In October 2003, Mick Carney (the first MySQLer in Sales in France) convinced us to choose Véronique Loquet and her company Al’x Communication as MySQL’s French PR agency.

And what an excellent choice it was! Véronique and her Paris team have been with us now for nearly five years. Her contacts are excellent, as are her organising skills. She practically embodies PR for les logiciels libres (Free and Open Source Software) in France.

Véronique has visited the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara several times, and of course introduced us to numerous French journalists, fixing plenty of meetings for Mårten, Zack, myself and others.

Being acquired by Sun Microsystems does have many more ups than it has downs, but one of the big downs is that we won’t be working with Véronique any longer.

Merci, Véronique! Tu vas nous manquer.

Links:

• Al’x Communication: http://www.alx-communication.com/

Under the title of “From MySQL to Sun“, I’m writing a monthly column to a Swedish-language business publication called “Forum för Ekonomi och Teknik“, about the Sun-MySQL integration.

If you happen to read Swedish, you may want to take a look at the five articles that have appeared so far:

• Issue 2: “En bra start” (”A Good Start”): HTML PDF
• Issue 3: “Ut på turné” (”Going on a Roadshow”): HTML PDF
• Issue 4: “En ny kropp” (”A New Body”): HTML PDF
• Issue 5: “Mårten avgör” (”Mårten Decides”): HTML PDF
• Issue 6: “Delad identitet” (”A Shared Identity”): HTML PDF

Teknologföreningen (or TF for short) is the Swedish language student corporation at Helsinki University of Technology. That’s where I started my studies in 1981 at the Department of Physics, together with Mårten Mickos and Michael “Monty” Widenius.

TF has a tradition of each year publishing “Katalogen“, a membership directory and year book, to finance its activities. The way for sponsors to stand out in  this yearbook is to have the funniest cartoon. And we’re happy to support TF, where “MySQL was born” (Swedish: “MySQL föddes på TF”) as we humbly claim in our ad this year:

Note: The “mother” giving birth to MySQL’s mascot dolphin Sakila is TF’s building Urdsgjallar, which has the shape of a drinking horn seen from an aerial perspective. According to legend, it has “no two perpendicular walls”. The name of the building derives from Gjallarhorn of Norse mythology). And the two “teknologer” (students at a University of Technology, generally in Finland or Sweden) are wearing “teknologmössor“, hats that denote membership and are decorated by a tassel (Swedish “tofs”). The drawing was made by Bosse Österberg (architect, song-writer and artist), who made drawings for Katalogen already in 1981.

Links:

• Teknologföreningen (TF): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teknologföreningen
• Bosse Österberg (in Swedish): http://www.finskaakademien.se/ordbrukare.php

Late February 2002 at the recommendation of our then-advisor Florian Müller, I first met with Ingrid Vos at Cafe Glockenspiel in Munich. Right thereafter, her company Marketing Communications became MySQL’s German PR agency.

Ingrid and her Munich based team have accompanied MySQL AB — and specifically MySQL GmbH — now for over six years. It has been a fantastic ride together. She has introduced us to numerous German journalists, and fixed plenty of meetings for Mårten, myself and others. Always with efficiency, a positive attitude, a happy smile and a friendly Austrian touch.

Being acquired by Sun Microsystems means changes in how we do lots of things, and one of those changes is that we won’t be working with Ingrid any longer.

Thank you, Ingrid! I’ll miss you.

Links:

• Marketing Communications Ingrid Vos, Dorfen bei München: http://www.markcom.de/referenzen_content.html
• Florian Müller: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Müller

In 2000, MySQL co-founder David Axmark first told me about having met with Eben Moglen. His descriptions of Eben were always filled with respect and admiration — respect for a person who can keep his integrity and views of how software law should shape the world, and admiration for Eben’s pragmatism and ability to make a difference in the real world.

David Axmark	Michael “Monty” Widenius	Eben Moglen

Over the years since David’s first encounters, Eben and his later estabished Software Freedom Law Center have repeatedly provided MySQL and its founders with insightful advice. As a startup, initially without any VC financing, MySQL hasn’t always been able to compensate proportionately to the value created.

In recognition of the value created for MySQL through SFLC’s advice, especially on how Eben helped defend MySQL as a GPL developer against license breaches, David and Monty have decided to donate 100 000 dollars each to the SFLC. David and Monty hope this token of appreciation can help the SFLC to give legal advice to support some of today’s startups, who build their business on Free Software. They also hope to inspire other Open Source entrepreneurs to support the SFLC.

Note: SFLC provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

Links:

• Software Freedom Law Center: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/
• David Axmark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Axmark
• Michael “Monty” Widenius: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael Widenius
• Eben Moglen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen
• MySQL DevZone Interview with David: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/david-axmark.html
• SFLC Services: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/services/
• SFLC Donations: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/donate/
• MySQL Thanks the Free Software Foundation (7 Nov 2002): http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/generate-article.php?id=178
• MySQL Thanks the Software Freedom Law Center (8 May 2007): http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2007/05/08/software-freedom-law-center/

If you for some reason missed the news yesterday: Symbian, the largest mobile operating system, will soon be Open Source. The software will be made available “over the next two years” and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

Looking at the Symbian press release:

Mobile leaders to unify the Symbian software platform and set the future of mobile free

Foundation to be established to provide royalty-free open platform and accelerate innovation

LONDON, UK; June 24, 2008 - Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS™, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations. This initiative is supported by current shareholders and management of Symbian Limited, who have been actively involved in its development. Plans for the Foundation have already received wide support from other industry leaders.

To enable the Foundation, Nokia today announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola today announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ and DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.

Many commentators, such as TechCrunchIT, think this is a good move by Nokia. Om Malik has a good analysis of the likely background reasoning.

Personally, I’m a happy Symbian user (Nokia E61i) and certainly welcome the move. Hey, Symbian’s market share is already well over half of the mobile market. This is a move in the right direction, at the right moment in time.

Ah, and did I mention that MySQL runs on Symbian?

Thanks, Nokia!

Links:

• Symbian enlightened by LAMP (entry on my blog from Dec 2007): http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2007/12/10/symbian-enlightened-by-lamp/
• Symbian press release: http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2008/pr200810018.html
• TechCrunchIT / Nik Cubrilovic: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/06/24/symbian-goes-open-source-courtesy-of-nokia/
• Om Malik — Symbian, iPhone & the New Mobile Reality: http://gigaom.com/2008/06/24/symbian-iphone-the-new-mobile-reality/

During the last month, MySQL code has been migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. Bazaar is a distributed, free revision control system sponsored and supported by Canonical, the company behind the fast-growing Linux distribution Ubuntu.

We have migrated all MySQL code trees that were available in BitKeeper. This means not just current GA and development versions of MySQL Server and MySQL Cluster, but also the history all the way back to MySQL 3.23.22 released about eight years ago. And we’ve also migrated non-MySQL-server FOSS applications to Bazaar, such as MySQL Workbench (formerly not in BitKeeper but in Subversion, also known as svn) and our internal QA suites.

We would like to thank BitKeeper for the fruitful relationship that has lasted for 5 years. BitKeeper has helped MySQL to achieve its goals in a professional way and to scale from simple version control to a more productive workflow.

Despite BitKeeper’s strong features, we wanted to find a more open product, since our goal remains to expand our external contributor base. For that, we need a freely distributable product to build a new policy of cooperation. For this, BitKeeper had published a free client for the community; however, this client is unfortunately limited to a few read-only operations. The community has been asking for more functionality, and we have taken these requests to heart.

It is because of our commitment to the development community that we decided to switch. We can’t encourage contributions without providing the appropriate tools for the task. Before opting for Bazaar, we evaluated several candidate Revision Control Systems, looking for the following features:

• ease of use for a distributed development organization
• feature set compatible with BitKeeper
• availability in all major operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris).

All the above requirements have played a decisive role in our choice, and countless email messages have been exchanged in the internal mailing lists to weight the pros and cons of replacement candidates. In the end, the features and openness of Bazaar was agreed to be the best alternative. The engineers at Canonical, under former MySQLer Elliot Murphy’s guidance, have worked wonders in adapting Bazaar to what they know about our requirements. Bazaar has been under intense development lately, resulting in 5 releases that have enhanced and stabilized the product since January, and these fixes have been of great benefit to us.

Side note: After being acquired by Sun, we learned that Sun will standardise on Mercurial. However, our decision on Bazaar was in the works already before MySQL was acquired and won’t affect Sun’s policy.

What is in it for the MySQL community? A more open environment for sharing MySQL code, and for working on it. Using Launchpad (http://launchpad.net), the Bazaar public web interface, Sun can now offer a better code repository for internal and external work on MySQL. This repository is now available at http://launchpad.net/mysql-server.

