Sam Varghese
Monday, 19 May 2008 23:33
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 7
"They were looking for a technical writer to work on the MySQL documentation. The additional thing was MySQL had just acquired a company named Polycom in Finland basically for the training that that company had developed for MySQL. They basically acquired a training organisation and integrated it into MySQL. There were a couple of trainers and training materials at the time."
His closest company colleague at the time was an Estonian who worked from Hong Kong, eight or nine hours from Australia.
The documentation for MySQL which was available at that point had been written by Monty Widenius and David Axmark, the founders of the company. Says Lentz: "They are both Swedish speaking originally; Monty is a Finn but a Swedish speaker (about 6 percent of the Finnish population speaks Swedish). What they were writing was 'Swinglish'. It was basically English but the grammar wasn't that brilliant. You could tell what they meant if you knew a little bit about MySQL but it needed a rewrite and I've done lots of rewriting. This was the time when MySQL 4 was being developed with lots of new features, so there were lots of new chapters and reorganisation required."
Until this point, Lentz had had limited exposure to Linux and other free and open source software. "At some point in the early 90s, I think I started looking at Linux and I worked indirectly a bit with BSD but actually did not have a lot of exposure to it. When I joined MySQL I hadn't used Linux that much and actually my desktop for a while was Windows. MySQL (the company) is a very heterogeneous environment, it doesn't matter what desktop you use. Some developers use Windows, some use Linux, some use BSD, some use Macs, some use Solaris and so on. And that is very good overall for the infrastructure of the company and the product. With all the different environments, things tend to get tested better. It ensures that people using a different environment do not get neglected. If you have people only using Windows, or only Linux, you kind of forget about the other operating systems."
He notes a point of difference between himself and others in the FOSS community. "I'm a firm believer in Free and Open Source Software but as a practicality I'm a Mac user as well. I have a little 13-inch MacBook in my bag; the reason I started using that a couple of years ago was that at the time laptops that ran Linux were a bit awkward to travel with - suspend often didn't work, the wireless didn't work and there were a number of problems. So the answer at that point to 'why do you have a Mac' was 'I have work to do'.
"Plus it was a better environment for me than Windows. Now I have lots of things on that laptop that I am comfortable with and some of my infrastructure is Mac-focused, so it's all staying in there, even though, if I booted my machine with Linux, it would work just fine, the wireless would work. I trust Linux, it's just that I am a happy Mac user now. Of course, Steve Jobs is evil and I know it. I'm a pragmatist when it comes to things like this. Some of my very good friends, they still like me, but they think I'm a bad person because I use the wrong kind of software even though I know that it's wrong."
