cc. Releasing the theme as open source is something I always planned of doing, but never really got round to it. I'm especially proud of the fact the theme looks different than most Drupal themes I've seen, so I hope others can use this as a basis for creating nice sites.
Well, for Matt Asay, I should start by congratulating you for the new job and nice title! (Also, we learn some intelligence from Matt's blog: apparently Canonical is already close to the size of MySQL AB at the time of the Sun acquisition.)
Usually we are told to "ignore the trolls" and all that. The blogosphere unfortunately seems to be full of commentators who like to have share their opinion - even while they are entirely clueless. Sometimes, like the comments on Slashdot, it is ok and considered part of the entertainment. Sometimes it is harmless, because nobody reads that blog. And sometimes, it is just unacceptable:
Between following (from a distance) the talks at Fosdem and anticipating the ones at MySQL User Conference in April, I was reminded of 2 interesting MySQL talks that have had a deeper meaning to me than their original speakers probably intended. I thought today could be a good time to share these 2 stories that for me personally are filed in the "things I learned from MySQL AB and Sun" folder...
"If you can't solve the problem, try solving some other problem"
Last week Red Hat announced what seems to be a significant effort to bring open source thinking into non-technical areas of life and society. This was very interesting to me, as it is a topic I have also put much thought to in my book. While the welcome announcement is dated last week, it seems the sight has been pre-seeded with posts from different Red Hat employees so that it already looks like an active community site.
One post I stumbled upon is written by Red Hat's Pam Chestek, titled Letting Go:
It seems last week was a popular weekend for programming hobby projects, as it wasn't only me who was having fun with some recreative programming. Yesterday I published a new version of my Footnotes module for Drupal.
I just wanted to post this note so there is no confusion or rumors popping up: In a recent meeting at Monty Program we concluded that with the recent additions to the community and engineering teams, the team is now in excellent shape, except for one thing: we have bottlenecks on the top. As a solution we've decided to split my current job in 2 parts:
COO: in charge of company operations and routines, who most will report to
VP of Community and Business development: will be a more "project oriented" role taking care of ad hoc things that need to get done. (Such as, setting up ODBA, arm wrestling with Oracle, productizing our offerings, developing also internal processes, etc...)
A week after the first announcement, MySQL user conference seems like it's coming together and will be as good as ever.
In particular, Sun makes a come back with a tailor-made "Founding sponsor" status. Great! That means everyone will be there, just like we are used to.
Call for Papers is opened, but hurry, you only have a month to submit your papers. Baron Schwartz has updated his"How to write a good MySQL conference proposal.
The European Commission has now got a lot of emails! It seems they even have to block some (at least GMail) just to keep their mail server alive. Thank you, all, for helping out, it is working.
As you can see, the emails already have had a small effect that Oracle had to backtrack and make some promises.
In this blog I will explain why these promises are not very helpful, even if they show that even Oracle is a little bit concerned now.
It has been a tough Autumn for all of us so it is a pleasure to finally blog on some good news! O'Reilly has finally announced the next MySQL User Conference.
Last week professor Eben Moglen published an SFLC position paper related to the EU investigation on the Oracle Sun merger. Even though most of the proceedings do not happen in public, the SFLC publishing its own paper allowed us to answer it to the Commission. While it is not our primary objective - and we are a bit constrained at this point - to educate the public or debate this. But given that it is something everyone likes to have an opinion on, and the SFLC has already opened the discussion, we have decided to also publish our submission as well.
We would like to emphasize the following paragraph from the introduction.
I attended Open Ocean Capital's birthday party yesterday. It was in the Storyville Jazz Restaurant in Helsinki, with Katja Toivola and the Spirit of New Orleans playing. It was great to be at such a good live Jazz concert, something I have been missing the last years.
Mingling with business people I was reminded of 2 sayings that I often hear managers use.
Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?
This saying was actually quite popular at MySQL. Just in case someone doesn't know how it is used, this saying is used against someone who points out problems or weaknesses in the company, especially if perceived as complaining.
During this autumn I've had the pleasure of working closely with Georg Greve, Founder and former President of the Free Software Foundation Europe. Seeing that he had just left his previous post, we realized that his experience would be invaluable to do some of the heavy lifting involved in setting up processes for this fresh association. And so it has been!
As a result, we now have mundane things like a post box and accountant in Zurich where the non-profit association has its legal home. We are finally able to accept membership applications through the new website.
Last week Finland voted a law that next summer everyone is entitled to at least 1Mbit broadband connection. Not for free, just that it must be available to 100%, if you are a nation wide service provider.
Considering that Finland is a sparsely populated country, and service providers have in fact been removing cables in the country side. Indeed, the statute allows for some variances in the speed specifically to allow implementations with wireless broadband.
Update: Before posting this, I had made an effort to verify that this was not a technical problem. However, Lenz from the MySQL Community team has now replied that indeed Zak Greant's RSS feed had changed it's URL address (see comments), which is why new posts did not appear. So rather than telling anything about Planet MySQL, this post is good evidence of my and others mistrust towards it - thankfully still unfounded. (The roots of this is also discussed in the comments.)
