On this particular sultry evening, the second day of WikiMania has just about wrapped up. Buses filled to capacity with Wikipedians wrapped up in earnest discussion are shuttling the majority of attendees to the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, the Gdańsk shipyard.

I’ve taken my leave. While I’d love to see the shipyards, it’s been a full day and I was feeling a bit unwell after letting myself get dehydrated in the heat.

Earlier in the evening we had the privilege of being the first audience to see <Truth in Numbers?>, a documentary on the Wikipedia movement and it’s critics.

The film, shot and produced over a 5 year period between 2005 and 2010, focused on what Wikipedia is, what effects it has had, who the Wikipedians are, and what the criticisms are of Wikipedia.

The film felt like a media literacy piece that was designed to foster discussion and introspection. The audience of dedicated Wikimedians took the film in many different ways. By turns, it was praised and criticized. A socially awkward young man made a long comment that abstractly reduced to, “I’m disappointed that the film wasn’t made for my own needs.” One volunteer was visibly wounded by the film and commented that he felt attacked.  I threw in my two cents. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation offered her views. Small discussions and comments were twittered.

The film is worthwhile. It will foster discussions that will develop better media literacy – not just around Wikipedia, but also for traditional scholarship and media.

In some ways, perhaps the most shaken community member should have been Jimmy Wales.  The movie provided a balanced view of his faults, something that few of us would like to see. Still, after the screening, he was on stage, answering questions alongside the directors and seeming to take it all in stride.

In the criticisms of Wikipedia, I’ve always been surprised at how often people focus on Jimmy and the idea that he is the project leader– it seems clear to them that this North American white male of a suitably alpha age should be in control of the project. Perhaps this idea is more comforting to them than the idea that the control really vests in those who do the work.

You can see what the sparklines look like in the screenshot below:

MediaWiki History Sparklines Greasemonkey Script Screenshot

Like other Greasemonkey scripts, you’ll need Firefox (and a recent version – 3.5+) with Greasemonkey installed to run this script. The script relies on the awesome jQuery and jQuery Sparklines libraries (which Greasemonkey will silently install for you.)

To install the script, click here.

If you’d like to contribute patches, note a problem or the like, visit http://github.com/zakgreant/Miscellaneous/tree/master/mw_history_sparkline. The code is licensed under the permissive Simplified BSD license, which allows you to do almost anything with it.

I’ve been fortunate to rely on and work with many exceptional women over the years – teachers who changed my life, employers who took a chance on me, peers who supported me, mentors who helped me out of the thickets, editors who saved my bacon, and more – but my mother stands out as achieving amazing things with many challenges and few resources.  To understand how exceptional she is, a bit of back story is in order.

Somewhere in the 1940s, my mother was born to an older couple who were long past expecting any more children. Her early life was difficult. Her physical abilities were limited by childhood polio combined with undiagnosed chronic illness, but her curiosity was voracious and her intellect was keen.  She read anything that she could get her hands on – Frost and Twain, Longfellow and Cervantes – and she wrote and wrote and wrote.  The map of her world was prose and every point on her compass rose was a pen that pointed as far North, South, East and West as she could write.

Fast forward decades and the girl is a woman with adult children. She’s been writing professionally for nearly thirty years and has been an entrepreneur for nearly as long.  Along the way she’s worked at museums, freight companies and float plane companies, trained and practiced as an herbalist, raised a family, run a health food store, raised bloodhounds, made and sold dolls, made mascot suits, written books, studied theater and drama, repeatedly attempted to save the world and generally cultivated a passion for life.  Her health is still deeply compromised, but she learned to cope by becoming a self-taught expert on the illnesses that she was diagnosed with (eventually publishing a well-respected book on Myasthenia Gravis for patients and physicians.)  While the variety of activities is tremendous, very little of it encounters computer technology.

In 1994, this all changed. She was taking a business course when a fellow student told her of an amazing new technology called the Information Superhighway. The idea that the written word could be published quickly and distributed cheaply in an instant set her passion alight and weeks later the entire family was planning to start a business on the web.

