Arto Bendiken

The City of Athens has launched a new Drupal site to serve as its official website, along with a Drupal-based site at http://www.breathtakingathens.com/ that provides visitor and tourism information.

Athens is a large city (3.5 million residents and 6 million tourists each year), with a large tourism base due in part to its role in the 2004 Olympic Games. To support the city's needs, the site includes a large calendar of city events, a comprehensive map-based index of city services and interactive tools that allow citizens to access city resources. The site builds on Drupal's multilingual capabilities to provide information in both Greek and English.

MySQL, the open source database product that puts the "M" in LAMP, was created by MySQL AB, a company founded in 1995 in Sweden. In 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion.

The story of MySQL AB is pretty amazing, so I unleashed my "inner academic", did some research and compiled a timeline of MySQL AB's history. This timeline is assembled based on different resources online, such as MySQL press releases (example 1) and interviews with MySQL AB executives (example 2, example 3), etc.

Things to add? Let me know in the comments and I'll update the post.

• MySQL AB founded by Michael Widenius (Monty), David Axmark and Allan Larsson in Sweden.

• MySQL goes Open Source and releases software under the terms of the GPL. Revenues dropped 80% as a result, and it took a year to make up for it.

• Mårten Mickos elected CEO at age 38. Mårten was the CEO of a number of Nordic companies before joining MySQL, and comes with a sales and marketing background.
• 2 million active installations.
• Raised series A with undisclosed amount from Scandinavian venture capitalists. Estimated to be around $1 to $2 million.

• MySQL launched US headquarters in addition to Swedish headquarters.
• 3 million active users.
• Ended the year with $6.5 million in revenue with 1,000 paying customers.

• Raised a $19.5 million series B from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.
• 4 million active installations and over 30,000 downloads per day.
• Ended the year with $12 million in revenue.

• With the main revenue coming from the OEM dual-licensing model, MySQL decides to move more into the enterprise market and to focus more on recurring revenue from end users rather than one-time licensing fees from their OEM partners.
• Ended the year with $20 million in revenue.

• MySQL launched the MySQL Network modeled after the RedHat Network. The MySQL Network is a subscription service targeted at end users that provides updates, alerts, notifications, and product-level support designed to make it easier for companies to manage hundreds of MySQL servers.
• MySQL 5 ships and includes many new features to go after enterprise users (e.g. stored procedures, triggers, views, cursors, distributed transactions, federated storage engines, etc.)
• Oracle buys Innobase, the 4-person Finnish company behind MySQL's InnoDB storage backend.
• Ended the year with $34 million in revenue based on 3400 customers.

• Mårten Mickos confirms that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Oracle' CEO Larry Ellison commented: "We've spoken to them, in fact we've spoken to almost everyone. Are we interested? It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between $30 million and $40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is $15 billion."
• Oracle buys Sleepycat, the company that provides MySQL with the Berkeley DB transactional storage engine.
• Mårten Mickos announces that they are making MySQL ready for an IPO in 2008 on an projected $100 million in revenues.
• 8 million active installations.
• MySQL has 320 employees in 25 countries, 70 percent of whom work from home.
• Raised a $18 million Series C based on a rumored valuation north of $300 million.
• MySQL is estimated to have a 33% market share measured in install base and 0.2% market share measured in revenue (the database market was a $15 billion market in 2006).
• Ended the year with $50 million in revenue.

• Ended the year with $75 million in revenue.

• Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for approximately $1 billion.
• Michael Widenius (Monty) and David Axmark, two of MySQL AB's co-founders, begin to criticize Sun publicly and leave Sun shortly after.

• Mårten Mickos leaves Sun and becomes entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Sun has now lost the business and spiritual leaders that turned MySQL into a success.
• Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion.

Every other week or so, someone asks me the following question: How are Mollom CAPTCHAs better than those created by CAPTCHA module?. This is an important question, and understanding it is central to understanding our philosophy with Mollom.

