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!

This morning, Sun Microsystems announced plans to acquire MySQL AB.

After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences during several partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). And over the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs with various viewpoints of the deal.

First of all, let’s point out a couple of facts about Sun Microsystems — since all MySQL stakeholders may not be fully up to speed about Sun.

Facts on Sun Microsystems

• Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy
• 34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billion euros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares) about the same as yearly revenues
• Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters
• Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger)
• The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL
• Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home
• Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters)
• Counts some of the worlds most brilliant innovators amongst its current and past employees

For me personally, I’m excited to get the opportunity to actively contribute to the successful integration of MySQL into Sun. I want to make an impact in merging our corporate cultures, and I look forward to making that a bi-directional process. Since I am based outside the US, I am particularly excited about meeting the many Sun engineers located in Hamburg (Germany), Grenoble (France), Prague (Czech Republic), St Petersburg (Russia), Beijing (China) and Bangalore (India).

But let me now turn to the more general planned implications of Sun’s acquisition of MySQL AB.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for MySQL users?

Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy about the acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the wave of positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sun gets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under the GPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office / Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s the NetBeans IDE tool. And more.

Sun’s track record is embodied by individuals with a solid set of FOSS values, such as Simon Phipps (Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer), Ian Murdock (Debian founder, now Sun’s Chief OS Strategist), and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL lead). I’ve met all three in various FOSS arenas, I respect their work, and I am looking forward to be working closely with them.

Anxiety on the part of MySQL users may stem from Sun’s success with Java and Solaris. Will MySQL’s support for other programming languages and operating systems now be given less attention?

Absolutely not. MySQL is still being managed by the same people, and the charter is still the same. There is no need for reducing the set of platforms or languages. It only makes sense for us to continue to support defacto Web development standards like LAMP, as well as emerging ones like Ruby and Eclipse. This deal is about addition, not subtraction.

But let’s dwell on the topic of Solaris a bit. Solaris has a special position in the heart of MySQL, as it was the first platform under which MySQL was developed. Linux came second. Internally, code coverage tests were long performed just on Sun. And with the DTrace probes planned as part of 6.0, some types of optimisation of MySQL applications are the easiest on Solaris.

I would expect that having access to the topmost Solaris and Java experts within the same company will accelerate our development for the benefit of MySQL users on the Solaris platform, and in the Java environment, respectively.

But I don’t expect that in any way to be at the cost of other popular operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X, other Unixes etc.) or development environments (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, ODBC, C++, C#, VB etc.). MySQL grew with LAMP and MySQL without LAMP at its core is simply unimaginable. It was MySQLs part of LAMP that interested Sun in the first place. Hence I don’t see Sun having a platform migration strategy, but to continue to be an integral part of the dot in .com.

So while the news may be especially good for MySQL users on Solaris and/or Java, the news is definitely good irrespective of environment: As part of Sun, the MySQL database will have immediate access to technical, marketing, OSS developer relations and sales rescources that would have taken us years to build as an independent company.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the core MySQL community?

I’d like to think that the acquisition of MySQL by Sun will be seen as good news also by the core group of users who form the active MySQL community. This is because Sun is a safe haven for MySQL. Sun knows Open Source, and to the extent things change, I expect Sun to add value to our community. I don’t expect huge change, though. We continue to work with our quality contributors, we continue to provide our MySQL Forums, the Planet MySQL blog aggregator, we remain on the #mysql-dev and #mysql channels on Freenode, we provide MySQL University lessons, we meet at the MySQL Users Conference. We’ll put effort into connecting the many FOSS enthusiasts and experts at Sun — whom we will now learn to know better — with our active user community.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the MySQL employees?

Admittedly, this blog is not directed at MySQL employees. We have a different, internal blog called “Village MySQL” for that purpose (as opposed to “Planet MySQL”). But many of our users, community members, customers, and partners have close relationships with MySQL employees — and you may be interested in what Sun’s acquisition of MySQL means for the employees.

For employees, Sun’s acquisition means continuity. Mårten Mickos will continue to lead us, and our executives and key engineering leads plan to join Sun. In addition, our existing engineering staff will be invited to come over as well. Sun executives have made us feel very welcomed and valued.

