You remember our slogan “Freedom to work anywhere“, meaning that MySQL doesn’t require you to relocate to Uppsala, Cupertino, München or anywhere, to join the company? And that you sometimes can work even far away from home? Sun continued this policy, more or less. Now, Dups is taking the policy to extremes.

Background: As a colleague and fellow mountaineer, I had heard of Dups wanting to do some mountaineering in the Andes well before hearing that he would want to join the Community Team. And hence, it was an easy thing for Dups to convince Giuseppe and me that he would retain his mountaineering plans, even though he joined our team. Hey, he can work nearly as well from Quito as he can from home.

Basically, Dups hasn’t necessarily done anything more just now than fulfilling those plans. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to share what he’s done, since Dups has given a perfect illustration of the extremes to which you can take the Freedom To Work Anywhere, by posting an 8 min 13 sec long video on YouTube.

So if you want 8 min 13 sec of impressive distraction, then I suggest you go take a look at his video.

This is what impresses me (not necessarily in this order):

1. That Dups climbs Rucu Pichincha, 4,784 m
2. That he videotapes it
3. That he speaks coherently [*] for 8 min 13 sec without interruption
4. That he puts it up on YouTube in real time
5. That he dedicates the video to Giuseppe, at about 4:15
6. That he is now back working, at his keyboard

[*] Relatively speaking, given the altitude and strain

I still have quite a bit of catching up to do, Dups. But I have already booked my trip to Kilimanjaro, so I am following your footsteps!

Links:

• http://www.mysql.com/about/jobs/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichincha_Volcano
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1rdmrk7Z6Q

To understand a bit of Italian, I just need a comparatively small amount of vino bianco. By contrast, to get any information flow going at all in Russian requires larger amounts of … preparation. That doesn’t have to be vodka, it can also be interesting discussions with Russians, or the opportunity to give a speech.

Now, a blog is the scalable way to interact with the rest of humanity, and I’m trying to increase my fluency in all things Web 2.0. So, here goes, may I present my Russian blog:

Like in the case of presenting my Italian blog, let me quote Google Translate’s automatic translation of some of my “writings” — deliberately doing so without making any improvements on the automatic translation:

Why this blog?

When I learned to read when I was five years old, I decided to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. This is not a normal thing to do in Finland at the time, but how was I supposed to know? A television program called “Good evening, ‘and learn to read Russian, appears to be a smart career move for a five-year-old boy.

And I learned Russian alphabet. Nevertheless, I did not learn the Russian language.

Although I grew up in a neighboring country, the Soviet Union, it took until 1985 before I first went there. I went with two friends, and we stayed at the Hotel Europe. Incidentally, in Finland, Archbishop John Vikström was there at the same time.

Now it’s time for me to learn Russian. In addition, I visit Russia more than once a year, so I decided to start a blog in Russian.

The purpose of my blog is to

• learn more Russian
• to learn more about Russia
• be inspired to visit Russia more

I go to Russia for work and for pleasure, and I use blogs for both purposes.

Why not write a blog in Russian?

The fact that I do not speak English is not an excuse, not a blog in Russian.

I want to prove the point: these days, it is possible to create a blog in Russian, even if you do not speak Russian, but only pretends to do so.

I have occasionally tried to pick up a little Russian language for many years, but what makes this blog Google Translate. Usually, I write in Swedish, but unfortunately the Russian language has a high quality, starting with English. That is why I first write something in English. Next, I ask Google to translate my text in Russian. I look at the translation and make the first guess as to whether it is perhaps understandable. Finally, I ask Google to translate it back from Russian to English. If I can understand it, I finally publish my text.

Let’s see where this experiment takes me!

Tags: gladness, friendship, contacts, Russian, Respect, language

Fandorin: Naming issues

How to choose the name “blogs.arno.fi / fandorin /” to my blog?

Well, “blogs” should be easy and self explanatory.

And “arno” should also be fairly easy to understand: That’s because my name Arnö, and people used 7-bit domain names (why I bought arno.fi but not arnö.fi).

