So now that we have said goodbye to the old crew, I thought it might be appropriate to make some forward looking statements, as publicly traded companies say...

Kaj's talk at FOSDEM seems to be a good summary of the situation: We'll probably become a bit more integrated into Sun, there'll probably be less Swedish drinking songs1 , and other than that we don't know yet.

One observation one could make is that instead of Scandinavian drinking songs, there might be some Turkish or Persian influnce taking over. In honour of that, today's post is a favorite internet viral video from these regions:

• 1Mårten finished his last all hands staff meeting (call) as they apparently have started once upon a time, singing Helan går. (I hope I don't get into trouble now, contents of the staff meetings are of course company confidential...)

I try to limit the amount of hair-cut blog posts, but since The Data Charmer is writing travel blogs too... Here are some observations from Moscow:

It seems January and February were just completely taken up by customer engagements. I don't know if it is due to the recession or what, but we who are selling MySQL are just very busy right now. Towards the end of February I finally got on top of my life again, and on the bright side, I took almost a full week off from work, just to get even with all the overtime I accumulated.

This is old news now, but I still want to make a note of these historical events for my own blog too. If you're like yawn... then don't read it. OTOH, seems like I'm in good company commenting on this this week :-)

So some weeks ago we were hit by the surprising news that Mårten will leave Sun, just a few days after Monty had decided to do so too.

Let's make some comments in ORDER BY DESC chronological order.

I realized I don't often do what bloggers often do, link to other bloggers. But this Matthew Asletts post is really good, I seem to agree with it and it touches the same issues I just wrote a mini-trilogy about, namely the evolution of future Open Source business models. Of course, Matthew should know he analyzes Open Source companies for a living, I'm just a guy with one book.

While everyone else is doing predictions for 2009, I want to do something different and look about 10 years forwards and backwards: ie. finish my trilogy into the past and future of Open Source and Open Other Things - let's call it Free Culture for this post. The first part and the spark to this trilogy was Nokia acquiring Symbian followed by Open Source has arrived... where's the money?. So let's complete the circle and look at how Openness is doing outside the world of software...

"The Arts"

(This is a purely technical or at least semi-technical post about a database and Web20 architecural issue.)

I just noticed about 5-10 status updates from my friends on Facebook are duplicated. Reading from the top I get to "17 hours ago" and then it restarts with duplicate status update messages from "5 hours ago".

Last Friday I got to enjoy the benefit of being a MySQL'r and located in Finland: We were invited to Monty, Anna and Maria for a MySQL Christmas party. Now that we are part of Sun, the company of course organises its own official Christmas party (who organises parties on a Thursday???) like all companies do, but a special MySQL party was still a very good idea, thanks Monty for inviting us. I especially enjoyed meeting some of the MySQL'rs who had recently either left Sun or happened to be on maternity leave.

This blog post was originally posted on November 10, 2008. It was then withdrawn the next day and replaced with the short explanation below. Since the person who asked me to withdraw it has since left Sun, I have left Sun, and Sun itself will not exist anymore in a few days, I have decided to re-publish the original text for historical purposes.