We settled on one idea – an online travel magazine for Calgary, Canada – and got started.  My mother would write the content, my brother would take photos and I would learn how this computer and Web stuff worked (my dear father was mostly bed-ridden at the time and offered moral support.)  We bought a second-hand computer and spent weeks puzzling about how to get online.  In the end, it was my mother who first got a handle on HTML. She looked at some source for a while and then said, “This looks like the typesetting instructions that I had to read when I set type for newspaper presses.” She taught me and, with the help of Netscape’s view source feature, I was quickly roughing up functional (if ugly and invalid) HTML pages. Some months later we published one of the first commercial websites in Calgary, going on to try our hand at a Internet consulting and a web startup.

We’ve all come a long way since then, but I think that my mother may have come the furthest and, while her health has further declined, her ability to use the Web to foster change has continued to grow.

She’s in her sixties now and, on a shoestring budget of both money and energy, she manages to amplify every bit of good she does by sharing it over the web.

Her efforts to green her corner of the world, raise environmental awareness and to help others in need she promotes via her blog. Her expertise in managing the social, mental and physical effects of a specific chronic illness is shared on a website that she’s developed and maintained for over a decade now.  She teaches less technically adept seniors how to use the net to keep their curiosity bright and family ties strong.

She’s an inspiration every day and I still strive to use technology as effectively as she does.

Last week, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos wrote you a letter urging approval of Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems¹, asserting that Oracle’s ownership of MySQL (as part of the Sun acquisition) will increase competition in the market.

As a long-time MySQL user, a former MySQL AB staff member² and a participant in or consultant to a wide range of other open source and free software projects³, I found Mårten’s conclusion to be optimistic at best.

Oracle’s ownership of MySQL will lead to what the commission fears – greater costs and less choice in the DBMS market.

In making this point, I’ll challenge the three key arguments made by Mårten:

1. MySQL and Oracle do not compete
2. Oracle has many compelling business reasons to continue the ramp-up of the MySQL business
3. Oracle’s ownership of MySQL will increase competition in the market

Also, please note that I have no financial interest in Oracle or Sun and haven’t been paid to write this article.⁴

MySQL and Oracle Compete

First, it is very clear that MySQL is a difficult and disruptive competitor for Oracle. Imagine yourself Oracle’s position: most of your present and future customers use MySQL at no cost, and the combination of open source communities and the commercial entities backing MySQL work in a distributed fashion to erode your key advantages and populate many niches in the market.

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun would provide them with a way to control this competition.

We don’t have to rely on  imagination to see the competition between MySQL and Oracle. Even a cursory examination of the market leads one to the same initial conclusion reached by the commission that, “… Oracle databases and Sun’s MySQL compete directly in many sectors of the database market …”⁵

A volume of evidence demonstrating the heated competition between Oracle and MySQL can be found online, including Oracle’s acquisitions of key pieces of  technology licensed to MySQL⁶, benchmarks⁷, case studies⁸, migration toolkits⁹, presentations given by MySQL staff at the MySQL conference¹⁰, attendance of the MySQL User Conference by key Oracle management¹¹, articles in trade publications and recently leaked Sun Microsystems internal documents¹².

Oracle’s Compelling Business Reasons (or, Why Oracle’s Acquisition of MySQL Won’t Increase Competition)

Mårten wrote that, “Oracle has as many compelling business reasons to continue the ramp-up of the MySQL business as Sun Microsystems and MySQL previously did, or even more”, but did not elaborate on what these business reasons would be.

We know that Oracle will seek to use MySQL to provide maximum value to their shareholders, but this is not the same as a “compelling business reasons to continue the ramp-up of the MySQL business” nor is it the same as, “(increasing) competition in the database market.”

Oracle has a large and successful business. Its net income for the first fiscal quarter of 2009 was reported at 1.1bn USD¹³ The direct commercial value from licensing and services that it would be able to extract from MySQL would be trivial compared to this (and would likely be at a much lower margin than services and licensing it is accustomed to.)

