In July I wrote a blog post MySQL community counseling: talking about your feelings. It was triggered by an earlier blog post and followup threads on Google plus by Monty Taylor, Andrew Hutchings, etc... (everyone involved in that outburst have apologized and moved on long ago). I wanted to use that opportunity to highlight what I call our hidden trauma related to the Oracle acquisition of Sun, things that I still hear being discussed today, 2 years later, and things that I consider unresolved or unsolved that I see causing friction and misunderstandings - the kind of which that outburst too represented. Both before and after writing it I wondered if it was a good idea to publish it - I wondered whether I would be seen as helping to solve the problem or just contributing to it. I actually got some positive feedback about it, including from people at Oracle/MySQL (it's kind of a defense of Oracle, actually) so perhaps it wasn't all wrong. Thanks for that feedback by the way, it was really valuable to me.
A part of that post mentions three persons by name: Mårten Mickos, Zack Urlocker and Kaj Arnö. The post in general is not about any of them and they appear mostly as historical MySQL figures, while the post is about the current situation in the MySQL community and in particular how we are still dealing (or not dealing) with events related to the Oracle acquisition. Each of them appear only in a few sentences. Perhaps that brevity is also part of the problem, as you'll see, this post certainly will not be too short. But nevertheless, if you happen to focus on those specific sentences instead of the rest of the post, they do read as quite grave accusations against these persons - perhaps more than any others against Mårten.
Which is also a bit ironic, because whenever I have talked in private conversations about Mårten's open letter to Neelie Kroes, I always had only good things to say about him:
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