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.

I visited the London installment of our MySQL European Customer conference on Thursday. In a lecture hall of 250+ attendees I found an empty seat next to a man who turned out to be Patrik Pada who is the webmaster of HSS Media. Tick, tick, tick... [sound in my head thinking there is something familiar here...]

My parents had found a box of old stuff which they delivered to me and I went through yesterday. For instance, did you know that I appeared on a photo of Kellogs Frosties (with Tony the Tiger) in 1995! We have several of those boxes still saved, empty of course. No, I'm not a celebrity. I was in the audience of a hockey game in Lillehammer Olympics which they used on their boxes in 1995. All the more memorable then, since 1995 is still the one and only year that Finland won the World Championships!