TheOpenForce.com

Thanks Everyone!

Thanks to Jay Pipes and the conference team for putting together a great event and especially the top-notch keynotes. I think this is one reason we had such large attendence this year with more than 2,000 attendees. Also thanks to all the bloggers, speakers, session buddies, community members, users, boffers, drinkers, runners, sales people for bringing customers, alliance guys for getting sponsors, to engineering for shipping great products, marketing for promoting the conference, consultants for having great solutions, SEs for keeping us honest, support guys for meeting with customers and more...

There are some great conference photos from Duncan Davidson available on Flickr, including the one above of our community awards.

Burning the Boats!

At the MySQL Conference & Expo this week, Marten Mickos showed a slide in his keynote presentation of a recent ceremonial "S-1 burning" that took place on the beach in Santa Cruz.  The S-1 is the document filed when a company goes public with the SEC.  MySQL put a lot of effort into preparing the S-1 and getting ready to go public over the last year or so, working with auditors, creating the prospectus, lining up the bankers, the lawyers and all of that.  We were literally weeks away from filing when Marten had his dinner with Jonathan Schwartz who asked about acquiring the company in late november. 

So the S-1 burning was a little bittersweet especially for CFO Dennis "the fox" Wolf (right) and VP Finance Jeff "in socks" West (middle) who had put so much time into the preparation.  Also the photo shows how meticulous Dennis is since he's giving the numbers one final review before tossing them onto the fire!

But now that we are part of Sun, we won't look back.  Burn, baby, burn!

MySQL Boxers

What could be more of an incentive to attend the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara next week than to know that you could get a pair of genuine MySQL boxer shorts?   They have the official "freedom to work anywhere" motto on them, because, well, if you're working at home, you may as well work in your boxers.  (This is not recommended for those who work in an office.)

This past weekend I was in Utah for the first ever Open Source Goat Rodeo (OSGR) gathering organized by rabid open source ski-cowboy and pie-maker extraordinaire Matt Asay.  I'm not sure why, but I got everyone to put the boxers on their head for a group photo.  From left to right, Matt Asay (Alfresco), Marc Fleury (JBoss founder), John Robb (Zimbra), Fabrizio Copobianco (Funambol), Larry Augustin (open source investor), Lon Johnston (PageOne), Ross Mason (Mulesource), myself and Bryce Roberts (O'Reilly Alpha Tech Venture).  Richard Daley (Pentaho) and Jeff Borek (IBM) had the good sense to not join us for pie and boxers.  Amazingly enough, no alcohol was involved.

The Open Source Goat Rodeo was an interesting "un-conference."  Perhaps a bit unstructured for my taste in that there's no formal agenda or presentations, just lots of good discussions, whether over lunch, beer, or on the ski slopes.   I hope we will make it an annual event but continue to keep it very small and informal.  Thanks to Matt for organizing the event and for bringing the pie.   

BTW, there is still time to register in advance for the MySQL conference and avoid the "on site" charge.  But some tutorials are now sold out.   But you can still vote for what you're most looking forward to at the conference. 

• MySQL: Conference, Job openings, QuickPoll
• Open Source Goat Rodeo: Video, Photos

 

Danger: St Patrick's Day Drunk Dial Competition

Ever thought about dialing someone when you're three-sheets-to-the-wind to let them know how you really feel?  Now instead of calling your ex, your boss or your soon to be ex-boss, all-star MySQL web developer Dups has created the St Patrick's Day Drunk Dial phone line.  Now your innermost drunken thoughts are safe and stored with millions of web listeners around the world.

I tested out the service after a few celebratory MySQL vodka shots and it works as advertised. I just hope I don't win.  Otherwise I'll have to call back and beg to be disqualified.  It's a great service to society, but I can't help but wonder: What about the other 51 weeks of the year?

Check it out.  I'm sure this is powered by open source.  But remember, not every web site is gonna win MySQL Application of the year at the MySQL Conference.  But who knows, this one might.  Particularly if you call today: +1-317-644-6963 (normal long distance charges to US may apply.)

• St Pat's Drunk Dial: Home, History, Rules, FAQ
• News coverage: Laptop Magazine, Gizmodo

MySQL & Sun Community Town Hall

We did a community townhall video session earlier this week with Jonathan Schwartz, Rich Green and myself.  You can view it online at http://ustream.tv/sun and at YouTube.  This is a pretty high-level discussion, but we responded to some questions that came in from the live chat about platforms, languages, patents, how Sun makes money from MySQL etc.  I was also hoping to resolve once and for all what remains one of the hot developer issues: vi vs emacs.  And in keeping with the MySQL tradition, we had a vodka toast at the end.

