Simon Phipps yesterday blogged about the emerging Sun Model for Open Source business:

As time has gone by, a clear “Sun Model” for open source business has been emerging, at least to my eyes. The summary of it is:

1. remove barriers to software adoption between download and deploy;
2. encourage a large and cohesive community of software deployers;
3. deliver, for a fee, the means to create value between deploy and scale, for those who need it.

Each software team at Sun interprets this model in a slightly different way, but the model holds pretty much everywhere and works regardless of the license for the code. As a business model, it …

Not everything is going the wrong way on our planet. There are things that are changing for the better! And one of them is South Africa. Just back from a three-day MySQL related trip to Johannesburg and Pretoria, I saw a lot of well-founded hope around me. The hope is related to less crime, less racial tension, and more economic growth. I share the positive vibes and think they’re founded in reality.

I was in South Africa for the yearly Sun partner event in “Sub-Saharan Africa” or SSA for short. SSA is one of the fastest-growing regions within what is known as “Emerging Markets”, which in itself grows faster than Europe, North America or Asia Pacific. And partners are extremely important, as Sun uses solely indirect sales in the region.

I was so impressed by what I saw that I wrote nine blog …

Angelo recently showed an easy way to dump SQL queries using DTrace, while reading the articles I felt that some important information is missing: The name of the user executing the query and the selected database. So I sat down a few minutes and tried to collect that data.

For the database name I found a quite simple solution: It is passed as parameter to the check_user() function to MySQL so we can easily add a thread-local variable to keep that name. Simple script for that:

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s

#pragma D option quiet

pid$1::*check_user*:entry
{
    self->db = arg4 ? copyinstr(arg4) : "(no schema)";
}

pid$1::*dispatch_command*:entry
{
    printf("%s: %s\n", self->db, copyinstr(arg2));
}

Getting the username is a bit harder, for the …

End October - time for the traditional meeting of the German and International "PHP family" - end of October? - Yes, the International PHP Conference is a bit earlier this year. Additonally the organizers moved the conference away from the industrial area of Mörfelden to the center of Mainz which sounds quite promising. Although I'll spend only around 24hrs at Mainz I'm looking really forward to the conference next week.

On Thursday morning I'll give a presentation about PHP 5.3, which will be quite interesting as one of the biggest features, namespaces, is still undergoing heavy discussions and the final syntax probably won't be clear when presenting - fortunately PHP 5.3 is much more than namespaces!

Sun will also be present at the …

I was booked for keynoting the second MySQL Users Conference in Japan on 30-31 October 2008. Going to Japan is always something I’m looking forward to.

However, I won’t have that pleasure this time. I got requested to keynote a Sun partner event instead, on Tue 28.10.2008 at Kievits Kroon, just outside Pretoria in South Africa.

For Japan, I will be replaced by nobody other than David Axmark. I’m happy he gets the opportunity to do this keynote, transitioning from his current role to a consultant next month. I hope this also gives the press an opportunity to understand David’s motivations a bit better!

Two month have passed since the close of the Sun-MySQL-Deal, two months of uncertainty whether it's a good idea to join Sun or not but after consulting my ElePHPant, who read the 18 pages of the contract and related documents (including MySQL termination agreement, data privacy agreement, ...), I'm quite optimistic and look ahead to a sunny future. Therefore I'll be a true Sun employee as of tomorrow, May 1st.

 Saw both of these on ComputerWorld:

   Oracle buying BEA

   Sun buying MySQL 

It'll be interesting to see how this changes the landscape.