maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kristian,

On 18 Sep 2013, at 01:26, Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Colin Charles <byte@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
>> It's 17.09 today, and we've hit 50,160 total downloads (this number is
>> considered company-internal, we don't share this number externally).
> 
> "company-internal"? What have you been smoking? Colin, you are supposed to be
> the community guy for crying out lout :-(
> 
> This is *completely*, utterly unacceptable.
> 
> MariaDB is a community project. We are about openness. We are about working
> together, all of us, to create a better world. We are *not* some individuals
> or companys playground.
> 
> So no, the community's usage numbers of its own project is not "internal",
> thank you very much.
> 
> So please cut out the crap already.
> 

I am the Chief Evangelist for MariaDB, and clearly a community advocate and always fight for the community when discussing things internally. 

You are also absolutely right, that MariaDB is a community project. It is governed by the MariaDB Foundation. We have always had a strong ethic with being open. However, despite our strong ethic of being open, we have never published our download statistics. And maybe we should, but that is a discussion that needs to happen with all the stakeholders involved, from the company that pays your salary to the community of developers and users.

There is an utopian view of the MariaDB world and a realistic view of the MariaDB world. Let’s try to achieve a balance without being anyones playground. There are many changes happening in a rapid fashion, and the cowboy-style that we used to run at Monty Program is clearly changing.

So while we might want to celebrate the community’s usage numbers, they were set to be internal, like they have always been. Its like a Facebook keynote: they have a lot of MySQL servers, but they will never tell you the exact number of servers or instances that exist (swap Facebook with any large web property, Google, Twitter, etc.). 

There are competitive reasons to keep numbers private sometime. We have analysts paying attention to MariaDB. We have the press paying attention to MariaDB. We have investors paying attention to SkySQL, a large backer of MariaDB. 

MariaDB has been very open with some numbers (see What’s happening now - https://mariadb.com/kb/en/), but we have never in the history of the project shared download numbers.

Maybe it is time to start a discussion on what numbers do become public. Maybe its time to publish a press release at the start of next month. Maybe numbers should be shared amongst all members of the MariaDB Foundation. Maybe once the MariaDB Foundation is running at full speed, there is a Community Council, ala what Ubuntu does.

I don’t know the right answers to this, but one thing I can assure you is that I do my level best to keep things in the open. I would appreciate that when something is posted in private it remains that way. You might think its crap, but its unethical to share private emails in public. 

Kristian, I have very high honours for you. Thank you for your occasional outbursts to remind us to keep it real.

cheers,
-colin


--
Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist
MariaDB | t: +6-012-204-3201 | Skype: colincharles