There were also more technical IRC sessions led by Kaj Arno and Ian Murdock this week and we'll be kicking off a worldtour mashup visiting many cities around the world and toasting to the MySQL community and wrapping up at the MySQL Conference & Expo April 14-17 in Santa Clara. You can find out more info at www.sun.com/mysqltour. 

I'll be in Austin Sunday March 9 for an event that's sponsored by Sun at La Zona Rosa 9pm featuring live performances by The Smithereens and Seven Mary Three.  I hope to see many MySQL users there!

 

Photos from Orlando

Here are a few photos from our announcement in Orlando earlier this week.  It's been crazy busy, but the response has generally been very positive from our community, our customers and our employees. 

It's been fun to have some pretty cool Sun folks at our company meeting in Orlando including Rich Green, James Gosling, Ian Murdock, Bill Shannon, Karen Padir, Rich Lang, Dave Douglas, Eduardo Pelegrillo and others. (Also, thanks to Tobias for the photo of the long-haired guy playing RockBand at our party Wednesday night.) 

No doubt there will be a few gotchas here and there as we work out integration details, but I'm stoked.  Tired, but stoked. 

Helan går in Orlando

The above is a YouTube clip of Kaj Arnö leading MySQL and Sun executives in a rendition of  "Helan går" the official Swedish drinking song at MySQL.  This was followed by 400 shots of vodka being downed in unison. 

New MySQL Web Site Home Page

Late last week we did a minor change to the layout of the MySQL home page and navigation.  While there are still a few minor issues to be corrected, overall the response has been favorable.  The key thing we wanted to do was reduce some of the clutter on the home page and provide a more streamlined and professional look.  The web team did a great job launching English, French, German, Italian and Japanese versions simultaneous.   You'll also see some other nice graphic design elements throughout the site, such as on the new jobs section at www.mysql.com/jobs and elsewhere. (And yes, we're hiring -- lots of open positions in Engineering and elsewhere.) 

But like any web site, it's a work in progress and there will be more improvements in coming weeks, months and years. 

Let us know what you like or don't like about the new look and any suggestions for further improvements.

• MySQL: Home, French, German, Italian, Japanese

Blogging at Infoworld

For those who may not have noticed, I was suckered into asked to take over part of Matt Asay's former blog over at InfoWorld when he fled the coop moved his blogging over to CNet.  Both my old blog (that's this one, www.theopenforce.com) and the new one are aggregated at PlanetMySQL so for many folks this may not be any big deal.  I will continue to post occasionally on this blog, but most of my postings will be done on the InfoWorld site for now along with co-conspirators Dave Dargo, Savio Rodrigues, and Dave Rosenberg.  It's just too much work to maintain two blogs at the same pace.

Here are some of the recent stories I posted at Infoworld:

• SugarCRM goes GPL 3 / OSI approves Attribution
• O'Reilly Radar at Oscon
• Open Source Barometer at Alfresco
• JasperSoft BI Suite 2.0
• Microsoft in China
• Linux Shoots for the Big Leagues
• Freedoms We Take For Granted
• Big in China

Carpal tunnel syndrome

This post is slightly off-topic, but I thought I'd share some information.  I've been suffering from carpal tunnels syndrome recently, and it's only gotten worse.  Apparently I'm not the only bloggers to suffer from this. And what's apparently made it worse is in my Internet/e-mail/blogging addiction, I've queued up a bunch of posts to take place over the next couple of weeks while I'm traveling.  (I may also have aggravated this by trying to play a lot of rock guitar.  Recently when I'm completely ill-equipped to do so.)

At any rate, I'm trying not to type so much.  And some of you may have already guessed that this posting is being written using voice recognition software from Dragon systems.  (Naturally speaking, version 9).  The software works better than expected, but you do need to review and fix a few mistakes along the way.  I'm purposefully leaving the mistakes in this posting to seek and see how accurate (or inaccurate).  The software really is.  Okay my lesson, I haven't fully learned is that you shouldn't cause too much between clauses, otherwise, it treats them as separate sentences.

The other thing I've done is picked out a couple of a wrist bandages.  In this case, the Smart glove by IMAK.  They look a little dorky, but it leaves their black.  So that's rock 'n roll for you.  I'm also taking a lot of ibuprofen and icing my wrists routinely.  But mostly I need to stop typing.  Good luck with that.

If anyone has any tips or recommendations please let me know.

• Dragon Systems: Naturally Speaking