Lenz Grimmer's blog

There were free copies of the Linux Journal handed out to attendees outside in the hallways here at CommunityOne and I noticed that they just published this year's Readers' Choice Awards - MySQL was voted as the favourite database by 62.7% of their readers!

MySQL is not only the world's most popular open-source database, it's your favorite as well. Although PostreSGL,
SQLite, Firebird and others registered votes, the competition was not fierce. It doesn't hurt that MySQL runs on more than
20 different platforms.

Thanks a lot to the readers of LinuxJournal, we really appreciate the support!

I took this picture at Hamburg Airport while waiting for Kaj to arrive for our meeting last week. I was browsing through the magazines in a news shop in the arrival area and was pretty impressed about the amount of available magazines about Linux and Open Source Software. It amazes me how they all manage to produce enough content to fill a magazine on a frequent basis. I take this as a very positive sign - Linux has become a mainstream OS. I wonder how many people consider switching to Linux instead of going with MS Vista - the numerous CDs/DVDs that are included in these magazines significantly reduce the acceptance threshold for new users. Live CDs make it easy to give Linux a try without having to touch the installed operating system. The support and automatic detection and configuration of hardware in Linux has become much better nowadays, too. Granted, there is still a lot of room for improvement (especially when it comes to video card and WLAN chipset support, it seems) - but Linux distributions have reached a level of maturity that make them a viable alternative to Mac OS X or MS Vista for the most common use cases. And all the required applications are already included out of the box and are free (as in beer)! So what is missing to world domination?