NOTE: Heading of this post was subsequently changed.
Not that I would be surprised of anything anymore, but still.
When I was younger and had lots of free time, I used to do video editing as a hobby. At that time I developed a rule that is true for many projects in general (it was also true for writing a book some years later). The rule is: When you think you are 90% done, you are only 50% done. With video-editing, this meant that when the video was more or less ready, you are still 50% away from the final goal of actually having a master copy on tape. The latter 50% would be spent on checking ending credits, watching through the video a couple of times, and in those time, rendering even simplest of effects. Using a Windows PC for video editing was in those times a shaky effort in itself, so even when mastering you had to sit there and watch through the whole tape to make sure there were no glitches.
Producing a MariaDB release has been a similar process. In our company meeting in August we were discussing "final steps" to produce a final Beta, then Release Candidate, then production release. As I blogged then, the progress has been documented on a daily basis on the askmonty.org wiki.
We know it's true, now it's been scientifically proven. (At least pending an independent study for confirmation?) When a book gets onto p2p networks, there is a sales peak, not a decline:
Brian O'Leary, founder of publishing consultancy Magellan Media, measured the impact of peer-to-peer piracy on titles published by the US house O'Reilly for 71 weeks. At today's Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, the first in Europe, he revealed that while non-pirated books (both print and e-books) showed a "trending decline" after an initial sales peak, the sample titles saw a second peak at the onset of piracy. From week 19, which is on average when titles began to be pirated, to week 23, which was the average second peak, sales rose 90%.
On Thursday it became public that Carlo Piana has joined the Oracle team as co-counsel in the EU investigation on Oracle acquiring Sun. The short introduction of Mr Piana is that he has been (still is?) legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation Europe, in particular representing the Samba project in the Microsoft anti-trust case (which we/he won!).
Has anyone read the report Microsoft, IBM and Oracle Lead the SMB and Mid-Market Database Segment - Yankee Group - 7/31/2006 - 5 Pages - ID: YANL1327246?
Paying 800USD just to know the percentages of each database is a bit expensive for my small startup budget, especially since it is not me who needs the information.
Just a short heads up on what is going on with the Open Database Alliance.
We started hearing rumours yesterday, and today we see they were true:
“The commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world’s leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world’s leading open source database company,” said Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes in the statement.
Last week we ended the first Monty Program Ab company meeting in Mallorca, Spain. Even if many of us have met before, there are a couple who had not met everyone before and it was great to be together. Even for myself, since I was in the Sales org at MySQL and Sun, I wasn't that close with all the oldtime developers, so it was great to finally spend several days with them.
Since it was the first meeting both for the company and MariaDB project, we spent a lot of time on the "vision, strategy" excercises. Btw, for future MariaDB meetings we will in the future always invite all the Maria Captains and other community members, it is not intended to be a meeting of one company at all. For this meeting, we had 3 non-employees present and they gave valuable input, so it already works, even if we will do more of it in the future.
In June I upgraded the Drupal version running OpenLife.cc. Unfortunately I forgot to turn on caching again - or maybe I didn't even understand it was so important. Turns out requests to the front page without caching on would easily use up 7-15% of the shared server's CPU, per request!
We've been mingling here for 4 days already, but today the official part of OSCon kicks off. At Monty Program we've been a bit late in preparing for this conference - busy getting started with the company and everything. But even if we were a bit late, we succeeded in lining up a good set of sessions.
First day at the Community Leadership Summit. Kurt will blog about our being here separately soon. I just wanted to say this quickly tossed together unconference is a huge success, with a lot of the Community leaders and intelligenzia present and networking. We get all the time questions about what is happening with MySQL, so even though we hadn't planned to, we did a session What's up with MySQL where we tried to explain our plans for the MariaDB community and Open Database Alliance, but also as objectively as possible answer any questions that came up. (The unconference rules strictly prohibit promoting any company, which Monty Program of course goes out of it's way to obey.)
Oh, if you're in the Bay area, definitively should consider coming for the second day of this free conference.
Anyway, I'm wearing the new Open Database Alliance T-shirts Kurt had made. This reminded me that I wanted for a long time blog about the logo (which I had no part in making):
Open SQL Camp will be organized in St Augustin, Germany on the weekend of 22-23 August. Unfortunately, at Monty Program, it looks like we have already scheduled a company meeting at the same time and all of us will be in Spain instead. Consequently, there are now no MariaDB talks proposed for the conference, which is a shame.
Some weeks ago I've resigned from Sun Microsystems, where I worked as a MySQL Telecom Sales Engineer. Beginning July 13th I will take on a new role in the MySQL ecosystem, as "Project Manager and COO" for Monty Program Ab.
