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Content Tagged with Sun + community
MySQL adopts Sun Contributor Agreement
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Until a few months ago, the MySQL community had several complaints about the contribution process. The two biggest obstacles were an unfriendly revision control system and a too demanding contributor agreement. The revision control system was changed in June. Exit BitKeeper, enter Bazaar. And now goes the second obstacle. Today, Kaj Arnö announced that MySQL has adopted the Sun Contributors Agreement. Kudos! |
There are still a few impediments, but the database group management seems well determined to tackle the problem and become contributions friendly. There is more in the making. Stay tuned!
MySQL adopts Sun Contributor Agreement
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Until a few months ago, the MySQL community had several complaints about the contribution process. The two biggest obstacles were an unfriendly revision control system and a too demanding contributor agreement. The revision control system was changed in June. Exit BitKeeper, enter Bazaar. And now goes the second obstacle. Today, Kaj Arnö announced that MySQL has adopted the Sun Contributors Agreement. Kudos! |
There are still a few impediments, but the database group management seems well determined to tackle the problem and become contributions friendly. There is more in the making. Stay tuned!
Attending the Systems trade fair in Munich (October 21st-24th)
This year's Systems trade fair will take place from October 21st-24th in Munich, Germany. Sun will be present there with a stand in the exhibition area (Hall B2, Stand 329) and we also sponsor a conference themed "Perspective Open Source" that will provide half-day sessions (in German) about opensource-related topics throughout the week.
Some highlights of what we'll present on our stand:
- MySQL
- Sun Fire Servers (with Intel Xeon Processors)
- Open Storage
- VirtualBox
- StarOffice/OpenOffice
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for SMBs
By the way, we have a limited contingent of free day passes for the fair - see this page if you're interested to get one!
I will be there to help manning the MySQL demo pod on all days. See you there!
Cloning Jay Pipes
The MySQL Community Team is about to lose a valuable member. In a few weeks, Jay Pipes, Community Relations Manager for North America, is joining the Drizzle project, under a different organization within Sun, and he won't be much available for MySQL community matters anymore.
On one hand, I am glad for Jay. He has been craving for more technical work, and he happily jumped at the offer from the Drizzle team. On the other hand, I have now the hard task of finding a worthy replacement. It won't be easy. For several years we have taken Jay's presence for granted, and he has done incredibly remarkable things, like creating MySQL Forge (v1 and v2) and organizing two MySQL Users Conferences and two MySQL Camps.
So, here I am, shouting to the world my need for a new manager. What am I looking for? What makes a good Community Relations Manager? At the end of this post, you will find a more detailed and formal list of requirements, but here is my personal take. The ideal candidate should
- Be a clone of Jay Pipes
- live in North America (US or Canada);
- be willing and able (valid passport) to travel domestically and abroad;
- be a team player, a good communicator, already comfortable with some Open Source community;
- speak and write English fluently;
- have a deep technical knowledge about MySQL (a certification would be nice);
- have a broad understanding of databases, open source, and community in general;
- be a proficient blogger;
- be able to work from home effectively;
- have a relevant wealth of contacts in at least one social site (LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, etc);
- author of a book on MySQL
- author of articles on MySQL or databases in general;
- experience as web developer;
- experience of the world outside North America (time zones, foreign cultures and needs, foreign languages, exotic food)
If your fit the above description, please get in contact with me. I am leaving no address on purpose. Being able to find an unlisted email address is part of the skill set for that job!
Oh, and don't forget that you will have strong competition. Please read A glimpse and a hook before pressing the send button.
The official part starts here
Primary Responsibilities and Duties
- Establish inroads into various MySQL and open source communities through:
- Attending and speaking at open-source conferences
- Blogging about MySQL and community topics
- Initiate and maintain contacts (primarily in North America) with:
- Developers who use or could use MySQL for projects
- User groups and meetups in the open source ecosystem
- Community leaders and advocates
- Assist the program chair of the MySQL Conference and Expo in
- Planning, reviewing, and administering the conference
- Write articles for various MySQL web properties and other publications
- Actively participate in mailing lists, forums, and other websites by:
- Encouraging the growth of MySQL
- Assisting others in MySQL technical issues
- Vetting and reviewing open source projects which use MySQL
- Develop and maintain in-house software such as PlanetMySQL and the MySQL Forge
- Actively promote open source development practices internally and externally to Sun/MySQL
- Blog and write articles about best practices in open source development models
- Encourage openness and transparency of MySQL engineering roadmap and development practices
Required Knowledge and Skills
- Experience speaking at conferences, user groups and functions on technical topics
- Experience networking with community leaders and open source advocates in building and growing the MySQL and associated ecosystems
- Deep technical knowledge of MySQL
- Understanding of open source development practices
- Excellent written and oral communication skills
- Knowledge of at least 1 programming language
Preferred (Bonus) Knowledge and Skills
- Knowledge of Bazaar and/or other source control systems
- Knowledge of PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby
- Knowledge of Spanish language
First pictures from Software Freedom Day in Riga, Latvia
Greetings from the University of Latvia in Riga, where the local activities related to Software Freedom Day 2008 are in full swing! We've just finished the introductionary talk "Software freedom in Latvia" by Evijs Taube (LATA) and Leo Trukš
The Microsoft-Novell Deal and Trust in Princes
Sun and MySQL Launch event in Munich, Germany on Thursday, 2008-06-26
If you happen to be in Munich, Germany next week, don't miss out the final Sun/MySQL launch event which will take place on Thursday, 26th of June at the "Sofitel Munich Bayerpost", Bayerstraße 12, D-80335 München.