“. Fi” part, of course, must be self-evident: I am from Finland. I grew up in Finland. I have always lived in Finland, except for 2002-04 (in Munich) and 2006 - the year (in Munich). Summary: I am a Finnish citizen, as all my ancestors over many generations [1].

“/ Fandorin” part deserves more explanation. I chose it because my closeness to Russian literature, particularly for my favorite characters Erast Petrovich Fandorin books Boris Akunin. I think I have read all of them (unfortunately, not in Russian, but also in German).

Alternative names for your blog could be “yevski”, as I always joked that I wanted someone to write an operating system with the same name. Why? Because I could write a utility for converting files yevsky (and move them into DOS). The title of this utility will dostoyevski. However, as DOS virtually obsolete, I have concluded that there would be no market for these products.

[1] my father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father, Jakob Saktmodig of Dragsfjärd in Finland, was in line with the church books (1712) “rysk afföda”, which I always interpreted as a “lower-quality Russian origin” (but handwriting in the book was bad)

Tags: Fandorin, Boris Akunin, Dostoevsky, Fandorin, Finland, Erast Petrovich Fandorin

Providing a presentation in Russian

Yesterday and today I had the opportunity to make a presentation in Russian. Colleagues of MySQL and Sun have helped me to translate from English to Russian what I wanted to say.

The presentation takes about six minutes to deliver, and I was very happy to get a lot of questions afterwards.

As I clearly do not speak Russian, it seems to be strange, the idea of simply reading aloud from the paper for six minutes. Let me explain why I think it was a good idea, but first let me paste the contents of my speech:

Dear users of MySQL, dear Sun customers and students of St. Petersburg University, Ladies and Gentlemen! Good evening! I am pleased to welcome you today at this meeting where we gather to celebrate and discuss the company’s acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems. I hope this meeting will give a better idea of what benefit each of you can draw from combining our companies. [...]

Now you may ask yourself: Why am I talking in English, when it is obvious that I can hardly even understand what I am talking about?

I tried to explain why I do it in my blog entry in blogs.mysql.com / kaj /. Here are some central parts of it:

“Why” and “How to” make the presentation more local than this can be done in English

English as a language of communication greatly exaggerated. In the international context, English may be sufficient for the transfer of meaning, but it has serious drawbacks when it comes to creating social ties, showing respect, to build confidence and having fun.

In general, there is nothing wrong in English. This is a good language, just as many others. But just as in biology, monoculture causes many risks, and diversity is good. Let’s celebrate it, let’s enjoy it, and let us reap commercial benefits from it!

Tags: MySQL, Sun Microsystems, use, acquisition, Respect, Language

To my surprise, I got comments on my Russian blog even before announcing it. Thank you, karidola! You seem to share my interest in the Finland Swedish author Tove Jansson (she’s the one with the Moomins that I found in Japan) and in the Icelandic language

For those of you who, unlike me, can read Russian faster than a five-year-old, I suggest you to take a look at these pages that I pretended to write, and for which I used no other help than what can be obtained through Wikipedia and Google Translate (specifically, I used no human / Russian help):

• Почему именно этот блог? http://blogs.arno.fi/fandorin/why-this-blog/
• Почему бы не писать блог на русском языке? http://blogs.arno.fi/fandorin/2008/10/25/why-not-write-a-blog-in-russian/
• Предоставление презентации на русском языке http://blogs.arno.fi/fandorin/2008/06/17/delivering-a-presentation-in-russian/
• Fandorin: именования вопросы http://blogs.arno.fi/fandorin/2008/10/25/fandorin-name/

As with the Italian blog, what I really am curious to know is, what my Russian speaking friends and colleagues will say. Anjuta? Sergei? Kostja (who looks like Fandorin on the book cover)? And Dima, Alik, Igor, Bar, Holyfoot, Gluh, Ramil, Vladislav, Kaamos, Sveta, Vita, Evgeniy, Sanja, Valerii, Timour, Lawrin, Peter, Arseniy, Kitry, Natalia, Natasha, Grisha, Elena, Dmitry, Ekaterina, Olga, Vladimir, Egor, (and I’m sure I’ve embarrassingly omitted several friends — please forgive me), and last but definitely not least, Морж!