Since it can be argued I'm moving to a competitor, and I was working in a customer facing role, upon resigning I had to immediately return my computer, phone, etc to Sun, and my login accounts, including email, were terminated. I've gotten some comments about this (like: "Is there no trust in the world anymore?" and "How can you treat anyone like that?") and I cannot stress this enough: This is normal, I expected it, indeed brought it to my managers attention myself. If nothing else, think of it this way: This precaution also protects me from any misunderstandings and/or false accusations. Besides, starting your vacation by returning your laptop and removing your email account isn't the worst thing to happen to you - try it, you'll love it :-)
This had in any case the side effect that I was not able to honor a long standing tradition of sending a goodbye and thank you note to a certain internal mailing list, because I cannot do that from my private email. (Also asking others to forward a mail proved to be problematic/sensitive in many ways.)
Hence, I'm posting the email I wrote here instead, so that both my former collagues and other MySQL community members can read it alike:
I've been enjoying a nice vacation - the Sun is shining, so to speak :-). But a couple of days I've enjoyed upgrading www.openlife.cc to a newer drupal version, and also adding some much delayed blogging and Web2.0 enhancments.
Notes about the upgrade process (Drupal 4.7 to 6)I had never upgraded openlife.cc, so I had to go through 2 major version upgrades. To do this, I created a staging site on my laptop so I could spend several days fixing things that would and did break when upgrading.
As someone may have noticed, I recently wrote a trilogy on how to dive into the MySQL Cluster source code. Unfortunately my overtures towards the MySQL Cluster source code ended up being only a look-but-don't-touch affair, as I failed to actually get to touch her internals with my text editor. Even so, in this post I'd like to tell about the background to my love affair with this beauty, by relating to some benchmarks I've been working on together with my customers.
Oh, and I'd like to apologize already, that I cannot mention where these benchmarks were done, what the schema looked like and the exact numbers. If you want that kind of real benchmarks, you should read Mikael's blog, or watch the slides from this webinar. (Then compare those results to BigDBAHead's SSD RAID magic with InnoDB, both are the same DBT2 benchmark.)
"Rick Falkvinge: Today is a good day for epic winnage.11 hours ago" (Facebook status of the Chairman of Swedish Pirate Party.)
The Swedish Pirate Party (the first of the many national Pirate Parties popping up) wins it's first seat (bordering on two, some votes still left to count) in the European Parliament tonight, with 7+ %. In percentages they drive right past 3 long time established parties from the Swedish national parliament.
This is a historical moment in the turns of copyright and even civil liberties movements. I've personally for years supported the EFFish approach (and member of the Finnish equivalent EFFI) of lobbying all political parties with rational arguments about how good copyright, patents and civil liberties legislation will benefit the economy and society in general. Maybe we have achieved something there, who knows how the world would look like without the EFF. I'm still a supporter of the basic principle of copyright, after all, Open Source licenses like the GPL actually rely on it.
This is part II of my efforts to prove myself that I can do programming. In part one I successfully created a MySQL Cluster branch for myself and compiled it.
Let's go to the public MySQL bug database and see if there are any trivial MySQL Cluster bugs I could sharpen my teeth on. Heh, sure enough #32658 looks simple enough. There is a typo in an output string - so I could fix that without even doing any C++ code! (Funnily, a MySQL internal comment to the bug says something about it being embarrassing. Guess it is a good bug for me then, as patching over embarrasments is what Sales Engineers do routinely :-)
Let me see...
My collagues Anders and even Ivan sometimes blog about the grandeur of being a Sales Engineer. And I agree, it is a great job, probably the best I ever had, so far. But let me share a secret: It's not as technical as you'd think. Sure, they call me a "pre-sales consultant" alright, but I would be ashamed of comparing my own work with those of the real consultants. I sometimes jokingly say that the most amazing technical things in my job are airplanes (they fly in the air!) and how to make a nice slideshow. (OpenOffice Impress sucks btw, and I always envy my OS X + Keynote using friends on this one point.) What I mean is, I mostly meet with customers and talk about the technical stuff, and they think I know what I'm talking about.
I have to confess I'm kind of a wannabe hacker. I think of myself as a developer, yet in practice I always end up being a customer facing person like a Sales Engineer, a Trainer or basically anything where you do more talking than coding. But there is this tiny little Drupal module, footnotes, that I'm actually the proud maintainer of for several years now.
Wired already reported that Google Trends could have been used to find out about the Swine Flu epidemic in Mexico weeks before it was reported in the news media. Then, in anticipation of the Eurovision Song Contest 2009, the google engineers created a widget that would take Google Trends data as input (per country), and transform the search activity in each country to Eurovision points of 1 to 12. I copied the prediction to my Facebook page just when the Eurovision final was starting:
Having read a weeks worth of reactions to MySQL ending up at Oracle, I just want to say that by far the aptest1 commentary goes to Chris Powers from the Falcon team. A picture indeed says more than 1k words:
Now I know it is not the apocalypse and we probably won't be crucified either. But I do sympathise with the Falcon team, their reason of existence certainly is put more into question than us in general.