Simon Phipps will speak about "Sun and Open Source - How it has changed the industry", Kaj Arnö will give a talk about the positioning, strategy and momentum of MySQL as a part of Sun. Other speakers include Donatus Schmidt (Marketing Director Sun Germany) and Ralf Gebhardt (Sales Engineer, MySQL). You can see the entire agenda here, you need to register here if you would like to attend.
The MySQL community is counting its ranks
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The MySQL Community is taking charge of counting its own ranks, by means of a survey with the purpose of measuring the usage of the world most popular open source database. The proposal comes from Keith Murphy, editor of the MySQL Magazine, which should host the results in July. |
More attention to this survey is coming from Lenz Grimmer MySQL Community Manager for EMEA, and Mark Schoonover, who is co-author of the survey. I also chimed in.
The MySQL community is counting its ranks
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|
The MySQL Community is taking charge of counting its own ranks, by means of a survey with the purpose of measuring the usage of the world most popular open source database. The proposal comes from Keith Murphy, editor of the MySQL Magazine, which should host the results in July. |
More attention to this survey is coming from Lenz Grimmer MySQL Community Manager for EMEA, and Mark Schoonover, who is co-author of the survey. I also chimed in.
Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community
Note: these are live notes. It was a great talk, I’d rate it as excellent (and I’m not just saying that because Josh and I work in the same group at Sun). I’ll have to also comment on his thoughts and talk, in due time. MySQL, as an open source project, has a lot to learn.
Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community
A How-To Guide
Josh Berkus, Community Guy
Part 1: The Evil of Communities
- you may attract and will be unable to get rid off a community
- they mess up your marketing plans, because the community goes out and does its own marketing and PR and distributes your software in places you didn’t expect to
- they also mess up your product plans, because they contribute to code and features to your project, with unexpected innovation!
- communities are never satisfied by any amount of quality and keep wanting to improve it - if you can’t make it better fast enough, they sometimes do it on their own!
- you have to re-define your partner and customer relationships… people who were your customers start contributing to your project, sort of making them partners… “confuse your salespeople” :)
- the worst part about having a community, is that they require to you communicate constantly (and who has time for that?). Emails, chat channels, web forums, you get constant pestering
10 Ways to Destroy (The Berkus Plan, Patent Pending!)
1. Difficult Tools
- weird build systems
- proprietary version control systems
- limited license issue trackers
- single-platform conferencing software
- unusual and flaky CMS
This will limit attracting new community, and eventually people will get frustrated with the tools and go away.
2. Poisonous people
Maximise the damage they do - argue with them at length! So if people give you problems, continue feeding the trolls. Then denounce them venomously, and finally ban them. Josh then goes into a funny way of making use of poisonous people, which eventually leaves your team and the troll(s).
3. No documentation
Don’t document the code, build methods, submission process, release process, install it.
4. Closed-Door Meetings
Short notice online meetings are good. Telephone meetings are even better, because of timezones and limited conference lines. Meet in person, in your secure office, is the best way! (even if you dial in on a conference line so that others can here). People that are most involved will leave your project right away.
5. Legalese, legalese, legalese
The longer and more complex the better! Hate and fear of attorneys help drive people away from your open source project. Contributor agreements that are long/complicated, with unclear implications are particularly good. Website content licensing, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) [European developers usually never sign an NDA], trademark licensing terms (name and logo of your project… good way to dissuade people). Used properly, you can use legalese to keep out developers!
Bonus: change the legalese every couple of months without informing folk!
6. Bad liaison
A bad liaison/community manager is someone reclusive (least social, hates answering email, unplugs phone regularly, etc.). Also, someone with no time works very well. They’ll spend a few weeks, but pretty soon they’ll give up, and if you’re really lucky they’ll be snappy and make bad comments to the community!
Assigning someone with no authority also helps. As a community manager, you have no chain of command, and you just get to deliver bad news (we decide, and you just say something). That person usually leaves your company, and becomes a poisonous person, and its a win-win.
