Catching up with Colin Charles and MySQL

A few days ago, I met up with a friend, Colin Charles during the Sun Tech Days event in Manila. I first met Colin during Ubuntu Down Under in Sydney where he was more known as ColinCharlesQueue (which means a specification is queued for him to review in MoinMoin). He’s currently associated with MySQL as the community manager for the Asia Pacific region and we had a very good chat about MySQL as an organization, its licensing, community and plans for the future.

Some stuff I learned from him:

• MySQL’s move from Bitkeeper to Bazaar - which was recently announced. It was surprising, but I understand the reasons for it, primarily of which is that community contribution is being stiffled with the bitkeeper licensing model. Kaj Arno explains it best.
• That MySQL has been very popular in Japan. I wouldn’t believe this at first since Japan is pretty much PostgreSQL territory. But then, they (MySQL) have a Japan office then it must be true.
• He’s still pretty active in Open Source, but majority of his work involves making sure of MySQL compatibility across platforms as the product supports a big number, which should include Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (and even previous 6.06 LTS). I guess this is where certified binaries help.
• and of course, the complex topic of licensing and making money out of open source, wherein a lot of stuff has trickled down to various organizations, making sure everyone involved gets a slice of every dollar you opt to pay for MySQL enterprise.

There were a lot more we discussed, but the good part was catching with each other, what we’ve been up to lately (he’s still active in Fedora), and potential projects in the future (a local MySQL group is in the works).