Last week’s Wednesday (seems like ages ago, and I haven’t got any blogging time since), the Sun MySQL Meetup-Mashup World Tour got to Paris.

The Meetup-Mashup gets a local flavour wherever we are. And the local flavour in Paris was an Irish Pub, where we had an intimate meeting with a good 160 of the closest friends of MySQL.

We had some bière gratuite (free beer) to celebrate the logiciels libres (free software), as well as a presentation by Giuseppe, after a brief introduction by myself and followed by an overview by Sun.

I had good encounters with old friends and made some new ones. Damien Seguy from Nexen.net belong to the oldest, and our discussions ranged from the well-being of the French PHP community to stuffed animals, particularly those depictingo species relevant to FOSS (elephants, penguins, and, let’s not forget, dolphins).

The PHP contingency was probably the biggest developer audience in the group, but Ruby on Rails and Java were also ably represented.

From a community perspective, the most interesting discussions I had with three gentlemen from www.developpez.com: Adrien Artero in charge of the Business Intelligence column (bidvp.com@gmail.com), Nicolas Joseph and Antoine Dinémant. They asked us to help them by identifying the best articles related to MySQL on our website, so that their volunteers can translate them to French and publish them on their developer site. Talk about well-aligned interests! We’re happy to oblige, as we very much welcome spreading the word on MySQL in the languages relevant to the developers — in the case of France, French.

Some notes on www.developpez.com, the French language community that concentrates the largest number of professional IT specialists:

• Provides for free all kinds of useful services for IT specialists: newsletter, magazine, topicality events, tutorials, articles, FAQs, tests, benchmarks, debates, surveys, tools, sources, components and examples of code, blogs, and free site hosting for IT specialists.
• Up to 130.000 visits per day
• More than 1.400.000 distinct readers attend www.developpez.com at least once a month.
• With more than 5000 messages per day, it is also the most active forum of mutual support in its field.
• The largest voluntary editorial team: more than 500 authors.

A great thanks to Mick Carney, our senior Sales guy in France, to Giuseppe Maxia, who organised the event from a community perspective, and, most of all, our long-time French PR agent Véronique Loquet of AL’X Communication, who did an amazing job in planning and coordinating this event.

Looking forward to the next French event, an enterprise event directed at Sun & MySQL customers, happening in June.

References:

• Damien Seguy’s blog: http://www.nexen.net/articles/dossier/18257-rencontre_sun/mysql_du_3_avril_2008.php
• Giuseppe Maxia’s blog: http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/2008/04/meetup-in-paris-mysql-social-event.html

Twice a year, Sun invites their Sun Fellows, Sun Distinguished Engineers and many Principal Engineers, Sales Engineers and Consultants to an offsite meeting, usually in California and this time in the Chaminade in Santa Cruz. For the first time, we now had MySQLers present — and over 20 of us.

The purpose of the meeting is to share new trends, new technologies, and new ideas across Sun’s wide spectrum spanning everything from the bare metal of the Niagara system through other aspects of system all the way to software.

I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to describe MySQL the Product, MySQL the Business and MySQL the Culture, in a long 90 minute day session in front of all the audience. Our Product, Business and Culture were described by a six-headed panel, with Jim Starkey, Jan Kneschke, Michael “Monty” Widenius, Mikael Ronström, Igor Babaev and Serg Golubchik.

MySQLers in general were very well received, despite our loud newbie comments about how to “properly” address Open Source issues and develop Free Software.

There’s plenty of time to talk one-on-one, and a multitude of Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. We might have been excessive in the amount of MySQL related BOF sessions offered, as I at one point had to ask a colleague where “the Sun BOF” was.

Yesterday, we concluded the Sakila Express World Tour, more aptly named “Sakila Tour of Seven Top European MySQL AB Sites Using Decadence Airlines“. The last two were in Germany: Hamburg in the north, in Sun’s offices, and Munich in the south, in Hilton am Tucherpark.

In Hamburg, we went directly into the meat with three hardcore developers. Onboarding, intellectual property, and contractors were the hardcore topics.

Ulf, Jan and Kay experienced Izhevsk and Kiev vicariously through the blog

The discussions added plenty of colour to the picture for Julie and Dave. Julie has a great metaphor for explaining the purpose of Sakila Express: To understand how the integration message comes out in the other end, in the Telephone game (also known as Chinese whispers, in German as Stille Post, in Swedish as Ryska posten, in French as Téléphone arabe, where the German version is the only one which would pass all tests of political correctness).