The prize to the most astonishing prediction goes to John Dvorak, writing in January 2008:
As mentioned previously, Monty Widenius is starting his new company based on some interesting premises. With Zak Greant they have co-authored a pamflet where they outline a blueprint for Open Source companies. In many ways this could be considered the "Dogme 95" of Open Source businesses:-)
So we had a very nice dinner with Monty and the Finnish "MySQL Ab alumni". It was to my surprise augmented by Sergei Golubchick, whom I had never really met face to face and was delighted to be seated next to. Also a first for me was to meet Pekka Nousiainen, from the MySQL Cluster team. Which is funny because I kind of work together with him on IRC and email, but we had never met before "in real life" either.
Before the dinner I had asked in a rather cryptic message people to share some MySQL memories on a separate page on this site, followed up a couple days later by Kaj's less cryptic message. I printed whatever had arrived before I left for the restaurant and read a few snippets out loud. I should say that Monty liked it very much and thanked more than once for such a nice thought. He said that hearing some of the things you had written brought back many nice memories for him, and between all the Swedish drinking songs there was a sentimental moment right there. Personally I also liked the "international connection" of enabling Monty's friends to participate in this kind of virtual manner together with us Helsinki bound people that actually were there face-to-face so to speak. After all, MySQL always was an international project.
if( $name == "Monty Widenius" ) {
STOP reading;
}
else {
Contribute a personal MySQL memory here
then spread-the-word!
}
So now that we have said goodbye to the old crew, I thought it might be appropriate to make some forward looking statements, as publicly traded companies say...
Kaj's talk at FOSDEM seems to be a good summary of the situation: We'll probably become a bit more integrated into Sun, there'll probably be less Swedish drinking songs1, and other than that we don't know yet.
One observation one could make is that instead of Scandinavian drinking songs, there might be some Turkish or Persian influnce taking over. In honour of that, today's post is a favorite internet viral video from these regions:
I try to limit the amount of hair-cut blog posts, but since The Data Charmer is writing travel blogs too... Here are some observations from Moscow:
It seems January and February were just completely taken up by customer engagements. I don't know if it is due to the recession or what, but we who are selling MySQL are just very busy right now. Towards the end of February I finally got on top of my life again, and on the bright side, I took almost a full week off from work, just to get even with all the overtime I accumulated.
This is old news now, but I still want to make a note of these historical events for my own blog too. If you're like yawn... then don't read it. OTOH, seems like I'm in good company commenting on this this week :-)
So some weeks ago we were hit by the surprising news that Mårten will leave Sun, just a few days after Monty had decided to do so too.
Let's make some comments in ORDER BY DESC chronological order.
I realized I don't often do what bloggers often do, link to other bloggers. But this Matthew Asletts post is really good, I seem to agree with it and it touches the same issues I just wrote a mini-trilogy about, namely the evolution of future Open Source business models. Of course, Matthew should know he analyzes Open Source companies for a living, I'm just a guy with one book.
While everyone else is doing predictions for 2009, I want to do something different and look about 10 years forwards and backwards: ie. finish my trilogy into the past and future of Open Source and Open Other Things - let's call it Free Culture for this post. The first part and the spark to this trilogy was Nokia acquiring Symbian followed by Open Source has arrived... where's the money?. So let's complete the circle and look at how Openness is doing outside the world of software...
"The Arts"Some years ago I posited that Music, Movies, Photos, Books and other works of art are following the same curve of development as Open Source did and that after an initial 10 years of resistance and ridicule from the established industry, something like a Creative Commons based model would win, just like Open Source is doing now for software. This is still possible, but I've come to realise the entertainment industry is also different from the software industry. (shocking! really?)
To some degree Creative Commons has been successful, for instance many people choose to upload their images on Flickr with a Creative Commons license, and myself and many others create derivative works out of those images, or just use the images for illustrations in our blogs. The Blender Foundation created the worlds first Open Source high definition short animation Elephants Dream, on the other hand I've understood this was done in a pretty traditional fashion by employing six animators that would sit and work in the Amsterdam Studios. To that extent, I'm much more excited about the Finnish Star Wreck movie and especially its successor Iron Sky. Iron Sky is being created in a very collaborative fasion on the Internet, and also other movies are free to use www.wreckamovie.com to collaborate on movie creation. Yet, it is not a 1-to-1 clone of the Open Source recipe. In particular, while there is a lot of collaboration, the script of Iron Sky is not public at all. I have to admit, there is some value in not knowing the plot when watching a movie - this is unlike software for sure.
To be clear, Iron Sky -while an extremely interesting project - isn't actually Open Source, because it uses the Non-Commercial version of Creative Commons. It is an interesting Internet phenomenon nevertheless.
Music and movies Ahoy!
(This is a purely technical or at least semi-technical post about a database and Web20 architecural issue.)
I just noticed about 5-10 status updates from my friends on Facebook are duplicated. Reading from the top I get to "17 hours ago" and then it restarts with duplicate status update messages from "5 hours ago".
Last Friday I got to enjoy the benefit of being a MySQL'r and located in Finland: We were invited to Monty, Anna and Maria for a MySQL Christmas party. Now that we are part of Sun, the company of course organises its own official Christmas party (who organises parties on a Thursday???) like all companies do, but a special MySQL party was still a very good idea, thanks Monty for inviting us. I especially enjoyed meeting some of the MySQL'rs who had recently either left Sun or happened to be on maternity leave.
