“If you’d like to get out of the aircraft quickly, and we’re not around to help you, grab this red handle on the door and pull it up.” Our friendly pilot (from what I later dubbed Decadence Airlines) just gave us his friendly security instructions at take-off from Dublin airport, on the way to Bromma in Stockholm. Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and myself are heading on the first leg of our trip to meet MySQL personnel across Europe.

I’ve been frequently teased about using “Sun’s Corporate Jet”. Flying around on that one is certainly perceived as glamorous, and perhaps not compatible with the humble roots of MySQL. Well, glamorous or not, here we are, three people, three empty seats and two pilots up in the sky. However, it’s not exactly “Sun’s” jet. It’s Netjets, more like a taxi than a company car. We’re going to have a different pilot tomorrow, and a different plane. That said, I do enjoy it and I took my favourite gadget, my 8mm fisheye lens, with me to commemorate the moment.

The purpose of the trip is quite a bit closer to the humble roots of MySQL, though. As opposed to asking everyone to come to one place to listen to centrally dispersed top-down communication, our ambition is to go where the MySQLers are, and listen to what their questions, concerns and joys are. The on-boarding process is just getting underway, and we were addressing questions related to terms and conditions of employment, how territories change, or how to interface with the Sun Visors (the existing Sun employees who can give all the inside tips on whom at Sun to get introduced to, which intranet URLs to visit, and which mailing lists to subscribe to).

And, as before, Sun’s attitude is respectful, positive, helpful. It’s about “we’ll make it work”, without at the same time extending promises that cannot be held later on.

So, now on from the Inside Sales teams of Dublin to the very heterogeneous group of MySQLers from the mother county of Sweden!

Since well before I joined MySQL in 2001, I have had contact with now-members of the four-headed management team of Germany’s top-notch PHP experts and solution providers Mayflower GmbH.

Mayflowers and MySQLers frequently pop into each other at PHP conferences and other Open Source events, and meet informally under various circumstances ranging from Christmas parties to Biergarten discussions. It’s always interesting to exchange thoughts on virtual companies, Open Source, business models, IRC, scrum, and finding developers (some of which have worked for both MySQL and Mayflower, incidentally). And by sheer coincidence, Mayflower’s Munich headquarters is now about 150 metres from where I live, in the same street that I look out at from my home office (Mannhardtstr.). This time, they copied us, though — I arrived first and they became neighbours several months later …

So you can imagine that I was happy last Friday when I had asked Johann-Peter Hartmann to come to celebrate life under the Sun “with a colleague or two”, and he brought in all three other members of the Mayflower leadership quadruplet: Albrecht Günther, Björn Schotte and Gregor Streng. We had miso soup and sashimi, with hot sake and green tea, at Jin’s Heaven Takumi another 200 metres towards Isartor. Delicious food, good drinks (they wondered I hadn’t brought along salmiak vodka) and entertaining discussions.

Looking forward to more of the same with Mayflower over the years to come!

Now we have The Real Thing: MySQL joins Sun Microsystems!

On 16 January 2008, less than six weeks ago, Sun announced their definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB. That “definite agreement” was still subject to government approval in the US, Germany and Austria, and to the signing of the legal transfer documents by MySQL AB’s current owners.

Those hurdles have now been passed, and the acquisition is thus official. MySQL is part of Sun!

Many community members and customers have surely thought of Sun’s acquisition as a Done Deal already. Perhaps there never was any real uncertainty about it, but at least theoretically, there still was a risk of the deal not closing. That uncertainty is now removed.

This is very exciting for us at MySQL.

The last six weeks, we’ve been living under special circumstances: We’ve known that Sun is acquiring us. We’ve seen and experienced that Sun displays a “do no evil” attitude, from the top downwards. I have yet to meet the Sun employee who is not excited about the acquisition. Everyone is eager to get going, to do joint activities, to launch MySQL as part of Sun.

At the same time, an era is ending. Yes, I may be overly dramatic, but today also marks the end of MySQL as an independent company. For me personally, this means I’m now working for a company with over 34.000 employees. In 2001, I split my company into two, and sold one of the halves to MySQL AB. We were employees no 15 to 20 (roughly). I’m happy and proud to note that all five of us who joined MySQL AB in 2001 are still with the company, when it’s size is about 450 people. Little did we know!

So what changes with todays announcement of the closing of the deal?

