… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the conference

My friend Monty (of MySQL fame) has started blogging at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/. After just a day, he already has two posts ? one on the Sun acquisition of MySQL and a longer one on the new Maria engine.

If you are interested in MySQL, you should definitely check the blog out.

The Linux Business Campus Nuremberg (LBCN) presents annual awards for innovative ideas, well-considered concepts and promising business plans in the field of Open Source and Free Software.

The European Open Source Business Award is presented for innovative business concepts after detailed examination by an expert jury comprising LBCN campus coaches and selected figures from the venture capital scene. The annual award seeks entrepreneurs with innovative open source software business ideas which can revolutionize the markets and set new

This award was presented for the first time in January 2007 as a highlight at the Heise congress on ?Open Source Meets Business? (http://www.heise.de/open/news/meldung/84306).

The next award presentation will take place in the old city hall in Nuremberg on Wednesday, 23

I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own

I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

I just received word that my proposal (which was to present my Age of Literate Machines presentation) for FrOSCon has been accepted.

I’m pretty excited - the event should be fun and it will give me a good chance to see friends (including a good number of my German MySQL colleagues)

MySQL’s latest advertising campaign (called “The 12 Days of Scaleout (http://mysql.com/why-mysql/scaleout/)“) is getting a bit of a kicking in the MySQL blog space.

I am sure that this is slightly uncomfortable for the MySQL team, but at the same time the team is lucky that people who care about MySQL still take the time to explain what they don’t like.

Perhaps it would be a good time for them to go back and add some meat to the case studies?

Unfortunately, I had to skip out on my presentation at this year’s MySQL Conference.

Thankfully, my friend Mike Hillyer was able to pinch hit for me. I had planned to do a podcast of the session, but - as he is totally awesome - Mike even recorded the session.

My MySQL Sandalcamp proposal made the cut for the upcoming MySQL Conference. I hope that I will see some of you down in Santa Clara in April.

I wonder how many people will attend a session at a tech conference where the start of the description reads as follows:

Hey You! Yes, You! Manager, marketeer, sales professional: are you tired of 98lb weaklings kicking silicon in your face?

I am thinking this way because my friends at MySQL AB (http://www.mysql.com/) are putting on another MySQL User Conference - this time from April 23 - 26 in Santa Clara, California.

The Call for Participation went live a few days ago and, as always, I am proposing a session. I don’t really need to go, but I definitely have a soft spot for the event, as I chaired the first two MySQL UCs. Also, I had a good deal of fun working on the

Ilan Rabinovitch let me know that the SCALE team is getting started on version 5x of the SoCal Linux Expo.

In past years, SCALE has been a great community event - the ratio of promoters to real Linux enthusiasts is low and the attendees are friendly. Also, like most other Linux conferences, attendees have a strong interest in many other FLOSS community issues and technologies, like BSD, Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Free Software licensing and so on. Hopefully I can attend this year (and can wear both my eZ hat and my Mozilla hat for the event).

The event will happen from February 10-11 and will be held at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Get more details at:

Slides from my presentations at the PHP Québec Conference are below:

• Copyright, Contracts and Licenses for PHP Developers (PDF, 650KiB)
• SQLite: A fast, transactional DBMS embedded in PHP 5 (PDF, 55KiB)

I will make the audio of the licensing session, along with a transcript, available as soon as possible.

Update:

Transcript now available.

Matt Asay writes:

Marten Mickos today confirmed with Stephen Shankland @ CNET that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Not sure when, but it sounds recent (and, I suspect, more than once). It’s not surprising that Oracle would make this move, though it surprises me that it wasn’t IBM (which is not to say that they haven’t tried, too - I haven’t asked Marten that) - IBM has a clear strategy of using open source as a “low-end” alternative to its high-end products.

What is most impressive in all this (and just one reason that I think Marten is one of the top CEOs anywhere, and certainly in open source business) is Marten’s response to

April 1st is still more than a month away and at least one rumour about Oracle’s upcoming purchases is true: today the software giant annnounced their acquisition of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB (and various other products).

One interesting point is that Berkeley DB was already seeing competition from SQLite (which is an excellent, fast and free (as in beer and freedom) RDBMS). I wonder how much the acquisition is going to drive adoption of SQLite?

Additionally, Oracle now owns both half of MySQL (http://mysql.com/)’s transactional storage engines, which perhaps gains them another measure of control over the Swedish upstart. (The other engines are