Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org – Office Suite
2. Firefox – Web Browser
3. MySQL – Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go …

This post is more of a personal note than most on the Pythian blog, but over the holidays, I couldn’t help thinking about my turbulent last year.

First, MySQL

In 2008, I worked at three different companies. It was about a year ago (January 15th will be a year) I was at MySQL AB’s first company-wide meeting in a few years with more than 400 of my colleagues, when all of a sudden we get the announcement: “Sun acquired MySQL for 1 billion dollars”. Many thought it was a joke, just in time to watch Jonathan Schwartz come up live on video to greet us. Talk about an intense way of starting a year! For some reason, nobody thought that toasting with a shot of vodka before 9:00am was the oddest thing to happen that morning.

Working for MySQL was, most likely, the wildest ride I will ever have. True Open Source spirit (no matter what the rest of the world says), start-up mentality, and growth equal to one order of magnitude …

2008 is nearly over, and it's time to take a look at what happened over the year, as well as to take a peek at the the coming 2009. A year ago I made a guess that social networking services would open up and start sharing their profiles – well, practically everyone but Facebook are doing some of that, and Facebook is trying to get everyone to depend on them – not that “create dependency” isn't a part of Google's and MySpace's plan, too. Unfortunately, we haven't yet found a meaningful way for Habbo to participate in this festival, due to differences in demographies, interest areas, and the priority of running a profitable business, instead. Still looking for that solution, though.

I’ve been thinking about the business of what’s variously come to be called commercial open-source and enterprise open-source. I’m interested in the gestalt — the product, development processes, marketing, licensing and so on.

MySQL has tried many different ways to earn money. These include dual licensing, support subscriptions, a knowledgebase, consulting, an Enterprise/Community split, [...]

tl;dr: The MySQL community rocks. Percona, XtraDB, Drizzle, SSD storage, InnoDB IO scalability challenges.

For anyone who lives and dies by MySQL and InnoDB, things are finally starting to heat up and get interesting. I’ve been banging the “MySQL/InnoDB scales poorly” drums for years now, and despite having paid Enterprise licenses, I haven’t been able to get anywhere. I was pretty excited when Sun …

Ok, Now we are talking!

Oh well, we know the Obama team is quite technology savvy and want to run the administration on the state of the art computer technologies. As an example, Obama campaign website used MySQL on the backend. 

So then, can Cloud Computing benefits lure the administration? Security and Technology experts discuss on national public radio  if Cloud Computing will work for the White House and how their computers should run.  Kevin L. Jackson further muses if the Obama Administration should use Cloud Computing.  He believes that Cloud Computing technology can indeed be used to implement the recommendations made by …

Ok, Now we are talking!

Oh well, we know the Obama team is quite technology savvy and want to run the administration on the state of the art computer technologies. As an example, Obama campaign website used MySQL on the backend. 

So then, can Cloud Computing benefits lure the administration? Security and Technology experts discuss on national public radio  if Cloud Computing will work for the White House and how their computers should run.  Kevin L. Jackson further muses if the Obama Administration should use Cloud Computing.  He believes that Cloud Computing technology can indeed be used to implement the recommendations made by …

Ok, Now we are talking!

Oh well, we know the Obama team is quite technology savvy and want to run the administration on the state of the art computer technologies. As an example, Obama campaign website used MySQL on the backend. 

So then, can Cloud Computing benefits lure the administration? Security and Technology experts discuss on national public radio  if Cloud Computing will work for the White House and how their computers should run.  Kevin L. Jackson further muses if the Obama Administration should use Cloud Computing.  He believes that Cloud Computing technology can indeed be used to implement the recommendations made by …

• Two days in Frankfurt, two days in Munderkingen and two days in Heidelberg between December 5th and 17th. Mostly just ordinary working and travel days.
• Visited Sandro Groganz of Init Marketing in Munderkingen. Worked from Sandro's house after a nice dinner on Sunday.
• Caught up with (and was interviewed by) Rory MacDonald of Init Marketing while he was vacationing near Ulm. The interview was focused on Mozilla and should go online in the new year on http://www.initmarketing.tv
• Visited Georg Richter of …

Registration for the MySQL Conference and expo 2009 is now open.

Kudos to Colin Charles, who has the not easy task of being the program chair of the conference, for pulling the schedule together.

The schedule is not complete yet. If you haven't got either an approval or a rejection, your proposal is still under review. In the previous years, some of my talks were approved as late as February, but we are trying to finish off the schedule much earlier this time.

This is my last blog post for this year. I am going on vacation this evening. No computers, no internet. Therefore, no comments are enabled for this post (there would be nobody to moderate and approve them).

Happy new year, Community!