Laura Thomson has an interesting post about the MySQL acquisition. And I think it really highlights a fundamental disconnect that some companies built on providing open source applications for enterprises face:

Their means of getting revenue are at odds with their customers’ needs.

I’m a paying MySQL Enterprise Platinum customer, and I’m seriously considering not renewing for another year if Laura’s thoughts are on target. In a nutshell, here’s why:

I would pay more for a version of MySQL that has Yasufumi Kinoshita and Google’s patches than I would pay for a version without.

In fact, as I mentioned already, I probably wouldn’t pay for MySQL as it stands today. I paid for it in the hopes that, as a paying customer, my feedback that these patches (and others like them) are vital would be listened to. Thus far, it hasn’t.

I could care less about MySQL’s desire to keep their released, supported software dual-licensed (commercial and GPL). I don’t consider our Enterprise subscription to be for the software - mentally, I’m paying for service and support. And the support (fixing InnoDB’s concurrency problems) is increasingly at odds with the business (releasing a commerical binary-only Enterprise release). But they’re on a collision course - I’m not the only one who will stop paying for it, resulting in damage to MySQL’s business.

I believe the right (and admittedly scary) thing to do is provide paid support for the GPL’d version and move the ball forward - accept community patches that fix major problems.

You can bet that I’ll be telling Sun this, over and over again. Since they have a history of listening, I’m optimistic.

(BTW, this problem isn’t unique to MySQL. Red Hat has the same dilemma - and they won’t take my money, no matter how hard I try to throw it their way)

Remember when I said Sun was a company that listened? They sure do.

Maybe MySQL will finally start fixing all the performance/concurrency issues with InnoDB (basically, InnoDB’s threading and concurrency aren’t working well with modern multi-core CPUs). Google’s had some fabulous patches for awhile, and the brilliant Yasufumi Kinoshita does as well, but they don’t seem to be making their way into MySQL anytime soon.

Personally, I worry they’re focused too much on Falcon and not enough on InnoDB - but luckily Sun listens, so that may change.

SmugMug isn’t your normal Silicon Valley startup. We do everything differently. And Jessica Guynn’s Column One article on the front page of the LA Times this morning captures our quirky nature perfectly. If you want a glimpse into our mad, wonderful world, head on over there for a great read.

Special thanks to Terry Chay and Stan Chudnovsky for introducing Jessica and making sure I followed up with her.

And an extra special thanks to all of our customers who’ve become part of the family and made SmugMug the company it is today. You’re the best!

Ok, so I guess I’m a total n00b. In hindsight, SLAs make a lot of sense after all. The whole point isn’t to compensate SmugMug for our loss, it’s to make it unprofitable for the service provider to keep making the same mistakes.

In other words, let’s say Amazon’s margins on S3 are 15%. (I have no data, I’m just picking that number out of the air). If Amazon has a serious problem during a month, they have to cough up 25% to all their customers. In other words, they lose 10% instead of make 15%.

That’s pretty major incentive - and it now totally makes sense why SLAs are so highly valued.

Carry on.

Read over on O’Reilly Radar about David Recordon’s post at Six Apart entitled We Are Opening the Social Graph. He talks about the emerging tools and technology to allow shared social graphs, like OpenID, XFN, FOAF, and others.

Given that Thursday night is ‘Release Night’ at SmugMug and I had a few minutes to kill, I felt inspired and whipped up XFN and FOAF support to compliment the partial OpenID support SmugMug already has. (I apologize for not finishing our OpenID implementation yet, but I’m finding OpenID 2.0 to be a complete disaster and find myself at a loss as to what to do. Anyway, I digress…).

I’m absolutely positive we’re barely scratching the surface, and people like David will set me straight, but at least we’re making forward progress - 150K SmugMug accounts now have auto-discoverable FOAF, embedded XFN, and are OpenID endpoints.

What does this mean for you? It means, hopefully, that SmugMug can play nicely with other social applications on the web. Your network of friends & family is now published in machine-readable formats so that other networks can do intelligent things with that data. How exactly this will happen remains to be seen, but there are lots of bright people thinking about it, so hopefully it’ll happen.

At the very least, when the Semantic Web actually works in the year 2022, SmugMug will be ready.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that these technologies do properly obey your SmugIslands and other related privacy settings to protect you should you not want to share this information.

Aye, ye be hearin’ right: Sony ImageStation be shutting down, the latest in a long line of free photo sharing sites to make for port and haul down their Jolly Roger. Back when I was just a young deckhand and the Dread Ship SmugMug was barely a gleam in me eye, Sony ImageStation was one of the heavy hitters in these seas, and the thought of running up against them on the high seas in the dead of night did shiver me timbers.

Things be different now, with the Dread Ship SmugMug hailed in all the seas of the living and the dead as the greatest pirate ship to have ever set sail. Once mighty cap’n Sony has hung up his hook for all time. But in a last dastardly act, that scurvy dog tried to foist off all yer booty onto Shutterfly, a true land lubber if ever I saw one.

If ye prefer to sail the high seas with the rest of us honorable scum, though, ye’re not outta luck! A new beta version of SmuggLr adds ImageStation support in addition to the great Flickr support it’s had for quite some time. Simply install the free Firefox extension (instructions here) and a few glugs o’ grog later, yer booty’ll be safe inside SmugMug’s holds, protected and supported by the best o’ me hearties on deck. Best of all? Enter the secret password ImageStation to receive a 50% discount on yer first year’s passage.