Out of loyalty to someone I respect, I have chosen to withdraw my post about honesty that appeared at this address.
Let me however take this opportunity to remind my dear MySQL customers and users: I warmly recommend you consult an experienced MySQL expert when architecting your MySQL solutions. Setup a call with a Sales Engineer, hire a consultant, read the blogs of MySQL AB oldtimers. If you have a hard time finding solid MySQL info, we are there to help you.
I visited the London installment of our MySQL European Customer conference on Thursday. In a lecture hall of 250+ attendees I found an empty seat next to a man who turned out to be Patrik Pada who is the webmaster of HSS Media. Tick, tick, tick... [sound in my head thinking there is something familiar here...]
My parents had found a box of old stuff which they delivered to me and I went through yesterday. For instance, did you know that I appeared on a photo of Kellogs Frosties (with Tony the Tiger) in 1995! We have several of those boxes still saved, empty of course. No, I'm not a celebrity. I was in the audience of a hockey game in Lillehammer Olympics which they used on their boxes in 1995. All the more memorable then, since 1995 is still the one and only year that Finland won the World Championships!
Uh oh. It seems my blog posting frequency is dropping even below my modest minimum target of one per month. I didn't post anything at all in my summer vacation. Well, a small child plus a house to re-decorate does take its share of energy I guess.
I thought I'd still follow up with were we left before holidays:
What I'm left with is the question: Are we there? Is this it? Is all that is left just some minor cleaning up after the big battle has already been won? I think it might be. For me, somehow the day I read the news of the release of Symbian as Open Source marks the milestone when it was clear that we had "won". [...]
I was sitting in a train in the middle of rainy Ireland when I received a mail that Nokia has bought Symbian and is releasing it as Open Source. I didn't believe a word of it. But the web was full of news about it, so it was true. This is an amazing turn of events that I didn't anticipate at all. (You may or may not know that in my previous job I was heavily involved with Symbian programming. Ironically, one reason I left just 6 months ago is that I wanted to work in an Open Source environment :-)
(This blog entry was written and co-posted together with my friend and the CEO of Warp Networks and EBox Platform, Ignacio Correas. Copyright notice: Please note that pictures embedded in the story by Ignacio are certainly not Creative Commons licensed anything.)
Ignacio: I have always considered MySQL as the best model for open source companies. Their approach to the market, the execution of different business models, their relation with the community or the way their work internally as a virtual organization have shown an innovative and successful example of how an IT company in the 21st century can be managed.
I thought I had already conquered the jet lag last night when I fell asleep at 22:00 (that's 10 pm...). But then I woke up somewhere around 2:30, read a book for a while until I decided to give up and have a nice breakfast. I kind of like jet lag though, it is a nice feeling to get out of bed 5:30, when no one else is awake, and birds are singing outside.
There would be a lot to tell about the conference, but you kind of find summaries from many live bloggers on Planet MySQL. One interesting aspect of the conference of course was to meet so many interesting people, many of whom I work with of course, but meeting them in flesh is still great. And Santa Clara being in Silicon Valley adds another funny revelational feeling to it all. For a European Yahoo, Google, Digg and others are Internet companies and seeing that they actually do have tangible offices in Silicon Valley was a surprisingly unreal revelation to me. Oh yes, I also saw the Transmeta offices, you know, where Linus went to work after graduating with the M.Sc. work titled "Linux: A portable operating system" (What did YOU do for master's thesis? I know I did multiple choice quizzes, I'm not kidding...). And when strolling in Santa Clara I was also amused to find out that apparently Freedom also begins there, just a few blocks away from where the conference was held!
I'm hosting a MySQL Tour event in Helsinki, probably this is the last stop on the tour so it will end in the same city where MySQL got started. If you are nearby, please pop in!
***
MySQL Tour visits Open Tuesday in Helsinki May 6th
This winter we haven't had as many Open Tuesday meetings as we had last year,
but we will finish off the season with meeting Sun and MySQL on May 6th at
18:00, in the usual place Club Ahjo, Bulevardi 4, Helsinki.
If you are reading this it means the nameserver update is in effect and we have officially moved to a new web hotel. From its inception openlife.cc has been located on a GoDaddy.com server, and almost from day one I had my doubts about it: "BTW, is this GoDaddy server slow or what? Or is it just Drupal? I wonder what will happen when I actually get some visitors." Now I know what happened. After the site was added to planetmysql.com, response times went from slow (like 20-30 secs) to unusable (60 secs, which means 50% of the time you'd just stare at a white page after page timeout). I already relocated the Finnish sister site avoinelama.fi some time ago, and actually regretted my first choice of hosting provider DreamHost, only to find out that the current one HostGator, wasn't perfect either (doesn't support unix style directories /~hingo/, but at least allows a hacked redirect to save the day).
