On Saturday I wrote a review about 451 Groups excellent report on commercial adoption of open source, "Control and Community". There was one more thought inspired by the report I thought I'd better blog separately as it is kind of R-rated:

"Continuing to maintain the right balance of functionality between the freely downloadable open core and the commercial extensions is both art and science. It's critical to get that right so the model continues to grow and advance."

(Anonymous vendor)

At the MariaDB developer meeting in Istanbul, we didn't yet tackle the logistics of filming and streaming the talks given, so if you weren't there, you have to be content with the blogs and slides published. I did however take the following 3 videos and now that I'm outside of Turkey's Internet firewall, I published them on YouTube. They are not technical at first sight, but if you think about it, they illustrate and summarize perfectly the current status of MySQL/MariaDB community development.

Hakan and My have done an excellent job organizing our MariaDB developer meeting here in Istanbul. For the farewell dinner, Hakan asked what kind of music we'd like the DJ to play. I realized it is possible to compile a rather nice list of MySQL/MariaDB related music for an evening:

• Obviously: Lilla My's visa (Little Mys song) from the Moomin series. (I love female jazz vocalists anyway!)
• And why not also something from this band called Little My too?

In celebration of Midsummer today, I wanted to post the below monologue on likelihoods (of nuclear powerplant catastrophies), which is a translation of a famous Swedish monologue by Tage Danielsson.

When we at MySQL had joined Sun, one task for me and my Sales Engineer collagues was to travel to Sun offices and educated the huge Sun sales force about MySQL, so they could sell it too. (Basically to tell them about open source, scale-out, reference customers, and most importantly: Don't sell Cluster on your own, call me first.) Being a Telecom Sales Engineer, I was sent to tour the Ericsson account team meeting, the Nokia account team meeting, and for logistical reasons even the Siemens account team meeting that was at the same location as the Nokia team.

Each meeting had nicer and nicer dinners, but the Ericsson account team meeting in Stockholm was clearly the winner. The dinner was set in the City Hall restaurant (Stadshuskällaren), which is also were they serve the Nobel gala dinners. Our menu was a copy of the 1981 Nobel menu, served on the authentic Nobel porcelain.