Some reasonable tactics and strategies for an Oracle who has acquired MySQL would include:

• Using MySQL to price-target customers, ensuring that each customer pays as much as possible to Oracle. In the past, Oracle has reduced prices on a case-by-case basis to help retain customers who have “defected” to MySQL. The reduced competition in the marketplace will give Oracle more control, especially over large institutions who currently rely on MySQL Enterprise.
• Using control of the non-software MySQL assets (such as domain names, documentation, trademarks, conferences, …) to  manage competition in the MySQL space.
• Managing the rate of innovation in the MySQL product, so as to ensure that price-targeting can be effective.
• Continued support of the open source version of MySQL, so as to ensure that other open source competitors do not become prominent enough to challenge Oracle’s business.

Oracle will engage in strategies such as these for as long as it has a compelling business reason to do so, but certainly not out of concern for or in service to the market.

Closing

Commissioner Kroes, I won’t presume to advise the commission on the best path forward, however I do hope that you have a clearer view of the facts.

Open source and the market forces that supported MySQL’s rise to prominence and allowed it to compete with Oracle will exist regardless of what the commission chooses to do.

If Oracle acquires MySQL, then the market will be hindered for the next three to five years. Customers will pay higher prices. The open source community will need a few years to route around Oracle’s control. Current MySQL customers will be faced with challenges as they decide whether or not to stay with an aggressive vendor who now has much more control of a database that they often rely on to serve the online market.

If Oracle does not acquire MySQL then it will still have significant influence, as it controls a key MySQL resource in the form of InnoDB. This is something that the open source space is still wrestling with, as various engines and forks attempt to deal with the problem.

If the commission truly wants to foster competition, a middle road would be to allow Oracle to acquire MySQL on the condition that the database, engines and documentation are released under a permissive open source licence, such as the New BSD license¹⁴. This would allow Oracle to make the acquisition that it so desires without having to spin off MySQL and would foster a great deal of competition in the market, as no single party would be able to control the integration of MySQL with other products.

1. via Matt Asay’s CNET Blog – Mickos letter to EU: “Approve Oracle-Sun deal”
2. from 2001 to 2004, I served as MySQL’s community liaison
3. including multiple years serving on Free Software Foundation’s license compliance team, working as a Mozilla Foundation staff member and volunteering for the Open Source Initiative
4. The founders of MySQL and many of the early MySQL staff are friends, which likely influences my thinking. I don’t know what options or financial arrangements friends and former colleagues who have a stake in Oracle or Sun have in place, but I’m sure that some friends will have significant benefit from a sale of Sun to Oracle.
5. EC Press Release: European Commission opens in-depth investigation into proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle
6. Oracle acquired Innobase OY in 2005, followed by Sleepycat Software Inc. in 2006. These vendors licensed transactional database engine technology to MySQL that allowed MySQL to more effectively compete in Oracle’s space.
7. MySQL.com: February 2002 eWeek Benchmarks
8. Mysql.com case studies: ThePhoneHouse consolidates its eCommerce Systems on MySQL Enterprise, MySQL.com: Citysearch Saves Over $1 Million Using MySQL (pdf), …
9. MySQL.com: Introduction to the MySQL Migration Toolkit, Oracle.com: Oracle Migration Workbench
10. MySQL User Conference 2005: Migration from Oracle to MySQL, MySQL User Conference 2006: MySQL Migration Toolkit, MySQL User Conference 2007: MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers
11. Oracle VP Ken Jacobs has attended and spoken at multiple MySQL User Conferences
12. Wikileaks.org: Sun/Microsystems ‘Project Peter’ targets Oracle to MySQL migrations to boost sales
13. As reported by BusinessWeek: Oracle’s Earnings: Summer Doldrums Set In. Note that this was a rather weak quarter, as previous recent quarters reported nearly twice the income.
14. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

With most publishers, I’d have demurred – my work on LexPublica leaves me with little enough time for family, friends and clients – however, I have a soft spot for innovators like Packt, O’Reilly and No Starch.

As most readers of this blog know, the publishing industry is undergoing massive (and painful) change. Over the last decade, I’ve watched good presses get eaten up, squeezed hard or simply closed down. The market around information has changed and it’s been tough for the publishing industry to adapt.

