During this autumn I've had the pleasure of working closely with Georg Greve, Founder and former President of the Free Software Foundation Europe. Seeing that he had just left his previous post, we realized that his experience would be invaluable to do some of the heavy lifting involved in setting up processes for this fresh association. And so it has been!

As a result, we now have mundane things like a post box and accountant in Zurich where the non-profit association has its legal home. We are finally able to accept membership applications through the new website.

When I was younger and had lots of free time, I used to do video editing as a hobby. At that time I developed a rule that is true for many projects in general (it was also true for writing a book some years later). The rule is: When you think you are 90% done, you are only 50% done. With video-editing, this meant that when the video was more or less ready, you are still 50% away from the final goal of actually having a master copy on tape. The latter 50% would be spent on checking ending credits, watching through the video a couple of times, and in those time, rendering even simplest of effects. Using a Windows PC for video editing was in those times a shaky effort in itself, so even when mastering you had to sit there and watch through the whole tape to make sure there were no glitches.

Producing a MariaDB release has been a similar process. In our company meeting in August we were discussing "final steps" to produce a final Beta, then Release Candidate, then production release. As I blogged then, the progress has been documented on a daily basis on the askmonty.org wiki.

Last week we ended the first Monty Program Ab company meeting in Mallorca, Spain. Even if many of us have met before, there are a couple who had not met everyone before and it was great to be together. Even for myself, since I was in the Sales org at MySQL and Sun, I wasn't that close with all the oldtime developers, so it was great to finally spend several days with them.

Since it was the first meeting both for the company and MariaDB project, we spent a lot of time on the "vision, strategy" excercises. Btw, for future MariaDB meetings we will in the future always invite all the Maria Captains and other community members, it is not intended to be a meeting of one company at all. For this meeting, we had 3 non-employees present and they gave valuable input, so it already works, even if we will do more of it in the future.

Here are the slides for the "State of MariaDB" lightning talk I did at OSCon.

We've been mingling here for 4 days already, but today the official part of OSCon kicks off. At Monty Program we've been a bit late in preparing for this conference - busy getting started with the company and everything. But even if we were a bit late, we succeeded in lining up a good set of sessions.

First day at the Community Leadership Summit. Kurt will blog about our being here separately soon. I just wanted to say this quickly tossed together unconference is a huge success, with a lot of the Community leaders and intelligenzia present and networking. We get all the time questions about what is happening with MySQL, so even though we hadn't planned to, we did a session What's up with MySQL where we tried to explain our plans for the MariaDB community and Open Database Alliance, but also as objectively as possible answer any questions that came up. (The unconference rules strictly prohibit promoting any company, which Monty Program of course goes out of it's way to obey.)

Oh, if you're in the Bay area, definitively should consider coming for the second day of this free conference.

Anyway, I'm wearing the new Open Database Alliance T-shirts Kurt had made. This reminded me that I wanted for a long time blog about the logo (which I had no part in making):

Open SQL Camp will be organized in St Augustin, Germany on the weekend of 22-23 August. Unfortunately, at Monty Program, it looks like we have already scheduled a company meeting at the same time and all of us will be in Spain instead. Consequently, there are now no MariaDB talks proposed for the conference, which is a shame.

Some weeks ago I've resigned from Sun Microsystems, where I worked as a MySQL Telecom Sales Engineer. Beginning July 13th I will take on a new role in the MySQL ecosystem, as "Project Manager and COO" for Monty Program Ab.

Since it can be argued I'm moving to a competitor, and I was working in a customer facing role, upon resigning I had to immediately return my computer, phone, etc to Sun, and my login accounts, including email, were terminated. I've gotten some comments about this (like: "Is there no trust in the world anymore?" and "How can you treat anyone like that?") and I cannot stress this enough: This is normal, I expected it, indeed brought it to my managers attention myself. If nothing else, think of it this way: This precaution also protects me from any misunderstandings and/or false accusations. Besides, starting your vacation by returning your laptop and removing your email account isn't the worst thing to happen to you - try it, you'll love it :-)

This had in any case the side effect that I was not able to honor a long standing tradition of sending a goodbye and thank you note to a certain internal mailing list, because I cannot do that from my private email. (Also asking others to forward a mail proved to be problematic/sensitive in many ways.)

Hence, I'm posting the email I wrote here instead, so that both my former collagues and other MySQL community members can read it alike: