Since I joined MongoDB it seems I have mostly been doing technical blogs. Yesterday I had a conversation with a long time friend from the open source database scene, which inspired me to jot down some observations on my long time favorite topic: open source business strategy.

In fact, this will be very much a Selling Open Source 101 blog. I've come to realize that while what I'm about to write is well known to open source oldtimers, those of us who were lucky to work at Red Hat and MySQL and other first generation open source companies, these ideas are not necessarily well known to many executives and sales managers working in open source today.

5 years of MySQL

People often write a blog post when they reach some nice anniversary since they joined MySQL community. Well, for those old enough it usually means when they joined MySQL AB as employee. For me this was January 2008. Because I didn't remember the month correctly, I haven't blogged anything then, but decided to save it for a better opportunity - now.

TL;DR Starting this week I will be working for 10gen, selling MongoDB to the Nordics. This blog post is really long - even then it doesn't contain the most interesting stories, I'm not sure if they can ever be published. Sorry for the length, but remember you don't need to read all at once. This is my last MySQL post so save some of it for cold winter days!

2008 - Sun acquisition

For reasons that I will blog about in a couple of weeks, several people last week asked me what I think about open core. My answer was that nowadays I don't care much about the topic. Long time readers of this blog might be surprised at such an answer, so I thought this was a good time to reflect on why I don't think it is very important anymore, and more importantly to document the empirical evindence that we now have about open core as a business strategy.

The Winter season for conferences is catching up speed.

DOAG

As I write this the DOAG conference in Germany is happening. It is one of the biggest (or the biggest?) Oracle user group conferences outside of USA. Many of my European friends in the MySQL space are talking there. As you know I have been a big fan of Galera Cluster for MySQL for over a year now, but I was perhaps a bit of an early adopter. Lo-and-behold, I was surprised to see the DOAG related press-release from SkySQL puts the creators of Galera first in their headline: Codership, SkySQL und weitere Top-Experten rund um das Thema ‘MySQL Datenbanken” in Nürnberg versammelt. Talk about crossing the chasm! Ralf Gebhardt, my other mentor from MySQL AB times, is speaking on MySQL HA solutions. Seppo, Erkan and Oli and people from Oracle are talking too.

Percona Live UK, Dec 2-3

Here are the slides of the talk I just gave at Froscon. (Video should be available soon.)

A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

In July I attended the Community Leadership Summit in Portland. This was the 3rd CLS overall and my second. The first one was organized in San Jose 2 years ago. I noticed there has been a small evolution between those two years (which might partly be due to geography too). The first one in San Jose I think was very successful and drew many de-facto leaders in the open source community, including Bruce Perens himself (author of the Open Source Definition). In Portland there was perhaps less of those, but instead you could see how the audience increasingly consisted of people who actually work as full time Community Managers for various businesses, or in some cases for a non-profit organization.

Speaking of conferences, in general, and OpenSQLCamps in particular, there is one a week from now, and I will be speaking! It is organized as a single room track at Froscon, Germany, by Felix Schupp (Blackray/Softmethod) and Volker Oboda (Primebase). The content is mostly a collection of database related talks originally submitted via the main Froscon call for papers. (In other words, unlike many previous camps, the schedule is all set.)

I'm a little excited about this one, because for the first time in my career as speaker I will be giving the keynote. The title of my talk is

How I learned to use SQL and how I learned not to use it

Slides from my talk at OSCON 2011 are now up on Slideshare:

I will be using this picture of the famous Korv Göran kebab grill in my talk at OSCON next week. They recently launched a new slogan "Bigger is better". I think they are on to something, at least when it comes to the kebab business.

Did you know that...