Bruce Perens has nominated himself to become a board member of the Open Source Initiative. To get there, the OSI board (which elects its own members) has said he needs to show he has support in the Open Source community. If you want to show Bruce your support, you can do it here: [techp.org]
MySQL being acquired by Sun has of course put a lot of focus on the success of MySQL so far, but it is also interesting to think what success will mean as part of Sun too. In this light a recent interview of Mårten by Business Review Online about the acquisition was inspiring. (As words from Mårten usually are!)
"It's a marathon, not a sprint," he said. "If a 15-year-old downloads MySQL now, when do we get our money? In about 15 years' time when he is head of IT at a company and he loves MySQL. But in many cases it will happen sooner than that."
"In open source we say fail fast, scale fast. Many web 2.0 ideas will fail, but when Google or Facebook [two of MySQL's biggest customers] get it right they suddenly need to scale like crazy," Mickos said. "Open source is the only model where they can scale fast on exactly the same code base; it's the same product. All of the [commercial] database players have free versions, but when you need to scale you need a slightly different version [of the database]."
I was wrong in my last post, it seems that all Sun database developers are now part of the same organisation, including PostgreSQL's Josh Berkus.
MySQL has the pluggable storage engine architecture, which is unique in the industry. The idea is you pick from among a suite of storage engines the most suitable one. PostgreSQL on the other hand has a plugin architecture for programming languages you can then use for stored procedures. And the cool thing about Open Source...
Someone went as far as to implement a PostgreSQL plugin of LOLCODE, a funny programming language I didn't know about until recently. So now you could do this with PostgreSQL:
I was finishing up a business trip in Madrid yesterday and heading back to the airport while making sporadic calls into our conference calls that were going on. The Sun acquisition is now closed and we are part of the worlds biggest Open Source company. Mårten Mickos is heading the Sun Database Technology Group the Sun Database Group, which in addition to MySQL includes some happy Norwegians (they are always happy) of the Sun owned Clustra Systems, known as the Database Technology Group, who also sing drinking songs in their own language :-) They also work on the Apache Derby project. However, there was no mention of any Postgres developers falling under Mårten (caveat: I wasn't able to hear everything). I think it might be best so :-)
Here is the funny video of today, it is a documentary of the evolution of the species known as Sun Sales Engineers (I'm a Sales Engineer):
In December 2007 I was invited by www.re-public.gr to participate in a debate on the social web. While I like writing and the topic was good for me, getting a grip on the topic proved to be surprisingly difficult. In the past months I've had the privilege to hang around academics who study the phenomenons of Free Software, Internet or as one group calls it in the broadest possible way, peer-to-peer production. Listening to and reading some of the academics has been quite difficult, as socio-economics is not something I would know much about. Yet the setting of the re-public.gr discussion seemed to belong to a category I've had especially difficult to relate to. Thanks to my friend Michel Bauwens I've now learned to categorise these contributions as some kind of leftist socio-economical school of academics.
The basic framework seems to be that no matter how much progress we've had since the 19th century, and no matter what phenomenon is being discussed, somebody somewhere is being exploited!!! With this realisation I was able to scribble some kind of very non-academic reply:
There is a japanese karaoke bar here in the Dolphin and Swan hotel (where we are finishing the the MySQL All Company Meeting). I asked the people who would find it appropriate to sing along, and there were many who did:
So I worked with MySQL for a full 2 days, basically one day on an airplane and another day in the new employee introduction we had in the Orlando meeting. Then I wake up the next morning, Mårten Mickos stands up on the podium with a shaky voice and tells the audience that Sun has bought MySQL. Then there is that 5 seconds of quiet when people realise that it was not a joke, it's for real. Or like me, it was 5 seconds when I realised that, hey, MySQL, that's us.
So I managed to answer all those questions correctly and the US Border Control officer kindly let us into the country. It was easy since the questions were the same as the last time I visited the US in 2000. Filling this sheet is always a fun time, it makes me wonder wanna know wether there exist any statistics on how many terrorists and drug trafficants get caught by accidentally filling in the wrong box :-) Then of course there are some tricky questions, what if you are traveling to the US to engange in immoral but legal activities. From what I know sitting naked in the sauna would already be suspicious here ;-D
Wow, this is shocking...
Some time ago we had a discussion on the p2presearch mailing list about the deletionism movement that is rampant on Wikipedia. This led to Michel Bauwens spending a few hours finding out more about the topic. The results - posted on his blog - were shocking. (Also the comments to the article are good, some my own of course :-)
Modified by Henrik Ingo from
original picture by "Just Taken Pics'" @ Flickr. CC-BY
I haven't written much on this blog related to my work. There's a simple reason: Apart from some welcome exceptions, my work at Sesca is not at all related to Open Source. And even when it is, we are not supposed to talk about our work much in public. Also, as a manager my work is rather boring sometimes, not something I'd want to write about.
All of this is about to change though. On Monday I will start working as a Sales Engineer (or some call it "pre-sales consultant") for MySQL! Here's a list of things I'm looking forward to:
I didn't blog about it, but I'm sure you read it in all the other blogs, that the band Radiohead did a revolutionary thing in October of 2007. They released their new album for download on the Internet. Fans were able to pay a price they could determine themselves. This is great news for those of us who believe the old and stagnated recording industry has got it all wrong. We need people like the Radiohead guys to prove them wrong.
