I have never been to a DrupalCon before so my first was DrupalCon Portland 2013 (with some 3,500+ attendees). My first DrupalCon happened to also be one that I spoke at, and I hope to return to Austin in 2014 (added bonus: I’ve never been to Texas before).

SkySQL had decided to get a booth at DrupalCon since I was speaking and I have to say that the booth was very successful. You may ask why and the simple reasons are:

1. Everyone at DrupalCon was a user of MySQL. Once they hit scale, they may need professional services or even just switch to MariaDB. This is a captive audience.
2. Everyone running Drupal at scale with many modules and nodes generally faced issues with database slowdowns. Hello …

Peter Zaitsev leads a track at the inaugural Percona MySQL University event in Raleigh, N.C. on Jan. 29, 2013.

Portland is a well-recognized hub for Open Source technologies in the Northwest, home to conferences such as OSCON and Open Source Bridge as well as hosts of OpenSQL Camp in 2009. As such it is a very natural place for our next Percona MySQL University event scheduled for June 17.

We run this event in partnership with MySQL Meetup at Portland organized by our own …

Chrome OS and Andoid to merge - eventually. Oracle and SpringSource propose Eclipse OSGi project. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Gizmodo reported that Chrome OS and Android are destined to merge, somehow.

# Q&A with open government activist David Eaves about Portland’s …

OpenSQL Camp Portland 2009 is coming up on the 14th and 15th of November. Eric Day (of the Drizzle project) is the lead organiser this time around.

I went to the first edition in Charlottesville VA last year which was organised by Baron Schwartz (Percona). It was a great event, like other unconferences but with specific focus on database technologies. Monty (MySQL), Brian (Drizzle), Richard (SQLite), Jim (Interbase/Firebird/Falcon), Bruce (PostgreSQL) were all these, as were various storage engine builders. Very interesting, and lots of informal fun. If you’re anywhere near, do go!

Even though noone from our gang is able to make it to this one, Open Query is sponsoring this event – for all the above reasons. It rocks and deserves every support.

Patents. M&A. Adoption. Business strategies. And more.

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This bumper edition of 451 CAOS Links is brought to you courtesy of the Open World Forum’s temperamental wireless connection.

Patents
# Red Hat urged the Supreme Court to to make clear that it excludes software from patentability, while the SFLC and the FSF also filed briefs with the US Supreme Court arguing against software patents.

Investment and M&A
# The WSJ …

While chatting with a few SVN hackers at OSCON, it occured to me that MySQL is the Perl of RDBMS. Discuss among yourselves.

Damian Conway is giving the funniest public flogging I have ever seen. He is single-handedly kicking the ass of Web 2.0, Sxip, patents, patent vulture firms, snake oil crypto, Microsoft, Google, r0ml and all the rest of us all at the same time.

Great quotes include:

• We have a patent on replacing the letter in a name with x, but still pronouncing it the same way.
• Every time you read the name Microsoft, you will see a kitten. We call it “Pavlovian Marketing”
• We thought that we might call it … firefly, fireangel, firebuffy. Then it became obvious - the new browser is called FireWhedon.

I sure hope that O’Reilly recorded this session.

Update 1

I just registered cxap.{biz,net,org} - now to go ask Damian what he would …