Holy cow... It really works!! (Just like they promised!)

Uh oh. It seems my blog posting frequency is dropping even below my modest minimum target of one per month. I didn't post anything at all in my summer vacation. Well, a small child plus a house to re-decorate does take its share of energy I guess.

I thought I'd still follow up with were we left before holidays:

What I'm left with is the question: Are we there? Is this it? Is all that is left just some minor cleaning up after the big battle has already been won? I think it might be. For me, somehow the day I read the news of the release of Symbian as Open Source marks the milestone when it was clear that we had "won". [...]

I was sitting in a train in the middle of rainy Ireland when I received a mail that Nokia has bought Symbian and is releasing it as Open Source. I didn't believe a word of it. But the web was full of news about it, so it was true. This is an amazing turn of events that I didn't anticipate at all. (You may or may not know that in my previous job I was heavily involved with Symbian programming. Ironically, one reason I left just 6 months ago is that I wanted to work in an Open Source environment :-)

(This blog entry was written and co-posted together with my friend and the CEO of Warp Networks and EBox Platform, Ignacio Correas. Copyright notice: Please note that pictures embedded in the story by Ignacio are certainly not Creative Commons licensed anything.)

Ignacio: I have always considered MySQL as the best model for open source companies. Their approach to the market, the execution of different business models, their relation with the community or the way their work internally as a virtual organization have shown an innovative and successful example of how an IT company in the 21st century can be managed.

I thought I had already conquered the jet lag last night when I fell asleep at 22:00 (that's 10 pm...). But then I woke up somewhere around 2:30, read a book for a while until I decided to give up and have a nice breakfast. I kind of like jet lag though, it is a nice feeling to get out of bed 5:30, when no one else is awake, and birds are singing outside.

There would be a lot to tell about the conference, but you kind of find summaries from many live bloggers on Planet MySQL. One interesting aspect of the conference of course was to meet so many interesting people, many of whom I work with of course, but meeting them in flesh is still great. And Santa Clara being in Silicon Valley adds another funny revelational feeling to it all. For a European Yahoo, Google, Digg and others are Internet companies and seeing that they actually do have tangible offices in Silicon Valley was a surprisingly unreal revelation to me. Oh yes, I also saw the Transmeta offices, you know, where Linus went to work after graduating with the M.Sc. work titled "Linux: A portable operating system" (What did YOU do for master's thesis? I know I did multiple choice quizzes, I'm not kidding...). And when strolling in Santa Clara I was also amused to find out that apparently Freedom also begins there, just a few blocks away from where the conference was held!

I'm hosting a MySQL Tour event in Helsinki, probably this is the last stop on the tour so it will end in the same city where MySQL got started. If you are nearby, please pop in!

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MySQL Tour visits Open Tuesday in Helsinki May 6th

This winter we haven't had as many Open Tuesday meetings as we had last year,
but we will finish off the season with meeting Sun and MySQL on May 6th at
18:00, in the usual place Club Ahjo, Bulevardi 4, Helsinki.

If you are reading this it means the nameserver update is in effect and we have officially moved to a new web hotel. From its inception openlife.cc has been located on a GoDaddy.com server, and almost from day one I had my doubts about it: "BTW, is this GoDaddy server slow or what? Or is it just Drupal? I wonder what will happen when I actually get some visitors." Now I know what happened. After the site was added to planetmysql.com, response times went from slow (like 20-30 secs) to unusable (60 secs, which means 50% of the time you'd just stare at a white page after page timeout). I already relocated the Finnish sister site avoinelama.fi some time ago, and actually regretted my first choice of hosting provider DreamHost, only to find out that the current one HostGator, wasn't perfect either (doesn't support unix style directories /~hingo/, but at least allows a hacked redirect to save the day).

Bruce Perens has nominated himself to become a board member of the Open Source Initiative. To get there, the OSI board (which elects its own members) has said he needs to show he has support in the Open Source community. If you want to show Bruce your support, you can do it here: https://techp.org/p/7