One thing I haven't seen anybody commenting on is the fact that with SAP acquiring Sybase, it will be the last major independent database company to be merged into a larger SW company. (To say this, you can qualify MySQL AB as a major database company, but disqualify, say, EnterpriseDB or InterBase, which imho is entirely reasonable.)

Well, for Matt Asay, I should start by congratulating you for the new job and nice title! (Also, we learn some intelligence from Matt's blog: apparently Canonical is already close to the size of MySQL AB at the time of the Sun acquisition.)

Usually we are told to "ignore the trolls" and all that. The blogosphere unfortunately seems to be full of commentators who like to have share their opinion - even while they are entirely clueless. Sometimes, like the comments on Slashdot, it is ok and considered part of the entertainment. Sometimes it is harmless, because nobody reads that blog. And sometimes, it is just unacceptable:

SUSE is indeed the nr1 choice right now, but I think there are many of us troubled with the direction Novell is going. (Part of the problem being, we can only guess what the direction is...)[...] I often wonder whether Novell knew what they were buying into when they bought both Ximian and SUSE. (me discussing Novell on LWN about 6 months ago)

FLUG member Simon Rönnqvist appropriately pointed out, that now that the book has been translated into English, the next logical step would be to make a translation into t

This is an old blog entry I copied from the Finnish book's site mainly to use as filling while I was designing the layout for this site. Since it might be an interesting read, I'll just leave it here. Hope you enjoy...

While Conan visits Finland as I write, last Thursday there was a chance to meetup with an even more interesting American. Earlier I had bumped into my old friend and former collague Ilija Lazarov, who informed me that the Nr 1 Open Source guy in Redmond, Bill Hilf would be visiting Rantasauna at my former university. So, did I really want to spend an evening listening to Microsoft's opinion on Open Source? Sure, that might be interesting. And no, Bill Hilf is not the "Get The Facts" man, I don't think I would have been interested in that kind of stuff. All in all, there would be a sauna, food and drinks courtesy of Microsoft, and if nothing else, I could meet two old friends Aali and Ilija, so the worst case scenario was good enough to go there. Luckily, Bill himself turned out to be a very interesting guy as well. He seems to be involved in anything MS does with Open Source, and lots of high-level stuff, like relationships with the EU Commission. Apparently, he came up with the idea to offer the source code instead of documentation. ("Not that I would say in public.")