Someone unfamiliar with the technology also helps. An open source Java project, getting a PHP programmer, is the best person for you :)
Having no liaison also helps. Refer to the project liaison, but have no one!
7. Governance obfuscation
A good model for this is none other than the UN (He has a slide on the UNDP).
Get your legal team to write a governance document. Like they’re dealing with a hostile outsider. You’ll be impressed what they come up with!
Three principles:
1. Decision making and elections should be extremely complex and lengthy
2. Make it unclear what powers community officials and communities actually have
3. Make governance rules nearly impossible to change
8. Screw around with licenses
Licenses loosely translate to Identity. You’re not just a Linux contributor but a GPL person… You’re not just a PostgreSQL contributor but a BSD person…
9. No outside committers
I. No matter how much code outsiders write, only employees get to be committers. This is a surefire way to annoy contributors eventually.
II. If they ask why they’re not being able to commit, just be evasive! Talk about needing a mentor, decision not made yet, etc…
III. Make sure there are no written rules on who gets to be a committer, or that the criteria are impossible to fulfil.
IV. Bonus: promote an employee who doesn’t code to committer! Most will get disgruntled by this and go away and they’re not your problem anymore.
10. Be silent
He demonstrates out live, by giving him a minute… what silence really is. Just do nothing, be really silent.
Q&A
How does Sun score?
All of these techniques have been successfully employed at open source projects at Sun and elsewhere. He gave this talk at a Sun internal event and people came up to him asking if they were talking about their project! Sun is scoring pretty well, but not necessarily any better than other corporations.
I missed the question, but the answer was: If you are fast and clear about explaining mistakes, communities tend to be forgiving.
Examples of a successful community?
Kernel.org, and the Linux kernel community.
What about using forking to destroy community?
Combines poisonous people and playing with licenses. It fragments the outside community as people have no idea which to use. You can’t plan a fork (as it requires a lot of motivation to do the fork - finding people with that level of commitment and masochism is hard). Keep your poisonous people around and encourage them (poisonous people who are also code writers), then you sort of foster their image in the community by giving them a voice, and if you do something to really mess with the community’s mind (say a change of license), then the poisonous person will take the project and fork it.
The other way of forking, is to take a legitimate outside developer, build them up, and then after they have become a major developer, abruptly lock them out. The danger here is that they might not fork the project, and change the project back…
How do you prevent companies from supporting your project? Because this also means more developers will come to your project. And these companies are now selling services around your product.
Monkeying around with licensing. Then you change the commercial services around that. The second thing to prevent ISVs, is to play around with trademark rules, and lots of legalese. Prevent them to get code into your project, that should help too.
Greetings from the MySQL Confererence in Santa Clara!
I made it to the US safely, even though I almost missed my connecting flight in Heathrow (even my luggage made it, hooray!). I reached the Hotel just in time to directly head off to the traditional pre-conference party at Mårten's house. However, we just stayed there shortly (barely long enough to say hi to everybody) and then headed to the MySQL pre-conference dinner (organized by Arjen). It was nice meeting such a large number of the key MySQL community people in one place! I was especially surprised about the presence of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green - this added a nice touch!
Today I am attending Stewart's tutorial session about MySQL Cluster. So far it has been quite entertaining and informative! We'll continue with hands-on excercises on setting up a cluster configuration on the attendees' laptops after the lunch break.
I have uploaded pictures from yesterday and this morning to my foto set on flickr (which I will also post to the MySQL Conference 08 Flickr group) and will try to continue doing so for the rest of the conference. Enjoy!
Interview on Impackt '08
I recently was interviewed by Packt Publishing for their Impackt '08 web pages:
Ever since the formal adoption of the term in 1998, Open Source has experienced growth and adoption rates that defy pressures and suggestions that it’s a viable option for enthusiasts and geeks only. Governments, corporations as well as small businesses have begun to choose Open Source over proprietary software. However, with the global economy facing an uncertain future, how will open source be impacted? Can it continue to grow despite this?
With these questions in mind and more, Packt approached some people at the heart of this movement to understand their take on the future of open source.
The interview has now been published. Enjoy!
Reminder: MySQL Meetup Mashups in Germany next week (Hamburg and Berlin)
A gentle reminder: next week, there will be two more stops of the MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour:
- Monday, April 7th, 19:00: Hamburg, Germany. We will meet in the meeting rooms of the local Sun Microsystems offices ( Nagelsweg 55, 22097 Hamburg). There will be two technical sessions: Giuseppe will talk about the MySQL Sandbox, Kay Koll will give a presentation about how to combine MySQL with OpenOffice.org. He will also describe the new report generator and give an overview over the future of OpenOffice. You can register for this event via meetup.com or Xing.com.