First, when using Mollom in "text analysis" mode, a CAPTCHA is only displayed when Mollom is uncertain about whether a message could be spam. Mollom analyzes the text of comments and combines that analysis with what it knows about the internal reputation of the posters, to determine whether a message is "spammy". Non-spam submissions are accepted without a CAPTCHA, and posts that are certainly spam are rejected automatically. By only presenting a CAPTCHA when necessary, we avoid penalizing normal (non-spamming) users with CAPTCHA challenges. The CAPTCHA module is different in that it does not perform text analysis and therefore must always display a CAPTCHA challenge.

Second, the Mollom module for Drupal has a "CAPTCHA only" mode, which is useful when clients would prefer not to use text analysis, or for when the forms have almost no text to analyze (like Drupal's user registration form). In "CAPTCHA only" mode, the user experience of the Mollom module is very similar to that of the CAPTCHA module -- the user is always prompted to complete a CAPTCHA in order to perform a certain operation. The similarity ends here, however. While the user experience is the same, the actual CAPTCHA generation is not. Mollom CAPTCHAs are "intelligent", in the sense that Mollom tracks the behavior and reputation of IP addresses from all sites using Mollom. A known spammer, operating from a known IP with a poor reputation, won't be able to complete a Mollom CAPTCHA no matter how hard he tries. And, as more users install Mollom, its performance increases as it learns from the additional data. A stand-alone module like CAPTCHA doesn't learn from user behavior, as it simply generates CAPTCHAs without regard to their context and delivery.

This second difference between the Mollom and other CAPTCHA modules is, in fact, huge. When we analyze our server logs, we see that 20% of all correctly completed CAPTCHAs are submitted by known spammers. Spammers don't seem to solve CAPTCHAs algorithmically; instead, they persuade humans to solve CAPTCHAs for them by using botnet infected machines. Two blog posts that detail this process are How to defeat Koobface and Breaking Koobface's CAPTCHA solving process. As spammers evolve and their arsenal of tools become increasingly powerful, CAPTCHA solutions must keep up to remain effective. We believe Mollom's "intelligent CAPTCHA" processing represents a significant benefit from traditional CAPTCHA generation and is one way we'll continue to stay a step ahead in our goal to eliminate posting spam.

Different protection modes in the Drupal module for Mollom.

In a couple of weeks, I'll participate in a panel discussion on The Future of Open Source in Business. In preparation for that discussion, I figured I'd write down my current thoughts and solicit some feedback. I'll talk about two important trends relevant for the future of Open Source, but there are certainly more.

First, Open Source adoption in the enterprise is trending at an incredible rate -- Drupal adoption has grown a lot in 2009 but we saw by far the biggest relative growth in the enterprise. Fueling this movement is the notion that Open Source options present an innovative, economically friendly and more secure alternative to their costly proprietary counterparts. Second, Cloud Computing is a transformational movement in that it enables continual innovation and updating - not to mention a highly expandable infrastructure that will reduce the burden on your IT team.

Two years ago, when starting Acquia, we predicted this would happen so it is no surprise that Acquia's strategy is closely aligned with those two trends: Drupal Gardens, Acquia Hosting and Acquia Search are all built on Open Source tools and delivered as Software as a Service in the cloud. Combining Open Source tools and Cloud Computing makes for the perfect storm for success. It provides real value to end-users and it enables companies to monetize Open Source. It creates a win-win situation.

At the same time, I think we have an opportunity to go beyond that, and to redefine the Software as a Service model based on Open Source values, almost exactly like we started doing 10+ years ago with off-the-shelf software. Almost all Software as a Service providers employ a proprietary model -- they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don't allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies.

There is room for Open Source companies to disrupt this model, and it is probably not something that can be done without the help of Open Source companies. Drupal Gardens provides a good example of this model.

For example, users of Drupal Gardens can help improve Drupal Gardens, simply by contributing to Drupal. By staying close to the Open Source project, everyone can help shape the service. Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Drupal Gardens site -- the code, the theme and data -- and move of the platform to any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Drupal Gardens without locking them in.