Very important for our employees is the fact that we can continue to work on Free and Open Source software. We can continue to work from home (as most of us do, including myself). Titles, reporting structures, and long-term goals may change, but as acquisition goes, the Sun culture as I’ve experienced it so far seems fairly similar to ours.

And — whether it’s destiny, divinity or just good luck — we get the opportunity to digest all of this together, during the MySQL All-Company Meeting here in Orlando. It goes on this week until Saturday 19 Jan.

Being acquired by Sun is unique for all of us MySQLers. But for two very special employees, it’s something even more. I’m thinking of our founders, Michael “Monty” Widenius and David Axmark. I’m very happy for them. Sure, the transaction has a financial impact on them, and it’s positive. But we’re humble Scandinavians, so we don’t flash money, nor even talk about it. More importantly, I can see their heritage being in good hands at Sun. They didn’t develop MySQL in order to Get Rich Quick; in fact, they rejected offers that would have accomplished that goal during the Bubble. They developed MySQL in order to have a positive impact on the world of computing. And as a step in that direction, they took in venture financing.

VCs are more motivated by money than our founders, and obviously look for a return on their investment. That involves either an IPO or a trade sale. Of all candidates to acquire MySQL, I cannot imagine a more ideal buyer from a founder perspective than Sun Microsystems. If I know our founders right (and I’ve known Monty since the late 1970s and David since the 1980s), they will use this deal as an opportunity to accomplish even more within the space of Open Source and Sun Microsystems.

Congratulations, Monty and David! And congratulations, MySQL users, community members, customers, partners and employees!

P.S. I promise more later!

Giuseppe Maxia had a stop-over yesterday on his way to the MySQL Staff Meeting. We met for community discussions, and rounded off with Weißbier and dinner in Munich’s famous Hofbräuhaus.

What a fantastic feeling! The Bavarian spirit of joy and happiness has been decoupled from tobacco stench! I’ve always liked the first and hated the second.

So the German non-smoker protection legislation of 1 January 2008 is good news for anyone considering arranging meetings in Germany. You will no longer be “welcomed” at the airport by an offensive smell. Headaches in German restaurants will now correlate mostly with the amount of alcohol you drink.

Germany just became an even better place to work and live.

For some reason, Germany and Open Source go very well together. That’s one of the reasons I moved to Germany a good year ago.

Now, I note a new Open Source marketing consultancy popping up in southern Germany. Not that such companies are very tied to geography. It’s Sandro Groganz, of Mindquarry and eZ Systems fame, who has set up shop.

Sandro will help companies and organisations, both in their capacities as creators, contributors, and investors. Read more about this on his well-organised blog. Good luck, Sandro!

One week to go! Then we’ll have MySQL AB’s biggest internal meeting ever, with some 400 MySQLers being shipped to Orlando, Florida.

Almost four years ago in 2004, the company met in Cancún, Mexico. A year before that in 2003, we met in Budapest, Hungary. In 2002, we met in St Petersburg, Russia. In 2001, we met in Helsinki, Finland. In 2000, they (I wasn’t on board at that time) met in Monterey, USA. As we met last time in Cancún, we were fewer people in the whole company than last September at the Developer Mtg in Heidelberg, Germany.

I’m looking forward to meeting with all my fellow MySQLers. Besides all the working and catching-up, I expect to do some running with fellow MySQLers, share some photographs, and just enjoy spending face-to-face time.

Right now, I’m preparing for this by looking through and setting the agendas for various meetings with other teams, as well as 1on1 mtgs with my team. And I even plan to create a check-list for random beer encounters and store it in my phone. Few things would disturb me more than sitting on my flight back across the Atlantic, only to realise that I forgot to talk to somebody special, and will need to wait forever to get the next opportunity.

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

As noted already in March and described more closely in July, we had a MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, opened up for selected members of the MySQL community. Since yesterday, I’m back and reflecting upon how it all went.

The first reflection is that I’m biased, since I was organising the meeting together with above all Patrik Backman (for the agenda) and Georg Richter (for the lion’s share of all real work, such as the coordination with our venue, Marriott Hotel). But I would still like to concur with the many MySQLers who think it was “the best MySQL Developers Meeting ever“.

