As I'm sure everyone has figured out by now, I've joined Rackspace where I will continue to work on Drizzle. I'm honestly thrilled with my new home, and there are a myriad of reasons for that. I think the one that I'm most excited about is that they are already the thing that all of the hype was about MySQL and RedHat and IBM wanting to become:
A Service Company
Rackspace doesn't want you to run Rackspace-Apache or RackspaceDB or EC-Rackspace. They want you to be able to run bog-standard Apache. And Linux. And MySQL. And PHP. And Drizzle. Then, Rackspace wants to be the best at providing you the service you need around those.
No ludicrous MySQL Enterprise "we'll sell you a license to a free product, and then we'll include bundled with that a subscription a piece of non-free monitoring software" upselling. Rackspace actually wants to provide you a valuable service, and they want to do such a good job at it that you will happily pay them to do it.
For developers, there is a wonderful upside to this: Rackspace doesn't want a special internal Rackspace-only version of anything. It has no value that way. They want the good software to be ubiquitous so that they can compete in the service arena. This means that they don't want assignment of copyright. This means they don't have crazy policies about what Free Software projects you can and cannot contribute to.
Rackspace goes one step further than "do no evil" ... they actually want you to try to improve the state of the art - which goes right to the core of why I'm involved with Free Software in the first place.
I truly believe that Free will always win over Restricted, that Open beats Closed and that Sharing will always improve the world before Hoarding. I've always contended that a company can be successful and make the world a better place and that the two are not mutually exclusive.
I am thrilled to now be a part of a company where I can do my best to prove it.
EAVB_QMDBEOGUYE
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