I will be speaking on Tuesday at the ProActum OpenMeetup in Pub Angleterre, Helsinki. (Drinks sponsored by Novell.) The title is "Open Core - What is an open source business model and what isn't? And who cares?".

A bit unusual for this kind of meetup, but I actually summarized my talk into 3 slides, which I will share as printouts with the audience.

I decided to label Open Core as a "Wannabe" business model, meaning that these products want to label themselves as open source while they are not.

Two independent Facebook related news stories caught my eye on Monday:

1) In Sweden about 10 thousand demonstrators showed up in a spontaneous rally against racism. This was less than 24 hours after a new immigrant hostile party Sverigedemokraterna had won the Sunday election and got 20 seats in the Parliament. The demonstration was called together by a young girl, Felicia Margineanu (17), who posted it as a Facebook event and invited her friends.

I didn't intend this to become a trilogy, but today I will wish good luck to a newly started company by a friend of mine from the university: Avoin Yritys literally means "Open Company" in Finnish and they have committed to making their company as open and transparent as possible in any way. I confirmed with Antti that it is an independently developed idea, although the concept is very much similar to an idea from the Open Life book. Oh, and see also the post on Lastwear for yet another independent incarnation of the same idea.

The pre-voting has started in Sweden,and there are 15 days until election day.

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 :-)

• 1If 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.

The Open Content revolution has happened! ...it just didn't happen in the way we expected it.

I was recently interviewed for a London music blog Music 4.5: What the music industry can learn from the open source movement?1 Somewhat surprisingly, I gave Youtube as an example of a website where music and video is re-used in an open source fashion:

• 1Funny story, I was introduced to Charlotta Hedman by my former MySQL Ab collague Mark Baker, also from London, without him knowing that we are both from the small Finnish city of Jakobstad and I even worked for her dad as a teenager.

Inspired by my previous blog about the Lastwear open clothing company, I decided it is again time to take the pulse on how open source is spreading outside of the software world. The last time I did this was in 2008, where I concluded: