TAG | MySQL: the Australian connection |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 20 May 2008 | |
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Page 4 of 7 His choice of software doesn't mean he is any less a fan of the GPL. And he has his own analogy to explain the difference between the GPL and BSD licences. "I compare it to freedom of speech that I know of in the Netherlands and freedom of speech in the USA. In the Netherlands freedom of speech is bound by the liberties of people around you; so i can exercise my liberties as long as they don't hurt the people around me. It is not absolute. I can't shout anti-Semitic abuse - not that i would, i'm Jewish myself - or other racial abuse because that hurts other people. I can't shout about religious opinions which hurt other people around me. In the USA you can. "I would compare the European version of that, or at least the Dutch version to the GPL - the freedoms that you get are bound by the environment in which you operate. "With BSD, the freedoms, that you have ends with you. It doesn't guarantee freedom for anybody else. If you want something to spread, regardless of the way in which it gets integrated into other applications, then the BSD licence is the way to go." Lentz' early days at MySQL were extremely enjoyable. "MySQL was a brilliant environment at the time and it's still very interesting. At the time I joined I think there were three salespeople. That was the total sales head count, I think. The CEO had just been hired, about six months before I was. The training department was just starting, I was the documentation team. I was able to speak at conferences in Australia and at user groups. There were lots of different things I could be involved in within the company because it was a small business that was growing. When you are in a business like that there are lots of things to be done, there is really no specialist and you can pick up what you want. I was doing a little bit of a lot of things. I was never a MySQL developer even though I have contributed a few lines of code to a couple of functions inside the server." In 2004, Lentz took on the job of community relations, which meant a lot of travel. "I did this until August 2006 when the amount of travel became a bit much. My daughter was born in 2005 and I wanted to spend more time at home. So I moved to the support engineering department." It was shortly after this that the idea of leaving slowly began to grow. "I really needed a long break. Over the period I had been at MySQL, the company had grown from 25 to more than 400 people. That's 16 times as many people, many of whom I hadn't actually met. By the time I decided to move on, the company had changed to such a degree that one had to specialise. I could only be a support engineer - I couldn't also do other things as that was different people's responsibility. You could not pick up things and do them if you were interested in them." |
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