Sadly, Dave had to depart for the US after Hamburg, and sadly, Julie and I had to go back to reality from having used the rental jets of our beloved Decadence Airlines, into using normal airlines, in our case Lufthansa.

Lufthansa departs from the “normal” part of the airport in Hamburg

Me getting back to real life, in a real aircraft

The last stop in Munich saw plenty of local MySQLers, but this time also quite a few Sun employees and MySQL community members from Mayflower and other companies.

This time, my thank you note goes to Julie Ross and Dave Douglas. We had a fantastic week together! It was superb to meet with MySQLers, as a team of three, in so many different locations in such a short time. Your comfort zone when travelling was wide, and when in distress (not being allowed into the Moscow hotel without an immigration card, having lost the pilots in Izhevsk, not knowing how much time was left to get to the airport in Kiev), you still were a charm to travel with. You listened to the concerns of the MySQLers with interest, respect and an open mind, and I think I can speak for everyone when I say that your presence was highly appreciated. Well done!

P.S. Julie: Do expect me to verify your knowledge of three key phrases whenever we meet from now on: Nasdrovye, Budmo and Zum Wohl!

Are you close to Munich? Are you available next Friday afternoon? Would you like to meet some MySQLers? And some Sun employees, whom we hope to lure from Sun’s German headquarters in Heimstetten?

Then, come to the Hilton where many of the Bundesliga football clubs stay when playing against FC Bayern München: Munich Hilton am Tucherpark, close to Englischer Garten.

I suggest you to be there at about 14:30. We theoretically start at 14, but two Sun execs and I are arriving late from Hamburg that same afternoon. We expect to be there by 14:45.

What will we discuss?

Well, the setup is the same as for many other meetups, between MySQLers, customers, community, and Sun employees. We’ll tell you that we’re continuing our support of all popular operating systems, and all popular development environments — just like we’ve stressed elsewhere. We’ll share our thinking on what will change and what will stay the same, and on why Sun’s acquisition made sense for MySQL, for Sun, and — most importantly — for community. Most of all, though, we plan on discussing with you, answering your questions, and learning from your experiences in working with MySQL (the product, the company, the community).

You can drop by unannounced. However, we’d like to know how much drinks and snacks to ask Hilton to prepare. And that’s why I’d like you to email Jean-Jérôme Schmidt (jjschmidt at mysql.com) and tell him you think you’ll attend. This is especially if you’re from MySQL or from Sun. Remember, we hope to lure many Sun employees to quit early on Friday afternoon and attend the meetup with MySQL community members and MySQL GmbH employees!

Next Thursday 6 March 2008 at 17:00-18:00 CET, there will be a panel on “The Commercialisation of Open Source” at the Future Talk Booth in Hall 9 (Stand A30) of the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany. One of the purposes of the panel is to publish the Open Source Yearbook 2008, the fifth in a series of yearbooks produced by a team around Professor Lutterbeck of the Technical University of Berlin.

I’ll be one of the panelists, representing MySQL AB. Other panelists are from OpenOffice.org, Citrix, the Zope user group, and the Free Software Foundation.

For the book, I wrote a chapter called “Architecture of Participation: Taking part in Open Source at MySQL“. It describes our attempts at MySQL at increasing the level of participation by our community in the development of MySQL, which has traditionally been very centralistic in its development model.

If you read German and want to have some fun at the cost of other business models than that of MySQL AB, I recommend you to read the comment “Windows Closed Source Yearbook appears at CeBIT” on heise closed.

Links (all in German):

• The Open Source Yearbook home page: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/
• Blog note on the CeBIT panel: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/blog/207
• Newsticker item at heise online: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/103860/from/rss09
• Fun comment on Closed Source Yearbook: http://www.heise.de/ix/news/foren/S-Windows-Closed-Source-Jahrbuch-2008-erscheint-zur-CeBIT/forum-132986/msg-14504436/read/
• My article “Architecture of Participation: Teilnehmende Open Source bei MySQL“: http://www.heise.de/open/The-Architecture-of-Participation-Teilnehmende-Open-Source-bei-MySQL–/artikel/104253

The World Tour starts on IRC next week!