It is Software as a Service done right -- it will offer enterprises a much more secure and low-cost alternative to proprietary counterparts and provides many Open Source projects the opportunity to have a much bigger reach. It creates a triple win scenario -- for the customer, for the Open Source project and the Open Source company -- in a way that wasn't really apparent five years ago. At least not to me.

Have you taken the 2010 Future of Open Source Survey yet? If not, please take a few moments to share your thoughts on where you think Open Source is headed.

Drupal 7 is moving along nicely, and is becoming increasingly stable. We just released a second alpha release, fixing a number of critical bugs, following our initial alpha release in January. Alpha releases are to give Drupalistas something to download and test, so they can report and help fix bugs.

When will we switch to betas? We will switch to betas when the upgrade path from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is working. Once we hit beta, we will become increasingly strict about accepting any more changes and we'll also commit to making HEAD to HEAD upgrades work.

Finally, we'll start rolling release candidates once the number of critical bugs is zero (or close to zero). To help us focus on critical bugs, we're working on adding a 'major' severity level to our ticketing system, making the options 'critical', 'major', 'normal' and 'minor'. 'Major' bugs would be really bad, but not necessarily block a release. For example, bugs that don't prevent Drupal from working, or that only affect a fraction of the Drupal population would be prioritized for fixing in follow-up releases. Critical bugs are those that badly break Drupal, or that are a major regression compared to Drupal 6.

Where are we right now? There are currently about 150 remaining bugs that need to be fixed. These bugs are real, and not always trivial to fix because a lot of background and domain expertise can be required. As a result, some bug reports seemingly depend on one or two people to fix them. Therefore, it is very important that we encourage and mentor new people to help fix some of these difficult bugs. I'd like to ask all sub-system maintainers to watch their sub-system's issue queues closely (like Moshe did recently), and to provide the leadership to help us make progress. If we do and we work hard, I think we can still release Drupal 7 in Q2. If not, I'm worried that Drupal 7 might not be released until Q3.

In other words, let's all try to put some extra time and effort into fixing the remaining bugs, and let's start to be laser-focused on the critical ones. It would make for quite a party if we could roll a first release candidate in time for DrupalCon San Francisco on April 19th. I would have to sing on stage from happiness, or something. Thanks!

Drupal goes to Mars, or rather, Drupal helps us go to Mars ... eventually. NASA's Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University is doing a lot of advanced work with Drupal. They have a number of Drupal sites, each with a different purpose, but all used to share information about Mars as discovered by ASU's THEMIS camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. All of the sites have some interesting integrations with other software, including LDAP, legacy authentication systems, Java Servlet based web services, Flash, Java desktop clients, map servers or Google Earth.

Their main portal, http://themis.asu.edu, features news, images and articles about THEMIS and the Odyssey mission. Another Drupal site, http://viewer.mars.asu.edu offers a search portal for millions of images and data from eight instruments on Mars orbiters. It uses Drupal and jQuery as the interface to a Java Servlet backend database and integrates "Deep Zoom" style image viewers.

Ever wanted to help explore Mars? No problem, http://suggest.mars.asu.edu is for you. On this Drupal site you can suggest places on Mars for scientists to photograph with the THEMIS camera aboard Mars Odyssey. The site shows you where Odyssey will be orbiting in the next week, and it integrates with Google Earth's desktop application and the Google Earth browser plugin to let you zoom around mars and choose a place to suggest. After it made the suggested photographs, it will send you an e-mail with a link, where you might be the first human to see that particular spot on mars in such detail. If that makes your inner geek jump up and down, make sure to read their technical write-up. Cool stuff!

The official website for the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority is using Drupal. Check out http://london.gov.uk because it is a great site! Every major city deserves such a site. ;)

Like last year, I'll be attending the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) next month, on March 17-18 in San Francisco. Also like last year, I will participate in a panel discussion led by Michael Skok (Partner at North Bridge, Acquia Board Member and personal friend). This year, I'll be in a panel with Larry Augustin (CEO of SugarCRM, VA Linux, SourceForge), Jim Whitehurst (CEO of RedHat) and Tim Yeaton (CEO of Black Duck Software) to discuss the future of Open Source businesses. The panel discussion will draw on the 2010 Future of Open Source survey so make sure to weigh in and provide your perspective on a number of important Open Source business questions. Take the Future of Open Source Survey 2010. As a reference, here are the 2009 and 2008 results.

