Well, for Matt Asay, I should start by congratulating you for the new job and nice title! (Also, we learn some intelligence from Matt's blog: apparently Canonical is already close to the size of MySQL AB at the time of the Sun acquisition.)

Usually we are told to "ignore the trolls" and all that. The blogosphere unfortunately seems to be full of commentators who like to have share their opinion - even while they are entirely clueless. Sometimes, like the comments on Slashdot, it is ok and considered part of the entertainment. Sometimes it is harmless, because nobody reads that blog. And sometimes, it is just unacceptable:

Between following (from a distance) the talks at Fosdem and anticipating the ones at MySQL User Conference in April, I was reminded of 2 interesting MySQL talks that have had a deeper meaning to me than their original speakers probably intended. I thought today could be a good time to share these 2 stories that for me personally are filed in the "things I learned from MySQL AB and Sun" folder...

"If you can't solve the problem, try solving some other problem"

Last week Red Hat announced what seems to be a significant effort to bring open source thinking into non-technical areas of life and society. This was very interesting to me, as it is a topic I have also put much thought to in my book. While the welcome announcement is dated last week, it seems the sight has been pre-seeded with posts from different Red Hat employees so that it already looks like an active community site.

One post I stumbled upon is written by Red Hat's Pam Chestek, titled Letting Go:

It seems last week was a popular weekend for programming hobby projects, as it wasn't only me who was having fun with some recreative programming. Yesterday I published a new version of my Footnotes module for Drupal.

I just wanted to post this note so there is no confusion or rumors popping up: In a recent meeting at Monty Program we concluded that with the recent additions to the community and engineering teams, the team is now in excellent shape, except for one thing: we have bottlenecks on the top. As a solution we've decided to split my current job in 2 parts:

COO: in charge of company operations and routines, who most will report to

VP of Community and Business development: will be a more "project oriented" role taking care of ad hoc things that need to get done. (Such as, setting up ODBA, arm wrestling with Oracle, productizing our offerings, developing also internal processes, etc...)

A week after the first announcement, MySQL user conference seems like it's coming together and will be as good as ever.

In particular, Sun makes a come back with a tailor-made "Founding sponsor" status. Great! That means everyone will be there, just like we are used to.

Call for Papers is opened, but hurry, you only have a month to submit your papers. Baron Schwartz has updated his"How to write a good MySQL conference proposal.

The European Commission has now got a lot of emails! It seems they even have to block some (at least GMail) just to keep their mail server alive. Thank you, all, for helping out, it is working.

As you can see, the emails already have had a small effect that Oracle had to backtrack and make some promises.

In this blog I will explain why these promises are not very helpful, even if they show that even Oracle is a little bit concerned now.

The first thing is of course that