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.

The past week more and more people weighed in on the open core debate. Personally, I don't have much more to add now and it seems I have been able to articulate why it is bad and against open source. Watching some of the comments of this week it also seems that the more people talk/write about it, the more their true thinking and motivation becomes apparent to everyone. So rather than add more words, I will just highlight what others are saying.

Watching the discussion last week reminded me of a friend in university, who was a vegetarian. This was becoming popular at the time. I once then saw her ordering a chicken pizza, so I mentioned that she is not a vegetarian after all. This upset her and she protested that who am I to judge her and surely just because she eats chicken doesn't mean she is not a vegetarian.

Now unto the open core debate...

My ongoing dialogue with Matthew Aslett inspired me to read more of his recent writings. An excellent piece Do not sell anything to your community is based on a blog post by Stephen Walli.

Inspired by Stephen, I also looked into a set of slides I recently created and will try that style for this post...

Aslett and Stephen make a great point:

the conversion of community users into paying customers has long been a concern for open source-related vendors. It has also long been a source of friction, with vendors that offer proprietary extensions being accused of “bait and switch” or otherwise undermining the value of the open source software in an attempt compel community users into becoming paying customers. In recent years the next generation of start-ups has learned that the best way to encourage a frictionless relationship between a vendor and its community is not to attempt to “convert” users at all.

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:

It has been a tough Autumn for all of us so it is a pleasure to finally blog on some good news! O'Reilly has finally announced the next MySQL User Conference.

When I was younger and had lots of free time, I used to do video editing as a hobby. At that time I developed a rule that is true for many projects in general (it was also true for writing a book some years later). The rule is: When you think you are 90% done, you are only 50% done. With video-editing, this meant that when the video was more or less ready, you are still 50% away from the final goal of actually having a master copy on tape. The latter 50% would be spent on checking ending credits, watching through the video a couple of times, and in those time, rendering even simplest of effects. Using a Windows PC for video editing was in those times a shaky effort in itself, so even when mastering you had to sit there and watch through the whole tape to make sure there were no glitches.

Producing a MariaDB release has been a similar process. In our company meeting in August we were discussing "final steps" to produce a final Beta, then Release Candidate, then production release. As I blogged then, the progress has been documented on a daily basis on the askmonty.org wiki.

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!

Wow, this is shocking...

Some time ago we had a discussion on the p2presearch mailing list about the deletionism movement that is rampant on Wikipedia. This led to Michel Bauwens spending a few hours finding out more about the topic. The results - posted on his blog - were shocking. (Also the comments to the article are good, some my own of course :-)

Heyhey... after a year of hard office work, it's like the good old times again: my blog seems to contain mostly notes of various conferences I've been to :-) (By the way, I also had an interesting trip to Dublin last week, maybe I'll write about that later.)

On Wednesday night I'm off to Notthingam, where I'm attending a seminar titled "The political economy of peer production" organised by the Nottingham Trent University. Excited as I am I became a bit grandiose and chose as my subject the introduction of a system of direct democracy. In other words, I've been thinking I should replace all the current democratic governments we have.