I do dozens of press and analyst briefings each year and I’m usually pretty confident that I can handle any question that comes my way. I’ve come a long way since that time at Comdex when I declared to an audience that included a lot of press members what I would have chosen as an alternate career. More on that in a future blog.

I did an interview recently the preparation for which had me totally perplexed. I understood from the briefing sheet that the interview would include questions about how a data center run by a woman would differ from one run by a man. I’ve never run a data center, and if I had I don’t think I would have put up window treatments and floral wallpaper, so I turned to my colleagues for input in answering this question. The one consistent answer I received that resonated with me is that women are more collaborative and, in a time of crisis, will pull a team together to get the problem resolved. (more…)

The MySQL conference is currently underway in Santa Clara and I’ve been watching the newswire and blogs for announcements and feedback. Yesterday I read in Jeremy Cole’s blog that Sun is holding back some vital features from the MySQL open source community, and providing those features only to their enterprise customers. Marten Mikos confirmed this and attempted to justify it in a comment posted on the blog. Regular readers of my blog will remember that in December I commented on the serious mistakes being made by Sun in open source, and this is another one that I’d add to that list. To be a little bit closed source is like being a “a little bit pregnant”. (more…)

I hopped on a plane in New York this morning and planned on writing a blog about new year’s resolutions. Resolution one is to “Stop Procrastinating” which might explain why that particular blog is three weeks behind schedule. When I landed in SFO, my blackberry almost melted under the strain of all the email traffic around the MySQL and BEA acquisitions. (more…)

I was amused to learn that Sun has announced a million dollar awards program targeted at fostering innovation around Sun’s open source development project. Those of you who have been following Ingres for a while will remember that when we first contributed Ingres to the open source community we too set up a million dollar prize fund to foster innovation in the open source development community. In hindsight it was a rookie mistake; money won’t buy you the love or respect of the open source community; many open source developers have full-time jobs as professional developers and participate in open source for fun, not profit. (more…)