Now with MySQL AB having been scooped up (as noted by 99% of the blogosphere including myself), what about SAP and open source? IIRC SAP was one of the investors into MySQL AB (not sure how large a chunk they held). SAP really put a lot of weight behind MySQL when they handed over SAP DB (renamed to MaxDB) to MySQL and made it clear that they expect MySQL to be SAP certified any day now (has this happened?).

At the same time SAP has been sending "mixed messages" at best in regards to OSS. And they …

Kaj wrote me email yesterday asking if I was sleeping for a whole week or may be dead because I'm probably the only one of people blogging about MySQL who has not commented about announced Sun - MySQL Deal.

In fact I was just on extremely busy travel schedule last week, so I'm just finding a bit of time now to comment on it.

First it is very interesting for me MySQL choose to be bought out by Sun rather than going IPO even though as I understand majority of the steps required for IPO already were done. This could be related to current market conditions or may be 1B price tag was at higher end what was expected from IPO, It also could be getting mostly cash payment now was attractive.

If we compare price tag of MySQL to other public "Open Source" companies - we can see it being about 1/4 of RedHat or 1/2 of Novel which seems quite decent valuation for me.

As minor MySQL stake holder I would be excited to see stocks …

Jonathan has a nice post with additional explanations on the MySQL deal, seeing as one or two folks have questioned it. (Note that the second link is for your amusement via Sun's Simon Phipps blog). Jonathan writes: "Where are the revenue synergies? The more interesting question is "where aren't the synergies?" Wherever MySQL is deployed, whether the user is paying for software support or not, a server will be purchased, along with a storage device, networking infrastructure - and over time, support services on high value open platforms. Last I checked, we have products in almost all those categories. In... READ MORE

In a speech celebrating NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt urged NASA to be more collaborative with other agencies and even the general public. He suggested that Google's successes often result from opening up without knowing where the breakthroughs would occur.

While Schmidt acknowledged that government agencies like NASA can't wholly adopt Google's "shift and iterate" model whereby it throws a lot of projects at the wall to see what sticks, it

...can learn from open-software development and projects like Linux and MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies like Google, he said.

...

Memcached is a very popular open source object caching server. It was developed to speed up livejournal.com by Danga Interactive.  We use memcached for a lot of our sites.  We use it for different purposes but one main purpose is to cache query results so we don’t have to keep hitting database.  As most [...] …

Computer certification tests are often dreaded by those of us who have to take them. After many years of taking certification tests on everything from TCP/IP networks, Redhat Linux, network switches to Paypal programming, I am now on the other side of the coin as the MySQL Certification Team.

Recently I spoke with someone who did not enjoy taking certification tests. He found the cost of exams, finding a test center, studying for the exams, creating time in a an already busy schedule for the test date, and traveling to the test center a challenge but not the big issue. What really bothered him was the clock, omnipresent on the screen, quickly subtracting time until he had to finish.

He said his eyes were always drawn to the counter despite his best efforts. Like the raven in the famous Poe poem, the clock seemed to both mock and infuriate him. And he asked me what I did about the clock when I was testing.

…

What a week!
It started with a gift for all employees. A book that Lenz Grimmer has produced with great professionalism.

It is not for the general public. I am showing it here to give would-be employees one more reason to join the company. (Yes. It's business as usual. We are still hiring!)
Then the unexpected but very exciting news arrived, and perhaps a part 2 of this book won't be necessary.
(Update. Marten pointed out that this is not necessarily true, and the second part of the book will only be more exciting. Maybe so. The second part may just need a different sub-title.)
As part of the interesting changes in MySQL, there has been some side effects …