I saw Monty's latest rant and I told myself "here we go again." I blogged before about deaf developers, and here's another symptom of the same disease.
This is another case of a developer, a brilliant one, mind you, one of the brightest in the open source arena, but a developer nonetheless, who has a non-user oriented mindset and is inflicting his view on the users.
I will stay clear of the reasons. Why the co-founder of MySQL decides to spoil the party on release day and ambushes his colleagues with a truckload of blame is beyond my understanding.
What concerns me is the patronizing plea that Monty uses against the users. "Don't use MySQL 5.1"? Really? What about the ones who have already been using it for …

With all due respect to Monty (and I mean that — much respect is due), I have some serious issues with his portrayal of the 5.1 release.  I hate to make my first entry on Planet MySQL about a controversy, but he encouraged people to blog about their experience with 5.1, so that’s what I’ll do here.

Overall Quality

As a long time user, I am very confident that the quality of 5.1 GA far exceeds that of the initial 5.0 GA release (5.0.15).  In fact, I would go further and suggest that the MySQL organization has if anything been too conservative about declaring 5.1 GA.

It’s obviously true that there are still many bugs open.  However no software is bug free, especially not those with codebase as large as MySQL.  So the question is not if they are bug free, but are the …

Smithy commented on my blog post about the rumor of Monty leaving Sun with a pointer to an article on ComputerWorld Finland that mentions:

Widenius told to Computerworld Finland on Friday that negotiations are still on.

Meanwhile, Matt Asay, who seems to think Monty actually has left Sun (even though all other reports have been clear to mention that this is unconfirmed), writes of a new investment Monty has made.

Last week I speculated about the impact of Monty leaving Sun. In the end, if he does stay, it’s wonderful for Sun. If he leaves, he will no …

ValleyWag reports that MySQL’s Monty Widenius is no longer “MySQL’s”. Some folks have known that Monty has not been happy in his current position; this leads me to believe the rumor is true (though of course an official announcement is the only confirmation).

So what does this mean for MySQL? Well, honestly, if a product falls apart because one out of 300 employees leaves, it was probably doomed anyway. There are plenty of capable employees left, and being owned by Sun means that there are many more resources they can tap as well.

What will the official company announcement be? My prediction is (more…)

Last week, I described how to use the MySQL plug-in API to write a minimal 'Hello world!' information schema plug-in. The main purpose of that plug-in is to illustrate the bare essentials of the MySQL information schema plug-in interface.

In this article, I'd like to take that to the next level and demonstrate how to write an information schema plug-in that can access some of the internals of the MySQL server. For this particular purpose, we will focus on a plug-in that reports all the SAVEPOINTs available in the current session. This …

My friend Monty (of MySQL fame) has started blogging at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/. After just a day, he already has two posts ? one on the Sun acquisition of MySQL and a longer one on the new Maria engine.

If you are interested in MySQL, you should definitely check the blog out.

For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …

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, …

I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

…