Last week I was in Tampere (Finland) attending the Openmind/Mindtrek event where I had the chance to meet quite a lot of open source people, from Finland and beyond. Surprisingly (or maybe not) I knew already quite a bunch of them. Henrik has a pretty good post about the event, the people and the beers with Stephe and Mikko (which together with the festivals of Pilar that started last Saturday are going to kill my liver ).
I must say that it has been one of the most interesting events I have

Yesterday I got to San Francisco, after a 35 hour trip from Spain, where I will be attending MySQL User Conference at Santa Clara. First time in the US

Although the trip was really long, it was an experience by itself. In Madrid, people at the passport control must have been thirsty as they stole my bottle of water. Then, I had a transfer flight in Amsterdam, the capital of legal drugs and prostitution, where before boarding the plane I got asked quite many questions concerning my luggage (who packed it, who owns it, did somebody give anything else to carry, why did I come to Amsterdam, why did it take so long to cross the airport, am I sure of everything I am saying).

But the funniest was when I got to the US. The plane landed in Minneapolis, which I always though

I blogged some months ago about an article written by Mr Puhakka on how to build a billion dollar business around open source software. Last Friday I attended Mr Puhakka’s presentation where he analyzed MySQL’s possibilities on becoming so (copied from his slides):

According to analyst firm Evans Data Corp, MySQL has a 44% share of the global RDBMS market making it the #1 database in the world. The article explains all the basic stuff about MySQL, with information such as where it started, what it is for or what systems it runs on. My favourite is “What makes it special?”

EDC’s research among users found that proprietary database servers were “almost twice as likely” as MySQL servers to have suffered a security breach.

According to MySQL AB, using MySQL can reduce database licensing costs by 90%, and administration, engineering and support costs by up to 50%. There

The rumours are confirmed: MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/), the fastest growing database, is planning to go public before the end of the year. This will make it one of the few Open Source products to be listed in the stock market, together with RedHat, Mandriva and VA Linux.

Their results so far are pretty good: around 10 million installations worldwide and 10,000 paying customers (25% of them just in the last year). Many people consider this as a failure, comparing it directly with Oracle’s result, but in my opinion this is a short-sighted vision. MySQL’s main asset are all those non-paying customers; thanks to them most web applications have been built on the LAMP stack, where MySQL plays a key role, and it makes it possible for other businesses to exist, bringing more paying customers without