As part of an internal programme at Sun, I am a “SEED mentor” for another Sun employee (not a former employee of MySQL, but what we Sun Dolphins call Sun Classics). He is called Alok and lives in Bangalore, and sadly, our schedules crossed so that I couldn’t meet him when I was at our Bangalore offices in July. So I am mentoring someone I’ve met only over phone — but we’re getting along just fine.

Two of the topics we’ve discussed recently are blogging and books. So after hanging up after our 9 CET 12:30 Indian time mentoring session, I got the idea to combine the two: write a blog entry about the books I recommended Alok.

One thing Alok is contemplating at the moment is the degree to which he should spend time on developing his business skills vs his engineering skills. That’s a familiar topic for many of us in Engineering.

So what I ended up doing was to list some of the top books I’ve read and used over the years. Not just the freshest and most recent ones, but the ones I remember and go back to, even over a decade after I read them. And they have a strong engineering slant to it — the general business books are missing from this list.

Steve McConnell: I started my list by three classics by Steve McConnell, published within Microsoft Press. (The “Microsoft Press” label may be surprising, as these books are truly timeless, as opposed to providing ideas that expire with the next file format change of Microsoft Word). These books are:

1. Code Complete, a Practical Handbook of Software Construction, 1993 (see Code Complete Home, Wikipedia). “Welcome to Software Construction”, “Characteristics of High-Quality Routines”, “General Issues in Using Variables”, “Code-Tuning Strategies” are some chapters in it. Very enjoyable, enlightening reading. I read it about 1995 and have been recommending it since. I managed to convince MySQL co-founder Monty to read it in 1995, and have been debating minute points of the book with him from time to time since then.
2. Rapid Development, Taming Wild Software Schedules, 1996 (see Steve McConnell’s Home Page). Some chapters: “Classic Mistakes”, “Software-Development Fundamentals”, “Lifecycle Planning”, “Estimation”, “Motivation”, “Teamwork”, “Feature-Set Control”. Same style as Code Complete, and as good. I read it in 1996, and have used its arguments to punctuate wishful thinking by customers and colleagues of the “pointy-haired boss” category ever since. In fact, I should probably have done more of it.
3. Software Project Survival Guide, How to Be Sure Your First Important Project Isn’t Your Last, 1998: “The Successful Project at a Glance”, “Hitting a Moving Target”, “Quality Assurance”, “Software Release”. Good, and a quick read after the previous two books, which still are the ones which stick to my mind as providing the most meat.

Steve Maguire: There is another Steve who wrote books with Microsoft Press, in fact of a very similar nature. The topic of software engineering management is so important that I am happy recommending the two additional books to Alik. When Maguire wrote these books, at least I was spending much more of my time using Microsoft products than today, and the lessons he writes about are (as I see it) relevant also in Open Source.

1. Writing Solid Code, Microsoft’s Techniques for Developing Bug-Free C Programs, 1993: “Assert Yourself”, “Step Through Your Code”, “Risky Business”, “The Rest Is Attitude”. This is C specific, for good and for bad, compared to the language-unspecific Code Complete.
2. Debugging the Development Process, Practical Strategies for Staying Focused, Hitting Ship Dates, and Building Solid Teams, 1994: “Laying the Groundwork”, “The Systematic Approach”, “Scheduling Madness”, “Constant, Unceasing Improvement”, “That Sinking Feeling”. The preface starts with the sentence “This book might make Microsoft sound bad.” which to me displays an attitude that I like, because we all know we make mistakes and pretending not to do so is not getting us anywhere — whereas learning from other people’s mistakes may do so.

A few other Software Engineering reference books: I also want to list three other books on IT for Alok.