- Tuesday, April 8th, 17:00: Berlin, Germany. This event will take place in the rooms of the Berlin offices of Sun Microsystems (Komturstrasse 18a, 12099 Berlin). This time, Giuseppe will talk about MySQL as an open platform, Kristian Köhntopp will share a few hints he gathered while doing consulting work at customer sites. Please use Xing.com to register for this event.
At both events, colleagues from Sun and MySQL will be present to answer questions and discuss the acquisition of MySQL by Sun and all things Open Source. There will be free drinks and food as well!
We look forward to welcome users from the various related Sun products/projects, e.g. OpenOffice, Java, OpenSolaris, Glassfish or Netbeans. There is so much opportunity for collaboration and exchange of experience - I am very excited to be at both meetings to meet and talk with people from these communities. See you there!
Visiting CeBit (Hannover, Germany) this Thursday
I have not been at CeBit for quite a while, but this year I will be there as a regular visitor this Thursday (6th of March). If you would like to meet with me, please send me an email or ping me via IM/Skype! I look forward to walking around the hallways, visiting my new employer's booth and finding out what other Open Source presences and activities there will be.
Teaching Sun the Open Source Dance
Over the past couple of days Sun has been getting a lot of feedback on it's behaviour with open source.
So there is Amanda McPherson trying to teach Sun that the L in LAMP really stands for Linux.
And then there was Roy T. Fielding quiting the Open Solaris community.
I'm still wondering why a company that once bought StarDivision because it was cheaper to buy the company than to pay licenses for similar functionality, keeps maintining their own kernel stack rather than contributing to one that is way more popular and as a much larger userbase.
Its not like they have a die hard community they will loose, it's not like they will loose customers over it. When Sun says that Linux is the new Solaris their customers will just follow.
Personally I stopped working with Solaris ages ago... when we ocasionally run into a customer that wants us to deploy things on Solaris we always have to spend extra time GNUifying the box, which is yet another pain.
Sun had to learn the hard way from the JAVA crowd that they do care about Licensing and a community only starts to build when they like what they see. and it's exactly that community that Solaris is still lacking.
Virtualbox also is in the same boat, they have a good user community, but they don't have a lot of contributers as they require contributors so use the MIT license and even sign some papers.
In a way MySQL used to be the same , altough lots changed during the last couple of years , but back a couple of years ago nobody outside of MySQL was contributing code, there was a gigantic user community, but not really a developer community.
The big difference here is in community.. not customer base, these people are actually using MySQL because they are freely choosing so. Not because their boss or corporate policy tells them to.
But MySQL learned, and is changing, it currently has also non employees contributing .. often ex employees but also other people , people that form a real community.
Today .. if you really want to cash out ... create an product open source it ,create a user community around it but don't allow contributors, my bet is Sun will buy you :)
I told it before.. I really really hope one day Sun will understand .. but from the past couple of acquisitions.. they seem to be taking the same path over and over again.
OpenOffice.org Community Challenge
Sun Microsystems wants to encourage more participation in the Open Office community. For that purpose Sun sponsors a contest for contributions to OpenOffice.org offering $175,000 in price money and public acknowledgment of achievement.
The contest asks not just for development contributions, such as source code or extensions. The contest also solicits documentation, artwork, marketing materials and methods, tools to improve the community in areas such as distribution, translation, etc. It even accepts improvements to OpenDocument Format (ODF) and other creative ideas.
There are a few conditions for entry: You must create original work free of other people’s rights and be of legal age. You also must be a member of the OpenOffice.org community (registered at OpenOffice.org). For the cash prizes you need to live or be a legal resident of certain countries and territories. You can enter the contest as an individual or a group.
If you are interested, read the rules carefully. Determine if you are eligible for cash prizes. If you live in Austria or the Philippines, you are out of luck in this category. Also make sure that what you produce does comply with the licenses of OpenOffice.org and can be contributed to the OpenOffice.org project under the Contributer Agreement (different from the licenses). You should also be willing to have Sun Microsystems use your work for publicizing the Contest and the OpenOffice.org software.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
GlassFish Grants and Awards Program
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Now that most people are back from the holiday's break, we need to close on the GlassFish Grants and Awards Program. If you are interested please check the Original TA post, the two posts at Users@GF ([1], [2]), the threads at the Advocacy@GF alias and the Program Page at our Wiki. |
The intention is to design as simple a program as possible, possibly borrowing the programs that other communities are using. We will be using the advocacy mailing list for any further announcements.
One year on, the Java community continues to build
GlassFish Community and Sun's Community Awards Program
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Sun has announced a Community Awards Program. This is going to be a multi-year program and this year it covers six communities: OpenOffice.org, OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, NetBeans and GlassFish. Each community will define its own program, in particular they can combine awards with grants. The overall guidelines will be described by Simon at his FOSS.IN keynote and we will start working on the GlassFish part of the program in the next few days. |
