Morning, I saw Monty's post asking for contribution to drizzle's i18n efforts. I did checked out Hindi language and well I must say translation is a fun activity. 
If you think that will be as easy as using some online translation tool (I tried Google Translate), you may be wrong. Many sentences that make direct sense in English get completely screwed when translated word by word. Sometimes they are translated into a perfect meaningful sentence and that is when you can laugh out loudly.
As of now I'm doing Hindi (already 80 translations down) and next I'm gonna pick Punjabi. Wow! I know languages.

As last year, MySQL will host three Customer Conferences in Europe. They will take place at the following dates and locations:

• Thursday, October 23, 2008: London, UK
• Tuesday, October 21, 2008: Munich, Germany
• Wednesday, November 19, 2008: Paris, France

The content differs slightly per location, but there will be sessions in two parallel tracks on a wide range of topics, including success stories from customers as well as talks on very technical/practical topics. Here are some excerpts from the agenda for the UK Event:

• Delivering Web 2.0 Applications with MySQL and …

I just got informed that two of my session proposals for DrupalCon 2008 got accepted - I will be speaking about the following topics there:

• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo

The second talk will be held in cooperation with Jakub Suchy, who will take over the practical demo. Sun Microsystems is a Gold …

In a recent article, Matt Asay was musing about the aspects of hosting an Open Source project by yourself vs. using a public project hosting service like SourceForge, GitHub or Launchpad. He concluded that it's important for commercial/sponsored open source projects in particular to do the hosting by themselves, so they can maintain full control and can gain more insight, which hopefully will turn into more revenue at some point.

However, Matt seems to reduce "hosting" to "providing downloads" only:

Control and visibility. Given the importance of customer conversions, it becomes hugely valuable information to know that it takes, say, eight months on average for someone to buy the "Enterprise" version of …

I was there in the meetup and my feeling was a mix about the same. It was nice to have Kaj here (for the first time) and listen to him about Sun's acquisition. On the other hand it was disheartening to see so few people from corporates turning up. It was almost negligible. I'm still positive on this and do expect many more people to turn up. There were a total of three talks in the meet and then we had some chit chat with people.

In his first talk, Kaj first greeted everybody in Hindi, Tamil and Kannada and many were delighted. Kaj touched various aspects of Sun's acquisition and also their on-boarding struggle. He also mentioned about MySQL considering Sun's liberal SCA in place of their stricter CLA. (I haven't gone through SCA to actually comment on it's benefits)

Second talk by Thava was on how to contribute code to …

An event truly fitting an “open world” — I will be speaking at Oracle Open World.

How does a wild-mannered MySQL DBA like me get to speak at an Oracle conference? Well, after I received the MySQL Community Award two years in a row, Dan Norris contacted me, and encouraged me to submit a proposal with him on how to contribute to the community.

Oracle has a formal program for recognizing community members at two levels: the Oracle ACE Director, and the Oracle ACE. An Oracle ACE Director is expected to make a 12-month commitment to working with the community, while an Oracle ACE is bestowed upon folks to recognize their volunteer efforts in the past. More information about the program can be found on …

Yesterday I attended the Franken Web Montag meetup in Nürnberg. This time the nice folks at insertEFFECT hosted us and opened up their terrasse.
Florian Bailey opened with a talk about Facebook applications. It was quite interesting. To me these applications are just annoying, but I can see now how they are used, and how success can mean making money within Facebook. They made also a test application called 'Who is the Kitchen Master?' (needs account).
I did also try to talk about something, but I …

The MySQL Community version is different in theory from the Enterprise version in relation to the following points:

0) It’s free
1) It has community patches
2) It is released less often
3) It is tested less strictly

In reality, the first two differences are not applicable — the binaries and source code for Enterprise can be freely and legally downloaded at http://mirror.provenscaling.com/mysql/enterprise/. The process for adding community patches to the MySQL source code has not been changed sufficiently to be able to actually add community patches and encourage more community development.

I understand that MySQL (and now Sun) needs to make money. I also understand that development takes a lot of effort, and seeing an ROI is important. The Community/Enterprise split was designed to have tradeoffs on both sides. …

Sparse notes from the talk, I noticed Sheeri recording some video, so sitting through that at some stage might make sense. There were no slides, this was a panel discussion. Suggested reading: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source.

Does Open Source need to be “Organic”?
Brian Aker, Rob Lanphier, Stephen O’Grady, Theodore Ts’o

Taking code, and slapping a certain license on it, doesn’t a successful software project make.

Blurring the distinction, by marketing. Not doing any work to get external contributions.

Open sourcing a product one plans on “genociding”, its really bad.

“Corporate sociopathic Druckerism” — Brian Aker

“As long as the source code is …