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. …

FedEx rang on my door today, delivering a large cardboard box. The Sender? Sun Microsystems, my new employer!

Upon opening it, I discovered the following:

Continue reading "A nice welcome package from Sun arrived today"

i completed all the paperwork to accept my new position at sun today. now i just need to drop it off at a ups dropbox or have ups pick it up. at least they didn’t ask me to fax anything.

for a hardware company trying to become a software company, you would think the process of “onboarding” would not involve writing your address on a half-dozen different forms.

i will be a “member of the technical staff 4 - software.”

yeah, they say that they are working on updating the titles and such for everyone.

• The University of Tokyo and Sun start Research on HPC and Web-based Languages
• Sun and Chinese …

Not sure during my vacation which part of the creative brain has taken over, but I’ve become rather obsessed with marketing graphics and associated words being used across the MySQL and Sun MySQL websites, (See previous examples here and here).

Here are a number of more interesting references from the front page of the www.mysql.com site.

• The MySQL website now has a MySQL/Sun logo, noting it starts with the MySQL logo first.
• MySQL & SUN Come together. Freedom & Innovation Fast, innovative, open database solution now with world class service and support (dolphin jumping at sunset)
• Unlimited Possibilities. Deploy an unlimited number of MySQL Enterprise …

Yesterday I mentioned the new The official Sun-MySQL WebSite. It interested me with the navigation, graphics and content used to describe MySQL.

Greg of One Free Voice in a comment raised a very valid question, he could not find the MySQL Reference Manual, see comments. (I should also point out Greg it is no shame to reference the MySQL manual even daily, I’m an expert in the field and I easily reference the manual multiple times a week, and for reference the single most important page for me is Option and Variable Reference. I’ve also forgotten when using multiple languages in MySQL what is OFF/ON, simple solution is in the mysql client go SELECT ON; and see it it’s 1 or 0.)

Well, I …

I hope I’ll have the opportunity to meet you in person soon.

A face to face meeting may indeed be possible, if our World Tour celebrating the acquisition of MySQL by Sun has a stop close to you, and if I happen to be lucky to be attending that particular meetup just announced:

To toast the success of the acquisition and engage with customers, employees, community developers and partners, Sun and MySQL executives will kick-off a global tour in March, hitting major cities worldwide leading up to the popular MySQL Conference & Expo in April. Every Sun-MySQL community can participate online, …

Now we have The Real Thing: MySQL joins Sun Microsystems!

On 16 January 2008, less than six weeks ago, Sun announced their definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB. That “definite agreement” was still subject to government approval in the US, Germany and Austria, and to the signing of the legal transfer documents by MySQL AB’s current owners.

Those hurdles have now been passed, and the acquisition is thus official. MySQL is part of Sun!

Many community members and customers have surely thought of Sun’s acquisition as a Done Deal already. Perhaps there never was any real uncertainty about it, but at least theoretically, there still was a risk of the deal not closing. That uncertainty is now removed.

This is very exciting for us at MySQL.

The last six weeks, we’ve been living under special circumstances: We’ve known that Sun is acquiring us. We’ve seen and experienced that …