In a way, the “Business as Usual” phase ends. “Business as Usual”, in this context, meant that MySQL couldn’t take orders from Sun, that MySQL and Sun couldn’t go on joint sales calls, and that information between MySQL and Sun couldn’t be disclosed freely. Those restrictions are now done and over with, together with the possibility (risk) of the deal not closing.

In another way, “Business as Usual” continues. We’ll continue to support our popular development environments (PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails, etc etc, not just Java) and likewise our popular platforms (RHEL, Windows, Mac OS X, etc etc, not just Solaris). Things don’t change, unless announced.

This also means that the MySQL Users Conference is happening with MySQL being part of Sun. Early registration ends this week, coinciding with the announcement of the closing of Sun’s acquisition. I hope this means many potential UC attendees will get wind of the US $ 200 savings in time to register by 26 February (today!).

What are the next steps?

The Integration Team has been working long hours in the past six weeks, planning how MySQL is to be integrated into Sun. Yet, plenty of work still remains: many uncertainties, many questions.

The immediate next step is related to so called personnel on-boarding. As MySQL AB is now a subsidiary of Sun, MySQLers are hence part of Sun. But from an employee perspective, this is merely an intermediate step. MySQLers will transfer to Sun Microsystems, or local subsidiaries of Sun — such as Sun Microsystems GmbH, in my case. That’s something that cannot be planned and executed in no time flat, so it’s going to be happening over the next months. When the process has concluded, I hope nearly all MySQLers have signed on, and received their Sun credentials, badges, and whatever insignia belongs to true Sun Microsystems employees.

To this point, I need to mention Damien Eastwood, Sun’s VP, Products and Technology Law. He’s been absolutely great in understanding the needs and requirements of MySQLers when it comes to job agreements. He’s worked with the thought leaders amongst our internal developers, to make the process of deciding whether to accept the Sun job offer a much easier process than what it would have been when the discussions started. A tough challenge, and everyone’s not yet on board. Still, I cannot but think it’s an omen that if you combine the first name of MySQL’s Legal Counsel, Clint Smith, with Damien’s last name, you get Clint Eastwood.

So, in summary:

• The ride has been smooth so far, as judged by my colleagues who’ve experienced previous integrations.
• We today really just see the beginning of the integration. I have no doubt that there will be bumps, even though both the Sun and the MySQL side have smart people with a good attitude of making everything work.
• We haven’t figured it all out yet, nor do we need to. Until further notice, we will continue to work as previously.
• All the Sun employees I’ve met have been very eager to help, and want to learn from MySQLers.
• We’ve had a good FOSS IP debate, where Sun has adapted our job agreements and made it possible for us to de facto contribute to projects other than MySQL, in a practical way.
• And finally, may I suggest an Action Item for you: Register today (to save 200 US dollars) for our Users Conference 14-17 April 2008! Come to hear Jonathan Schwartz’s keynote and learn about all the other things we’re doing around MySQL!

As part of planning our integration into Sun, we surveyed all MySQLers on their opinions regarding Sun, their concerns and ideas. Amongst concerns, “retaining the MySQL Culture” ranked second.

MySQL Staff Meeting in Budapest 2003; time off in the Gellért Baths

But what exactly is “The MySQL Culture”? That’s never been written down, and defining culture is usually a matter for anthropologists, not Open Source companies.

So we decided to ask. Instead of engaging field anthropologists, we just added a question to the survey. And did we get answers! This is what the foremost experts, i.e. our employees, think constitutes MySQL Culture:

