Damian Conway is giving the funniest public flogging I have ever seen. He is single-handedly kicking the ass of Web 2.0, Sxip, patents, patent vulture firms, snake oil crypto, Microsoft, Google, r0ml and all the rest of us all at the same time.

Great quotes include:

• We have a patent on replacing the letter in a name with x, but still pronouncing it the same way.
• Every time you read the name Microsoft, you will see a kitten. We call it “Pavlovian Marketing”
• We thought that we might call it … firefly, fireangel, firebuffy. Then it became obvious - the new browser is called FireWhedon.

I sure hope that O’Reilly recorded this session.

Update 1

I just registered cxap.{biz,net,org} - now to go ask Damian what he would …

In case you missed the news, Greenplum and Sun have teamed up to deliver a monster of a business intelligence/data warehousing appliance. What's it called? Well, that's the downside: "The Data Warehouse Appliance." If you're still awake after reading the name, you'll still be blown away by the performance (and the price). Those, at least, are interesting: capable of scanning 1 terabyte of data in 60 seconds and can easily scale to hundreds of terabytes of usable database capacity (10-50X performance boost over the Terradata/etc. competition).

What will it run you? Well, you won't find it at CompUSA, but it's pretty cheap (relative to the competition) all the same. From the press release:

Initial configurations will deliver usable database capacities of 10, 40 and 100TB. Pricing for the 40TB and 100TB configurations …

I'm listening to Scott Yara talk about Greenplum's commercialization of the PostgreSQL database, and comparing it to what Paul Weinstein (EVP, Business Development, MySQL). I had always viewed the two projects - MySQL and PostgreSQL - as direct competitors, and figured both were also competing with DB2 and Oracle. This is clearly not the case, at least, not for these two companies.

Who does MySQL compete with? With no one. Marten is on the record as saying that

We continue to have most of our deployments in areas where there was no database before. Either the application didn't use a database earlier, or the application is new. We are now seeing more and more migrations from old …

Fabrizio has one of the best posts I've yet seen on open source licensing. It's one of the most candid posts I've ever seen on open source licensing (and candor is something all software companies need - open and closed).

Fabrizio traces the contours of open source licensing, honing in on dual licensing strategies. He astutely observes that a dual-license strategy works well for MySQL (or a product that is embeddable), because there the "trigger" is clear: you either pay your way out of the GPL (or similarly restrictive license) or you contribute code back. Simple.

Open source applications, as Fabrizio notes, are different. There is no obvious trigger (You'll need to read Fabrizio's post to discover the non-obvious trigger that he comes up with) for either contributing back or buying. So what do you do?

In Alfresco's case, …

OK, so OSCON is one of, if not the, largest open source conference in the world. The complete list of sessions and tutorials is staggering. So, for those of you Sakila fans heading out to Portland for the "big gig" next week, I figured I would highlight the MySQL sessions and tutorials and also give my top 6 picks of the sessions you simply shouldn't miss.

MySQL Related

• Monday has both my own "Maximum Velocity MySQL" (on performance tuning and coding) and Brian's "MySQL 5.1 In-Depth" tutorials. Note that Brian is also giving …

At OSCON next week, I'm giving a presentation entitled Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses. I'm in the middle of preparing it, and also reflecting on some conversations I had earlier this week with sales executives from MySQL, Red Hat, JasperSoft, and SugarCRM.

In the course of those conversations, I was surprised by how differently we supposedly similar open source companies run our operations. We're each an open source company, but with varying licensing, sales, and support models. That's a good thing.

But it's also a perplexing thing if you're trying to weave together a common theme between them.

After our meeting, I spent some time on Sourceforge, pulling download data and correlating it to company revenues for these and other open source companies. After awhile, similarities started to …

OK, so next week is OSCON, in case you hadn't heard... I will be presenting a tutorial entitled Maximum Velocity MySQL on Monday morning, from 8:30am until noon, in room Portland 255. The tutorial will cover advanced SQL, schema and index strategies, and performance tuning topics, with lots of code examples and demonstrations. It should be a great time, and there'll be lots of giveaways, so be sure to check it out.

Additionally, there is a MySQL BoF session scheduled for Thursday evening from 8pm to 9pm in room D135. We'll be providing pizza (and probably beer if we can get our hands on some). I will be there along with Arjen and likely Brian as well. We hope to have discussions with …

I spent a productive hour with Krugle yesterday, meeting with a few members of management: Steve Larsen (CEO), Laura Merling (VP, Business Development - yes, that Laura Merling), and Ken Krugler (CTO). I have to admit: I went into the meeting with low expectations. In Ken's words, I figured a vertical search engine focused on open source and development might be interesting, but not useful (with "use" translating into dollars).

I was wrong.

First off, Krugle is more than a vertical search engine. It does that, and it does it extremely well. Krugle aggregates the many and various open source software repositories (Sourceforge being just one of them), indexes them, and makes them easily, productively searchable. So, if I know I need a utility to convert documents …

Bet you didn't think "Unisys" when you read that subject line, but it's true, all the same. Unisys has done a great job reinventing itself and extending its brand and expertise into new territory, most recently open source software. The firm has strong and growing relationships with MySQL and JBoss, and will increasingly be seen as one of the primary go-to partners for open source.

Julie Giera of Forrester has an interesting report on Unisys' open source services. The report deals primarily with Unisys, but also has interesting things to say about the larger open source services market.

On Unisys she says:

Unisys has announced a set of service offerings, called OASIS, for companies with open source platforms. It is the first time that a major IT service provider has offered a fully integrated set of services - including …

One of the most important requirements for any startup is hiring exceptional people. Hire weak people, and the company rises to the level of their incompetence. Hire exceptional people, and the company is elevated to the level of their expertise.

So how do you hire well in open source, given that - outside the realm of developers - very few business people actually have open source experience?

This is a question that I've had to answer repeatedly of late, as I've been hiring Alfresco's North and South American sales and business development organization. I have been very fortunate thus far, hiring three of the best people I've ever worked with: Luis Sala (Solutions Engineering), Jason Hardin (Inside Sales), and Martin Musierowicz aka "Mark" (Alliances).

What do most of Alfresco's employees have in common? Not a minute of open source experience. (Martin (JBoss) and Jason (Novell) are exceptions to this rule, as both came …