(This is the first in a series of blogs written while I was trying to get home from Santa Clara. Posting them now as I'm back home and online.)

These MySQL conferences certainly get more interesting every year. Last year we got acquired and I went home thinking I need to start looking for a new job. This year Eyjafjallajõkull erupted and I had trouble getting home at all!

Pre-conference there was also the suspense to see whether the conference will take place at all, but O'Reilly and Colin pulled it together perfectly! It seems most if not all Europeans will eventually find their ways home, so all in all, all is well that ends well.

To recount everything we've learned, I will step backwards in time through the highlights as I saw them.

I just want to jot down a few comments here about an open-ed piece by Glyn Moody at the H-online: Why Making Money from Free Software Matters. It is a very good summary of the motivations I had in writing my book Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source and why I have since also strived to work towards making businesses benefit from Open Source models, and vice versa, making Open Source benefit from the businesses.

Says Glyn:

Hi

Unusually, we actually wrote a text for Monty's keynote speech this year. I'm publishing it below. Part of the speaker notes are just bullet points though, but the text may still be interesting to publish. Also, there is a funny joke about Oracle being a major MariaDB contributor that Monty somehow missed in the speech.

The keynote is also available on Youtube. In fact, Sheeri has been nice enough to collect all videos from the conference into a playlist.

This blog post is just to list links and tips on getting home to Finland.

First leg: getting to anywhere in Europe

Being stuck in San Fransisco, my first problem has been to get just anywhere closer to home. Taking a boat from America to Europe takes from 6-15 days and is not significantly cheaper than flying. So the best bet is just to fly to Europe.

A friend just emailed some suggestions what to do while stuck in SF:

20+ campfires on Ocean Beach
-------------------------------------------------
A fun thing to do any Friday or Saturday night after about 8pm until
after midnight is go to Ocean Beach where hundreds of people make 20+
campfires (folks are friendly -- just walk up and introduce yourself
and join some group's campfire or walk between many -- bring some beer
or snacks to share if you want to).  This beach is at the intersection
of Great Highway and Fulton street, San Francisco

If you are a MySQL conference attendee who cannot get back home to Europe, you can find other fellow MySQLrs at this page on MySQL forge. Please use it as a central hub to organize gettogethers like dinners. Or why not take the opportunity for a hackathon?

As for myself, my BA flight is canceled and there is no way to even rebook (160 minute waiting line to call BA). I will have my travel agent rebook the flight on Monday European business hours. Until then, I'm stuck indefinitely in California.

I've been to (only?) 2 previous MySQL conferences. I never spoken before, I actually tried to avoid it plus I didn't feel I had any hardcore topics worthy of presenting. Last year all MySQL Sales Engineers were told to submit a talk, so I submitted one that I knew would not be accepted ("no vaporware rule"), and it wasn't. Hey, I obeyed our boss more than my collagues who didn't submit anything! I did feel that for me it was a more useful way to spend time with my customers who were at the conference, and just network.

Google Summer of Code is now open for student applications and people (like Ronald Bradford) are noticing that MySQL is not participating this year. (Drizzle otoh is a mentoring organization.)