We've also built a Drupal Gardens site to promote the survey, share articles on the Future of Open Source and facilitate ongoing discussion on the topic: http://futureofopensource.drupalgardens.com. There is also a Future of Open Source Survey twitter account that you can follow for updates.

OSBC 2009 panel discussion. From left to right: me, Ron Hovsepian (President and CEO of Novell), John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla), Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL). For more information about OSBC 2009, read my wrap-up blog post.

When I was at Le Figaro's headquarters last week, I ran into an old Linotype machine that was showcased in their lobby.

The Linotype is a "line casting" machine used in printing. It was invented in the late 1800's and revolutionized the newspaper publishing industry, much like the internet and content management systems are revolutionizing the publishing industry today. Its working parts are so meticulous, that the machine was invented and built by watchmakers. Major newspaper publishers retired Linotype machines during the 1970s and 1980s. For more information about the Linotype machine, see the Linotype's Wikipedia page.

When confronted with the Linotype in Le Figaro's lobby, I felt a sudden sense of admiration and respect for how it looked, and for how it has contributed to both my personal and professional life. It is well known that geeks can get a bit emotional about machines, I guess ...

The Kofi Annan Foundation is using Drupal. Kofi Annan was the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In 2001 Kofi Annan and the United Nations were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Since leaving the United Nations, the Kofi Annan Foundation supports Kofi Annan in his current work to press for better policies to meet the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable in the world.

Le Figaro, the oldest and second-largest national newspaper in France, started using Drupal for its social features on http://www.lefigaro.fr. It is still using its old web content management system to serve its main content, but all of the social features such as comments on articles are now provided by Drupal.

I met the engineering team, including Le Figaro's Chief Technology Officer René Wallendorf, for lunch when I was in Paris last week, and they were very happy with Drupal. The integration project was delivered on time, within budget and was considerably cheaper than the alternative solutions they had investigated. All things combined, this should be a big win for Drupal, especially in France. Vraiment très cool!

Some of Le Figaro's print publications. Le Figaro is also the official translator of The New York Times, pictured in the middle of the photo.

Left: Chief Technology Office of Le Figaro. Right: the community manager of Le Figaro.

In this post we show one way spanners operate, using organizations like IBM to spam others. We show how spammers abuse an IBM wiki to create an online pharmacy via IBM.com. Once a page like this is in place, the spammers try to insert links to it in blog comments and community websites across the web to drive traffic to it, and to improve their search engine ranking.

While IBM is not using Mollom (maybe they should?), many of the targeted blogs and community websites are, which is how we discovered this problem. Watch the video below for more details. This problem is not specific to IBM. We found hundreds of similar spam pages on Google Sites, Yahoo, Amazon.com, Wordpress.com, Ning, Tripod.com, Xanga.com and more.

I recorded this video last week, and notified IBM about the existence of these spam pages several days ago. We're happy to help IBM fix this problem.

On Saturday, April 17th, before DrupalCon San Francisco, I'm helping to organize the very first Drupal core developer summit. The goal of the Drupal core developer summit is to talk about ways we can improve Drupal core, and the core development processes, all while having a good time socializing with fellow core developers.

To make it lively and fun, we'll do a series of 10 minute lightning talks. In between the lightning talks, we'll have a number of meatier discussions or breakout sessions. The lightning talks will be divided in two categories: the first 8 lightning talks will take the format: "Why X sucks and how to improve it" where X can be anything in Drupal core; the last 8 lightning talks will take the format "Wouldn't it be awesome if ...". The idea behind the lightning talks is to educate core contributors about problems that need to be fixed, to present foundations for solutions, and to bootstrap collaboration.