As ye can probably tell from me portrait, the Dread Ship SmugMug and her crew are quite fond of grog, booty, and International Talk Like A Pirate Day. If ye be needin’ help from one o’ the deckhands, be sure to throw an ‘Arrr’ or ‘Ahoy’ their way. Oh, and one o’ the slaves in our brig lays tale that the Black Ship Flickr be flying the Jolly Roger particularly high today as well. I raise a jug of grog in their honor, and the honor of all those who plunder the high seas.

Yo-ho!

I fell asleep last night dreaming about all the neat things we can finally do with Flash because Adobe now supports H.264 video with AAC audio! Lots of great tech details here.

I think it’s safe to say that everyone building web apps said “wtf?!” when Flash 9 shipped without H.264 support, and we all said “WTF!?” when Microsoft shipped Silverlight without it, too. I mean, come on! We finally have an industry standard that’s efficient, used basically everywhere but on web pages, and neither the leader (Flash) nor the upstart (Silverlight) thought to include support, opting for expensive proprietary encoding formats instead? Talk about dumb.

Silverlight, especially, is a head-scratcher. Silverlight 1.0 is focused almost entirely on video, including HD, and clearly gunning for Flash. So why wouldn’t they go right for Flash’s big Achilles heel - no H.264 support?

Oh well - that opportunity is now lost, and I believe this basically nails Silverlight 1.0’s coffin shut. (The bad Mac installation process had nearly done this for us already) Sad, because I had high hopes for how beneficial strong competition would be for those of us building Rich Internet Apps.

Adobe deserves lots of kudos for actually listening to their customers and doing what we want. Honestly, I never thought this day would come. Finally, we can all encode video without expensive closed-source Windows-only encoders. You can’t imagine how limiting that is unless you’re in the trenches, but mark my words:

You’re going to see a massive boom in the online video space shortly. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Have you been to a tech conference lately? They’re dominated, absolutely dominated, by MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Their employers are happy to buy them because they’re fast, reliable and productive. I know I love mine. But ask any of those happy MacBook-toting people what they have on their desks at work, and they’ll admit to having a Dell.

So I found it interesting that at Apple’s big Mac event yesterday, Apple blew it with the Mac again. Steve fielded some questions about Mac adoption in the workplace, and another about price. But he skirts completely around the issue at hand: Apple has a huge, gaping hole in their desktop lineup. They have an iMac, a Mac mini, and a Mac Pro. But where’s the Mac?

At SmugMug, we’d put a Mac on every employee’s desk tomorrow. So what exactly is a Mac? That’s easy - it’s a Mac Pro with one dual-core Desktop class Intel CPU in it. Two (or four!) Server class dual-core CPUs (Xeons) are overkill both for performance and for budgets. I know - we’ve got some at our office, and I’m writing this on my Mac Pro at home.

Why not just use iMacs? Please. No business is going to buy desktop computers that require you to throw the display out when the CPU/RAM/etc get old. Displays last multiple generations of CPUs, particularly in the workplace.

Why not use Mac minis? Man, I wish! I love the little guys. But our employees, especially those writing code or doing lots of Photoshop work, are more productive with dual-displays. (Dual 30″ displays, if you really want to know). The Mac mini can only drive one, and not even the 30″ models. (You’d think Apple would want to drive sales of those 30″ displays, but I guess not?). So 2 x dual-link DVI is a requirement, and it’s a lot more common than you might think. Been to Google lately?

Also, like many IT departments in this day-and-age of cheap hard disks, we like to do RAID-1 on our employee’s desktops to reduce data loss. Mac OS X does great RAID-1 out-of-the-box, if only there were desktop computers to run it on…

So we need a Mac. Something like $500-1000 cheaper than a Mac Pro, powerful enough for most employees, and flexible enough for most jobs. Perfection - not to mention completing Apple’s lineup.

Oh, and when I talk to those same tech conference attendees (or their bosses!), I hear the same sad story. We’re all forced to head on over to dell.com to fill the void instead - or pony up extra for Mac Pros that we really don’t need.

Guess which option most employers choose.

UPDATE: Lots of comments all over the web on this story and how it’s not just for the workplace. Complaints about poor graphics cards in iMac/Mac mini making gaming impossible, people upset that they’d have to throw away their iMac monitor along with the CPU, etc. As a hard-core gamer, I have to agree - the gap is wider than just work machines. I’d rather have a Mac than a Mac Pro at home, too.

Feed readers: Digg this story

Last week we released some great updates to our iPhone interface, and today I’m sitting at Apple in the iPhone Tech Talk workshop. So if you’ve got any feature requests, now’s a great time to leave a comment - there’s a good chance I’ll ship it today.

Here’s what we released on Thursday:

• A link from your homepage to iPhone if you’re browsing on your phone.
• A link on your iPhone back to ‘Full Homepage’ so you can go back to regular SmugMug
• A cookie so if you’ve visited your iPhone interface, it remembers that you’d like to browse that way. Don’t want it anymore? It clears itself if you hit ‘Full Homepage’ on your phone.
• Browsing your most popular photos.
• Browsing through your photos by date. Full timeline supported.
• A green & black interface to get more similar to SmugMug’s traditional color scheme.

Anyway, leave a comment if you want me to build something for you

Anyone reading know how to get an invite to iPhone Tech Day at Apple?

I emailed them yesterday, but haven’t gotten any word. I’d love to go work on our iPhone interface for SmugMug if I could. If anyone can help, I’d really appreciate it. (And yes, I’ve been an ADC member for years and years. Probably close to a decade in one form or another).

Thanks!