For readers not familiar with Bazaar and Launchpad, I recommend Canonical’s Projects page for clarifications. However, do note one thing: That page says that “Launchpad is a collaborative system developed by Canonical, and used to keep track of many aspects of open source development including bug tracking.”. We’re using Launchpad as a code repository, but we’ll continue to use our own same bug tracking system, at http://bugs.mysql.com.

The “Installing from the Development Source Tree” chapter of the MySQL 5.1 manual has been updated to reflect the switch to Bazaar.

Over the weeks and months to come, you can expect articles and blog posts about how to work with Bazaar. As we are still in the infancy of this new experience, we will welcome community advice and articles on this matter. Please contact us at ‘community’ ‘AT’ ‘mysql’ ‘DOT’ ‘com’, or just blog about your thoughts. We are listening!

Links:

• BitKeeper: http://www.bitkeeper.com
• Bazaar: http://bazaar-vcs.org
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com
• Canonical: http://www.canonical.com
• Canonical’s Projects page: http://www.canonical.com/projects
• Launchpad: http://launchpad.net
• MySQL’s code repository: http://launchpad.net/mysql-server
• MySQL’s related projects: http://launchpad.net/mysql
• Elliot Murphy’s Launchpad page: https://launchpad.net/~statik
• MySQL 5.1 Manual page: “Installing from the Development Source Tree” http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/installing-source-tree.html
• Daniel Fischer’s article “Getting started with Bazaar for MySQL code“: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/getting-started-with-bazaar-for-mysql.html

This blog posting has little to do with MySQL or Sun. It’s about experiences gathered while shuttling around the world as MySQL’s Ambassador to Sun, but it’s not about databases, it’s not about operating systems, nor computer languages: it’s about human languages, and how going beyond English provides a business advantage.

Let me try to grab your attention by first sharing my perhaps somewhat controversial conclusion:

English as a language of communication is much overrated. In an international setting, English may be sufficient for conveying meaning, but it has severe deficiencies when it comes to establishing a social relationship, to showing respect, to building trust, and to having fun.

For many years, I have attempted at learning how to say “thank you” and “please don’t smoke” and “where is the toilet” in the local language. So I know to say “gdye tualet” in Russia, “where are the restrooms” in the US, or just a simplified “donde baños” in the Spanish speaking world.

Now, early this year, I got the assignment to travel around the Sun locations of the world. And I decided to raise my ambition level. I wanted to give a five-to-ten minute introduction to my presentation in the local language, no matter what language that may be.

The inspiration for that ambition I got from the enthusiastic reception of merely greeting the audience in the local language. In 2001, I got a rock star reception in Belgrade, Serbia — just for saying “Dobar dan svima!” (good day to you all). Last year in Seoul, Korea, I got plentiful applause just for saying “Anyong haseo“. Such enthusiasm felt a bit undeserved for two-three words, so I decided to see what would happen if I raise the bar.

Now, I’ve given 5-10 minute presentations in Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Czech, Turkish and Russian. As I don’t really speak any of those languages, what I did was reading aloud from a script. And I’d like to share my experiences.

My recipe for delivering a presentation in a language I don’t speak is this:

1. Write the presentation in a language you know
2. Target the message to the audience
   • say who you are, where you’re from, why you’re here
   • be clear on your key message, the simpler the better
   • sprinkle in some humour, but don’t be too ambitious
   • make sure your text is not generic, but specific to the audience
3. Ask a local to translate the presentation (Thanks Giuseppe for translating my original French meetup presentation to Italian! Thanks Kazumi-san for Japanese! And thanks to all Sun colleagues in Beijing, Prague, Istanbul and St Petersburg for your translation help — without it, none of this would have happened!)
4. If the language has an unknown or just hard to read character set, then transcribe it (I did so for Japanese, Chinese and Russian, but not for Italian, Czech or Turkish)
5. Study by reading a page or two (spend at least 15-30 mins) on how to pronounce that language
6. Add notes to your script, to make your pronunciation intelligible
   • Emphasis: Some languages put stress on seemingly random syllables, such as Russian — deNOTe THOse SYLlables SOMehow
   • Tone: In some languages, tone carries meaning — such as Chinese
7. Add notes to your script, to make your speech enjoyable
   • denote the *words* that you want to *underline* when *speaking* (if you stress every word in the same way, your speech will be boring and monotonous)
   • denote when you want to ask the audience for questions, such as <raise your hand, wait for audience response>
8. Practice your speech with one or more locals
   • over the phone beforehand
   • in the destination just before the presentation
   • have fun when doing it
9. Read the presentation aloud from your paper script
   • keep eye contact
   • don’t be too fast, don’t be too slow
   • enjoy the audience feedback
   • have fun! enjoy!
10. Ask how it went, afterwards
    • how many percent did the audience understand?
    • ask for honest (not just polite) feedback in private
11. Optionally: Arrange for your speech to be recorded

