First day at the Community Leadership Summit. Kurt will blog about our being here separately soon. I just wanted to say this quickly tossed together unconference is a huge success, with a lot of the Community leaders and intelligenzia present and networking. We get all the time questions about what is happening with MySQL, so even though we hadn't planned to, we did a session What's up with MySQL where we tried to explain our plans for the MariaDB community and Open Database Alliance, but also as objectively as possible answer any questions that came up. (The unconference rules strictly prohibit promoting any company, which Monty Program of course goes out of it's way to obey.)

Oh, if you're in the Bay area, definitively should consider coming for the second day of this free conference.

Anyway, I'm wearing the new Open Database Alliance T-shirts Kurt had made. This reminded me that I wanted for a long time blog about the logo (which I had no part in making):

I like the logo, it's clever and makes you smile. Here are some comments I've seen or heard about it (not necessarily reflecting my own opinion).

• The dolphin is taking a dive.
• There's the dolphin going down.
• The dolphin is dead! Long live the dolphin! (yes, he was French)
• Silly, it's not a dolphin, everyone can see it's a whale.
• Naval mammals, yeah...

Personally I like to think it's not a whale, but a mermaid. It could be, you can't know :-)

The mermaid is of course called Maria, and she likes to swim around the Open Seas, so if you keep your eyes open, you might be lucky and catch a glimpse (especially, in Copenhagen, I've heard). Maria is the daughter of the mighty viking god Odbaårg, the guardian of all knowledge in the Scandinavian mythology.

At least that's what I think. Many details of both the Alliance and MariaDB are taking form as we speak. Let me know what you think.