Dear friends. I'm proud to announce that on December 11th I could witness the miracle of birth and becoming a father to a healthy 3850 gram boy. Already on his birthday he had hair long enough to make a small pony tail - thus completing a line of three generations of ponytails for the Ingo men! Some days after his birth we also shot this picture, with the infamous ThinkGeek.com t-shirts.
In the part about business models, Open Life contains a chapter titled Glass House, a totally transparent company (fictitious). As the title already gives away, it is my fictitious vision - a utopia, if you will - of a radically open business model, where even the tendering process and financials of the company would be publicly available.
The New Inspirer reports on a business model not at all like that, but this was really inspiring to read:
Entrepreneur Sanne Roemen never makes an invoice. She lets her clients decide what they want to pay her. And how they want to pay her. Sanne, who consults on how companies can apply web 2.0 principles in their business, knows by experience by now that clients generally pay her three times as much as she would have offered before the job was done. The side-effect of clients paying less than expected therefore isn’t too much of a problem. “I can’t determine for the client what the value of my services is. That’s something which is different for everybody”.
The server that among many other things was hosting the avoinelama.fi domain crashed last Saturday. My main private email is henrik.ingo@avoinelama.fi, so for many days I did not receive any mails.
First day of the Peer production seminar in Nottingham university is over (though I'm posting this the next morning). I have to say it exceeded my expectations, so I'm really glad I was able to attend. There are several characters with a strong Free Software background here mingling with academics who are sociologists or whatnot. It creates a good mix of people on the one hand being able to give very concrete examples of how Free Software projects do stuff and on the other hand the academic minded people being very intelligent about analysing and generalising the concepts in action.
Andreas Wittel and Michael Bauwens introduced the day. Michael clearly has been thinking about this stuff for a long time, most things that we end up talking about he is already aware of and can immediately give very detailed insigths to them.
Heyhey... after a year of hard office work, it's like the good old times again: my blog seems to contain mostly notes of various conferences I've been to :-) (By the way, I also had an interesting trip to Dublin last week, maybe I'll write about that later.)
Wow what a week it was. I attended the Open Mind conference and it took me a couple of days to recover even so I could just blog about it! There is no way to blog about everything that happened, so I guess this will be more like a long list of namedropping :-)
(But, unlike me, Zak Greant seems to possess a brain that can produce typing and listening at the same time so go to his blog for more detailed commentary on the conference. My collague and friend Paul Sladen also wrote on LWN about the COSS.fi summer of coders.)
Years ago a company called SCO filed a lawsuit againt IBM for "stealing" code from "their" Unix and placing it into Linux. It was big news then, but most people haven't cared for years. Of course all of this was just a sham of the SCO management. It's been shown for some time that actually nobody stole anything for Linux, and in any case SCO didn't even own Unix in the first place. Recently SCO finally filed for bankruptcy, putting at least some kind of end to their misery.
How many open source developers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is 17. It takes... 17 to argue about the license; 17 to argue about the brain-deadedness of the light bulb architecture; 17 to argue about a new model that encompassess all models of illumination and makes it simple to replace candles, campfires, pilot lights, and skylights with the same easy-to-extend mechanism; 17 to speculate about the secretive industrial conspiracy that ensures that light bulbs will burn out frequently; 1 to finally change the light bulb, and 16 who decide that this solution is good enough for the time being.
This blog is supposedly at least partly about Open Source business models. Here is a LinuxWorld interview with Matt Asay about many interesting actions taken in running Alfresco as an Open Source company. While this is a must read for anyone doing Open Source business, I'll summarise the key points here. (The article is rather long, but again, everything is worth reading.)
Uh oh. Summer vacation is over and I've been working for 8 days already. Honestly I preferred the holiday :-/
As you may or may not know, my current job is being a manager at Sesca Technologies. In short that means I get to sit in a lot of meetings, look at my budget in an Excel sheet and lots of other interesting stuff... NOT! I don't get to do any of the interesting stuff anymore, such as programming and all the other things I used to enjoy.
Conveniently for the start of my holiday we received a new HP nx7400 from LinuxComp.net. Outside the US it is still impossible to by those Ubuntu Dell laptops, so this one comes with Windows XP forced upon me, BUT it also comes with Kubuntu 7.04 out of the box, courtesy of the great service by LinuxComp's Jukka Hellen!!! (As you might remember, there is already one LinuxComp Kubuntu laptop in the family, so we already knew we would be satisfied with Jukka's services.)
I'm now one week into my summer holidays. Jee!
We spent some days at my (and also my wife's) parents in Pietarsaari. In the picture here I'm taking a swim in a small sandpit. The water was warmer than I expected. (Next day we went to the beach by the sea. No swimming there, it was still freezing enough to hurt my feet!)
Reader Tomi Nousiainen sent me this sunny and relaxed greeting for Midsummer, which he allowed me to share with all of you.