The outcome from following this recipe has by far exceeded my high expectations:

• the Italians, Japanese, Chinese, Czech, Turks, and Russians all gave me their undivided attention during all of the 5-10 minutes
• based on informal feedback, I estimate that 80-90% of the contents of my Chinese was understood (my ambition level was “at least 70%”), with Japanese exceeding 90%, and the other languages exceeding 95%
• a Japanese blogged about having goose bumps when listening to a gai-jin speaking (or rather pretending to speak) Japanese
• the extroverted Chinese interrupted my speech in Beijing for about eight times, for applause
• all audiences laughed at the intended spots (in particular where towards the end of the presentation, I self-deprecatingly said “As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I *don’t* speak <language>”)
• several Turkish attendees thanked me afterwards in person, in a way that seemed even more sincere than polite (and by all means, it was polite)
• the usually notoriously quiet Russians bombarded me with 50 minutes of questions after my presentation, and also the equally quiet Japanese had more questions than we had time

I’ve discussed and analysed the reasons behind this positive feedback, with colleagues at Sun. My going theory is this:

• I show that I’m the stupid foreigner here — common courtesy would require me to know the local language, not the locals to know a foreign language
• going out of my comfort zone, I attract attention and show respect to the locals
• making mistakes in the local language, I show I’m ready to invest in the relationship
• as so few others are ready for this extra effort, the expectation level for the quality of my language skills is surprisingly low
• the attitude I display gains trust and comfort — and better business level interaction

I always feel strange when people apologise to me for their lack of knowledge of English. True, my command of the English language may exceed that of some taxi drivers in St Petersburg, London or New York. Yet, English is and probably will remain my third language. My native language is Swedish, and I feel more comfortable in German than in English, at least when the topic isn’t strictly related to my professional life. English is also chronologically my third language, as I learned Finnish before English at school. In consequence, when I state that the official common language of MySQL is Bad English, I consider myself a case in point. And the statement seems a relief for everyone when I say it.

All in all, there’s nothing wrong with English. It’s a good language, like many others. But just like in biology, monoculture comes with many risks, and diversity is good. Let’s celebrate it, let’s enjoy it, and let’s reap business benefits out of it!

Links:

• Sun Meetup-Mashup in Italy: http://youtube.com/watch?v=UjwdhFpNR8s
• A slightly more English-centric view of Italian (by Monty Python): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9TVYCffHEE
• A video of my presentation in Chinese: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3036893738929286405&hl=en
• My blog entry on speaking Chinese: http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/04/28/nushimen-xianshengmen-a-speech-in-chinese-on-video/
• Chinese comments: http://www.google.cn/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=zh-CN&ie=UTF-8&rls=IBMA,IBMA:2008-18,IBMA:zh-CN&q=MySQL+北京+Kaj
• Pics from Beijing event: http://event.full-design.com/Sun/MySQL/photos/photos.htm

Since meeting yesterday with Vladimir Voskresensky, a Sun colleague from St Petersburg, I have a new favourite answer to the request “so tell me an example of technical advantages resulting from Sun’s acquisition of MySQL“:

Using NetBeans as an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for coding and learning MySQL.

Now, that’s a simple answer, and that’s because it’s a simple and beautiful thought. But let’s start from the beginning.

In my days as a coder, I enjoyed the command line. I’ve used various coding editors, and I’ve disliked the hassle of learning new IDEs, who sometimes are more of a straightjacket than a productivity enabler. So call me conservative if you will, but I’ve written my PHP stuff directly in an editor.

Those who write the C and C++ code of MySQL are likely even more conservative than I am, and for a good reason: They’ve set up an environment that they’re happy with and used to. They are about as likely to change their development environment away from the vim/emacs/gdb/gcc stack as football fans change their favourite football teams.

So you can imagine that Vladimir had a bit of an uphill battle when he wanted to demo the C / C++ extensions to NetBeans.

But then Vladimir started to describe how the NetBeans team had used MySQL as a test case even before MySQL became a candidate for “eat your own dog food” through Sun’s acquisition of MySQL. It’s a real-world complex piece of software, and if an IDE can handle MySQL, it can probably handle most applications.

