I was reading Savio Rodrigues’ post, The economy and open source, in which he responds to Andrew Keen’s thoughts that a bad economy will see fewer open source contributions.

Now, Keen feels that people will contribute less during bad financial times:

The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

I know several volunteer open source developers — I consider this to be a “role” that someone plays. A person may be *employed* as an open source developer (say, working at Sun on …

The next generation of MySQL DBA exams are going to be performance based tests (PBT) or 'Hands on'. A candidate will have a series of tasks to be performed, a virtual server, and a time limit. The tasks are going to be based on the usual tasks performed by a Database Administrator. For instance, a candidate will get a list of user accounts that need to be added, updated, or deleted and will be graded on how well they meet the objectives.

I have already asked my fellow MySQL employees to review the tasks but I would like to have some input from the public. Following the Open Source dictum of the more eyeballs looking at a problem will provide better products, I would like to get some of you to look at the proposed tasks and give me your comments.

In the past there have been complaints on questions being too syntax specific, too picky, and asking for too obscure knowledge. This is a chance to help make sure that the exam …