In January, when Sun announced their intent to acquire MySQL, I predicted that there would be a significant clash of cultures which would result in the loss of some of the folks responsible for the MySQL phenomenon. MySQL is much more than a “SQL interface to a file system” as Suzanne McVeigh famously described it - it’s a cultural phenomenon for this decade. Losing the personalities that created “MySQL” could have the knock-on effect of losing the support of the community that has grown up around MySQL.

Yesterday I heard that David Axmark, a co-founder of MySQL, has resigned from Sun to pursue other opportunities, with MySQL, outside of Sun. Following so close on the heels of Monty’s departure, and before the one year anniversary of the Sun acquisition, one can only assume that life inside Sun was unbearable for these folks.

In the typical acquisition scenario the key players are incentivized, through significant bonus programs, to stick around for a year and to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. Their primary role during the transition period is to smooth the ruffled feathers of employees, partners, customers and users, help them adapt to the culture of the new organization and convince them that the acquisition was the best thing that could have happened for the product or company.

Sun is a large corporation with all the rules and procedures that are required to effectively run and manage an organization of that size. MySQL was something quite different, and something quite unique. I suspect that the culture clash between Sun and MySQL was of gargantuan proportions, and second only to the clash of cultures between Ingres and CA. I know first hand, from my time at CA, of the frustration of watching opportunities being squandered and process and egos getting in the way of innovation. Small companies, like Ingres is today, and like MySQL was a year ago, are the perfect vehicles for rapid innovation.

So what’s next for MySQL? I don’t believe for one second that Sun will allow its MySQL investment to wither on the vine, but I do believe that the open source model will allow for different incarnations of the product to blossom and compete with Sun’s MySQL. We will also see an emergence of companies established specifically to compete with Sun in providing support and services around MySQL.

I have nothing but goodwill for the MySQL folks - they, together with Postgres, provided the proof points we needed when deciding to put Ingres into open source. I hope to see fewer cloudy days for the MySQL guys at Sun in the future.

Related Links:

http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/10/07/thank-you-david-axmark/

 

Yesterday was one of those days where nothing seemed to go right!  I was scheduled to address the OW2 Technology Council at the France Telecom HQ at 9am, so I set out from my hotel at 7:30 to make sure that I arrived with plenty of time to spare.  The taxi dropped me at the address I’d obtained from the OW2 website at 8am, but I had a nagging feeling that France Telecom’s HQ probably wasn’t an abandoned building on a suburban street in Paris.  We finally tracked down the correct address for the meeting just minutes before I was scheduled to speak.   Arriving in a panic almost half an hour late, the fact that the projector wasn’t working was the icing on the cake!  I had to do the presentation without slides, which for me was like singing a-cappella - not for the faint of heart!  I topped off the day by spilling a glass of wine over my dinner - duck in red wine is highly recommended! Read the rest of this entry »

 

I’ve been researching tips on how to improve the web traffic to my blog and here’s the top five that I’m going to experiment with:

1. Be controversial! I’ve learned first hand that death by ten thousand flames on slashdot.org is good for site traffic.
2. Blog on wet weekends - apparently people catch up on reading when there’s nothing better to do. Given the soggy summer that they’ve just had I assume that the British have now read right the way to the end of the internet.
3. Choose blog titles more judiciously. While it’s amusing that people have wound up here when searching for fairy tales, tv-shows and movies, I’m not sure that people searching for “open source database” or “enterprise open source”, my target audience, will have found the blog.
4. Lure popular technology bloggers to point to my posts. That should result in their readership visiting 25B and hopefully they’ll return. The ZD Net post “Ingres Gives Fortify Security Study a Good Fisking” caused a significant spike in traffic. No doubt it also caused a similar spike for the “fisking” entry on dictionary.com.
5. Tag each post with “girls, girls, girls in open source”. Alternatively, tag posts with “Open Source Security” - apparently that’s the one tag that’s more popular than “Girls, girls, girls”!

 

Unique Hotel Room Accoutrements #2: Only in Paris does one bottle of wine and three glasses make sense in a bedroom

The Ingres web team recently added a tool to my blog called Wassup which provides me with real time statistics on my blog traffic. It’s interesting to see exactly how people wind up here; from people searching for “The View” and “The First Wives Club” who probably feel like they’ve stepped into a parallel universe, to people looking for more details on “Open Source Security Best Practices” who hopefully found something of interest. I can also see what operating system and browser you’re using and to the five of you out there who are persevering with Windows 98 I say upgrade to Linux now!

There are hundreds of people with an RSS feed to my blog, who I guess would be my regular readers, if only I blogged regularly. I had no idea until this week just how many of you there are out there, so I’ve decided that I owe it to you guys to blog more regularly. I’ll try to keep them short, interesting and amusing.  As always I’d appreciate your thoughts on blog topics and frequency!

Continuing on my unique hotel room accoutrements theme from last week – only in Paris does one bottle of wine and three glasses make sense in the bedroom!

 

Bedside reading in Texas

I’ve been away from my blog for a number of weeks and I’m just now getting back in the saddle. I’m writing this on my way back to New York following an Eclipse Foundation Board meeting in Dallas where I visited a shooting range and fired a gun for the first time. Amusingly the bedside reading provided by my hotel in Dallas was a magazine called “Garden and Gun” - only in Texas could that seem like an obvious combination!

Next week I’ll be in Paris for the Paris Captiale du Libre event. It will be my first time at the PCL event and I’m looking forward to participating in a panel discussion on global open source trends. No doubt we’ll talk about the role of open source in the global economic crisis, fighting the FUD surrounding open source security and I suspect we’ll also touch upon commercial companies buying open source innovation.

Talking about the acquisition of open source innovation - I’d like to get your thoughts on what’s happening at MySQL, and in particular the rumor that Monty Widenus, who put the “My” in MySQL may be leaving Sun less than a year after the acquisition. I suspect that Monty’s departure could have something to do with Drizzle and a desire to return MySQL to its roots. I plan on adding a second chapter to the “Happily Ever After?” fairy tale when I find out some more about it. I’ve already decided on a title - “The Full Monty”. In an unrelated move, Josh Berkus, a prominent leader in the PostgreSQL community, also left Sun this summer.

Related blogs:

Ed Merks has blogged about our visit to the shooting range

Rumors that Monty is leaving Sun

Josh Berkus blogs about leaving Sun

 

Open source software provides tremendous economic benefits, but can it save the world from global economic recession?

The crisis being experienced in the financial services industry today is entirely due to greed. Companies like Lehman Brothers were built on pyramids of gluttony; from the folks on the ground, who inflated their deal books to maximize their bonuses, right the way up the chain to the executive management team who reaped tremendous rewards by turning a blind eye to nefarious business practices. Read the rest of this entry »

 

Earlier this week Ingres CAFÉ won a product Excellence Award at LinuxWorld. Ingres CAFÉ for Linux is a community project, supported by the Google Summer of Code. The idea behind CAFÉ is to package and configure a complete stack of technologies for a web application developer so that they can focus their energies on application development and not spend hours banging their heads against their desks as they attempt to troubleshoot what typically transpire to be trivial configuration issues. The photo above was taken at LinuxWorld and shows an exhausted but proud Andrew Ross and Samrat Dhillon who’s collaboration is paying dividends for the Ingres and Eclipse developer communities. Read the rest of this entry »