I've been at MySQL for two and a half years now as a community manager. Through this time, I've learned a number of valuable lessons about what it means to be a community manager, what it means to belong to a community of technologists, and what it means to be an open source advocate. I think back now on the attitude and preconceptions I brought with me when I joined MySQL, and reflect about the changes in my own attitude that have happened.

One of the biggest "aha" moments I have had in the past three years is the following:

It is the role of a community manager to remove the barriers — both technical and ideological — between the user/developer community and the company or group of individuals which produces the open source software

Some barriers are small. Sometimes these barriers can be overcome by a simple email to an annoyed community member who has misunderstood a poorly communicated …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray solves …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray solves …

I previously wrote about Clipperz because I really think Marco and the team at Clipperz have a great idea. To summarize, Clipperz has technology for "zero-knowledge web applications" which they have applied to an online password manager as a proof of concept. Marco writes: "We simply meant that Clipperz knows nothing about its users and their data! ... As a consequence of the "learn nothing" mantra, every zero-knowledge application should be completely anonymous, or at least it should make it impossible to relate the real name or email of a user to his data" It seems that Richard Stallman agrees... READ MORE

When a PR contact from Reddit contacted us about "exciting news", a mixture of workload and getting sent press releases not remotely related to open source led me to ignore the request to meet with Reddit. My bad. The news is that Reddit has decided to open source the code behind reddit.com. The Reddit blog states: "There are only five of us who work on reddit; we couldn't have made this site if it weren't for a great community of developers. In no particular order, here's a quick list of the open source products that reddit is built and runs... READ MORE

The Red Hat Summit started today here in Boston. Based on the evening reception today, it is shaping up to be a pretty good show. I will be speaking at the show on Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 11:30 AM eastern time. I will discuss current state of open source backup as well as where things are headed. We also have a booth located towards the right side of the exhibit floor (by small meeting rooms). We are demonstrating Amanda as well as ZRM for MySQL. Do stop by if you are coming to the show!
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I usually try very hard to not write about IBM. But the following from Matt Asay requires a reply. Regardless, IBM isn't in the habit of open sourcing technology in which it has a lead or at least a strong position, such as it does with DB2. IBM strategically invests in open source to undermine the margins of its competitors, not its own. Really? Take a look into OSGi, SCA, Apache HTTP Server or the countless other open source projects into which IBM has open sourced technology. This technology didn't undermine competitors; it helped customers and competitors alike (and let's... READ MORE

There's a story on CNet about IBM considering open sourcing DB2. While there are no immediate plans, IBM UK's director of information management software Chris Livesy has said that market conditions may make it unavoidable. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open-source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that." And why not? A while back, I predicted that within 10 years... READ MORE

Dave reports that IDC's latest report "Worldwide Standalone Open Source Software 2008?2012 Forecast: A Preliminary View" estimates that the stand-alone OSS market will grow from $1.73B in 2007 to $4.83B in 2012. That's a 23 percent annual growth rate to 2012 vs. 7.7 percent annual growth for the overall software market. Interesting to note that $4.8B represents 1.3 percent of the overall software market. The previous version of the IDC data suggested that stand-alone OSS spending would come in at 1.8 percent of the total 2011 market spending. (Don't try to reconcile the two figures, as forecasting is difficult and... READ MORE

I was pretty excited when OpenLogic announced the Open Source Census. A key feature of the census was a tool that scanned respondents' servers to determine which open source products/packages were actually being used. Anonymous data from these individual scans was going to be shared with the public in order to revolutionize our understanding of OSS usage. This data-sharing would be very important for companies whose IT leaders don't know that they are using OSS. However, to date, only ~= about 1300 machines have been scanned. News from InfoWorld today that Microsoft has also sponsored the Open Source Census is... READ MORE