A few months ago, I had a meeting with a small local startup. Their tech and their pitch is pretty neat. They had an angel kick them a megabuck of seed to get started. It's the classic geek startup: two main guys, one wearing the CEO/sales/biz/money hat, and the other wearing the CTO/it/tech/arch/geek hat. And they've hired a couple of coders.

But they've also rented some office space: two cubes, a meeting room, a front desk, and a lockable office for the locking file cabinet. Now, it was cheap office space, but still, why?

It's a waste of the angel's money, is increasing their burn. For what it's costing them, they could hire another coder. Dev speed is their current bottleneck, and going from 2 to 3 causes only minimal invocation of Brook's Law, especially if it's early. If they start to grow, they'll have to hire #3 and #4 soon enough anyway, at which point they've outgrown their space, and now also have the cost, …

This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.

Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use.

For me, this was a tremendous help - I’ve been putting off working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to work on planning for the future.

The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to post them so that people can discuss. Also, …

Vertical advertising. I just stumbled upon The Problogger Job Board. They advertise it as such: post a job ad, for 30 days, at only $50.

People that visit the Problogger website, or job board, are definitely bloggers. Visiting the latter, means they’ve bought the hype that they can be a professional blogger, and make a living out of it. So what better way to hire journalists. Professional bloggers are no different to writers in a newspaper, magazine, and so forth. Turnaround times are quicker, the idea of formatting is probably a plus, but generally you’re a writer.

The FAQ lists the 37signals Job Board - $300 for 30 days. They’re a company that came to popularity thanks to a good blog, and Ruby on Rails. People that read the 37signals …

So, the open source community/mentality/legacy/mindset tends to be attached to the idea:

“Free as in beer” — for comparison’s sake, another meaning could be, “free as in speech”.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of this, making “free as in beer” equivalent to “gratis,” meaning “free of cost.” Whereas “free as in speech” is equivalent to “libre,” free of restrictons.

Now, I understand why some things cost no money but are restricted. I also understand why some things cost no money and are not restricted. I do not have a particular religion either way, I think each product’s business model can be different.

So I’ll present a third concept: “Free as in water.”

Water is a privilege. In many places, …

I know this is a bit old, but I’ve been trying to catch up with all the new stories after a conference, vacation, broken laptop and loads of work.

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) was launched some months ago. I’ve never been a big fan of RedHat in terms of technology. I guess is quite good now, but RPMs scared me years ago and I’m not over it yet.

One of the things I liked is that RedHat proved that the KISS principle doesn’t only apply to software development, but to marketing and sales too. This is their new SLA (service level agreement). Can’t be simpler.

That reminds me of MySQL and their all-you-can-eat support package (MySQL Enterprise Unlimited), easy to understand and with a …

You’ve heard me on the MySQL Podcast at http://www.technocation.org, now come work with me, the “She”-BA!

The company I work for is an online social networking/dating site. Our main product is for men seeking men in 87 countries throughout the world. We’re looking for another MySQL DBA, as designing schemas maintaining data integrity for our 1 million users (and growing fast!). The salary is dependent upon experience of course, but the company I work for pays on the high side of the industry standard for the Boston area.

Application Instructions
Please send cover letter, résumé and sample schema to work@online-buddies.com, with “MySQL DBA” as your subject. The
sample schema should reflect your abilities, so if you send along a schema you would like to see improved, include a description of what you would love to do to that schema to make it better.

…

This article shows the easiest way to audit commands to a MySQL database, assuming all content happens from an application. Now, this will use a lot of storage, and doubles the query load for each query, but it’s useful for when you know you want to capture the information of someone using the application.

The basic premise is simple. Logon to your nearest MySQL server and type the following:

SELECT CURRENT_USER(), USER();

Chances are the values are different. More on this later.

First, create a table:

CREATE TABLE `action` (
`user` varchar(77) NOT NULL default '',
`asuser` varchar(77) NOT NULL default '',
`db` varchar(64) NOT NULL default '',
`query` mediumtext NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Why varchar(77)? Because the mysql.user table puts a maximum of 16 characters for the username, and 60 characters for the …

Xing is Europe's leading Business Network with more than 2 million members. Recently, Xing announced that they would come up with an API later this year to get access to the network. As far as I know, Xing was developed by ePublica using Perl and MySQL.

Having an API is essential in these mashup days. I was invited to the private alpha test and implemented a reference implementation of an API client via PHP5 which behaves like SOAPClient (but uses ReST as the transport mechanism) and overloads the methods that are available.

Here's an example of how to call it currently (API is …

Rod Johnson, author of the Spring framework, thinks open source is hot right now, but its a “bubble” ready to burst, according to an article titled What Makes An Open Source Project Successful? by Charles Babcock.

Most open source projects are supported by an army of volunteers who buy into the hype, but “capitalism will inevitably reassert itself” and developers will find they need to put more effort into steady jobs and private lives, leaving “open source zombies”–unsupported, unmaintained projects–he predicts.

This is true, with many a project, that hasn’t built a successful ecosystem. Keep in mind that with the gazillion text editors out there, not all stand the test of time, like Emacs and vim do. Capitalism is always going to win hands down, because money in its essence is important to survival. Go …

I blogged some months ago about an article written by Mr Puhakka on how to build a billion dollar business around open source software. Last Friday I attended Mr Puhakka’s presentation where he analyzed MySQL’s possibilities on becoming so (copied from his slides):

1. Find or create a great value proposition. The price vs. quality ratio of MySQL is in place or even superior as MySQL has this with its database offering costing a fraction of competing incumbents.
2. Find a quickly growing market. Rapidly growing markets tend to be much more forgiving of mistakes than …