The event is open to all, but ... in order to attend, you must be prepared to do a 10 minute lightning talk. To secure a ticket to the Drupal core developer summit, you have to submit a 4 slide presentation by March 17th, 2010.

We expect one background slide to provide context or to talk about the history of the problem, one slide with a clear problem statement, and a couple of slides to propose a solution. You can focus on big things (i.e. How session management can be made more scalable) or smaller things (i.e. Why drupal_get_schema() is slow and how to make it faster). Everyone who submitted slides ahead of time will be invited to attend. All slides will be shared publicly, but not everyone will be invited to present as we'll only have time for 16 lightning talks. Some talks will be hand-picked because they are important or particularly intriguing, other talks will be randomly selected the day of the event.

This should be a lot of fun!

It's been a year since our last significant changes to the Mollom module for Drupal, so we're excited to announce a major update. The most exciting new features in the new Mollom 1.11 release include:

• Enables use of Mollom for any form; with Webform module integration almost completed
• Includes an embedded audio CAPTCHA player that works on all browsers
• Adds optional blacklist functionality to block spammers by text patterns and URLs
• Adds an optional link to Mollom's privacy policy from forms protected via textual analysis
• Adds support for serving CAPTCHAs over SSL (for Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium customers only)
• Makes Mollom compatible with Pressflow
• Integrates with CCK to change the position of the CAPTCHA field
• Provides many more unit tests for continuous integration testing
• Improves the APIs to enable module developers to better integrate with the Mollom module
• Implements various usability improvements (e.g., better permission names and better error messages)
• Updates several of the translations

We spent several months working on this release, and it marks our biggest upgrade to date. Upgrading requires some database updates, so remember to run update.php.

Thanks to Daniel F. Kudwien (sun), Dave Reid and Keith Smith for their contributions to the 1.11 release.

The World Bank has many websites and a varied online presence and some are running Drupal. Their climate change site, http://beta.worldbank.org, which launched a few months ago uses Drupal. The site serves as a beta for the new content strategy the Bank would like for the future: an integrated model of publishing around shared topics, countries, and products to achieve greater audience reach and satisfaction. This site takes a single topic: "climate change", and aggregates World Bank content from a variety of sources in an automated fashion.

The World Bank's mission is to reduce global poverty and improve living standards. It serves as a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. Global climate change is a major priority for The World Bank as developing countries will be particularly vulnerable to adverse conditions caused by it.

The World Bank has reams of information regarding climate change but it was separated by organizational groups and internal systems and it was nearly impossible for a visitor to find and combine these different sources. To counter this problem, The World Bank engaged Phase2 Technology to launch a pilot site that demonstrates the potential success of a topic-based site with large amounts of data. In addition to great tools for data integration and visualization, the site has support for low end mobile devices and multimedia integration.

It's very satisfying to know that Drupal is powering such an important site which is poised to help better the plight of developing countries. Experts anticipate climate change will hit the third world the hardest. This site is one of the more prominent Drupal sites The World Bank currently has, but it is a great example of how to effectively showcase data on important issues. I hope they will consider using Drupal for future projects.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that Mollom is a continual work in progress. By studying how people use Mollom, by listening to feature requests, and by examining the plugins that our software partners and others have made available, we've introduced new ways to interact with Mollom.

First, we're announcing support for blacklisting. We introduced two new methods: one based on detecting the presence of user-specified URLs, and another that detects specific phrases or keywords. In both cases, Mollom maintains custom, site-specific URL and text blacklists, and knows to search for the presence of these links or phrases when analyzing text for your site. We're adding support for this API to the next version of the Mollom module for Drupal.

Second, we've implemented a new method that detects the language of any given text. We currently support detection of about 75 languages and this new functionality allows our end-users to take action based on posting language. It could be used to help segment web postings into different forums by language, or to help moderate the languages spoken on your site, for instance. The language detection API is used by some of our customers, but probably won't make it into the next version of the Mollom module for Drupal.

We've got other new features that we're working on as well, and will introduce them as they're ready. In the meantime, I'm excited to see what our plugin developers do with this new level of control.