The attendees were not satisfied with the first answer RMS gave to Brian, that Harish Pillay (Chief Technical Architect, Red Hat Singapore), chose to ask RMS what more he had to say, with regards to the letter he’d written. He answered quite candidly in this video, which Brian chimed in for as well.

The back channel for all this was Twitter… Don’t hesitate to follow @harishpillay, @brianaker, @piawaugh or even @webmink …

At foss.my 2009, Brian Aker asked Richard Stallman at his keynote, about the Oracle/Sun acquisition (with a focus on MySQL), with regards to the parallel licensing approach used by MySQL. Brian was referring to:

As only the original rights holder can sell commercial licenses, no new forked version of the code will have the ability to practice the parallel licensing approach, and will not easily generate the resources to support continued development of the MySQL platform.

from Richard’s Letter to the EC opposing Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. Listen to the discussion between Brian and Richard.

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At the MySQL Conference, I had the chance to interview Rohit Nadhani, founder of Webyog, the folk that make SQLyog and MONyog. Watch the video, for more.

Generally based out of Bangalore (I visited them when I was last there), Webyog just started an office in Santa Clara, and are expanding. They boast 15,000 paid customers so far, with some big name customers: Google, Yahoo!, executive office to the US president, and more.

SQLyog is termed as an upgrade from phpMyAdmin. There is a GPL community edition, with some “power tools” that is part of the Enterprise Edition. It is very Win32 based, but easy enough to run on other OSes via WINE or some sort of virtualisation tool.

MONyog is an agentless monitoring tool. It …

While at the MySQL Conference, I caught up with Barry Abrahamson, the systems wrangler/de-facto DBA behind Wordpress.com (and all other Automattic properties). Watch the video.

You probably already know that Wordpress itself is built on top of MySQL. And despite everything you might have heard about our (MySQL/Sun’s) new founders, Wordpress is MySQL today, and for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I digress.

Wordpress.com has about 70 million tables, and tens of thousands of blogs. Large amount of tables, serve for easy sharding - …

I caught up with Marc Delisle (we have a relatively old interview with him on the MySQL DevZone) recently, and got him to give us an introduction to phpMyAdmin, the several books he’s written, and how the project gets new features from the Google Summer of Code. What’s really impressive? They continue winning awards (Marc won one from MySQL in 2009 as well!), and have a user base of nearly 18.5 million (this is downloads — not just users, considering how common it is in shared hosting environments). Watch the video for more.

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I caught up with Zach Skyles Owens, a PHP Evangelist at Microsoft. If you missed the embed, watch the video. I have some sparse notes below.

I learned some new things:

• Microsoft spends time working with the PHP community
• They are porting applications to work with an SQL Server backend
• They are ensuring that the language should “just work”, with the IIS and SQL Server stack. This is quite different from the usual AMP (Apache = server, MySQL = database, PHP = language) stack that we’re quite accustomed to.
• There is a Microsoft Web Platform, and there’s a Web Application Gallery, that brings in …

I had the pleasure of having a quick video interview with Chuck Hagenbuch and Leigh Heyman, both from Blue State Digital, and people that helped run the my.barackobama.com campaign. They’re giving the closing keynote at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 alongside three engineers from Google, and its going to be great.

If you missed the embed, here’s the video. Don’t forget to see them, at their closing keynote titled Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (and Server Rooms) of Barack Obama’s Online Presidential Campaign.

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