This blog post was originally posted on November 10, 2008. It was then withdrawn the next day and replaced with the short explanation below. Since the person who asked me to withdraw it has since left Sun, I have left Sun, and Sun itself will not exist anymore in a few days, I have decided to re-publish the original text for historical purposes.

I visited the London installment of our MySQL European Customer conference on Thursday. In a lecture hall of 250+ attendees I found an empty seat next to a man who turned out to be Patrik Pada who is the webmaster of HSS Media. Tick, tick, tick... [sound in my head thinking there is something familiar here...]

My parents had found a box of old stuff which they delivered to me and I went through yesterday. For instance, did you know that I appeared on a photo of Kellogs Frosties (with Tony the Tiger) in 1995! We have several of those boxes still saved, empty of course. No, I'm not a celebrity. I was in the audience of a hockey game in Lillehammer Olympics which they used on their boxes in 1995. All the more memorable then, since 1995 is still the one and only year that Finland won the World Championships!

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.

MySQL being acquired by Sun has of course put a lot of focus on the success of MySQL so far, but it is also interesting to think what success will mean as part of Sun too. In this light a recent interview of MÃ¥rten by Business Review Online about the acquisition was inspiring. (As words from MÃ¥rten usually are!)

"It's a marathon, not a sprint," he said. "If a 15-year-old downloads MySQL now, when do we get our money? In about 15 years' time when he is head of IT at a company and he loves MySQL. But in many cases it will happen sooner than that."

"In open source we say fail fast, scale fast. Many web 2.0 ideas will fail, but when Google or Facebook [two of MySQL's biggest customers] get it right they suddenly need to scale like crazy," Mickos said. "Open source is the only model where they can scale fast on exactly the same code base; it's the same product. All of the [commercial] database players have free versions, but when you need to scale you need a slightly different version [of the database]."