1. A Discipline for Software Engineering, Watts S. Humphrey, 1995. This was recommended to me after I read the McConnell books. “The Personal Software Process Strategy”, “Why Forms Are Helpful”, “Why Make Plans”, “Measuring Software Size”, “Popular Estimating Methods”, “Design and Code Reviews”.
2. The Capability Maturity Model, Guidelines for Improving the Software Process, Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute, 1995.”Introducing Software Process Maturity”, “Customer Satisfaction”, “Skipping Maturity Levels”. Introduces CMM and its five maturity levels of Heroics, Repeatable, Defined, Managed and Optimizing. I wish MySQL were more mature and less heroic.
3. Agile Project Management with Scrum, Ken Schwaber, 2003. Yes, I have bought new books this century. “Scrum Roles”, “Scrum Flow”, “Product Backlog”, “Sprint Backlog”, “Bringing Order From Chaos”, “Project Reporting — Keeping Everything Visible”. We try to apply Scrum for MySQL, but due to our virtual nature and to the timezones, we need to apply it a bit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Next, I took the step towards business through the more philosophical. I read both NNT books this summer, and I found them very inspiring and insightful.

1. Fooled by Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, 2004 (see NNT’s homepage, Wikipedia): “If You’re So Rich, Why Aren’t You So Smart?”, “Europlayboy Mathematics”, “Wittgenstein’s Ruler”. NNT has a somewhat peculiar writing style (mixing facts, opinion and personal anecdotes), but he clearly explains that random events influence us more than we believe, and what we should do about it. Winners tend to attribute their winning to being smart and hard-working, losers attribute their losing to bad luck.
2. The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007 (see Wikipedia on the Black Swan book and the Black swan theory). “Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary”, “How Not To Be A Sucker”, “The Narrative Fallacy”, “What Do You Do If You Cannot Predict”. About why we don’t know so much about the future, and why it’s dangerous to pretend that we do, and what we should do instead. One of the best books I’ve read this century. Especially now in the financial crisis, there is plenty of material on the book and NNT’s thinking, on Wikipedia, on NNT’s own website and elsewhere.

Just One (Semi-) Business Book: I wanted to concentrate my advice to Alok on engineering and engineering management, but there’s one book that describes the borderline from engineering to sales very well:

1. Writing Winning Business Proposals, Your Guide To Landing the Client, Making the Sale, Persuading the Boss, Richard C. Freed, Shervin Freed, Joe Romano, 1995. “The Slots in a Proposal’s Generic Structure”, “Desired Results, Benefits, and Objectives”, “The Four Buying Roles”, “Determining What to Weave in Your Web of Persuasion”. Very self descriptive book title, and it contains great advice about persuading both clients and bosses, in writing.

Meta-books on self management: At this point, I started to have a bad conscience towards Alok. Hey, already eleven books in my recommendation list. How is he ever going to have the time to read them, and to get any real work done at the same time? Thus, I decided to address those issues one at a time.

1. The PhotoReading Whole Mind System, Paul R. Scheele, 1993. “Read this easy-toread book and all books will be easy to read”, “5 breakthrough steps for improved comprehension and retention”, “The secrets to PhotoReading at 25,000 words per minute”, “5 time management strategies for instant results”. I still re-read (ehh, re-glance) the book at times, and have recommended it to many people, the latest one being my son.
2. Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, David Allen, 2001. It’s about getting peace of mind to concentrate on what you (through your systematic pre-planning) know is the most important thing. It has plenty of associated GTD services and software; personally, I’m just using Omni Outliner and my Thunderbird inbox. But then again, I’m rereading this book just now.

To round it off, I wanted to provide Alok with an entertaining book, without too much of an emphasis on usefulness, but still some practical usability. In that category of books, I try to avoid English books, in favour of Swedish and German (as I tend to get more than my fair share of reading in English anyway), so I’m limited to a fraction of the books I would want to recommend. My choice ends up in a book recommended to me by Simon Phipps:

1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon, 2003. Wikipedia says “The story is written in the first-person perspective of Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old autistic boy living in Swindon, Wiltshire. Although Christopher’s condition within the autism spectrum is not stated explicitly within the novel, the summary on the book’s inside cover describes it as Asperger syndrome.” And while that doesn’t sound entertaining, it is. It is both sad and fun, and I tend to believe Simon’s claim that it “helps understand Open Source developers”.

So, Alok, happy reading! I hope I haven’t inundated you with much too long a list of Recommended Reading.

