Shortly after I blogged about my upcoming talks and events, I got informed that one of my session proposals for the next09 conference was accepted. This event will take place in Hamburg, Germany on Tuesday and Wednesday (5th and 6th of May), so at least there isn't much travel involved.

My talk about "Working for a Virtual Company: How we do it at MySQL" has been scheduled for 9:00 am on Wednesday morning, parallel to a keynote by Brian Solis from FutureWorks. I'm not sure how many people will actually show up, but I look forward to giving a talk about a less …

It's really a hard job to decide into which companies to invest. We at Open Ocean, my investment company, have talked with around 60 companies the last few months to find those that we think have a great potential and that would benefit from our involvement.

One company that more than well matched our investment criterias was Ironstar, that makes the MoiPal virtual world. With more than 100,000 registered users they are definitely a company to watch out for.

I have always been interested in virtual worlds and see how the communities around them continue to grow. The thing that really stands out to me with MoiPal, is the way it combines the social networking aspects similar to Facebook, with the caring of your online character, like you do with …

My calendar for the upcoming months is already filling up with conferences, trade fairs and other events at which I'll speak about MySQL. Here's a quick overview:

• This coming Thursday at 15:00 CET, I'll be speaking about "Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots" at the MySQL University. The session will be hosted live using DimDim, which is a great online conferencing and presentation system (Flash required). Attendance is free, so come and join me if you want to learn more about this backup technique!
• On Friday, 6th of March at 15:15 I'll give a presentation about "MySQL Backup and Security" in the …

I have been talking more and more with colleagues about the Open Source community and licenses. Zak Greant recently wrote in Free Culture vs. Fear Culture vs. Fee Culture that, “People with bad intentions will do bad things . . . often regardless of the license on the work.”

And, unfortunately, he is right. If I release an article or presentation video with a Creative Commons license, it is still possible for my work to be plagiarized, and if it is, I will still feel violated.

Many of us who use Creative Commons or MySQL have an Open Source mentality. We often do not see value in pirating software—why would we use Microsoft Word (a legally licensed copy, or pirated) if we can use …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

If you would like to contribute to MySQL development, you can read the relevant top-level page on the MySQL Forge.

This page has some useful links to various forms of contributing to MySQL, including contribution of code to MySQL. (The MySQL|Sun team have recently simplified some of these pages in order to make them more useful to community members and potential contributors.)

Note that after some simple paperwork submitted to Sun ("Sun Contributor Agreement" or "SCA"), any signatory can contribute to any Sun-sponsored …

Now that FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium is over, it's about time for a conclusion/summary. I've been to FOSDEM for about five times as both an attendee and speaker, but this year I was much more involved. On Saturday, I gave a lightning talk about "Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS project". On Sunday, I gave a talk about "MySQL High Availability Solutions" in the main conference track. Both went fairly well and there was good feedback from audience. I've uploaded the slides for both talks to the FOSDEM 2009 page on the MySQL Forge Wiki, video recordings of the sessions should be available on the …

Today I gave an introduction talk of MySQL Cluster at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. The room was full and I didn't see anyone dozing!
A good feedback later on was to show more usecases. This a good point and I think on working on a talk showing less how it works, but how it can be used. Doing both technical details and use-cases is hard to do in 50 mintes.
I feedback is appriciated!

BTW, slide will eventually come online somewhere..

Given the changes announced this week, I have updated my original plans for my presentation on Sunday. I was going to talk about Social networking, but am now changing it to a very interactive Q&A session.

I expect people are asking themselves

• What has changed?
• What will happen now?
• What are the consequences for the MySQL roadmap?
• Are there other consequences for the MySQL community?

and I will attempt at answering these questions interactively during FOSDEM.

Towards the end of next week, after internal coordination, I plan to share some further thinking on the “what will happen now” front with my blog readers.

What also I plan to do during …