The very first UC related parties are over, and the Users Conference hasn’t even started!

The first one was Mårten’s traditional and well-liked MySQL staff party in his garden. The coolest and most community significant one was the MySQL Community Pre-Conference Dinner party, though, as advertised on MySQL Forge Wiki. So we dropped out of Mårten’s party at six, to meet with the community.

There were 48 registered people, and I think even more turned up. And some of the guys who turned up unregistered were from Sun.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz crashes the party and is surrounded by community members and MySQLers alike

Rich Green, Executive VP of Software …

Friday afternoon, I met with Tetsuro Ikeda-san and Teruyoshi Hazama-san of MySQL’s long-time key partner in Japan, Sumisho. Ikeda-san and Hazama-san taught me about their work on full text search in Japanese.

Senna is an engine for fast full text search in Japanese. The Senna project derives its name from Formula I driver Ayrton Senna. “But he’s dead”, I protested. “Sure, but he is a legend and will always be associated with speed.” I cannot protest there — and the numbers I saw for Senna’s full-text search defend the choice of name.

Tritonn is the combination of Senna into MySQL. The Tritonn name refers to two things: Triton Square in Tokyo, where Sumisho has its offices, and to the fact …

My Japan trip was full of meetings, as trips to Japan usually are. One of the most interesting ones was at Sun Microsystems K.K.’s site, with a number of people engaged in building Japanese communities for Sun.

Takashi Shitamichi, Yoko Suga, Natsuki Wakabayashi, Jim Grisanzio,
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Satoshi Kawai, myself, Toshiro Umetsu, Takanobu Masuzuki

From Jim Grisanzio and others, I learned that Japan is Sun’s most active blogging country outside the US, on blogs.sun.com. And I got reminded of the messages heard many times at numerous Sun meetings: That Sun has Community experts both in Marketing and Engineering. On the contrary, MySQL’s Community Team is a separate entity, outside of both Marketing and …

Point your browsers to forge.mysql.com.

• MySQL Forge is the directory for projects related to MySQL.
• New MySQL functionality under work is described on the Forge Worklog.
• New Forge 2.0 features includes site-wide search, commenting and voting.
• Forge 2.0 hence sports ranking of projects.
• Forge 2.0 has a new people section with profiles and listings of contributed tools.
• The tools section is a code and tool repository for smallish code snippets.
…

Today, 24 March 2008, the student application period opens. And it remains open for a week, until 31 March 2008, presumably at one minute before midnight UTC.

If you haven’t already discussed the MySQL related ideas published on forge.mysql.com/wiki/SummerOfCode2008Ideas, do so now.

A good place to first silently lurk in and then actively participate in is lists.mysql.com/soc.

As opposed to last year, you can now also apply for MySQL Worklog Items Open for Community Development listed on forge.mysql.com/wiki/ComContribution_Worklog. Worklog items are internal “todo items” or coding tasks identified (but not yet necessarily being …

Next Thursday 6 March 2008 at 17:00-18:00 CET, there will be a panel on “The Commercialisation of Open Source” at the Future Talk Booth in Hall 9 (Stand A30) of the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany. One of the purposes of the panel is to publish the Open Source Yearbook 2008, the fifth in a series of yearbooks produced by a team around Professor Lutterbeck of the Technical University of Berlin.

I’ll be one of the panelists, representing MySQL AB. Other panelists are from OpenOffice.org, Citrix, the Zope user group, and the Free Software Foundation.

For the book, I wrote a chapter called “ …

The World Tour starts on IRC next week!

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed 5 March 2008: Ian Murdock, 7am PT/16 CET. Ian is the ian of Debian and Chief OS Platform Strategist at Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia puts it like this:
  

  Since joining Sun, he has led Project Indiana, which he describes as “taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris,” making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system.

• Thu 6 March 2008: Simon Phipps 6am PT/15CET. Simon is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems. …

One perhaps not-so-expected attendee at the MySQL-Sun Integration Kickoff is Josh Berkus, of PostgreSQL fame.

Zack Urlocker, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart and Josh Berkus.

Josh gives valuable feedback within the Community track of the Integration Kickoff. Mind you, Jonathan Schwartz has reiterated Sun’s support for PostgreSQL:

What happens to your commitment to PostgreSQL?

It grows. The day before we announced the acquisition, and within an hour of signing the deal, I put a call into Josh Berkus, who leads our work with Postgres inside of Sun. I wanted to be as clear as I could: this transaction increases our investment in open source, and in open source databases. And increases our commitment to Postgres - and the database industry broadly. The same goes for our work with Apache Derby, and our JavaDB.

Josh says it exactly right on his blog - Sun …

Yesterday here at the MySQL-Sun Integration Kickoff, MySQL Co-Founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and I met with Sun’s CTO Greg Papadopoulos. For the beginning of the meeting, also Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz popped in.

And just as when the founders met Sun’s Rich Lang and David Douglas prior to the agreement being announced, this was a very positive meeting. Lots of mutual respect, and lots of mutual interest in listening to what the other party has to say. Relaxed atmosphere, full of anticipation.

The areas touched upon ranged from the right for developers to spend time on other FOSS projects besides MySQL, over the newly released Maria storage engine to possibilities for deep technical integration between MySQL and Sun’s software and hardware.

I could sense a mutual hunger for action, for change, and for making things happen. …

This morning, Sun Microsystems announced plans to acquire MySQL AB.

After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the …