Today at the Venture Capital Forum in Hilton Arc de Triomphe, Paris, I received the EVCA “Hall of Fame” Award on behalf of MySQL AB. What a timing, to meet with investment bankers and venture capitalists now!

In these times of a deep finance crisis, of no credit handed out by banks and of general doom and gloom, it felt great to be somewhat of an “everybody’s darling”. In the VC community, MySQL is seen as a great success — and in particular, we’re seen by European VCs as a European success story (despite over 50 % of our personnel and most of our Management Team being US-based, at the point of time when the VCs exited).

Side note: I don’t mind MySQL being seen as a European success story. We’re used to portraying ourselves as belonging to whatever geography is relevant for the moment. That can be “Swedish”, “Scandinavian”, “European”, “Bulgarian”, “American”, “Silicon Valley”, or whatever you’d like. And at the same time, I never stop pointing out that MySQL was originally written in Finland, and that a disproportionate amount of the corporate DNA originates from TF, the Swedish speaking, Helan går-singing student association of Helsinki University of Technology.

Before the panel began, Paul Deninger, Vice-Chairman of Jefferies & Company gave what I learned is his traditional opening speech. I can see why he’s appreciated. With a good sense of the audience’s mixed atmosphere of horror (at the current financial crisis) and hope (for opportunities presented due to lower valuations), he introduced Jefferies as “an investment bank that unlike the now-socialised ones never became an investment firm“. Paul is also known for his yearly “PD’s list of the top 10 events of the year”, with observations on raw material prices, the advent of CleanTech, the pricing of financial instruments, Russia remaining in South Ossetia and other equivalent global events. Interestingly, Sun’s acquisition of MySQL AB made it onto his list. We’ve always joked that we’re “world famous for being humble”, but PD does give us a hard time.

Together with Robert Dighero of Tradus (a UK based eBay-of-Eastern-Europe online auction company), I was on the “Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame” panel lead by Mike Chalfen, General Partner at Advent Venture Partners and a good friend of MySQL investor and former MySQL board member Danny Rimer.

I got a number of questions, both publicly on the panel and privately in the networking thereafter. In gratitude of having been given the award, I’d like to share my answers.

Q: What was the impact of VC investors on MySQL’s business?

A: Above all, VC investments enabled faster growth (through enabling recruitment of key talent). Each of the earlier-round investors also opened the doors for the next level of investors. Our VCs certainly granted us credibility towards big customers. Sure, they also gave us valuable feedback on our business model and tightened corporate governance procedures, easing our growth pains.

Q: What could the impact have been of having more or less cash?

A: Mainly, it would have influenced the speed of recruitment. Now, we grew as fast as we could with the ambition of having the VC money mostly as a safety net, and financing growth mainly through increased sales. Cash on the balance sheet increases operational focus and creates stability!

Q: How would MySQL fare in today’s tougher climate?

A: As for sales, it’s important to understand that MySQL has a “low TCO” proposition (”destruction factor”), where the tough climate is good for us. As for IPOs and trade sales, it’s hard to identify a company that isn’t negatively impacted by today’s climate.

Q: What were the 1-2 most critical turning points in the development of the business?

A1: Entering a deal with SAP in 2003, which influenced the product technically, but most of all gave us enterprise credibility (but was dangerous technically, as it impacted our roadmap).

A2: The next-round VC evaluation meeting in Scope Capital’s Stockholm offices after our CEO Mårten Mickos came back with term sheets from the two dream Silicon Valley candidates in a round where the finalists were Kleiner, Sequoia, Warburgs, Advent and Benchmark. Our co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius concluded with asking “Do we want to become partners with our father (referring to Kleiner) or our brother (referring to Benchmark)?“. Ending up choosing our brothers wass a key to the culture in the company, which is what really built MySQL.

A3: Moving management to Silicon Valley, easing recruitment of key people.

Q: What lessons can you pass on for VCs and entrepreneurs that are most relevant in the coming recession?

