… or, “Making Event Attendance Count”

Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I didn’t) then a naive estimation of costs would have been something like this:

• ~20 000 km of air travel (Vancouver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Helsinki. Return.)
• ~7 000+ CAD of costs (flights, hotels, taxis, meals, time) (borne by a combination of eZ Systems, the Mozilla Foundation and the …

I’ve come in late for Monty’s session - everything seems to be running a bit early - how odd.

Monty’s is covering mistakes in building communities - he’s talking about Dream Box and how they have let their community fragment so deeply. Then he talks about how MySQL has provided a strong central point for the development of the server.

At this point someone asks how much contributed code is in MySQL. Monty says very little in the core server (but mentioning the Windows port as a large and notable exception). He should mention that the non-server contributions are huge, but he gets sidetracked.

He heads back to his slides and start discussion stats from MySQL’s past - how many copies have been distributed (and estimated 100 million+ - about 40k downloads per day.) Lots and lots of books (about 250 in English, 200 in German, 200 in French, 50 in Japanese and 20+ in Spanish. Also in Chinese, Russina, Portuguese, …

After a break, Tommi Mikkonen of the Tampere University of Technology introduces Monty Widenius (who is, as most readers of this blog will know is one of the founders of MySQL AB)

Monty takes the stage wearing a suit - a nice suit - something I don’t recall having seen before.

He starts with an overview of the near past of DBMSs, talking about the state of databases around 1995, covering the state of proprietary and open products around this time.

He then quickly moves to discussing the rise of databases in web apps in the mid-to-late ninties. He’s covering a lot of metaphorical ground pretty quickly, perhaps too quickly for a crowd that may not be familiar with DBMS or web apps. If I had been thinking, I would have sat in the back of the room so that I could see how well-suited the content is the for the audience.

Monty has started discussing how the use of …

I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

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