Packt uses e-book and print-on-demand technology to reduce waste¹ and to help cover niche topics that might not otherwise receive complete coverage. They also partner with open source projects, allowing smaller projects to still have the legitimacy and convenience of professionally printed manuals and have their $24,000 USD Open Source CMS Award.

As for the book itself, embarrassingly I’ve requested a print copy. My only reading time is on the commute to the LexPublica offices and I’m not going to pull out my laptop on the crowded Vancouver buses.

1. though, frankly, I haven’t compared the environment cost of print-on-demand to the environmental cost the classic printing model

Perhaps not. There is no apology that can mend the deep injustices of the past. There is no kiss that can wake Alan Mathison Turing from the poison apple’s eternal sleep.

However, this isn’t about the unchangeable past. This is about the future.

#10‘s statement on Turing was catalyzed by one person (and hats off to you, John Graham-Cumming for being the sand in the oyster.) One person and then tens of thousands of others who embrace justice. That, my dear friends, is getting closer to enough.

empty yet full

of promise and opportunity.

Like the coming year,

they wait to be filled

with the affection of friends.

About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, eclectic, relevant and useful.

In addition to Rickard, we’re lucky to have a wide range of open web luminaries, local heroes and awesome hackers presenting, such as:

• Angela Byron of the Drupal community
• Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, Bespin hackers at Mozilla Corp.
• Boris Mann, from Bootup Labs
• Chris Messina
• David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging (formerly of ActiveState)
• Evan Prodromou, founder of Identi.ca
• Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project

As for topics, our speakers will cover a diverse range that includes Android development, engaging citizens via the Net, Drupal, iPhone development, Javascript, meditation, mobile web, Mozilla, MySQL, PHP,  privacy, Sita Sings the Blues, testing, Tor, web video for social change and a whole lot more.

If you are near Vancouver and are interested in the electronic frontier, free software/open source or the open net, then you should definitely register and attend – it’s only $185 CAD for both days.

Despite the downturn, it looks like this is going to be a great year for the conference: 400 people have registered and the list of speakers is formidable, including: OSI board member Danese Cooper, FSFE founder Georg Greve, MySQL founders David Axmark and Monty Widenius and Zbigniew “Gandalf” Branecki from Mozilla Europe.

If you are in or near Romania, you should try to register and attend: it’s only 39 EUR (19 for students) and is sure to be one of the best value IT conferences this year.

As a working group, we’re spread across multiple locations and time zones, come from a variety of different corporate and technical cultures, and are accustomed to different collaborative tools and collaboration styles.

This makes for some interesting discussions about how to use various technologies.  I’ll be sharing some of the discussions we’ve had and recommendations I’ve made, as they are likely to be interesting to people facing similar issues.

Our first major discussion was around wiki use. Wikis can provide a great collaborative space or they can become a dumping ground for lost ideas – it all depends on how well the wiki is structured, used and maintained.

I set up a wiki for the group shortly after we started working together. After about a week of us working via the wiki, discussions started to fragment across multiple channels – to follow up on a discussion, you’d need to read a string of email messages, look up notes from phone calls, read comments on wiki pages and review changes on wiki pages.

This lead to this recommendation:

I’d suggest that the group discuss mostly face-to-face, via voice and email.

When discussions move to the wiki, they tend to leave behind those who are less comfortable with wiki technology. Keeping up-to-date with wiki discussions means that extra burden is placed on both reader and author – either extra links need to be clicked, extra email needs to be sent or extra tools need to be installed.

Also, wikis used as discussion forums tend to grow into a state where a reader is never sure if information is up-to-date or canonical.

I don’t think that there is any problem with putting a draft or strawman in the wiki and then encouraging people to iterate over the ideas using meetings, phone, email, etc. Editing can happen with discussion, but it is best to use discussion technologies (like email and chat) for the discussion and document management technologies (like wikis) for document management.

Good practice here is to incorporate cleaned and edited versions of the discussions as conclusions and agreements are reached.

For the curious, I used Deki Wiki Express. I like Deki for a lot of reasons – the ones that mattered most in this case were that it is extremely easy-to-deploy, is friendly for those new to wikis,  offers power tools for experienced wiki-ists, is Free Software/Open Source and has a decent upgrade path for either self-hosting or paid hosting.