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed 5 March 2008: Ian Murdock, 7am PT/16 CET. Ian is the ian of Debian and Chief OS Platform Strategist at Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia puts it like this:
  

  Since joining Sun, he has led Project Indiana, which he describes as “taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris,” making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system.

• Thu 6 March 2008: Simon Phipps 6am PT/15CET. Simon is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems. Sun’s Executive Bio says:
  

  [Simon is] co-ordinating Sun’s extensive participation in free and open source software communities, promoting consistency and best practice and actively participating in the global conversation they express. Prior to this appointment he co-founded Sun’s pioneering staff weblog facility at blogs.sun.com. Simon joined Sun in mid-2000.

• UPDATED: Wed 12 March 2008: Bob Brewin 9am PT / 18 CET. Bob is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer for Software at Sun Microsystems. Sun’s Executive Bio says:
  

  His responsibilities include technical leadership for developer products and application platforms, including the Java platform, mobility, enterprise software and business integration products. Within this role, some of his key areas of responsibility include Sun’s expanding role in the development of Web 2.0 technologies, improving the developer experience, and alignment and integration of our platforms, technologies and tools.

I’ll also be there, and so will several other MySQLers.

The purpose is for us to come to where the MySQL users are, online, for an informal chat. We’ll try our best to answer your questions!

Instructions:

1. Start your favourite IRC client. In my case, that’s X-Chat on my Mac.
2. Connect to the irc.freenode.net server.
3. /join #mysql. That’s the channel we’ll be in. At least I will also be on #mysql-dev (for those who hack on MySQL Server itself, as opposed to use MySQL in their own apps) and #mysql.de (in German).

Chat to you on Wednesday and Thursday!

I hope I’ll have the opportunity to meet you in person soon.

A face to face meeting may indeed be possible, if our World Tour celebrating the acquisition of MySQL by Sun has a stop close to you, and if I happen to be lucky to be attending that particular meetup just announced:

To toast the success of the acquisition and engage with customers, employees, community developers and partners, Sun and MySQL executives will kick-off a global tour in March, hitting major cities worldwide leading up to the popular MySQL Conference & Expo in April. Every Sun-MySQL community can participate online, including videos, photos and comments from each stop at www.sun.com/mysqltour. This site will invite the public to visit the tour in a nearby city to meet Sun-MySQL executives, local developers and other open source enthusiasts.

If you click at the Google map, you’ll see our schedule.

The trip takes us to interesting places. For me, there’s a first: Izhevsk, the capital city of the Udmurt Republic in Russia (start in Moscow, fly straight towards the Ural mountains, stop at 2/3 of the distance). That’s where MySQL has one of its longest-serving and most prominent development teams, and I’m ashamed I haven’t dropped by before — but happy to be able to fix it in March.

And if you’re a MySQLer or MySQL meetup organiser, do contact Sun about hosting an event close to you. Email MeetUpTour@Sun.COM and contact your local MySQL Community Team member: Jay Pipes for North America, Lenz Grimmer for EMEA, Colin Charles for APAC, and worldwide Community Team Lead Giuseppe Maxia — who all are best approached through firstname@mysql.com.

The tour talks about us as “rock stars”. Now where’s humble old MySQL? Well, perhaps you never regarded MySQL as humble, but I’ll tell you two anecdotes on the topic anyway.

First, yes, I’d like to think we’re humble. But at the same time, we’re sticking out our heads in various circumstances. From my former-and-current boss, ex-MySQL-CEO now-Sun-SVP Mårten Mickos, I’ve with pride stolen the expression “We’re world famous for being humble“. It tries to capture that we don’t claim MySQL is good for all purposes (”we’re the best for everything”), but we still don’t hide that MySQL is being used by some fairly impressive enterprises.

Second, I’ll tell you about a humbling experience from right after I joined MySQL in 2001. Our founder, Michael “Monty” Widenius wanted me to be exposed to the external community of MySQL users. So he asked me to go to Belgrade in Serbia, to present for the Open Source Network of Yugoslavia. The room could fit 200 people. About 250 turned up. I was the only foreign speaker, and I had asked for some tips by MySQL’s first non-founder employee, Sinisa Milivojevic (incidentally a Serb). So I opened with “Dobar dan svima!”, good day to you all. Applause! Wow! Then I continued with a phrase that I’ve forgotten by now, but it meant “sorry for not speaking Serbian”. Further applause! “Why? It’s just me, Kaj!”, I was thinking. But I was truly being treated as a rock star. Talking to the hosts after the presentation, I understood that my favourable reception was partly due to a Western foreigner finally visiting Serbia without dropping bombs in their necks, and even apologising for not speaking Serbian.