The recent beta release of Apple's Safari browser for Windows made me reminisce of the history of browsers and recall a funny fact in the naming of them.
Did you ever realise, that all the major browsers follow a historical path in their naming tradition? First came the Netscape Navigator. (Well, skipping Mosaic, of course.) Then of course the navigators were followed by explorers, exploring the new continents as they were discovered. When the KDE developers decided to start creating their own browser, they set this tradition in stone by naming their browser Konqueror, with the explicit explanation that historically that's what usually followed the explorers. (Of course the fact that it's a word that could be miss-spelled with a capital K in the name was probably a factor too. You think?)
It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
This slightly anarchistic, yet intuitively true and acceptable statement has been on my mind many times lately. In Finland the public discussion about copyright often circulates around some legislative questions and arguments for and against certain standpoints. I call this "the EFF tradition". In contrast in Sweden and some other Northern European countries the people active in this discussion represent the Pirate Party line. (Which also exists in Finland but is newly founded and not a dominant voice yet.) While the Finnish discussion follows the EFF-like traditions - raising questions like DRM is bad - the Pirate Party goes right for the other extreme: legalise "piracy" altogether. (Note than then it obviously wouldn't be called "piracy" anymore.) In practice, the stances of EFF/EFFI and the Pirate Party are quite close to each other, for instance on privacy issues or software patents, but the public image and the means towards the end are completely opposite.
I wrote two months ago about the Finnish hacker heroes Mikko Rauhala and Einari Karttunen, who were going to trial for breaking the Finnish EUCD law (equivalent to US DMCA law). The verdict is now in and the guys were freed. But the grounds for the verdict are more significant: The judge concluded that CSS - the Digital Rights Management system used on DVD movies - is not an effective protection measure, since it is easy for anyone to get and use software that breaks it.
After years of teaching programming, writing about programming and doing programming, last autumn there was a situation at my work where I had to step up and take the leadership for the Helsinki office of Sesca. Since then I've been doing anything but coding: sitting in meetings, checking my budget, hiring more people like crazy (yes, we're hiring, every day) and trying to keep up with everything that comes with managing a unit in one of the fastest growing companies in Finland.
We bought a digital-tv set top box as an after-christmas present for ourselves. I went for the bells and whistles with the newest ProCaster1, yet... it wasn't the most exciting tech gadget I ever have seen.
Finnish Linux Users Group has posted the results of their poll with election candidates. A certain Nils Torvalds, running for the Swedish Peoples Party1 was among the 10% who answered. I'll translate this just for your Saturday amusement...
According to Google this has not yet been reported in English, so I'll guess it's up to me...
Mikko Rauhala and Einar Karttunen have on February 13th, 2007 been charged with breaking parts of the Finnish copyright law that were passed in 2005 to implement the EUropean Copyright Directive, our equivalent of the DMCA. The charges are that they participated in an online service organised by Mr Rauhala to provide advice on how to circumvent DRM and in addition Mr Karttunen has published online a computer program written by him in the Haskell programming language. The charge is especially serious because Rauhala paid Karttunen 0,05€ for this program.
Last week I was supposed to be in Spain for the Free Software World Conference. I was invited there to give a short speech, but due to some last minute changes I had to stay in Finland. Just as well, because then I caught a really bad flu, so I wouldn't have enjoyed air planes and hot weather that much.
One purpose of the Open Life book and this site is to study different Open Source business models. And one category which has significantly increased during the last year is the body of software that was previously closed source and then released as Open Source.
Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet John Buckman and "Mrs Buckman" Jan as they visited in Helsinki. John gave a talk about his Magnatune business and Creative Commons in the Aula forum. Unfortunately, the video is not yet available online, but let's hope it gets here eventually.
I've come to the age where my time is more valuable than my money, and I don't have time to do all the things I would like to do. One of those things is to install time and again new Linux distributions on new computers. The only problem with this situation is that it is surprisingly difficult to buy computers with Linux pre-installed, especially laptops. For laptops this service would be particularly valuably, since support for different laptops currently varies quite much, so I would be willing to pay a premium for the expertise of actually getting a laptop that works well with Linux. And mind you, I need one with a Finnish keyboard, so EmperorLinux did not really fit this problem that well.
There is a case coming up in the US Supreme Court, where Microsoft and AT&T are arguing whether a software patent granted in the US can also regulate how some software can be sold abroad. The case itself borders on ridiculous for an engineer to understand, but there seems to be no limits on what lawyers for big companies can come up with. Of course we don't want to care in Europe whether the US patent system allows something or not, just as we don't care about any other US laws either in our independent nations.
SUSE is indeed the nr1 choice right now, but I think there are many of us troubled with the direction Novell is going. (Part of the problem being, we can only guess what the direction is...)[...] I often wonder whether Novell knew what they were buying into when they bought both Ximian and SUSE. (me discussing Novell on LWN about 6 months ago)
Sun has been saying it for more than a year now, but we wanted action, not words. Then they open sourced Solaris, but we were not interested in that, we only wanted Java. Then last week it happened...
