An offer to sponsor your MySQL Meetup

If you participate at all in the MySQL Meetup circuit, by now it’s likely you’ve heard that the agreement currently in place between Meetup.com and MySQL/Sun is expiring quite soon. Because of that, MySQL Meetups which used to be free for organizers are reverting to paid status very soon (costing the organizer at least $12 per month). MySQL Meetup organizers (like myself) have received an email from Meetup.com giving them 7 days warning. MySQL/Sun have suggested that all MySQL Meetups move to Facebook.

I don’t know all of the details of MySQL and Meetup.com’s prior arrangement for this sponsorship, but from what I gather it did not involve MySQL paying $12 per month for each Meetup—I suspect it was a free/barter agreement. I specifically don’t know Meetup.com’s side of the story; but it doesn’t matter. I feel that Meetup.com has always provided a useful, functional, and fairly priced service. It was nice that it used to be free for MySQL Meetups, but nonetheless it’s a service I’m willing to pay for (and I did, for a few months, before I found out that they could be free).

In fact, I’m willing to do more. I think, given the pittance of a cost involved, it is entirely unnecessarily disruptive to the MySQL community to expect all MySQL Meetups to move to a new service… and I’m going to continue to use Meetup.com for the Silicon Valley MySQL Meetup. Furthermore, I am willing to personally sponsor about 10 other MySQL Meetups around the world.

So, to that end: If you are a MySQL Meetup organizer, and you would prefer to continue using Meetup.com to organize your meetings, please contact me. We can work out the details, and I will pay for a handful of you. Please send me at least the URL to your Meetup, so I can check it out. I’m looking to sponsor interesting and active Meetups, not necessarily idle Meetups that have never actually had a meeting. However, you can be anywhere in the world, and you don’t have to be a particularly large group.

I have been discussing this offer (before publication) with Peter Zaitsev of Percona, and he is willing to sponsor a few MySQL Meetups as well.

Thanks, and have fun meeting up!

Skipping the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009

I have been silent on the topic of this year’s MySQL conference, and really, silent in nearly all ways anyway. Today, as the MySQL Users Conference Conference and Expo 2009 starts up, some people will be wondering where I am, so I ought to at least answer that: I am skipping the conference this year.

As my wife can tell you, this is not a decision I’ve taken lightly, and I’ve gone back and forth on it for months and then down to the final days leading up to now. I’ve decided after much internal and external debate just to skip it all this year, including the side conferences and other stuff. Why? The reasons are basically:

  • It’s my opinion that the “state of the art” with MySQL has not changed, so I am not really missing much technical content to further myself. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on with Percona and Google’s work, but I largely follow that through blogs and mailing lists and personal contacts already.
  • I strongly disagree with the speaker selection process used in this and the previous couple of years’ conferences. I feel that they actively discourage any speakers who refuse to stay on script—those willing to tell users the reality of the situation. I can’t and/or won’t do that, so I didn’t submit anything this year—my initial effort, months ago, to disengage from the conference. I watched from the sidelines this year and listened to everyone else’s complaints about not being selected. I don’t care to hear about the process, the details, the counter-arguments, etc., but really, any selection process which ends up leaving out Percona, for any reason, is just broken. I know they got some consolation slots in the end, but that doesn’t change my opinion.
  • The previous years’ conferences, while they have been fun in various ways, have been declining in actual technical content and increasing in politics, marketing hype, PR stuff, and whatnot. This does not have value to me (see above).
  • I am tired of explaining MySQL Enterprise vs. MySQL Community, InnoDB/Oracle vs. MySQL Inc., where the patches have gone, why the foreign key implementation in MySQL sucks, why the triggers implementation sucks, the problems with replication, etc., ad infinitum. Nothing has changed, it’s all basically as broken as it was last year, the year before that, etc.

OK, many people know the above about me already. So why not go to the Percona Performance Conference or hang out and chat with people, or…

  • The most important reason: I am making a concerted effort to stay out of the politics of the whole conference this year. While I feel that I add nominally value to the conference by analyzing and reporting on the happenings, and asking uncomfortable questions, I just can’t do it this year. I need a break.

I debated potentially taking this entire week as vacation and really disappearing for the entire week, disconnected, but I really value the friendship of all of my friends that come out to California from the far reaches of the Earth for the conference. I will be in the Bay Area (as usual every week), and I would very much enjoy having a politics-free drama-free dinner if you’re up for it. Contact me!

Administrative Note: I have disabled comments on this entry, as I don’t want the debate and politics to shift over here. I apologize in advance for my anti-blog-like behavior in that regard. I welcome any and all notes and comments at jeremy@jcole.us.

Obama Rally for Change in Reno

This morning, Barack Obama was in Reno, at UNR for one of his Rally for Change events. Since I haven’t seen him in person before, I figured I would go up there and see him speak, take some pictures, etc. It was pretty awesome, and he gave a really good speech. I took a few hundred pictures, so here are a few select shots… I’ll get the rest posted soon:

 
 

Obama speaks to the crowd gathered at the Rally for Change event in Reno, Nevada on October 25, 2008.

 
 

The crowd at the Obama rally in Reno, Nevada.

 
 

Obama frustrated during a power failure in the middle of his speech.

On MySQL forks and MySQL’s non-Open Source documentation

All of this talk of Drizzle (a fork of the MySQL server by Brian and Monty) has reminded me of a topic I have wanted to discuss for quite some time…

One of the things that sets MySQL apart (in, IMHO, a very bad way) from other Open Source database projects/products such as PostgreSQL (license) and Firebird (license) is that the MySQL documentation is NOT Open Source. The MySQL documentation is and always has been copyright MySQL AB, and “… use of this documentation, in whole or in part, in another publication, requires the prior written consent from an authorized representative of MySQL AB”. This presents a major impediment to forking the server: who wants to re-write many hundreds of pages of documentation on things that haven’t even changed? Even if you’re OK with all of your new code being GPL (and anyone forking ought to be), and never being able to dual license or re-license your MySQL fork (oh well), you will have to start with no documentation, or publish an errata against the official MySQL documentation (which will only go so far).

Does this mean that MySQL is not really Open Source? I would say not exactly, although I could probably be convinced either way. Others may say yes. But it does go a long way to making the point that some things may not be quite as “open” as they initially appear. What do you think? Can a piece of software really be Open Source while its primary/only documentation is not? Did you know that the MySQL documentation was not Open Source?