Well, the rumors (that also made it into blogosphere, including Toby's post) obviously could not be ignored by Zend any longer. Therefore, the German division of Zend just sent out an email to a couple of people officially stating that Zend is currently not negotiating a sale to Oracle.

I suppose only time will tell on the deal, but it seems for now that the sale is not going to happen (and that there never was a sale in talks at all).

April 1st is still more than a month away and at least one rumour about Oracle's upcoming purchases is true: today the software giant annnounced their acquisition of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB (and various other products).

One interesting point is that Berkeley DB was already seeing competition from SQLite (which is an excellent, fast and free (as in beer and freedom) RDBMS). I wonder how much the acquisition is going to drive adoption of SQLite?

Additionally, Oracle now owns both of MySQL's transactional storage engines, which gains them another measure of control over the Swedish upstart.

It looks like MySQL is digging in though - they have just procured another 18.5 million dollars of investment (primarily from larger companies with a vested interest in MySQL's success). I bet that the money goes towards building a transactional database engine that they hold complete copyright on.

See also:

• http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006297.html
• http://laurat.blogs.com/random_ramblings/2006/02/oracle_buys_sle.html

I am going to present a talk and a workshop at the Free Software & Open Source Days 2006 in Istanbul/Turkey. Currently, the program is only available in Turkish, so I'll tell you a bit more about my presentations here in English. BTW: They will also be presented in English, because I speak no Turkish:

Talk: eZ publish, the Open Source Enterprise CMS

Feb 25, Saturday, 14:00-15:00

eZ publish is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System based on PHP. It is being used by thousands of customers around the world, installed over 150.000 and with 1,5 million downloads. This talk provides an overview of the eZ publish functionality. You will also get first-hand information on new features and the roadmap ahead.

Workshop: Technical Introduction to eZ publish

Feb 25, Saturday, 15:00-19:00

In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Open Source Enterprise Content Management System eZ publish to set-up a typical small business site where you need to customize the CMS system for the customer. This site will include e-commerce functionality, PDF exports, a customized content structure, RSS feeds to publish news and a WebDAV interface for simpler document management.

Do you know an interesting topic? eZ systems is always looking for authors who would like to write an article for us on eZ-related topics. We welcome technical as well as non-technical content. You could write for an audience of developers or sales-oriented persons - no matter what: any topic from within the eZ ecosystem is of interest to us.

This article will guide you through the authoring process: http://ez.no/community/articles/writing_articles_for_ez_no

OSCON is my favorite conference of the year. There's nothing else that provides such a wide range of interesting speakers and topics. I love learning about PHP, but I find it even more fascinating to see what the Perl and Python and Ruby guys are hacking on, or pick up JavaScript and AJAX tips, or heckle the Java programmers.

It's the first year for NYPHPCon, but Hans and the whole NYPHP crew are great guys, so I know they'll put on a teriffic show. When I still lived in NYC, I attended NYPHP user group meetings on a semi-regular basis, and they were even kind enough to let me present once or twice.

He also mentions the talks that he'll be presenting - more about web services in PHP, a "secrects of ext/soap", and a look at the "magical methods" in PHP5...