A: Four lessons. First, be smart. Choose smart people, pick the right strategy, make the right decisions. Second, work hard. If opportunity knocks, you have to seize the moment, or being smart won’t help. I don’t consider myself lazy, but my work hours pale in comparison with the co-founder’s when he grew the community around the turn of the century, and with those of our CEO ever since he took over. Third, be resistant to uncertainty. When bad things happen, never give up. Hadn’t our CEO been a replica of Admiral Stockdale, living out the Stockdale Paradox [1], we would have lost the company several times over. Fourth, be lucky. Yes, you can be smart about timing, but to succeed, you also need a big portion of luck.

[1] “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Q: What advice do you have for VCs?

A: Most VCs are smart people, and they know that they have to pick the right entrepreneurs (who are smart, work hard, and resistant to uncertainty). They know that to be lucky, they have to buy several lottery tickets. Then, let the right entrepreneurs do their thing! Support them when they need support. On a different note, I think VCs should be happy that they belong to a caste respected by Nassim Nicholas Taleb of Black Swan fame. VC investments are potential positive Black Swans, and I think MySQL turned out to be one of them.

Q: What does it take for a buyer to want to pay up a lot of cash for a VC business?

A: A huge customer base that has money to spend. A documented, strong and sustainable growth rate. Brand recognition doesn’t hurt. Finally, and obviously, a lot of cash in the bank.

Q: Did MySQL experience a conflict between the mentalities of the “geeky” MySQL users and the “greedy” Venture Capitalists?

A: In general, it hasn’t been that challenging to keep a balance. Sure, it’s true that the geeks and the VCs form two entirely different audiences. But we target our messages. “Tala med bönder på bönders vis och med de lärde på latin”, we say in Swedish — roughly “Talk to peasants as peasants do, and to the learned in Latin” (let’s not go into which audience matches which category in the Swedish saying). And in reality, at least when it comes to MySQL, geeks and VCs have benefitted from each other. We did of course joke in front of geeks that “we fooled these VCs to give us money to be able to write more Open Source software faster”, and conversely said in front of VCs that “we exploit Open Source Software to give a larger ROI for VCs”. But neutrally speaking, it was a mutual benefit, a virtuous circle, where we’ve done our best to align commercial and community interests.

Q: You’re a serial entrepreneur, and made some money out of the Sun acquisition. Would you do it again?

A: Obviously, there is a hunger for more. Or perhaps appetite is a better word, as I am clearly more picky about the nature of the opportunity than before. During my two first entrepreneurships (founding Polycon Ab, and buying back Polycon shares from a German investor three years after the trade sale where we had sold half of Polycon), I jumped at opportunities without evaluating them in detail. By contrast, in 2001 I sold the MySQL related part of Polycon to MySQL AB based on long contemplations, but still, with MySQL I’ve been willing to relocate my family from Grankulla, Finland to Munich, Germany. I’m not so sure I’d relocate as easily again. Besides, for the time being, I’m quite happy with working for Sun — it’s an exciting job with a great learning curve and an opportunity to have an impact.

Q: What are you investing in yourself?

A: I’ve got a day job at Sun, and that consumes nearly all of my business focus. That said, I made a certain investment, together with a former angel investor in MySQL, in an IT solution provider on Åland, the islands between Finland and Sweden that are independent enough to have their own Top-Level Domain .ax. It’s called PBS Ab, for Productive Business Systems, and provide a great opportunity to apply learnings from my earlier life as a serial entrepreneur (with both Polycon and MySQL).

That’s it. Finally, I would like to extend a special thank you note to a few of the members of the MySQL AB Board of Directors that I’ve had the honour and pleasure to work with over the years. Our first Chairman John Wattin once described me as a “fireman”, as I’ve been given various tasks (”wherever there’s a fire”) since joining MySQL. Fredrik Oweson of Scope Capital, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, Kevin Harvey of Benchmark Capital, Bernard Liautaud (founder of Business Objects) and Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media) have each provided all of MySQL but also myself in person with invaluable inspiration and insight over the years. Thank you, former MySQL BoD members!