So what made the meeting a success?

We got plenty of work done. Our motto was “Working Together“, making use of finally being together while going about our already defined goals. We had next to no overall one-to-many presentations (the type where each VP in turn preaches his favourite themes and people doze off waiting for the status report to end). Instead, each small development team met with other small development teams, based on detailed advance planning on which teams really need to meet. And we had plenty of seemingly random one-on-one corridor interactions, many of which were carefully pre-planned by goal-oriented meeting attendees.

We had lots of fun. We met in five-six different restaurants in the Old Town of Heidelberg. We had a great river boat cruise. We had a good team event seeing the Falconry close to Heidelberg. We went to the Kulturbrauerei to see how beer is brewed. And we concluded the team event by a superb evening in the old castle of Heidelberg. We ended that evening by some country-wise singing, started by the Ukraine and including the largest (employee-wise) countries of Germany, Russia, the US, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Australia, and Italy.

Our infrastructure was working. Heidelberg Marriot was our best-working hotel so far. Excellent food (including edible, healthy options, but not totally forgetting the mandatory junk). Internet worked all the time, even in the rooms. And this was no coincidence. Hey, this was Germany. And we have plenty of locals in Germany, and in particular, Georg met plenty of times with whomever needed to be seen locally from an organisation standpoint — right in front of his doorstep. (No wonder Georg got standing ovations at our closing Gala Dinner at Heidelberg Castle.)

We improved our meeting practices. We followed through on some of our innovations from smaller team meetings (like the one last December in Berlin). Team Leads were in charge of the days being but to productive use — with over 150 people, no single individual can ensure that time is used efficiently be all Developers. We insisted on good meeting preparations, and good meeting notes being talked. We spread the last-minute notes in outdoor roll-calls each morning, and in the daily Heidelberger Nachrichten (”Heidelberg Chronicle”) handouts.

We had Team Exhibitions and MySQL University Sessions. Nearly all thought that the Team Exhibitions invigorated all of us — where proud MySQLers demoed what they themselves had identified as Cool Stuff to be highlighted for their fellow MySQLers. And the twelve University Sessions spread the knowledge of the intimate details of how to code MySQL.

We had external guests, both customers and community members. Both categories gave us positive feedback for having been invited. We are deeply thankful for the input they gave us, Keeping It Real. But not only did they keep us real — they also made us a lot more polite and courteous than at some previous internal meetings. I heard very few negative comments or raised voices. Concerns were not wiped under the rug, but they were raised in a very constructive manner.

Thank you to all participants, external and internal, which made this event possible!

As noted already in March, we have decided to open up the MySQL Developer Meeting for selected members of the MySQL User Community, i.e. for MySQL users who have a need of interacting with our developers. In Sorrento 2006, Prag 2005 or Malta 2004, we had similar developer meetings — but the external representation amounted to one (1) customer presentation.

In Heidelberg (one bus shuttle hour from Frankfurt airport), we’ll do things differently.

Some key points:

1. Community Days are concentrated to Thursday 20.9.2007 and Friday 21.9.2007: While we have very few sessions closed for the community even on the other days (Wed 21.9, Sat 22.9, Mon 24.9), our scheduling started from the insight that few community members can afford to stay for too many days. So meetings that are of most relevance for Community generally take place on Thu and Fri.
2. MySQL University sessions are scheduled for the same Thursday and Friday. That’s where we spread our accumulated knowledge on how to develop MySQL internally amongst those who code MySQL, the Connectors, and Tools. Invited community members are welcome to attend physically, and anyone can participate virtually at no cost.
3. Team Exhibitions are a new form of gathering. MySQL engineering teams invite their fellow teams to celebrate success by showing what they themselves think is cool stuff — already in production, or in beta, or just in alpha. This doesn’t have to be flashy user interfaces. For instance, the Optimiser team may choose to demo a query that runs 75 % faster in 5.1 than in 5.0. We’ll make sure that our non-attending Community members gets to hear about this through MySQL Forge. And naturally, any external community members are most welcome to attend the Team Exhibitions first hand, both to get an impression of what’s happening, and to give us feedback.
4. Every attending non-MySQLer will get two hosts: one Community Team Host and one Engineering Team Host. The Community Team Host is either Jay, Lenz, Colin, Giuseppe, David or myself (Lenz will tell you know who is your host), and we make sure you know where and when the meetings are, we introduce you to the proper Engineering team members, and try to ensure your expectations are met. The Engineering Team Host is whichever MySQL developer who is the domain expert on your topic. Meeting with this developer is probably the reason why you came to Heidelberg in the first place, but do take into account that such devs are likely to be busy with many meetings in Heidelberg.
5. The detailed agenda is still under works. During the course of July, we expect to be able to publish the MySQL University schedule, as well as the tentative Team Exhibition schedule. Individual community members should also get a picture of what meetings they are likely to be interested in, through interaction at least with their Community Team hosts and in some cases even with their Engineering Team hosts.

