Following up on yesterday's post about Peter Drucker's principles of effective executives, I asked former CEO of MySQL Mårten Mickos to discuss the principles that we has used in building an effective executive team. After all no single executive can be successful on their own; to build a high-performance culture requires a discipline that extends across the entire leadership.

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Business intelligence has been talked about for quite a while. Even today, while companies are looking to make budget cuts, some experts are saying that BI can be used to beat the recession.

When I hear about BI systems, the first thing that comes to my mind is a huge and expensive system that has very powerful servers, that sucks data from many sources and runs some intensive and even more expensive reporting suite. Since I had been involved in projects to set those systems up, I know that it can probably take around a year to complete.

So everyone is in fact thinking about saving money yet still being …

On my last count, there are now 20+ Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) signatories whose names appear on the master list and who are interested in contributing to MySQL. Only this week, three new members signed the SCA.

These 22+ signatories have all been added since mid-February when we launched the new, Sun-compliant SCA signing process. Before the end of 2009, if we proceed at this same rate, MySQL SCA signatories list should grow to about 70 to 90 contributors.

In the meantime, contributions from many of these contributors have already been accepted and integrated. (I had earlier pointed to Armin Schöffmann's contribution as a simple example of how all this works.)

Some people continue to …

On my last count, there are now 20+ Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) signatories whose names appear on the master list and who are interested in contributing to MySQL. Only this week, three new members signed the SCA.

These 22+ signatories have all been added since mid-February when we launched the new, Sun-compliant SCA signing process. Before the end of 2009, if we proceed at this same rate, MySQL SCA signatories list should grow to about 70 to 90 contributors.

In the meantime, contributions from many of these contributors have already been accepted and integrated. (I had earlier pointed to Armin Schöffmann's contribution as a simple example of how all this works.)

Some people continue to …

On my last count, there are now 20+ Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) signatories whose names appear on the master list and who are interested in contributing to MySQL. Only this week, three new members signed the SCA.

These 22+ signatories have all been added since mid-February when we launched the new, Sun-compliant SCA signing process. Before the end of 2009, if we proceed at this same rate, MySQL SCA signatories list should grow to about 70 to 90 contributors.

In the meantime, contributions from many of these contributors have already been accepted and integrated. (I had earlier pointed to Armin Schöffmann's contribution as a simple example of how all this works.)

Some people continue to …

So once again, Innovate Europe starts in Zaragoza, although this time a bit different. There is a “Master Class” which started yesterday with a roundtable called “Thriving in the Crisis”. We could listen to some of the experts which will be sharing their experiences at the master class, like David Sifry, Marten Mickos, Yoav Leitersdorf, Maximilian Niederhofer, Barak Berkowitz, Madeline Duva, and Mike Rogers, conducted by Ignacio de la Vega .

Ignacio and Javi will be attending the Master Class this week, but I also joined the roundtable (this was the only part free and open to the public) and took some pictures.

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Over the past two weeks I've been mostly focused on MySQL, but the big-ticket item in the Sun/Oracle deal is not databases, it's Java. However, it's also the domain which is far less clear to predict. It was a big deal when Sun decided to open source Java, but the fact of the matter is that the first fully open source release isn't out yet, and Sun has been keeping the testing and certification kit off-limits for open source communities. This means it would still be far too easy for OpenJDK to be killed off.

I've been keeping clear of Oracle for several years, and can't even begin to guess what their position on this is. Oracle has been a pretty active contributor to Linux in particular for several years, and I'm sure their open source strategy and how it works together with their business is pretty well established within at least the engineering …

It's interesting that just as Apple announced surprisingly positive quarterly results, Microsoft announced their first decline in sales revenues in 23 years.  While Microsoft is not in any kind

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I enjoyed InSync09 conference and the networking opportunities there — great place to meet bunch of good old friends and make some new ones. The content of the presentations and direction where Oracle is going to provided some interesting food for thoughts on Oracle’s strategy and how it’s going to make money with all those acquisitions they’ve done recently including current Oracle-Sun deal.

My take now is that Oracle’s focus is integration of all those products. It’s absolutely clear that Oracle won’t be able to merge so many different product lines together. It’s difficult and time consuming task and customers often suffer during this transition process. Oracle does not want its customer suffer — it’s the best way to shrink their customer base.

What Oracle intends to do now is to …

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote a four-part blog posting a few weeks ago describing Sun's overall business model and how it makes money from open source. The basic idea is to go from adoption to innovation and then read more