Links:

• Benchmark Capital: http://benchmark.com/
• Index Ventures: http://indexventures.com/
• Scope Capital: http://www.scope.se/

Good news: Ivan Nikitin is feeling better all the time. He has gone through insightful treatment in Heidelberg, and he is responding very well to it. The best part is that while the donations aren’t yet sufficient for a transplantation, it does look as if a transplantation may not even be necessary; the German doctors give Ivan’s body a chance to regenerate by itself, and it worked. And the generous donations from MySQLers, from classic Sun employees and also from the MySQL user community have made Ivan’s treatment in Heidelberg possible, something for which we are all very grateful.

Ivan Nikitin in Georg Richter’s lap (in Georg’s boat)

Ivan’s father Andrii allowed me to publicly quote his email to MySQL employees:

Hello MySQLers,

Ivan’s condition goes with most optimal scenario - doctors think he will not require transplantation because he provides positive answer to treatment from German doctors. Ivan’s state is better with every day since August, but to be sure doctors suggest that we should visit Heidelberg clinic for 5-6 weeks (hopefully not more).

Ivan is allowed to do whatever he wants so he enjoys running, shouting, singing, playing, (even swimming), etc. This is very unusual and happy time for us after 9 months in Kiev clinic with heavy medicine where he was allowed to go outside and see parents just couple times per week.

So we are very happy family now! I am sure this is because so many people think and care about us! Thanks everybody for donations and support! Many thanks to Georg who is helping us all the time and especially for arrangement of our arrival to Heidelberg!

Andrii, Alice, Ivan, Artem

A cropped version of the above, with just Georg and Ivan

I don’t yet have an update about the financials, i.e. how much money has been collected, and how much is needed by his treatment. I hope to fill you in on those things in my next Ivan blog entry.

But in the meantime, I’m very happy to share this good news!

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

“We didn’t acquire MySQL to change it, but to learn from it”, or something to that effect, was a line used by Jonathan Schwartz very early on in the Sun acquisition of MySQL. And this seems to be taken seriously. So Sun has appointed teams studying MySQL: our culture, and our way of working from home (70 % of us don’t even have a desk at an office, i.e. permanently work from home, such as me).

I hope to soon share some of the results from the Culture studies. Today, co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I were the interview subjects of the “Virtual Work at MySQL” study group under Edel Keville.

We had lots of things to point out, but most things had already been said by the other interview subjects. The two key things that were missing were related to meeting practices: How does MySQL organise virtual meetings? How do we arrange physical meetings?

The first one of those would be worth a blog entry in its own right, but the second one already has one. Called “How to arrange a physical meeting in a virtual organisation“, a blog entry from January 2007 describes a meeting in Berlin in December 2006, which was a bit of a testbed for the large-size Heidelberg Developer Mtg in September 2007.

I stay by my philosophy of being descriptive of how MySQL works (and has worked), as opposed to being prescriptive about how Sun should work. That said, I think the meeting practices documented after the Berlin meeting are probably worthy of a read for several virtual organisations which meet physically from time to time (if it’s politically correct to recommend one’s own blog entries).
References:

• My old blog entry MySQL Heidelberg Developer Mtg: Looking back
• My old blog entry How to arrange a physical meeting in a virtual organisation

The very first UC related parties are over, and the Users Conference hasn’t even started!

The first one was Mårten’s traditional and well-liked MySQL staff party in his garden. The coolest and most community significant one was the MySQL Community Pre-Conference Dinner party, though, as advertised on MySQL Forge Wiki. So we dropped out of Mårten’s party at six, to meet with the community.

There were 48 registered people, and I think even more turned up. And some of the guys who turned up unregistered were from Sun.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz crashes the party and is surrounded by community members and MySQLers alike

Rich Green, Executive VP of Software at Sun, also surrounded by Community Dinner attendees

Given that we’ve got record number of attendees at the UC, I think I will have to speed up my discussions, as I got to talk properly only with Florian Haas and Philipp Reisner of Linbit / DRBD, with Kai ‘Oswald’ Seidler of XAMPP, with Marc Delisle of phpMyAdmin, with Volker Oboda of Primebase, other than the MySQLers, ex-MySQLers and Sun employees. Note to self: Blame the jet lag, as this is my second Sunday 13 April 2008 (having got up in Tokyo at 7, and left Tokyo at 16, and arrived in San Francisco at 9 i.e. 7 hours before leaving).