External participants should expect to be firming up their travel schedule within the next week or two. This involves getting a firm booking from the Heidelberg Marriott Hotel (along Neckar River at Vangerowstrasse, a short distance from Heidelberg’s Old Town), which is both our meeting venue and the place where nearly all MySQLers stay. Expect to be contacted by Lenz Grimmer, our Community Manager EMEA (or contact him yourself at firstname@mysql.com, if you want to be proactive). Lenz is keeping a list of the arrival and departure dates and times of our guests.

Last week, I wrote about my subjective Top Ten Reasons To Work For MySQL. Let me be a bit more specific this week. We’re looking for a CIO!

This leadership opportunity is about leading our IT department as CIO/Vice President of IT. Personally, I had a stab at these responsibilities before becoming VP Community Relations, and I can tell you it is a challenge.

MySQL’s technology is helping power the internet and we are enjoying explosive growth. Our company unites the power of open-source computing with web-based application providers and the CIO is leading this evolution from the front. Ideally, the candidate comes from like-minded enterprises and thrives in the excitement of being part of an international, virtual company providing disruptive technology.

The main responsibility of the CIO of MySQL is to ensure the proper functioning and scaling of IT systems for the entire customer lifecycle and for administrative functions. MySQL is a vital piece of the modern online world, and we want our own IT infrastructure to be a leading example of this.

Millions of people and tens of thousands of organizations depend on MySQL every single day, and we want to provide them with an unparalleled experience from the moment they visit our website all through their life as a paying MySQL customer. Our mission-critical internal systems for communication, collaboration, administration and financials need to scale with our rapid growth. And from all these systems and data repositories we need to continually produce useful reports and analytics. Only with highly functional and well integrated IT systems, whether on-premise or on-demand, can we reach our goals.

And, be prepared for a set of colleagues who can be both a great resource for you (as your fellow MySQLers are both knowledgeable and helpful) and very challenging (as your fellow MySQLers are also very opinionated, and have high expectations for how IT should be run)!

For a details, please visit our career page on www.mysql.com/jobs or e-mail your resume directly to our HR team: jobs@mysql.com.

You might have noticed that MySQL is hiring. We need more people. Last time I looked, we had 29 open positions, nearly all of which worldwide.

Internally, we have an initiative to come up with a canonised list of “The Top Reasons To Work for MySQL“. This is my input to the internal group of people compiling that list:

1. You get to work with some of the smartest people on the planet, as users, customers and colleagues.
2. You don’t have to relocate, but you can, if you (or your spouse) want to.
3. You usually work from home and can be available for family emergencies.
4. You can influence your own daily working rhythm.
5. You get to travel, meet people and get friends from all over the world.
6. You become part of a close-knit worldwide team of pioneers.
7. You get to work for a good cause: Free Software, Open Source.
8. You get to build and spread software used by millions of people.
9. You get spontaneously thanked by grateful users of MySQL, for work others did before you joined [1].
10. You get to contribute to an integral part of the infrastructure of the Web.

[1] That happened to me two months after I joined, in July 2001. I went to a country I had never been in (Serbia) and was cheered by 250 users when presenting MySQL to a room that could fit 200. They were so grateful to me for stuff I hadn’t done in the first place! Although undeserved, it still felt great, and I knew I had made the right career move.