While I have been using vacation days recently, I did follow the announcements by Oracle regarding new closed, commercial extensions. Almost universally in these discussions MariaDB is put forth as a fully Free, drop-in replacement. The Reddit comments on Monty’s blog post about this issue are a good example. Also, Monty, Colin, and I have noticed that over the past 6 months or so the, “What is MariaDB?” conversations, especially at conference booths, had dropped precipitously. It’s exceedingly gratifying to see that MariaDB is a known solution, and that the work around it is seen as a true project, rather than a corporate product distributed freely. People know the project. A community has really started to coalesce. This being the case, the inevitable, “So … what’s next?” conversation with Monty ensued, and neither of us had an answer at our fingertips. So it’s time for me to move on and find a new challenge.

I would definitely not be leaving Monty Program unless Colin was staying. There is a lot of work in community gardening, and Colin is a rock star. The “What’s next?” conversation with Monty did not have to include stewardship of the MariaDB community. If you have questions about what’s happening in MariaDB world, Colin is the person to find henceforth.

It’s been a great time working for Monty Program, and I wish them and the MariaDB project every success. Starting up a project and a community around critical LAMP plumbing was an extremely fun ride!

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it – It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it?

Monty Program is once again a proud sponsor of LinuxCon, and as such we’ll have a table in the Technology Showcase (the equivalent of an Expo Hall). If you use, hack on, or are otherwise interested in MariaDB and/or MySQL, stop by and say hello! Also, be sure to attend Colin’s talk Friday at 1400!

It’s hard to believe we’re celebrating 20 years of the Linux kernel this year. Rock on!

IRCing with my peeps over SSL.
Mega-corporations gonna give ‘em hell.
Metasploit’s running and *ding* goes the bell,
Backdoor’s open ’cause we do it well.

You suck at security, don’t mean to sound snooty.
‘Cause penetration testing is a sacred duty.
We’re in, we’re gone, we got your looty.
It’s now all stored in a folder called booty.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, associated with any group mentioned above. I do not condone illegal electronic acts, and will not ever commit them. These lyrics are written from a first-person perspective solely for artistic reasons. I am exceedingly grateful to live in a country with the inalienable right to free speech.

See you there! And yes, yes … I’ll have black vodka.

Much of the project’s focus over the past weeks has been on the 5.3 and 5.5 series, as beta releases are something we’d like to do very soon. Add to this the continued discussions of potential 5.6 work initially started in Lisbon and the MySQL Users’ Conference last month, and it’s a recipe for neglect of existing stable release trees. Thankfully this is not the case, and the tradition of providing meaningful updates to stable releases continues. Great job!

Speaking of the MySQL-UC, the Monty Program booth in the Expo Hall sold t-shirts and held an auction to raise money for relief efforts in Japan. After some time waiting for Direct Relief International to process payment, I am pleased to report that thanks to the generosity of UC attendees we were able to raise US$664.66 to donate toward the ongoing efforts to bring some sort of normalcy to the country. Thank you to everyone that donated. どうもありがとうございます!

Well, that draft is ready now. The draft is available in the MariaDB knowledgebase, and we are soliciting public feedback through January 2. During the first week of January any approved edits will be made to make a final version, and that final policy mirrored on mariadb.org and montyprogram.com.

Hopefully the intent of allowing the unhindered development of cool stuff related to MariaDB while protecting the value of the primary brand itself is made clear. Let us know what you think in comments to the KB entry. If you suggest edits, please be sure your reasoning is expressed plainly. Of course, glaring oversights or errors should be brought to our attention regardless of the open commenting deadline. But please make a little time in the next 2 weeks to give us some input.

Thanks!

Speaking of downloads, the 5.2 series has seen a remarkable increase in download totals. Several orders of magnitude, in fact. That’s usually a pretty good sign, so I’ll take it as such. It hopefully means more people are using MariaDB, and when talking about such matters with colleague Colin, he decided to get nosy with users. Satisfy Colin’s morbid curiosity, would you? Alright, mine too.

If you want to write an epic poem about your everlasting love for MariaDB, enduring hatred of it, or anything in between, you could sing it to Colin next week if you’re going to FOSS.in. Be sure to find Colin if you’re a MariaDB, MySQL, or general DB wonk.

Enjoy the new releases!