sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged with Articles + community
Welcome! - altnetpedia
Sheeri Cabral Speaks at Oracle Open World
An event truly fitting an “open world” — I will be speaking at Oracle Open World.
How does a wild-mannered MySQL DBA like me get to speak at an Oracle conference? Well, after I received the MySQL Community Award two years in a row, Dan Norris contacted me, and encouraged me to submit a proposal with him on how to contribute to the community.
Oracle has a formal program for recognizing community members at two levels: the Oracle ACE Director, and the Oracle ACE. An Oracle ACE Director is expected to make a 12-month commitment to working with the community, while an Oracle ACE is bestowed upon folks to recognize their volunteer efforts in the past. More information about the program can be found on the Oracle ACE Program FAQ.
Dan Norris is himself an Oracle ACE Director, and I think it is a good sign that he reached out to the MySQL community to help the Oracle community. As database administrators and developers, I think we all have much to learn from each other, and I hope this cross-pollination will continue.
If anyone attending Oracle OpenWorld, (or who happens to be in San Francisco from Sunday, September 21st through Thursday, September 26th) wants to meet me or have dinner with me, drop me a line!
MySQL Community Version
The MySQL Community version is different in theory from the Enterprise version in relation to the following points:
0) It’s free
1) It has community patches
2) It is released less often
3) It is tested less strictly
In reality, the first two differences are not applicable — the binaries and source code for Enterprise can be freely and legally downloaded at http://mirror.provenscaling.com/mysql/enterprise/. The process for adding community patches to the MySQL source code has not been changed sufficiently to be able to actually add community patches and encourage more community development.
I understand that MySQL (and now Sun) needs to make money. I also understand that development takes a lot of effort, and seeing an ROI is important. The Community/Enterprise split was designed to have tradeoffs on both sides. However, currently there is no benefit to running the Community version.
While I would love to magically make community contributions easy to put into a Community version of MySQL, logistically that’s not possible right now. I do have a solution that is possible right now, that takes very few additional resources, and is something I think will be acceptable to the MySQL community and to Sun — assuming the MySQL executives can admit that the Community version has not been working out.
I propose to make the Community release an older version of an Enterprise release. In this way, Enterprise users still get value in having bugs fixed and features added first, and Community users can choose to upgrade if they want the latest features. There is very little overhead in having Community releases, with no overhead in having to manage two trees/branches/whatever from both a code and build standpoint. Maintaining the promise of immediate security releases, 4 code releases per year and 2 binary releases per year becomes trivial.
The question is, of course, how far back the Community version should go. And should there be a delay (ie, release the January Enterprise version as the June Community version) or not?
I recommend that security releases be immediate (as they currently are) and for all other releases there should be a delay of at least 6 months, perhaps 1 year. Certainly that’s enough of an incentive to get customers to upgrade without having folks feel like the Community ersion is crippleware.
What do folks think of this as a solution to the Enterprise/Community split dilemma?
?It?s Not Dead, It?s Just Resting!? a.k.a., MySQL, Ethics and Death
In http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/01/should-we-proclaim-mysql-community-edition-dead/, Peter Zaitsev wonders if MySQL’s community edition is dead.
The title of Peter’s inquiry is somewhat misleading, as the database itself works fine. He clarifies a bit with, “there suppose to be 2 yearly binary releases (which are overdue) and 4 predictable yearly source releases, which we have not seen either.” I thought it was clear that “2 per year” doesn’t mean “one every six months”. It’s been eight months, sure. And I don’t actually believe that MySQL is going to have one source release per month until November, to make up for the lack of source releases. However, it’s certainly possible, if not probable.
The fact remains, however, that if you’re just looking for stable, recent, binary MySQL Community release, you might not find it. MySQL offers two out of three — stable and binary Community releases. Not recent, but I think it’s okay to charge for the most up-to-date version. In my experience only about half of the production environments out there have switched to 5.0, and many are running 4.1 and 4.0 still.
At the low end, a license costs just under USD$600. The requirement to buy a license to get the most recent version is a mere inconvenience, not a business-stopper. It’s not like MySQL is forcing everyone to run on version 3.23 unless they pay $10,000 per license. Charging a modest amount for the most up-to-date version is not a bad thing.
