Colin Charles Agenda

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 (Simon Phipps, while not at the event, was available on Twitter). Some interesting reading, naturally.

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.

My employer has this odd policy where they force you to change your password, once every six months or so. Its annoying, because sometimes, you forget your password. Its inherently more insecure to write it down somewhere, isn’t it? Plus, you can’t reuse passwords.

However, my mail client always has my password. And therein comes, a useful Thunderbird add-on, called Password Exporter.

Now, I can see what my last known password was, and login when need be.

So the news is everywhere. Sun has some info, Oracle has some info. If you’re thinking MySQL, you should definitely be at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 (if you’re not already registered). Find a speaker, they’ll give you a 20% discount code (heck, find me, I’ll do the same).

What does this all mean for MySQL? You bet you’ll find out a lot at the conference. I can highly recommend the keynote on Tuesday morning – you want to see Karen Padir deliver the State of the Dolphin.

What does this mean for the Linux distributions that MySQL widely supports? Does it mean more software from the Oracle stack will be open source and distributed easily? I don’t know. I find it poignant that I had this open as a tab recently though: Shuttleworth: Oracle a Litmus test for Linux, Ubuntu.

Alas, it also eludes to the band, we all received a little over a year ago. We can all wait and see what happens. The future is wide open.

I had the pleasure of addressing a crowd of over 1,000+ people yesterday, at the Sun Tech Days event in Hyderabad. I think this might as well be the biggest number of attendees at a talk that I’ve given. I spoke on MySQL: The Database for Web 2.0, and the notes for this talk are largely indexed at MySQL for Developers. Its more or less the standard deck for the Tech Days events these days.

The best part? The questions. I had intelligent questions, and they lasted well over twenty minutes, and there was even more chatter afterwards. Twenty minutes might not seem like a lot, but this is Asia, and in some audiences, you’d be hard pressed to get even a single question! MySQL is hot, in India. Really, really, hot.

I’m glad to see that most people are using MySQL 5 and 5.1. I’m not so glad to see that most people don’t know about storage engines – most are using MyISAM without even knowing it, and they don’t know there exist other engines. This is what I notice, every time I talk about storage engines, though. For the astute MySQL developer, the DevZone is known (thanks to the documentation, mainly), but the Forge is almost unheard of. Planet MySQL seems to be more popular, actually.

Arun Gupta has some nice pictures and videos of the event in general. For me, I was jet-lagged after a massive delay in my flight leaving Kuala Lumpur (plane was unserviceable), and I only mustered under three hours of sleep before addressing the large crowd of folk.

The Tech Days events for the (financial) year are winding down, and for the next (financial) year, we (MySQL/The Database Group, in general) need to plan to be first class citizens at the event. Not only in terms of talks, but we need booth space (we’re about the only Sun project lacking a booth). After all, we have interesting things to talk about: MySQL, Drizzle, MySQL Enterprise Tools/Merlin, Workbench, Proxy, Query Analyser/Quan, Cluster, Replication, DTrace, Virtualisation and the database (VirtualBox? xVM?), etc. This list is probably never ending, so some cool demos, lots of fact sheets, maybe even USB sticks of goodies (2GB sticks are dirt cheap, and loading it up with information not only make people want to get a stick, but makes them learn more – hopefully before they format it! :P).

Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org – Office Suite
2. Firefox – Web Browser
3. MySQL – Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go on, and read their first quarterly newsletter. More savings to come, I’m certain in 2009.