Just in case it wasn't clear from Hakan's post, we are opening up the next Monty Program company meeting in October 7-12 to be a general MariaDB developers meeting. (In fact, we've had a few guests in all of the previous meetings too, but now it's formal and public.) Ever since Sun folded this annual MySQL AB tradition (to save money) there has been people asking when the next meeting would be, since for the developer community outside MySQL AB it was the main networking and information sharing event of the year. Last MySQL user conference we agreed that something needs to be done, and this is it. If you work on any of the MySQL variants, a storage engine, or are otherwise interested in deep architectural MySQL/MariaDB discussions, you are welcome to join and should contact Hakan or My for details.1 The invitation of course also is valid for Oracle employees, in case you were wondering.

And that's the other significant news hiding in Hakan's post: My Widenius, an experienced traveller herself, will be in charge of meeting logistics. This means even My herself now works for MariaDB, and can be reached with my at mariadb dot org :-)

1. 1. If you are a Drizzle hacker, it is probably less interesting, but you are of course still welcome if you come! Anyway, we did also discuss having a similar developer meeting adjacent to an OpenSQL camp or something that could cover broader topics, and this is still an option. But as it is now, this is a MySQL/MariaDB focused meeting and there already was a separate Drizzle Developer day and we can just see what else is needed.

Below is my talk from the International Federation of Computer Law Associations conference banquet that took place in Helsinki last week. (It is post-edited to match what was actually said.)

I have to say I was quite honored to be asked to speak. I was preceded by Finlands Minister of Justice Tuija Brax and later in the evening followed by imho Finlands funniest magician Martti Vannas. The dinner was set in the old stock market building of Helsinki, an exquisite restaurant now. I'm happy to say the talk was well received and many of the lawyers came to thank me afterwards.

Last Saturday I became father to a baby girl - in addition to our 2½year old son.

Those of you who are my former collagues from MySQL, you know about the generous Scandinavian 5 week vacations. (Which in MySQL were practiced globally.) I have decided that now is a good time for me to enjoy another Scandinavian perk: long paternity leave. I will be home with the rest of the family until approximately next February :-)

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...)

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

It has been a tough Autumn for all of us so it is a pleasure to finally blog on some good news! O'Reilly has finally announced the next MySQL User Conference.

Last week professor Eben Moglen published an SFLC position paper related to the EU investigation on the Oracle Sun merger. Even though most of the proceedings do not happen in public, the SFLC publishing its own paper allowed us to answer it to the Commission. While it is not our primary objective - and we are a bit constrained at this point - to educate the public or debate this. But given that it is something everyone likes to have an opinion on, and the SFLC has already opened the discussion, we have decided to also publish our submission as well.

We would like to emphasize the following paragraph from the introduction.

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.