It would be nice to have been aware of that ahead of time, but MySQL as a company has not been so great at organizing and having all its ducks in a row. In fact this is where I hope Sun can really help MySQL out, as it has a reputation (a deserved one, in my experience) of being more highly organized.
Have you heard of Hanlon’s razor? “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
Open Source - The Foundation of Civilization
Almost 2 years ago, in How Open Do You Have To Be To Be Open Source? I wrote:
Google and Yahoo! are not rich because they have secrets. They are rich because they started with secrets, but I believe they could safely let their secrets out with very little loss of revenue.
Matt Asay’s recent post Google’s slow transformation into an open, transparent company made me dig up that post, which by many standards is old in terms of time, but it’s only now that some of this change is actually happening.
Matt ponders,
It remains to be seen what, if anything, Google will actually open, but I trust its track record on living up to its word more than Microsoft’s, which also went through a flurry of “We’re now really open!” announcements lately that actually netted the industry…not much.
In interesting news, at last night’s Boston Sun/MySQL event (more on that in another post), the question was asked if the panel thought that Microsoft was really serious about open sourcing their software(s) and what that would mean for open source software.
I couldn’t wait to jump in with my answer — and even though I had to wait, I did eventually say what was on my mind.
If Microsoft opened all of their code tomorrow, how big of a *developer* community would they have? By that I mean, how many people would say “yeah, all right! I’m going to make this code better!” and how many would take a look at the internals and feel like they’d just been on a roller coaster?
Open source is the foundation of civilization. The title of this post mentions that, and now I will explain why.
MySQL Community Member of the Year Award Musings
(If you want $100, you will have to read the entire blog post. Sorry for the tease, but I did not want folks to miss out on the opportunity to win!)
By now it is no surprise that I won one of the three 2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year awards. And folks may know that I won the same award last year.
One interesting fact you may not know: during the 2006 MySQL Awards Ceremony, where Giuseppe Maxia, Roland Bouman, Markus Popp and Rasmus Lerdorf won community awards, I thought to myself,
Next year I want to be on that stage, collecting that award.
Well, I did that and then some! (note that the image below is both of the awards, side by side, with no photoshopping).
But this post is not about me. This blog post is about you. More specifically, I am going to detail in this blog post the secrets to my success. This year, I thought to myself, “how can I make it so I am not on this stage receiving this award next year?”
So here is my challenge to you. I will open source my methods, and in return I will give $100 to each 2009 MySQL Community Member of the Year (in whatever form they want, whether it’s US cash, a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate, a donation to an organization, whatever).
April 2006 - March 2007
- 154 blog posts
- 3 User Group/conference presentations
- Organized 12 User Group meetings
- Produced 2 Videos
- Produced 11 Podcasts (started Nov. 2006)
- 1 Grant
- Google Summer of Code mentor– full disclosure, the $500 mentor incentive went directly to MySQL and helped pay for the new MySQL Forge servers, so my only payment was a T-shirt.
April 2007 - March 2008
- 94 blog posts
- 4 User Group/conference presentations (+1 lightning talk)
- Organized 11 User Group meetings
- Produced 6 Videos plus all the videos from the mysql user conference (available at http://technocation.org/content/2007-mysql-user-conference-and-expo-presentations-and-videos
- Produced 14 Podcasts
- 2 Grants
Besides the above, other ideas for community involvement are:
- Forum/list involvement
- Volunteering for the Documentation team
- Helping to organize user-based conferences (my brain wants to call them UDC’s — “user defined conferences”).
I have only listed non-technical ways to win the award, and only what I could think of. The sky is the limit!
A Challenge to MySQL Employees
Keith Murphy wrote about the open/closed source debacle and the first comment on that post was:
Monty makes all this money from the Sun acquisition, and pretends to be a free software advocate. How much did he make? How much is he giving back to the MySQL community?
Now, Keith rightfully met this with “grow up”. However, I want to point out that many people in the MySQL employee pool benefited from the sale, not just Monty. I also want to point out that Monty devoted years of his life to developing MySQL long before it was ever profitable.
