Larry has sailed off allright

I guess most people have noticed by now that Larry stopped blogging.

If we are to believe him, it's due to

some complications with my lawyers and the public relations department

Hah! Like anybody would buy that! I mean, seriously, how reasonable does it sound to you that the tenth richest man (ok, eleventh) in the United States that practically owns the largest (ok, second largest) software company on earth would have to care about lawyers and public relations departments?!!

No my friends, the real story is a little bit different. Normally, I wouldn't tell a secret, but in this case, my Nordic sense of justice compels me to finally step forward and explain what's up with Larry.

Well, its not a secret that Larry is deeply disturbed by the success of open source. Of course, he can't say it out loud, but deep down he's scared because he knows he can't win this race in the long run. Most of the time, he can find some distraction by buying a new company, but sometimes, it gets the better of him, and then he calls me up,threathening to pull the plug on InnoDB or whatever.

Anyway, last week, Larry had one of his Angst fits again, and in an impulse, he came over to visit me at home. Well, he was all doped up on that Bonsai weed of his, and kept saying that we should give up making these crap database products and that we had no business subverting his users by intoxicating them with our free products. He even threatened to buy all our shares the minute we would go IPO, and at some point, he even said Oracle would fork MySQL.

I tell you, I really felt sorry for the old chap. I must suck pretty darn hard to be him: he's a dinosaur, and he's smart enough to realize that according to Darwin, he and Oracle are on their way out, and we're the one's kicking their ass in that direction.

So, I made a joke and offered him to settle this once and for all over a game of Finnish Chess. For those that don't know it, it's like ordinary chess except that we use little glasses of Vodka instead of wooden chess pieces. When you take your opponent's piece, you must drink the Vodka and sing a Finnish drinking song afterwards.

Larry must've been really hitting the bong too hard before he arrived at my place, because it took him less than a second to accept the challenge. I tried to tell him I was just joking, but he insisted and he called me a coward that was afraid to accept a real challenge.

Well my friends, there was just no reasoning with him: he just felt he had to play. What is a fellow to do? So I decided to make the most of it, and I told him that if he'd win, he could pull the plug on InnoDB, but that if I'd win, he'd had to take off from work and spend time to get to know our products. Then, I got my wife to fetch the Finlandia and the chessboard and I set it up and we played. Or at least, I did...I don't quite know how to call whatever the fuck Larry was doing. Let's just say that by the time he drank the 3rd Vodka he was looking very pale until his face suddenly went green and he threw up in the pool. Gross, I can tell you that.

Anyway, judging from the title and the picture on Larry's blog, he's kept his promise and went away, at least for now:

Those that are wondering how that has to do with MySQL, just look at this:

You must be stoned to not see the similarities.