I think this was a really interesting talk (because of all the contributors talking), and my only minor complaint was that it was up against some really good talks, and we didn’t get more people showing up to a talk that was very largely on the great Architecture of Participation. It also is interesting, as it goes to show that blogging can get you good rewards - most of everyone listed below, is a somewhat active blogger.

Martin Friebe - bug reports, patches
Why? Its just cool to contribute. Improves your knowledge. MySQL rewards you (named on the website, Enterprise, etc.).
How? Write code. Look for limitations. Just use MySQL.

Peter Zaitsev
Hates submitting bugs, but he needs a bug free MySQL for himself and customers. Therefore, report them, and scream loud!
Be an early adopter.
Regular hardware, for storage engine benchmarks. Patches, and other cool bits for …

Rod Johnson, author of the Spring framework, thinks open source is hot right now, but its a “bubble” ready to burst, according to an article titled What Makes An Open Source Project Successful? by Charles Babcock.

Most open source projects are supported by an army of volunteers who buy into the hype, but “capitalism will inevitably reassert itself” and developers will find they need to put more effort into steady jobs and private lives, leaving “open source zombies”–unsupported, unmaintained projects–he predicts.

This is true, with many a project, that hasn’t built a successful ecosystem. Keep in mind that with the gazillion text editors out there, not all stand the test of time, like Emacs and vim do. Capitalism is always going to win hands down, because money in its essence is important to survival. Go …

If anyone’s missed these excellent posts, I should really point them out.

• Chris DiBona tells us all that the moral is “Don’t Talk. Do. Don’t yammer. Launch. Release. Ship.” He’s right. Look at Microsoft talking about freeing their database, and wanting to release their beloved FoxPro code to the world, via CodePlex. Open source or not, they surely received a lot of positive karma last week. I don’t doubt their delivery aspect of things, but why talk about it before it happens - it means a lot more, doing it first, I’d think. With the possiblity of users expanding on this, maybe someone will work on a FoxPro to MySQL migration suite, that will be feature complete?
• Then Jeremy Zawodny tells us about how silly lame announcements are (really, they are) and we should …

Today I saw an interesting opinion posted on a mailing list. I’ll quote from the fedora-list post:

What folks say here cant be taken as Fedora toting anything. It is just some user opinions.

Some of those “user opinions” came from @redhat.com addresses, I actually don’t take any notice of @anydomain.blah posters, as they are just like I, posting a personal opinion, but when you post with @redhat.com, it is next best thing to an official comment.

And I’m wondering, is this true with all users? Does it matter if the post comes from @projectname.com or not? Are your opinions more valued if you’re employed by an open source company or the project in question?

I personally think its silly. If I make a post to mysql-list, with my @mysql.com address, I don’t expect that to be an official comment or a …

Many people ditch the rat race, to start anything from a one-man show right up to a medium-sized business these days. Globally, computers are being accepted everywhere, and its always been touted to help the business owner, improve business processes. From an open source perspective, how do we help the small business owner?

We start by studying what a small business owner requires:

• contact management - the business is in the network. Without contacts, there’s no exchange of services, and definitely no exchange of money.
• document management - businesses, no matter how large or small, end up with lots of documents. Moving to the e-society that we’re all aiming for, we should aim to manage documents well, right up to the backups of these crucial business data.
• accounting - taxation, income, expense, credit, debit, etc. are what make the business world work. You need to keep track of absolutely every …

There have been a lot of good talks at linux.conf.au so far that I’ve attended (and the one’s that I’ve missed due to scheduling difficulty, I’ve already started watching some videos of). There are lots of good reports about it on Planet Linux Australia even, but one of the most useful talks in my opinion was Jono Bacon’s talk on Herding Cats and Influencing People (watch the video when its uploaded), his thoughts on running a Community.

He talked about McDonalds, and how they package things, that are consumable by all (his point was that projects generally might even need bite size tasks, not get new contributors chucked into the deep end). Which got me thinking, a little more. McDonalds are in the real estate business, and they’re one of the major players in the fast food industry. I’ve always believed that there are too many Linux distributors in the market, …

BuilderAU released a recent article titled Developer skills outlook 2007: What’s hot for employers. There are a few things to take away from the article, that seem to apply not only to Australia, but elsewhere.

“The biggest issue that we see generally speaking is that the overall skill level of the developers is not where it needs to be,” said Jeff Pope, Asia Pacific vice president for Agitar Software.

The general idea of skills shortage. And its not that there’s a shortage of people in the market, the universities and TAFEs are churning them out by the dozen; its the lack of highly-skilled people. So where should aspiring IT people aim to spend their passion and hone their talents and ambitions in 2007?

It would seem that it’s in the Java and C# …

I don’t normally blog about events that I’m not going to be attending, but this seemed like too cool an offer to pass up. Proven Scaling will be offering one free ticket to MySQL Camp - thats free airfare and hotel, for the rather cool MySQL Camp un-conference.

From what I can tell, there’ll be a lot of rather cool people attending, its from the 10-12 November, at the Google campus (yes, you get to tour that place, and eat free food). And maybe if you’re super nice to Jeremy, he might be flexible with the flights, and you might also want to go to the Mountain View Ubuntu Summit. Having been to one of these before (Ubuntu Down …

Open source projects have a lot of documentation. Some professionally written, others community contributed. One thing that community contributed documentation has going for it is the passionate users that write localized content.

Localization of documentation is important. While we take it for granted that we all speak/read/write/understand the English language, a lot of people just starting out in non-English speaking areas might find it useful to read some localized content. Hook them based on their interests, and slowly they can be weaned off to other non-localized documentation, and might contribute to the localizing cause eventually, even.

Localization is also not easy. If you tried to localize the MySQL Documentation, …

I didn’t really know that the Open Source Developers’ Club actually existed, but I’m impressed with the previous topics. I shall aim to be at Ben Cornwell’s MySQL Normalization & Optimisation Techniques talk if time permits on the 14th of June.

Maybe as pre-requsite reading, it might be useful for folk to read mhillyer’s excellent introductory article on Database Normalization.