• A diversified and distributed workforce
• Lack of empire building
• A place for geeks
• Lack of politics
• The abililty to make decisions
• Large virtual family
• The ability to grow
• Leading by ideas and visions rather than by rules and procedure
• Accessibility of executives
• Lean approval cycles
• Active outbound blogging
• Learning from others
• Agility
• Listen to music
• Approachability
• Little “red tape”
• Being heard when raising concerns
• Love thy customer
• Blogging
• ‘M’ in [Open Source] LAMP Stack
• Bringing people together routinely to share, learn and work
• Making the world better
• Broken English is our standard language
• Managing and developing products remotely
• Can-do spirit
• Marten Mickos
• Care for customers
• Meetings in strange locations
• CEO mail to *all* employees
• Minimal bureaucracy
• Clarity
• Motivation
• Collaboration
• Multicultural environment
• Collaborative management
• Mutual respect
• Commitment to our jobs
• Nimble organization
• Communicate freely
• No back-stabbing or obstructiveness.
• Communication
• No politics
• Continuity
• No unhealthy competition
• Continuous product improvement
• No-asshole Rule
• Cooperation: one for all and all for one
• NOT only about money
• Courageous
• Open dialog
• Creative contributions
• Open minded
• Cultivating thinking outside the box
• Open Source
• Decision making
• Openness
• Dedicated
• Organizational transparency
• Dev meetings
• Our lively, highly personal content: photo albums, fun@ mailing list, wiki discussions etc
• Discuss@ and Life@
• Passion
• Discussion
• Passion for quality
• Disruptors
• People, people, people
• Distributed employees
• Personal relationships
• Diversity
• Polite
• Drinking songs
• Positive spirit and attitude
• Eat good food
• Pride in our community
• Efficiency
• Product quality
• Embracing the best of many different cultures
• Quality of work
• Emphasis on work/life balance
• Quirkyness
• Encouragement to express ideas and thoughts
• Radio Sakila
• Engineering/support quality
• RC/GA release policies
• Entrepreneurship
• Recognition of hard work
• Face to face meetings
• Relatively egalitarian nature
• Fellowship with co-workers
• Relaxed humor
• Fix all known bugs before doing new development
• Scandinavian-style leadership
• Flat organization
• Sense of urgency
• Flexibility
• Singing “Helan går”
• Focus on training and learning
• Small company feel
• Free exchange of ideas, thoughts, feedback
• Speed of development
• Free, Open, Flat, Casual
• Support of proactive ideas
• Freedom to explore new models
• Surveys
• Freedom to innovate
• Team spirit
• Freedom to work anywhere
• TEAMWORK, TEAMWORK, TEAMWORK!
• Friendly environment
• Test coverage
• Friendship
• The importance of each employee
• Fully empowered teams
• The love of FOSS
• FUN FUN FUN
• The love of the product
• Global
• The right to speak up on anything
• Global Sport’s and Culture Days
• The Users and community
• Goofy traditions
• Thorough code review
• Hard working
• Treating *all* colleagues as important
• High quality coffee
• Trust
• Honesty
• Trust in co-worker’s expertise
• Independence to innovate
• User’s Conference
• Independent thinking
• Vibrant “online” culture
• Individualism
• Virtual
• Integration with the Community
• We are outspoken and honest
• Integrity
• We go the extra mile
• Internal debate on the best way to do things
• We respect and help each other
• Introduce changes quickly
• Willingness to lend a helping hand
• IRC, email, phone, Skype
• Work ethic

A summary might look like this: We are outspoken and honest. We are dedicated. We are courageous. We aim to do good. We drink high quality coffee, eat good food, listen to music and share these and many other human values across the world on IRC, email, phone, Skype and real-life meetings disregarding business rank, and size of wallet. This helps management to be in touch with the real work as well as helping workers to be in touch with business goals.

The last few days before the Sun-MySQL Integration Kickoff happening 29-31 January 2008 at Sun’s headquarters in Menlo Park, quite a few European MySQLers have approached me with concerns related to the potential danger of a skewed focus on the US in the integration discussions. After all, MySQL AB originates in Scandinavia and almost a majority of our employees work outside the US, so some aspects of MySQL AB should remain Scandinavian or European, even though we’re been acquired by a Silicon Valley based company.

While this geographic concern will remain on my agenda, yesterday evening provided some peace of mind on this account. Summoned by our Scandinavian CEO, a group of MySQLers (American and European) met at the Ikea restaurant in East Palo Alto.

Both the furniture and the food at Ikea looked much like in Gloms, Esbo (in my native Finland), or Kungens kurva close to Stockholm, or anywhere in Europe. Or presumably anywhere in the world. Even the meatballs tasted the same.

Another point of comfort for worried Europeans is the German Handelsblatt blog, where the blogger wonders who actually acquired whom — and what “the Vikings” will make happen with the acquiring company.

We’ll see!

Two employees of Sun Finland, Margot Wik (whom I studied French with in the 1980s at the Helsinki University of Technology) and Thomas Branders (another fellow HUT student, from whom I tried to learn how to sing Helan går while having fun at HUT’s Swedish language student corporation Teknologföreningen, but don’t blame him for the end result on YouTube) invited me to Sun Finland’s Friday Coffee Meeting 25.1.2008 at about 14:00. I was happy to accept. It’s only natural to do the inaugural ambassador visit in my native country.

I’m looking forward to learning from Margot, Tomi and their colleagues, and telling them about MySQL!