Unfortunately, Belgrade isn’t on my track this time, but at least Dublin, Stockholm, Moscow, Izhevsk, Kiev, Hamburg, Munich and Milano are. And this time, I promise to do more than just the greeting sentences in a predominant local non-English language (huh, except for Gaelic in Dublin). Let’s see if I succeed.

For a change, let me remind you of the upcoming MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara. It’s less than two months from now; it’ll be from Monday 14 April 2008 to Thursday 17 April 2008. Same place as last year: Santa Clara, California, USA.

My reminder is triggered by the fact that tomorrow is the last day for Early Registration, by which conference participation costs 1299 instead of 1499 dollars (or, if you skip the Monday tutorials, 999 instead of 1199 dollars). In short, early registration saves you 200 dollars.

I do think the UC is at least as interesting as last year, and I’m very happy about our line-up of keynoters, which includes Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz, MySQL’s CEO Mårten Mickos, Werner Vogels (Amazon.com), Rick Falkvinge (Swedish Pirate Party), Dick Hardt (Sxip), and Jacek Becla (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). For those of you who didn’t go to OSCON 2007, Rick Falkvinge may be an unknown name, but boy, did he have the full attention of the audience with a message that wasn’t exactly the average conference keynote.

Links:

• MySQL Conference & Expo: http://mysqlconf.com
• Registration: https://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/register

The MySQL All-Company Meeting in Orlando is now over. Many are already back at home (= back at work), and others are in transition. What a meeting!

One of the mildest surprises of the week were the name tags carrying a flag that represented the country of residence, as opposed to nationality. These matters are emotional. While I happen to like Germany, it’s not as if I were German. Teased by others for deserting my native country of Finland, I spent time retaliating at innocent fellow countrymen for their “even more foreign” flag than mine. Max Mether had a French flag. Birgitta Löfberg had a Swedish flag (OK, that’s the least foreign, but still foreign). And, for the largest distance from Finland, Mårten Mickos carried a US flag. Eminently teasable.

Also, on my initial name tag, I had the title “Sr. Director Sales Operations”. However, it turned out not to be an innovative way for HR to tell me about being transferred to a new position, but to be a mere mistake. I must have complained too loudly to our All-Company Meeting organiser, Michael Schiff (whose daytime job includes being “Sr. Director Sales Operations”), since he “rewarded” me by handing out a new name tag:

I happily carried that name tag on the flip side of my real tag throughout the conference, and I got many more jokes and laughs out of the flag that I carried, than the title “Schiff’s Admin.”. Ah, flags have so many connotations.

Michael Schiff: You did a superb job arranging the All-Company Meeting! And remember to calibrate that against the Scandinavian scale, where “not bad” in Scandinavian translates to “great” in American. Thank you! Happy to be your Admin anytime!

This is a week full of changes. It’s been a wonderful week for me, meeting with so many MySQLers, telling the rest of the departments about our Community, having productive meetings, being acquired by Sun, and singing Karaoke with my colleagues from the Legal Team as well as performing drinking songs that get posted on YouTube.

The latest change came today. I’ll put my duties as VP Community Services on a spare flame, and focus on the integration of MySQL into Sun. Title unknown (as we’re still just planning the integration, not executing it), but something like “MySQL Ambassador to Sun”.

We want to take Sun by storm. My task will be to get out the message to Sun. “It’s not that I want you to filter the emails, but …”, said my boss Mårten. And as usual with sentences that start with “It’s not that I want you to”, the exact opposite is meant. So I’ll try to distinguish the requests for “super-important trade events in Muchasransk” from those truly worthy of attention, which I’ll promote within MySQL.

I’ll learn about Sun. I’ll teach MySQL about Sun. I’ll teach Sun about MySQL. As part of that, I’ll visit as many Sun facilities as possible, with a special emphasis on those outside the US (as we’ve got plenty of other MySQL executives and VPs on US soil).

It’s going to be great fun!