Arjen already
mentioned this in December, but let me remind you anway: we would like to showcase some Open Source projects that use or support MySQL in the MySQL Community Pavilion at our
MySQL User Conference 2006 in Santa Clara, California.
So if you are a member of a project that utilizes MySQL in a cool way, here is your chance to show off!
Repeating Arjen's words here: Primarily, we would like to hear from projects which are not backed/run by a company, because companies of course already have the opportunity to become a sponsor/exhibitor.
Also, note that the conference is in Santa Clara, California - while we can provide space, we are unable to fund everybody's travel/accomodation costs. So if you are overseas and unable to make it, perhaps someone else more local who also works on the project can come...
Anyway, send message to community at our main domain name, subject "MySQL UC2006 Community Pavilion" telling us the name of your project, a description of the project, website URL, other relevant details, who is involved, and which people would actually be coming to the conference (and their email addresses). Someone from the community department (probably Colin) will collect all the info so we can plan from there.
Markus yesterday
mentioned that he started reading "
Producing Open Source Software" by Karl Fogel, a book that I plan to read some time, too. The table of content looks promising, he covers a wide range of aspects related to building up and running an OSS project.
In addition to Fogel's work, there also is another interesting book about this topic: Matthias Stürmers master thesis "Open Source Community Building". It takes a slightly more scientific approach and documents the results of actually interviewing the members of various OSS projects about their experiences. It has been around for a bit, Matt Asay wrote a nice review about it in September 2005. I just read the rewritten german summary Mattias created for the german Open Source Yearbook and found it an interesting read! If you are running or plan to found an Open Source Software project, you might want to consult these books for some good advice on how to avoid common pitfalls and how to attract and foster a community around your project.
I've had some discussion with the developers of the
Open-XChange Groupware server about using MySQL as a storage backend.
As it turned out, a long-standing bug report has just recently been picked up and the first patches have been posted.
The procedure on how to get OX working with MySQL is also described on a Wiki page and there is a discussion about this in their Forum. So if you're interested in testing Open-XChange with MySQL, give this a try and provide them with feedback! Thanks for your support.
I noticed that
twinkle has been under heavy developement since the last time I looked at it. To test it, I created an RPM for my local SUSE Linux 10.0 installation, which I have now placed into my
RPM download section.
Unfortunately it's still unusable for me, as the sound is very choppy when using my Bluetooth headset, no matter which sound setting I choose. Which is sad, as twinkle is one of the very few OSS SIP phones that has native ALSA sound support 
I finally finished my interview with
Kai Seidler, who is one of the people behind the very popular
XAMPP project.
You can now read the interview on the MySQL Developer Zone - I hope you will enjoy it!
A few days ago, the MySQL GUI team
announced new maintenance releases of both the
MySQL Administrator (1.1.6) and
Query Browser (1.1.18).
I now built RPMs for SUSE Linux 10.0/x86 - you can get them from my RPM Download section. Have fun!
