Lenz Grimmer's blog

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 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!