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 …

I’ve had an introductory article to MySQL Cluster 5.1 Disk Data published in the September 2006 issue of International PHP Magazine.

If you’re using Cluster or you’re interested in doing so, and you’ve not yet tried out MySQL 5.1, you’ll find that disk data storage makes MySQL Cluster more flexible, scalable, and cheaper to run than MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 Cluster. In the article, I’ve outlined some reasons why this is so. The article covers the basics of creating disk-based Cluster tables, and discusses some Disk Data do’s and dont’s. There’s also some info about some other improvements to MySQL Cluster that are being made in 5.1, as well as some diagrams and sample PHP5 code for accessing a MySQL Cluster. Just in case you’re not that familiar with setting up a MySQL …

Steve Hamm has a great blog entry on Alfresco and other open source (and SaaS) companies that are destroying the incumbents in markets they founded in the first place. Alfresco, of course, we founded by John Newton, who founded Documentum (and, hence, the document management industry). Now Alfresco is cannibalizing that same market.

There are other examples. Paul Doscher and JasperSoft. John Roberts and SugarCRM. Etc. Many open source business managers formerly ran huge swaths of the proprietary market.

I'm just waiting for Larry Ellison to give up his day job at Oracle to get a job at MySQL....

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Nearly 100 days after the close of its JBoss acquisition, Red Hat is delivering the goods. Michael Tiemann said at OSCON that JBoss' business model was fine, but Red Hat would teach them how to really make bank with open source (my words, not his). It looks like the Red Hat model has found room for middleware siblings, as well.

As Peter Galli notes in his eWeek article:

The new Red Hat Application Stack subscription includes RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), JBoss AS (Application Server) and JBoss Hibernate, as well as support for the MySQL and PostgreSQL open-source databases.

New offerings also include JBoss subscriptions, such as JBoss AS, JBoss Hibernate and the various JEMS (JBoss Enterprise …

Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet has an interesting interview with Darryl Dewan of VA Software. In the course of the interview, Dana queries Darryl as to whether open source businesses can deliver serious financial heft. The answer?:

Maybe the good old days really are gone for good. But is open source to blame for that? No more, I think, than the end of the gold rush can be blamed on mine automation.

There are still fortunes to be made, Dewan said. Look at the money the founders of MySpace made, or those of YouTube will make, and all the gazillion Google-aires.

"You can create things online and do things online and you don't need to program," Dewan concluded. This is not a bad thing. Unless you want to become a millionaire through programming.

I disagree (with all due respect to Dana, to whom much respect is due). Marten Mickos …

We've known for years that upwards of 70% of web sites use Apache to power their sites. We also know that much of MySQL's thriving business comes from "Web 2.0" companies - the web runs MySQL (and a heck of a lot of Linux). What has been less clear is how much of the web that we see is managed by open source web content management systems.

Dries Buytaert, lead on the Drupal Project (a leading web content management system), sent me the results of an interesting, 5000-web developer survey that sheds light on the question. The survey was conducted from June 2006 to July 2006, and released by as the "2006 State of Web Development" report by SitePoint Pty Ltd. and Ektron, Inc. This is must-read material for anyone in the WCM space, but also interesting for those tracking the rise of …

I’ve worked for two Internet startup companies, both around 2 years each, both now long dead. The first was due to eventual lack of new VC funds, the second gross financial managment in the second year (apparently, when we were told there was no money December one year to pay us, the company that made large profits every month for over the first year, then had made losses every month for the past 12 months, but nobody knew about it. There were 5 Directors from 3 countries and nobody knew. Yeah Right!)

I’ve learnt a lot of non IT street smarts in this time. The first startup took the VC route, and after 3 rounds while I wasn’t involved in the process you pick up things. The single biggest tip here is the Bell-Mason Diagnostic. Here a few introduction references worthy of a quick review ( …

Jonathan Zuck has written an incendiary piece on the death of the peaceful compromise between free sourcerors and open sourcerors. The great divider? GPLv3.

I found the article profoundly fascinating, as it was evidence of intelligence gone awry. It completely misses the point that GPLv3 is just a license, and only applies to code to which it is newly licensed.

Will Linux suddenly be consumed by the dreaded v3? Nope. Will MySQL? Nope. JBoss? Nope. And so on.

The GPLv3 will only apply if these project maintainers choose to apply it to their code, and there's not a big line waiting for it.

Linus Torvalds says:

(The GPL 3) no longer works in the "fairness" sense. It's purely a firebrand, and only good for the extremist policies of the FSF. It's no longer a nice balance that a lot of people …

What this project aims at is to stimulate the implementation/adoption of free software, open source software and open standards in the Bulgarian Government Administration (BGA) and other sectors of management, in the economics and at home.

There will be a reading of the EU requirements and a review on which of the open standards are suitable for the current status of the BGA. The project has the objective to prepare the migration from present-day to open source EU recommended technologies. We will create a special guide that will focus on how to migrate, how to make this process easier and how to create the prerequisites for doing so.
We will review all of the available OS and software possibility, covered by this project that can be used in the BGA and other sectors.

We need supporters and fresh ideas. Please let me know if you are able to help us with your experience, knowledge or by other way.