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!

Giuseppe Maxia (stress on the “i”, MaxIa, not MAxia) is now the new Community Team Leader. On Friday, our Data Charmer from Sardinia in Italy agreed to assume the responsibility of leading our Community Team, as I’m busy with my new appointment to Ambassador to Sun.

This means that Giuseppe now has a team of three Community Managers for each time zone, Jay Pipes in North America (NAM), Lenz Grimmer in Europe (EMEA), and Colin Charles in Asia Pacific (APAC). For the time being, Giuseppe reports to me.

Jay Pipes is the Program Chair for the upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, the main MySQL community event of the year.

One issue remains. “Community Team Leader” seems like a boring title. What title should we pick for Giuseppe? Given Giuseppe’s character and name of his blog (http://datacharmer.blogspot.com/), why not “Chief Community Charmer“? Or if not Charmer, then what about “Catalyst?” If you have ideas, email him and/or me!

Part of what makes me very happy about our Sun deal is the interest Sun has expressed in learning from us. That has been evident in all the various meetings here in Orlando — be it with the founders, with the individual departments, or in front of the entire audience.

So as a way to teach Sun a first lesson, I had prepared a gig for the end of the presentations during the morning. We have a tradition of singing songs in our company, stemming from our Scandinavian heritage. “We take this very seriously”, I had heard Rich Green comment. And I’m happy he meant it in a very respectful manner: Corporate culture is important. Drinking songs themselves are meant to be purely fun, and not taken seriously, although they are surrounded by plenty of fairly rigid tradition.

In order to make it light for our future colleagues from Sun, as well as our own recent recruits as well as others unfortunate enough not to know the simplest of all drinking songs by rote, we prepared a phonetic translation for Helan går and put it up as a slide:

Helan går: Phonetic version (sing this!)

Hell and gore
Shung Hop father Allan Allan ley.
Hell and gore
Shung Hop father Allan ley.

Oh handsome in the hell and tar
hand hell are in the half and four.
Hell and gore <drink now>
Shung Hop father Allan ley

A few of us probably sang that without understanding what the underlying Swedish words actually mean. So this brings me to:

Helan går: Translated version (think this!)

The first drink (”whole glass”) goes,
sing <long expression of joy>!
The first drink goes,
sing <short expression of joy>!

And anyone who doesn’t take the first drink,
will be disallowed the second drink.
The first drink goes!
<drink here and now>
Sing <short expression of joy>

The original version, which is both phonetically correct, and carries the right meaning, goes like this:

Helan går: Original version (learn this!)

Helan går
sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej.
Helan går,
sjung hoppfaderallan lej.

Och den som inte helan tar,
han ej heller halvan får.
Helan går,
sjung hopp faderallan lej.

Links:

• Helan går video & audio on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyZpCs3i71s

An important question for MySQLers and MySQL users alike is: “What do the MySQL Founders think of the acquisition of MySQL by Sun?”

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to explore that question further, in my first personal encounter with Sun. Already before that encounter, I had asked Monty a couple of questions.

Kaj: Monty, in the 1990s, you developed MySQL on Solaris. Why was that?

Monty: In the early years when I worked with Sun products, I was always
impressed with the stability and reliability of both hardware and
operating system. That was the reason why we used Sun Microsystems technology to develop MySQL.

Kaj: You did that development ages ago. What do you think about the Sun Microsystems of 2008?

Monty: In recent times, I have been very happy with Sun’s contributions to the Open Source world, for example Open Solaris, Java and Open Office. Also, I am impressed by their understanding of Open Source, as witnessed by the Open Office contributor license.

Kaj: I know you haven’t had too much personal interaction with Sun so far, relating to the acquisition agreement. What do you expect to happen between the two companies?

Monty: I know that MySQL AB has a lot to learn from Sun when it comes to Open Source, and hope Sun desires and will be able to learn from us. Through this agreement, we can contribute our knowledge to each other, so that we together can create something even bigger.

Based on the interaction between Monty, David and the senior Sun representatives we met, I think it’s safe to say that there was a lot of excitement both sides. Founder expectations are high regarding what Sun can mean for MySQL. And I’m happy to note that the feeling is mutual — it was my firm impression that the Sun guys we met have high expectations regarding what the MySQL founders can continue to contribute to the future of Sun.

Finally: Today during the presentations by Mårten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, one particular person has been very active, and very supportive of the agreement. That’s Monty.

We’re living in exciting times!