While chatting with a few SVN hackers at OSCON, it occured to me that MySQL is the Perl of RDBMS. Discuss among yourselves.

I get emails and calls all the time from salespeople (usually from my company's competitors) looking for a job. They're watching the ground drop out from under them as open source infilitrates their accounts and starts nudging them out. Salespeople go where the money is, so they're calling me (and my colleagues at MySQL, Red Hat, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, etc.).

One call last Thursday was particularly funny. He was perplexed by how we make money, given how low our prices are.

"How do you stay in business without more direct salespeople like me?" he asked.

My response?

Specifically because we don't have more expensive sales people like him. :-)

Verbal one-upmanship aside, these conversations tend to confirm my belief that the proprietary world still doesn't grok just what deep potty it's in. (I have four kids, so I can say the word "potty" without …

We open sourcerors are fond of poking fun of Microsoft. Blue Screen of Death, bugs galore, etc. I guess the biggest software company on the planet is ripe for abuse.

But in an interesting post from TechWeb, it appears that some within the open source community actually think there might be something to be learned from the Great Satan.

Mozilla developers who spent several days this week with the Windows Vista team at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash. campus said that they're considering implementing a security feature in the upcoming OS to better protect future versions of Firefox from attack.

Vladimir Vukievi, who was one of the Mozilla team to take up Microsoft's August offer of Vista assistance, said that Vista's "Low Integrity Mode" might make Firefox less susceptible to exploits....

"We spent a while talking to members of both the …

Ross McFarland recently posted to the Cluster mailing list about a Perl binding that he’s been working on for the NDB API. Ross says that it’s just a proof of concept, and at this point nowhere near complete, but is inviting folks to download it and take it for a spin. I’m not a Perl hacker myself, but I’d be interested in hearing your reaction or if you’re doing something interesting with this.

Of course, if you’re working on your own port of the NDB API to some other language - say, PHP, Python, or (heh) even JavaScript - I’d love to hear about it.

Slashdot carried a story earlier today entitled "Why Is Commercial OSS So Expensive?" He was referring to embedded software, and his experience is 100% contrary to my own experience. (My background is in open source embedded software.) He says:

Our startup honestly wanted to use OSS products. We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support for all OSS products-. We thought were prepared to pay the price for OSS products, but then we got a price sticker shock....After all, we have decided that the survival of our business is more important for us then 'do-good' ideas. Except for that embedded Linux (slated for WinCE or VxWorks substitution), we are not OSS shop anymore.Taking the author at his word - that commercial open source is, in fact, expensive (has he tried the alternatives?) - I think he's …

I'm not going to pretend that it was easy to nail this Q&A with the CEO and Co-founder of MuleSource. The company has been hiding in plain sight for about 2 months and my quest for an interview has been nothing short of Indiana Jones meets Get Smart.

Nonetheless, I persevered and bring to you a delightful Q&A with myself.

Q&A with Dave Rosenberg, CEO, MuleSource Inc.

Just what is Mule?
Mule is the leading open source ESB (enterprise service bus) and integration platform. Mule has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and is in production at more than 100 companies and governments worldwide.

The open source Mule project was founded in 2003 by Ross Mason, CTO of MuleSource …

This is just a hypothesis at this point, but my experience with Lineo, Novell, Alfresco, and the companies I advise is pushing me toward the following:

An open source company's sales model should be "low-touch" until the point that companies are buying your product more for its intrinsic qualities than because it's cheap/open source.I need to figure out a more concise way of saying that, but wanted to get it up on the web so that others could see if it matches up with their experience.

The thought behind that statement is this: When companies are willing to pay parity or a premium for your product, it means they're no longer primarily interested in you because you're open source. Some companies will download your product solely because it's open source. They may initially be interested because they think they want an open source widget, and your product fits that bill. For such interest, a low-touch, inside sales approach is …

Zack Urlocker is at the Gartner Open Source Summit this week, and has been hearing some good things about open source databases. Open source databases (Sleepycat, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) have been around for a long time, but the analysts didn't give them much credit because even though everyone was using them, few were paying for them. Or so they thought. Now, however, open source databases are becoming big business.

Zack cites Gartner's Donald Feinberg:

Overall, Gartner is predicting that the worldwide DBMS market is around $14 billion and will continue to grow by nearly 7% per year. If this was a new market, it would not be a very impressive growth rate, but for a market of this size, it's huge. And there can be lots of movement within the market. We are at …

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 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 …

I was reading this article today about William Gallas, the fullback that Arsenal pulled away from Chelsea just before the transfer window closed (what a great replacement for whiner Ashley Cole). The article quotes Arsene Wenger, Arsenal's brilliant coach, who mentioned an article that talks about commonalities between winners. I tracked down the article, and was surprised to find out that the coach who walks on water also reads...

USA Today, the McNewspaper of the US. The article comes from USA Today. Ugh.

Still, I managed to hold my snobbish nose long enough to read the article, and found it useful. What separates the winners (in athletics) from the also-rans? What are the commonalities of winning …