So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my …

This time of the year is usually a very busy one, as there are plenty of events and conferences to attend. Just take a look at our calendar of OSS events on the MySQL Forge to see what I mean! Here's a quick summary of the ones that I will attend and speak at until the end of this year:

On November 14-15, I'll attend the openSQL Camp in Portland (OR), USA. I missed the first one that took place in Charlottesville (VA) in 2008, but had a lot of fun organizing the European Edition earlier this year. The upcoming one will be more like an unconference again - the list of …

FOSDEM, the Free and Opensource Conference, will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday and Sunday (6th and 7th February, 2010). Now happening for the 10th time (congratulations!), it is one of the largest Open Source conferences in Europe, with a strong focus on developers. Sun/MySQL have been regular sponsors of and contributors to the event in the past and it is alway a great experience to be there. It's very rare to meet so many well-known and bright people from such a wide range of OSS projects.

They have now opened their Call for Participation - the organizers are seeking input on talks for the main conference tracks (deadline: 2009-11-22) , …

I wanted to provide an update on two things:

• Firstly, we have opened registration for InnoDB/XtraDB training in Los Angeles (Nov 18th).
• The second is that while I am in New York City for training (Oct 29th), I'll be giving a (free) talk at the MySQL Meetup group there (Oct 28th).

We love to speak at Meetup groups.  If you are an organizer feel free to let us know you are interested.  There's no guarantee that we can get schedules to align - but there are a number of Percona consultants that travel regularly.

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When I was younger and had lots of free time, I used to do video editing as a hobby. At that time I developed a rule that is true for many projects in general (it was also true for writing a book some years later). The rule is: When you think you are 90% done, you are only 50% done. With video-editing, this meant that when the video was more or less ready, you are still 50% away from the final goal of actually having a master copy on tape. The latter 50% would be spent on checking ending credits, watching through the video a couple of times, and in those time, rendering even simplest of effects. Using a Windows PC for video editing was in those times a shaky effort in itself, so even when mastering you had to sit there and watch through the whole tape to make sure there were no glitches.

Producing a MariaDB release has been a similar process. In our company meeting in August we were discussing "final steps" to produce a final Beta, …

With thousands of votes from the Zimbra community submitted to our product management database, and tens of thousands of hours logged by our engineering team, we are excited to officially announce Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0.

ZCS 6.0 is chock full of everything you asked for – because we made sure to check off the hit list of top requests. Some of the highlights include improved delegation and share management, increased productivity with three-pane email view, read receipts, remote wipe for mobile devices, and more. Our goal was also to make ZCS 6.0 the most flexible product yet, so we’ve also made it easier than ever to integrate 3rd party software. You can learn more about the new features in 6.0 later …

The linux.conf.au organisers have given all miniconfs an additional few weeks to spruik for more proposal submissions, huzzah!

So if you didn’t submit a proposal because you weren’t sure whether you’d be able to attend LCA2010, you now have until October 23 to convince your boss to send you and get your proposal in.

We'd like to fill the remaining session slots for MySQL University this year. Currently, there are 7 available slots in 2009, as can be seen here:

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University#Upcoming_Sessions

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live session time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a …

We'd like to fill the remaining session slots for MySQL University this year. Currently, there are 7 available slots in 2009, as can be seen here:

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University#Upcoming_Sessions

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live session time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a …

We'd like to fill the remaining session slots for MySQL University this year. Currently, there are 7 available slots in 2009, as can be seen here:

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University#Upcoming_Sessions

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live session time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset, start a Flash-enabled browser on either Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris, perform a …