And it seems I also blew my opportunity of flying Decadence Airlines again anytime soon. I was going to handle the payment using Rich Green’s credit card (Rich had to leave a bit earlier), but the restaurant gave him back the credit card and left me with merely signing a receipt. This isn’t going to buy me any aircraft fuel on Netjets.

Footnote 1: Yes, I was teased all evening for the four days we flew “Sun’s Corporate Jet“, i.e. a rental airplane by Netjets from Dublin via Stockholm, Moscow, Izhevsk, Moscow again, and Kiev to Hamburg in March. But it was good, so I suppose I deserve some teasing.

Footnote 2: I googled for “Decadence Airlines”, and funnily enough, one of the links goes directly to http://www.netjetseurope.com/eng/welcome-to-netjets/. I think I will have to plead guilty to that one.

My Japan trip was full of meetings, as trips to Japan usually are. One of the most interesting ones was at Sun Microsystems K.K.’s site, with a number of people engaged in building Japanese communities for Sun.

Takashi Shitamichi, Yoko Suga, Natsuki Wakabayashi, Jim Grisanzio,
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Satoshi Kawai, myself, Toshiro Umetsu, Takanobu Masuzuki

From Jim Grisanzio and others, I learned that Japan is Sun’s most active blogging country outside the US, on blogs.sun.com. And I got reminded of the messages heard many times at numerous Sun meetings: That Sun has Community experts both in Marketing and Engineering. On the contrary, MySQL’s Community Team is a separate entity, outside of both Marketing and Engineering, but serving them both.

And that’s an area where MySQL and Sun has a lot to discuss about, in order to understand if there is something to learn from the other party, and how the learnings can be applied and implemented in practise.

There is at least one area where MySQL can learn and contemplate how to implement Sun’s practices: Developer Marketing. We have never used those two words in combination at MySQL, which at times also means that a certain group of MySQL users fall between the cracks — those who contribute to the MySQL community but work for commercial customers. The Community Team socialises with them at Dev Mtgs (such as in Heidelberg last year) and at the Users Conference, and so do the Sales Engineers, Support Engineers and everyone else working for MySQL. Yet, spending time isn’t the same as concerted efforts.

Conversely, the concept of “user” seems to be different at MySQL and Sun. At MySQL, “user” is often used to mean “non-paying customer”. And these users form the core of the charter of the Community Team. We want to smoothen the way for our users, we want them to use MySQL, to expand their usage of and benefit from MySQL, and to share their positive experiences with the rest of the world. And while working on this, the MySQL Community Team strictly does not have an agenda of convincing the users to pay for something, ASAP. Sure, we want our pay check, and sure, we want MySQL (now Sun) to prosper financially. But our main goal is to fill the invisible pipeline of users who may take months or years at the user stage, before even considering to become paying customers.

Some of this forces top management to have quite a strong belief in the good that a community can have for a company. I’m thinking about metrics. It’s not as if there would be ideal metrics for community building. Or rather, there are ideal metrics, such as the number of project wins, i.e. cases where MySQL is being adopted in new projects. That would be highly relevant to know, segmented by various types of organisations. But we don’t have access to those numbers. Forcing people to register won’t work, and voluntary registration gives only a fraction of the new projects as well as a fraction of the relevant data.

My personal conclusion is that I’d rather have a high adoption rate, than know exactly which low adoption rate I have.

And another personal conclusion is that I’d generally rather spend time increasing adoption further, than increasing my level of knowledge of that adoption. That conclusion is less easy to defend, though, as some level of knowledge about adoption rates is essential.

What’s again easier to defend is that exact knowledge about an irrelevant aspect of the adoption rate may fool one to believe that said aspect is relevant. How significant is download rates? Web page hits? Email list traffic? Number of blog postings? Forum entries? And how much of that is directly driven by the efforts of the Community Team, rather than events outside the control of that team (such as new releases, security holes, acquisitions by Sun)?

Looking forward to various discussions on this topic with Ian Murdock and many other colleagues!

Reference:

• Jim Grisanzio’s blog at http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/mysql_meeting_at_sun_japan