According to Sun’s press release, “Sun will pay approximately $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and assume approximately $200 million in options. The transaction is expected to close in late Q3 or early Q4 of Sun’s fiscal 2008….. The deal is expected to be accretive to FY10 operating income on a GAAP basis.”
Now, there’s financial mumbo-jumbo in there, but basically what that means is in all likelihood, Monty actually has not received any real money yet. And with 20% of the sale being in options (not stock, just options, which means that there is the option to buy stock, so there’s nothing free there), that’s even less cold hard cash floating around.
But I present a challenge to MySQL employees who have derived tangible benefits from the sale to Sun: what percentage have you put back into the MySQL community, and how?
(and thinking outside the box is OK — time is money, so I am OK with you directly translating the number of hours you’ve worked on community projects into $$ given your approximate hourly salary).
For instance, Brian Aker’s list of software is impressive, and of the 28 projects explicitly listed (see “Project list” on the right-hand side, and I’d bet there’s more in the actual repository) I’d guess fewer than 5 were done on time paid for by anyone (much less MySQL/Sun).
I know that Giuseppe Maxia’s mysql sandbox is a project he works on during non-MySQL/Sun time.
But I’d love to see comments on what folks are doing, even without percentages of money and such, because I am willing to wager that most of the folks who work for MySQL give plenty back to the community on non-company time. My theory is based on the fact that most MySQLers that I’ve met do not see working at MySQL as “their job”, they see it as “I get paid to do what I love doing, and would do anyway.”
Neighborhoods and Communities
Recently I acquired Sesame Street Volume 1, and on the third DVD in the set I came across one of my favorite Sesame Street songs: “Who are the people in your neighborhood?”
Here’s a sample of one such skit, if you are not familiar with it, or if you want a bit of nostalgia http://youtube.com/watch?v=B9lpUjQvToY (note, play will likely start automatically, so tune your volume appropriately before clicking).
The refrain is “Who are the people in your neighborhood? The people that you meet each day!” I live in a city of 34,000 people just 6 miles northwest of Boston, MA. I know exactly one neighbor, across the street, whom we met because I sent my husband over to get her live band to stop playing loud music at her party at 2 am. I do not know many of the local business owners. I do not know who lives in my neighborhood, yet people live around me. Saying I live in a “neighborhood” might be true, but I have no ties or links to it.
Calling a group of people with common interests “community” is just as meaningless as saying I live in a “neighborhood”. There has to be a bond there. I am proud to be a part of the MySQL Community, which actually has forged bonds. Much like Sesame Street, with dentists and bus drivers, our community has many different types of people in it.
In fact, I know that there are many who “only” read and perhaps comment. Remember that every single child (and adult!) that watches Sesame Street is a valuable part of the community — after all, a bus driver is useless without people to drive around. Similarly, folks who develop tools would be doing useless work if there was not such a need for these tools.
The MySQL Community is very real to me. If I were to “move away” from this community, I would experience a loss. There are so many folks whom I will be glad to see and spend time with at the upcoming MySQL Users Conference, and if they are not there, I will definitely miss them.
I blog about MySQL because I enjoy helping others. More importantly, I’ve enjoyed helping out the MySQL community a lot. I have been a part of other “communities” that did not have very much momentum and I was the only or one of the only contributors. I have also been a part of communities in which I’m mostly a lurker, or a learner, and while I gain a lot from it, I much rather prefer a more balanced give-and-take (that’s just my personality).
Speaking of personality, I’m human, as is everyone whose blog feeds to Planet MySQL (organizations excluded). This means that when folks e-mail me or find me in person and say “I love your podcast!” and “Your blogging really helped me.” and “Thank you for all you do,” I feel really good about myself.
If you are new to the MySQL community, feel free to come up and talk to me (or anyone, really) — during the conference, or otherwise. Even if you feel you have nothing to say, just say hello.
And I must end with a disclaimer: I won last year’s “Community Advocate” award from MySQL, so I guess all in all, I’m still a community advocate. Long live the dolphin!
