Pythian Group

In this article I am responding to many parts of Monty’s post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html which are just plain not true, or are exaggerations.

I will give my own answers to the self-interview questions Monty provides, as I feel he is using his name and popularity to spreading fear that is not warranted.

Q: Why don’t you trust that Oracle would be a good owner of MySQL?

I cannot say whether or not Oracle would kill MySQL. However, I have already stated I believe Oracle will not kill MySQL. This is based on the fact that Oracle has had the chance to kill MySQL for several years, by making InnoDB proprietary, and has not.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

The bottom line: As both a community member of MySQL, and a service provider, I am not worried about Oracle buying Sun and acquiring MySQL in the process. There is no validity to the argument that Oracle will slow down or stop MySQL development — it is not possible, with various forks already in heavy development, and it is not probable, because Oracle has owned the InnoDB codebase for 4 years and has not slowed that development down.

My bias

I use MySQL, and want to see it continue to be developed. I work for The Pythian Group, providing DBA services to clients running MySQL. Read the rest of this entry . . .

The all new OPN Specialized Program was officially launched on the 2nd of December, 2009. The very next day, we became one of the first OPN Specialized Platinum level partners. Maybe the very first!

This achievement took us lots of efforts before the launch to get recognized as one of the first platinum level partners but we’ve made it through. Now, we are working on updating all of our specialization areas. It’s still a bit cloudy on how to navigate in the new OPN Specialized interface but I guess in these days of cloud computing cloudiness is becoming a norm, especially early on!

The OPN Specialized Program was designed as the result of numerous acquisitions completed recently and over time the old Oracle Partners Network structure couldn’t accommodate all the different kinds of partnerships that Oracle inherited. The Oracle/Sun merger was going to make a tough situation untenable, and as a result Oracle designed OPN Specialized to simplify the search of a partner for Oracle internal staff and Oracle customers on one hand while it also lets partners distinguish themselves amongst the rest by technical areas and types of services and products. Congratulations and good job to the OPN group at Oracle for what we at Pythian believe is a much improved vision and structure for partnering with the vibrant Oracle ecosystem.

Our VP, Biz Dev and Strategic Alliances, Peter Ling, should take all blame for this as he’s been working on this non-stop. Well done Pete — you are a rock star, indeed

More details to come as we go through available options and build our profile so stay tuned — lots to learn still.

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.
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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 doubt go on to continue to be wonderful for the database community at large, much like Jim Starkey.

But until Monty Says, nothing is official.

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 Read the rest of this entry . . .

Liveblogging from OSCon 2008: Going Open Source, The 20 Most Important Things to Do – by Martin Aschoff of AGNITAS AS.

Firstly I have to extend a heartfelt “thank you” to Sun Microsystems and Monty Widenius, as I would not have been able to attend OSCon without their assistance.

AGNITAS AS makes e-marketing software, 25 employees, no venture capital, from Munich, Germany. The municipality of Munich runs entirely on Linux desktops and on infrastructures with open source software.

This session is about the nuts and bolts of an open source company. Aschoff kept a journal of the key learnings of the company when it went open source, and has become a board member of the Open Source Business Association in Europe.

Before deciding on going open source:
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In a despicable business practice, I received a message from a PR Firm representing Ingres. Now, I even wrote about the controversy that seems to have swept the open source community; but even my writings were not completely factually correct — I wrote that even if online backups were closed it was not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The actual parts of the online backup that are not open source and free are compression and encryption — that is all.

So really, we are talking about a very small part of backup. The last I saw most people used their own compressing (ie, | gzip -c) and encryption for backups. And honestly, I would rather use tried and true compression and encryption than something new that MySQL comes up with, so I do not even see most people wanting compression nor encryption.

But that’s besides the point. If Ingres thinks they can win customers over by swooping in when a controversy is happening, they are way more evil than I would ever have guessed. It’s not good business practice to do this kind of thing — it is cold, calculated, uncalled for, and just plain wrong.

As for my comments — firstly, MySQL did not make any particular “announcement”, and secondly, MySQL is already losing “feedback and contributions on its products from a large group of users in the community” because it does not have an easy way to get community patches committed to the source tree.

There is so much else that bothered me about the e-mail I received, so I will just copy it here for full context for readers:

Subject:  Ingres' Thoughts on Today's MySQL Announcement and What it Means for the Open Source Community

From:  Lindsey Pappas

Date:  Apr 15, 2008 5:33 PM

Hi Sheeri,

 Did you see MySQL 's announcement on new features in MySQL Enterprise version of its product? This is interesting news for the open source community, as it appears that MySQL is moving away from true open source towards a proprietary model by not providing the same features in its community version. Ingres is a a leading provider of open source database management software and support services and views the news as the loss of a true competitor in the open source space.  By doing this, MySQL will lose feedback and contributions on its products from a large group of users in the community. Costs will go up and quality will go down.

 Ingres is a believer in the true open source of its products.  I can put you in touch with an executive at Ingres to hear thoughts on the news and what MySQL's announcement means for the future of the open source community, including comment on:

·         The benefits of open source solutions that are identical between community and enterprise, functionality should not differ between products, cost or version.

·         The importance of an online backup component for mission critical applications.

·         In a community where everyone benefits from the valuable contributions and feedback on new developments and innovations from other players, MySQL’s move away from open source is a loss for the open source community.

Please let me know if you’d like to connect in the next day or so to discuss MySQL’s announcement and where the open source community is headed.

Thanks,

Lindsey

Lindsey Pappas
Atomic Public Relations
8 California Street
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 402-0230
lindsey@atomicpr.com