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Items by hingo
OpenLife.cc blogs
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Apache-MySQL-PHP on my phone, and it wasn't even hard
Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 12:44pm PDT by hingo
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Open Source has arrived... where's the money?
Posted: August 21st, 2008, 6:39am PDT by hingo
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". [...]
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The Open Sourcing of Symbian by Nokia
Posted: June 30th, 2008, 11:12am PDT by hingo
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 :-)
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The MySQL model
Posted: May 13th, 2008, 1:02pm PDT by hingo
(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. -
Back from MySQL User Conference
Posted: April 21st, 2008, 9:52pm PDT by hingo
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!
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Sun - MySQL Tour comes to Helsinki Open Tuesday on May 6th
Posted: April 10th, 2008, 12:41am PDT by hingo
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!
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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. -
Bruce Perens needs your help in re-joining the OSI board
Posted: March 25th, 2008, 3:12am PDT by hingo
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]
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Scale to everywhere
Posted: March 18th, 2008, 5:06am PDT by hingo
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]."
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Postgres and LOLCODE: GIMMEH RECORDZ OUTTA DATABUKKIT
Posted: March 15th, 2008, 1:17pm PDT by hingo
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:
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Sun deal closed
Posted: February 27th, 2008, 3:10am PST by hingo
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):
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Re-public.gr publishes "Ethics, Freedom and Trust" my contribution to a weird academic debate
Posted: February 2nd, 2008, 2:17pm PST by hingo
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:
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Kaj is Like a Virgin
Posted: January 19th, 2008, 7:34am PST by hingo
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:
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I'm worth 2,5M USD! ...or not?
Posted: January 17th, 2008, 9:39am PST by hingo
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.
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To and at the MySQL Staff Meeting, Orlando FL
Posted: January 15th, 2008, 1:53pm PST by hingo
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
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Wikipedia under siege!
Posted: January 13th, 2008, 6:45am PST by hingo
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 :-)
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I'm a MySQL'r now!
Posted: January 9th, 2008, 3:39am PST by hingo
Modified by Henrik Ingo from
original picture by "Just Taken Pics'" @ Flickr. CC-BYI 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:
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Radiohead and other songs
Posted: January 2nd, 2008, 6:22pm PST by hingo
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.
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A new Ingo was released unto the world December 11th, 2007
Posted: December 20th, 2007, 2:10pm PST by hingo
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.
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Open Payment: the client decides your pay
Posted: December 2nd, 2007, 5:51am PST by hingo
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”.
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Blog from the Nottingham seminar
Posted: November 16th, 2007, 2:33am PST by hingo
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.
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Direct Democracy - My presentation in Nottingham
Posted: November 11th, 2007, 12:39pm PST by hingo
Enclosure: [download]
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.)
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Open Mind 2007
Posted: October 7th, 2007, 3:52am PDT by hingo
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.)
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Public apologies and/or excuses from the SCO fanboys
Posted: September 25th, 2007, 12:00pm PDT by hingo
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.
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Steven Weber: The Success of Open Source and the stew in the magic pot
Posted: September 23rd, 2007, 9:48am PDT by hingo
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.
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Matt Asay on Alfresco business practices
Posted: August 19th, 2007, 3:29am PDT by hingo
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.)
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limericks on lkml and other things from my vacation
Posted: August 8th, 2007, 1:09pm PDT by hingo
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.
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Enjoying yet another Kubuntu laptop
Posted: July 23rd, 2007, 1:04am PDT by hingo
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.)
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Long tail
Posted: July 6th, 2007, 3:01am PDT by hingo
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!) -
Summer greetings with a sunny picture plus drinking game
Posted: June 24th, 2007, 1:06pm PDT by hingo
Reader Tomi Nousiainen sent me this sunny and relaxed greeting for Midsummer, which he allowed me to share with all of you.
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Navigator, Explorer, Konqueror, Safari
Posted: June 16th, 2007, 10:52am PDT by hingo
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?)
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Rights and wrongs in copyright
Posted: June 3rd, 2007, 8:23am PDT by hingo
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.
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Finnish court rules CSS protection used in DVDs “ineffective”
Posted: May 27th, 2007, 7:15am PDT by hingo
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.
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Healthy hacking
Posted: May 2nd, 2007, 11:50am PDT by hingo
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.
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digi-tv
Posted: April 19th, 2007, 11:52am PDT by hingo
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.
- ProCaster is an OEM brand of TopField, and usually the ProCaster versions come out first, kind of like Fedora before RHEL.
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Nils Torvalds is for Free Software, Jyrki Kasvi's Klingon campaign on CNN.
Posted: March 10th, 2007, 4:46am PST by hingo
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...
- This small party represents mainly the Swedish speaking minority in Finland. There is no connection to Sweden-the-country-next-to-us, just so you know.
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Mikko Rauhala being busy: charged for breaking EUCD, running for parliament and collecting 8k€ in 24h
Posted: March 4th, 2007, 9:55am PST by hingo
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.
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Almost participated in Spanish conference, cleaned up some spam
Posted: February 17th, 2007, 3:23am PST by hingo
Enclosure: [download]
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.
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Second Life client released as Open Source (server to follow)
Posted: January 20th, 2007, 12:47pm PST by hingo
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.
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Mooch a copy of Open Life and meeting John Buckman and Neil Leyton
Posted: January 7th, 2007, 3:16am PST by hingo
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.
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Persons of the year 2006: You and Rory Fitzpatrick
Posted: December 31st, 2006, 12:12pm PST by hingo
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Dad got a Kubuntu laptop for Christmas, from LinuxComp.net
Posted: December 28th, 2006, 2:56pm PST by hingo
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.
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Surprise attack to get rid of software patents in the US
Posted: December 17th, 2006, 10:58am PST by hingo
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.
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Novell CEO trying to understand his customers
Posted: November 26th, 2006, 12:03pm PST by hingo
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)
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It's a new day, the SUN is rising, Java is free!
Posted: November 19th, 2006, 1:08pm PST by hingo
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...