Two independent Facebook related news stories caught my eye on Monday:

1) In Sweden about 10 thousand demonstrators showed up in a spontaneous rally against racism. This was less than 24 hours after a new immigrant hostile party Sverigedemokraterna had won the Sunday election and got 20 seats in the Parliament. The demonstration was called together by a young girl, Felicia Margineanu (17), who posted it as a Facebook event and invited her friends.

I didn't intend this to become a trilogy, but today I will wish good luck to a newly started company by a friend of mine from the university: Avoin Yritys literally means "Open Company" in Finnish and they have committed to making their company as open and transparent as possible in any way. I confirmed with Antti that it is an independently developed idea, although the concept is very much similar to an idea from the Open Life book. Oh, and see also the post on Lastwear for yet another independent incarnation of the same idea.

One of many things I really enjoyed working as a Sales Engineer back at MySQL Ab and Sun was that I was paid full time to encourage companies to use open source for their database layer. While Linux has already become the norm for the operating system on servers, and open source alternatives exist for app servers, it wasn't until a few years ago we really started seeing major traction of that in the database layer. And I was happy to be a small part of it!

I'm not really a salesy person. I mean I'm good at evangelizing something I believe in, addressing customer business needs and such. But you couldn't get me to lift a finger just to meet a quota, if I didn't really believe in the product. Which is what good sales guys can do. (Also known as "selling what you have in the truck".)

But thinking back at my time selling MySQL, I felt it was a great privilege to be paid a salary to travel to companies around Europe and spend a day with them explaining how and why to migrate from a proprietary database they had standardized on, to MySQL. And btw, we always met our quota too.

The pre-voting has started in Sweden,and there are 15 days until election day.

Just in case it wasn't clear from Hakan's post, we are opening up the next Monty Program company meeting in October 7-12 to be a general MariaDB developers meeting. (In fact, we've had a few guests in all of the previous meetings too, but now it's formal and public.) Ever since Sun folded this annual MySQL AB tradition (to save money) there has been people asking when the next meeting would be, since for the developer community outside MySQL AB it was the main networking and information sharing event of the year. Last MySQL user conference we agreed that something needs to be done, and this is it. If you work on any of the MySQL variants, a storage engine, or are otherwise interested in deep architectural MySQL/MariaDB discussions, you are welcome to join and should contact Hakan or My for details.1 The invitation of course also is valid for Oracle employees, in case you were wondering.

And that's the other significant news hiding in Hakan's post: My Widenius, an experienced traveller herself, will be in charge of meeting logistics. This means even My herself now works for MariaDB, and can be reached with my at mariadb dot org :-)

• 1If you are a Drizzle hacker, it is probably less interesting, but you are of course still welcome if you come! Anyway, we did also discuss having a similar developer meeting adjacent to an OpenSQL camp or something that could cover broader topics, and this is still an option. But as it is now, this is a MySQL/MariaDB focused meeting and there already was a separate Drizzle Developer day and we can just see what else is needed.

The Open Content revolution has happened! ...it just didn't happen in the way we expected it.

I was recently interviewed for a London music blog Music 4.5: What the music industry can learn from the open source movement?1 Somewhat surprisingly, I gave Youtube as an example of a website where music and video is re-used in an open source fashion:

• 1Funny story, I was introduced to Charlotta Hedman by my former MySQL Ab collague Mark Baker, also from London, without him knowing that we are both from the small Finnish city of Jakobstad and I even worked for her dad as a teenager.

Inspired by my previous blog about the Lastwear open clothing company, I decided it is again time to take the pulse on how open source is spreading outside of the software world. The last time I did this was in 2008, where I concluded:

I was recently pointed to a startup called Lastwear, who has gotten their seed funding via Kickstarter.com (also a new acquaintance to me). With an eye to the topic of this blog and namesake book I wrote some years ago, this is some great news in so many ways.