My 2 cents...

Standing at the sidelines, a few people have asked about my opinion regarding Monty Widenius leaving Sun... And I suppose I probably should offer an opinion about Mårten Mickos departing too.

The big three at MySQL AB... Monty, Mårten and David. None of them are with Sun anymore.
Does that mean the end of MySQL? Certainly not. There is far too much momentum in the community for it to simply disappear overnight.

Of the three... I guess I was a little surprised when David left Sun first. I had imagined that Sun would make space for him in their organization, especially for his campaigning for FOSS in government and to continue MySQL's Anti-Patent pledge.

Monty... I'd like to say that I was surprised but to be honest, I knew that he would leave. It was more a matter of "when" and not "if". Of course, I had thought that he would leave after Maria 2.0 so the timing was a little earlier than I expected. In hindsight, I would have liked to do more work with him, especially while I was an employee, but timing was never quite right.

Mårten ... Now for him, I am quite surprised about. We're talking about the "Business Brains" behind the MySQL AB success story here. The man who sold an open source software company for one billion dollars in a cash deal. Not to forget all the interviews, publicity and promoting of MySQL that he has done as CEO of MySQL AB.

There's little doubt that we shall be seeing these guys do more than just MySQL community stuff in the coming years but rest assured, they have the skills and resources to do great things... and hopefully wonderfully disruptive things... now that they are free to exercise their creativity.

I expect that I shall meet them and many other friends and former MySQL colleagues in April, at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA. See you there!

Monty, bring plenty Salmiakki!