Linux Solutions

A number of Sun MySQL workers have been told they cannot enter the border of Australia because the Oz government fears that they want to steal local business.

The employees were due to attend a Linux conference in Hobart, Tasmania but have been denied short stay business visas.

Kaj Arno, vice president of the “database community” at Sun, appeared to be completely un-shocked as he blogged about the news, claiming that borders are one of the biggest hindrances to open source development.

“Open Source is global in nature. You can develop a database in, say, Finland or Sweden, and become known in, say, Ukraine or the United States. This would imply that Open Source knows no borders,” Arno mused. “In practice, borders hamper Open Source work a lot.”

He went on to describe how Russian and Ukranian based MySQLers have struggles to obtain visas for meetings in America and the European Union. And as a Finnish-born bloke he has also suffered the “hassle” of getting into Russia, and was once stopped from entering India – but he never thought Australia would shut the door on him.

He mentions that the country’s decision to barr the workers will “adversely affect” MySQL’s presence at the linux.conf.au at the end of January.

In other barely related, but interesting nonetheless news, Red Hat and Novell – the Linux distributors – have had a bit of a reshuffle in their respective board rooms.

As the try to battle the bite of the worlds economic meltdown Red Hat has brought in Greg Symon as vice president and general manager of its North American sales division – the biggest slice of the company’s cake.

Symon, who spent 22 years at Intel, will report directly to Red Hat’s president of global sales, services and marketing, Alex Pinchev.

Symon takes over the role from Ed Bovajian who worked at the company until June last year. He moved to EnterpriseDB as its president and CEO.

Novell have made a change too, promoting Javier Colado to president of EMEA operations. Novell have replaced Volker Smid, who has gone on to “pursue other interests”.

Colado has been at Novell since 2006 and has been an executive at McAfee and Lucent Technologies. Colado’s responsibilities for managing Novell’s channel partner relationships will be given to Jhon Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer for Novell.