And the NetBeans team was able to successfully support MySQL:

• MySQL can be directly imported as a NetBeans project
• NetBeans can show dependencies between MySQL routine calls
• NetBeans can show all occurences of a C variable in MySQL’s source code, in a scope-sensitive way (i.e. not a simple grep)
• NetBeans shows all occurences, across the code base, of a particular class, function, field, macro etc.
  
• NetBeans can rename any identifier in-place, such as “a” to something more meaningful (see demo)
• NetBeans integrates debugging, even of MySQL
• NetBeans provides easy navigation of code

Now this was enough even for a sceptic like me to become eager. During his demo, Vladimir used the Discovery Wizard to import MySQL and was then quickly able to dispel my deeply rooted skepticism against “unnecessary straightjacket GUIs that prevent real work”. I got a sting in my heart, longing back to do some Real Work, i.e. coding (of which I’ve done much too little this century).

My conclusion is that

• NetBeans is a great way to learn the MySQL source code
• learning the MySQL source code is simplified both for our community and for our own engineers
• usage is so simple and provides so many advantages that it’s worthy of a try

So I didn’t leave the meeting before Vladimir had promised me three things:

• to write a MySQL Forge Wiki article with pointers to all resources necessary to open MySQL as a NetBeans project
• to write a MySQL Dev Zone article, expanding on the Wiki article, on how to productively use NetBeans when learning and developing the MySQL code base (from downloading NetBeans over importing MySQL to debugging MySQL, including the key productivity-enhancing benefits of NetBeans)
• to try his best to come to the MySQL Developer Meeting in Riga in September, to demo NetBeans to our engineers

In return, I promised Vladimir

• to introduce Vladimir to key MySQL engineers that may evaluate the IDE
• to set up a MySQL University slot on development MySQL with NetBeans
• to encourage MySQLers (employees and community) to provide the NetBeans time with feedback that may improve upon, say, the debugging properties

In short, stay tuned for some practical tips on how to work on the MySQL code base from the NetBeans integrated development environment.

I showed a draft of my blog entry to a small group of developers from the MySQL Engineering Team and here are some points I found interesting in their feedback:

• “I was an emacs hacker once, but since then I got my behind kicked by a VB-developer, a dreamweaver clicker, and a drag-n-drop flash code designer so I opened my eyes to a bigger world. Now I use NetBeans.”
• “There are some small shortcomings, like attaching debug process, but it works very well in most cases.”
• “I tried the NetBeans C/C++ package. I liked that I don’t need to download all the Java bloat just to use C/C++. Something I used to miss with Eclipse - just packaged for the C/C++ developer. Bravo!”
• “Please allow me the luxury of obeying to my habits and staying away from IDEs (being a 10+ years exclusive vi/gcc/gdb command line user this is a lot of inertia that I don’t like to lose right now).”
• “NetBeans has a neat little re-factoring goodie: change the name of a variable in one place and NetBeans can change it in other places for you.”
• “My colleague seems to enjoy the ease of extending NetBeans by plug-ins. He has written a plug-in which integrates PHP test runs and presents the results as HTML during a weekend. Can you mention http://blogs.sun.com/netbeansphp/ ?”
• “The only feature which I don’t like - which is a killer feature for me as I’m a typical “MSIU” (most stupid imaginable user) - is the automatic close and reload of modified files. Accidently remove a file outside of NetBeans, go back to NetBeans and *damn* NetBeans has closed the file. Anyway, this has been reported to the responsible dev already.”
• “Class browsing and debugging worked well for C/C++. And yes, performance was very much acceptable.”

Links:

• NetBeans C/C++ Support: http://cnd.netbeans.org/
• NetBeans IDE 6.1 Features: C/C++ Development: http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/
• Find Usages and Rename in NetBeans (3 minute demo): http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/attach/CndRefactoring/Refactoring.htm
• NetBeans for PHP: http://blogs.sun.com/netbeansphp/
• NetBeans C/C++ mailing list: users@cnd.netbeans.org — registration and subscription: http://cnd.netbeans.org/servlets/ProjectMailingListList

Last week in Prague, I met with Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for version 8.10.

myself, Mark Shuttleworth, Arseniy Kuznetsov (Sun, NetBeans), Matt Zimmermann (Canonical CTO)

As you would expect, we discussed Canonical’s and MySQL’s offerings to the market. And we pondered on possibilities for joint customers to have the best of both worlds: Wouldn’t it be great if MySQL users on Ubuntu could get the “best bits” from MySQL through the software delivery mechanisms of Ubuntu?

Mark drew the above picture on a piece of paper (which I used Omni Graffle to capture in .png form), and we decided to explore how the “curved orange” part of the customer experience could be improved.