What links JBoss, XenSource, Zimbra and MySQL (aside from the fact that they were all acquired for large amounts of money)? Peter Fenton and/or Benchmark Capital.

UPDATE This post corrects a couple of mistakes in the original version. UPDATE

Fenton made his investments in JBoss, Zimbra and XenSource while at Accel. Benchmark also invested in Zimbra, via Kevin Harvey who led the investment in MySQL. JBoss, sold to Red Hat for $350m; XenSource, sold to …

“What will happen to us now?” That’s the usual question for most employees in any acquired company, and MySQL AB is no exception. And given that less than 10% of MySQL AB is at the integration kickoff here at Sun’s headquarters in Menlo Park, more than 90% are probably also asking “what is that small group of people deciding?”.

Judging from the feedback I’ve got, those questions are of relevance not just for MySQLers, so let me re-state a couple of “old truths” and come with a few observations from MPK. (Do note the lingo — MPK is Sun speak for Menlo Park; I’m trying to learn…).

First thing, it’s “Business as Usual”. We’re just making plans for actions that can follow upon closure. Closure is planned (as announced earlier) in late Q3 or early Q4, where the Sun quarter numbering should be translated to mean late Q1 or early Q2 for the rest of the world.

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Several years ago (looking at archive.org it was at the end of 2001) I wrote a database that translated IPs to locations. Very similar to the city-db from maxmind.com. Perhaps someone still remembers the article in the iX about it ?

Anyway, now it is time to release the idea to the public. The idea is a distributed, open-source IP to location translation. Source comes later.

The basic idea

The idea behind IP-to-location translation is pretty old already. For I stumbled over it when I was running traceroute to some IP addresses on IRC. If you are in city-specific channels, you can easy proof if the basic idea works or not.

# traceroute -w 1 -q 1 …

Well we are all quite excited about what's going on with MySQL AB. We have read the talk about MySQL 6.0 and the upcoming Falcon storage engine. We have read the news about SUN having bought up MySQL AB and how this is going to improve their abilities. We also took note about Monty's first blog posts and the announcement of the Maria storage engine. But in the middle of this, I wonder if the priorities are sorted properly.

Again, the above mentioned stuff is all big news and very important. But since quite some time I have not heard anything about MySQL 5.1. Wasn't 5.1 supposed to be GA last fall? Aren't we all really excited …

Horay, one of my talks for the MySQL Conference 2008 has been accepted! So after one year off, it appears I'll be going to Santa Clara again - for the first time under my own OpenQuery banner.

Deadly Sins Using MySQL & PHP is a fun interactive session about things one should not do ;-)

It'll also be good to meet up again with lots of familiar faces and friends - community as well as former colleagues. Cool.

In the past few months, we have completed some important core development initiatives, while at the same time adding additional features to opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM. The significant developments include the following:

1. Building out a set of cross-application unit tests to verify the correctness of key areas such as order management, inventory, purchasing, and accounting.
2. Improved e-mail processing and management features. Customer service e-mails can now be associated with orders and assigned to different reps for processing.
3. Improved the use of form letters for generating outgoing e-mails and communications.
4. Support for managing resellers and partners, including contact information, agreements and contracts, and invoicing partners based on their sales activity.
5. Completed most of the documentation site for opentaps …

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 …

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Several years ago (looking at archive.org it was at the end of 2001) I wrote a database that translated IPs to locations. Very similar to the city-db from maxmind.com. Perhaps someone still remembers the article in the iX about it ?

Anyway, now it is time to release the idea to the public. The idea is a distributed, open-source IP to location translation. Source comes later.

The basic idea

The idea behind IP-to-location translation is pretty old already. For I stumbled over it when I was running traceroute to some IP addresses on IRC. If you are in city-specific channels, you can easy proof if the basic idea works or not.

# traceroute -w 1 -q 1 …

Totally expectable, the sun has gone up and down for the past two weeks since Sun bought MySQL for $1 billion and we still trust in MySQL – do we trust in Sun?

In fact, Sun paid a high premium for MySQL’s credibility (aka brand value) to benefit from the high profile of the cute dolphin publicly. MySQL simply knows how to play the Open Source game right, that’s their largest asset. How high is it actually?

Let’s look at MySQL’s reputation management:

• MySQL is everybody’s Open Source darling. Their consistent brand design created trust and allowed for the amortization of goodwill.
• In the past 5 years, there was no proof of the viability of an Open Source business model without mentioning MySQL. MySQL is an Open Source thought leader.
• MySQL is the M in LAMP. Any doubts?

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