We've now officially closed MySQL's acquisition by Sun this morning and I thought I'd make a few observations about the process. I've been through several acquisitions over the years, both on the acquiring and the acquired side, and so far, this one has gone the smoothest. While Sun is obviously a much larger company than MySQL, the approach that the Sun execs and managers have taken has been professional and respectful every step of the way. Not once have I heard Sun employees say "This is the way we do things here." Instead, there has been a strong desire to... READ MORE

While posting about my talk on MySQL Cluster and Drupal I realized something very important about Open Source and how it differs from proprietary software.

Looking at a traditional software and infrastructure consultancy shop you will see that they carry a broad range of products which they care about and which they are actively offerering to customers. For this products they have formal arrangements with suppliers that will both give them licenses, support but also incentives to sell those licenses.

So when a sales guy or a consultant arrives at a customer they are already biased to plug a certain product, and they will try to convince the customer that the product they are selling is the right fit. Even tough when it's a total Misfit.

With the Open Source consultant he won't be plugging a product, he will be listening to his customer and will use the …

Today there was a recent flurry of blog posts, starting with Charles Babcock's interview of Jonathan Schwartz about Sun's strategy of targeting Web 2.0 developers. This brought to light an interesting topic about open source development communities, the perceived insularity of Sun towards the external OpenSolaris developer community, and why Linux will apparently always be more popular and technically stronger than OpenSolaris.

The initial interview led Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation to take issue, and long comments on those posts from …

Today was at the faculty of Industrial Design in Delft to attend the first 'c,mm,n Garage' event. c,mm,n - pronounced as common - is a project to develop sustainable mobility. It is led by Stichting Natuur en Milieu, The Netherlands Society for Nature and Environment and currently the main participants are students from a number of Dutch technical universities.

Right now, engineering efforts are focused on a clean, remanufacturable car that runs on electricity generated by a hydrogen fuel cell:
The car is almost completely built out of biodegradable plastics, making it extremely light and environmentally friendly.
There is a YouTube Video available that shows off the exterior design and which gives you a good impression of how open and …

Thanks to Tony Lawrence for inspiring today’s post. Hopefully these links don’t stink. 

Anthony Lawrence: Reasons I Don’t Like Social Media

Tools that once were valuable for pointing out the best of the web often become obsolete or spammy (you might say this about Digg). Tony’s example is StumbleUpon, a link sharing site that I love.  He contends that the social networking site has become clogged with junk or at least doesn’t provide consistent "quality" links. [Updated: Actually check the post comments for …

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There has been plenty of press this week regarding Microsoft making a bid for Yahoo. This week the Wall Street Journal Article From Uncertain Future To Leading Yahoo Bid has prompted me to the following observations. I quote several points:

The bid, he said on the call, is “the next major milestone in Microsoft’s companywide transformation” to incorporate online services.

as Microsoft pushes the bid and, if successful, tries to meld Yahoo with Microsoft.

Microsoft had been negotiating to buy online ad company DoubleClick Inc. but lost that deal to Google, which paid $3.1 billion. Microsoft in May countered, spending $6 billion on online ad company aQuantive Inc.

While Microsoft should continue investing in its own online services, it …

Apparently the role of community managers is one of the coolest jobs around. Jono Bacon’s one for Ubuntu, and Jeff Waugh did an awesome job before that. Jay Pipes does a nice job for MySQL. Dawn Foster is the community manager that "powers" community managers at Jive Software who makes wicked-cool collaborative software. 

Glyn penned an article about the proliferation of community managers. In his article he mentions …

i am listed as one of the ten members of the php group. most of the php source code says it is copyright “the php group” (except for the zend engine stuff). the much-debated contributor license agreement for PDO2 involves the php group.

could i assign whatever rights (and responsibilities) my membership in the php group represents to someone else? how much should i try to get for it? i mean, if mysql was worth $1 billion....

i am still disappointed that a way of evolving the membership of the php group was never established.