Are you close to Munich? Are you available next Friday afternoon? Would you like to meet some MySQLers? And some Sun employees, whom we hope to lure from Sun’s German headquarters in Heimstetten?

Then, come to the Hilton where many of the Bundesliga football clubs stay when playing against FC Bayern München: Munich Hilton am Tucherpark, close to Englischer Garten.

I suggest you to be there at about 14:30. We theoretically start at 14, but two Sun execs and I are arriving late from Hamburg that same afternoon. We expect to be there by 14:45.

What will we discuss?

Well, the setup is the same as for many other meetups, between MySQLers, customers, community, and Sun employees. We’ll tell you that we’re continuing our support of all popular operating systems, and all popular development environments — just like we’ve stressed elsewhere. We’ll share our thinking on what will change and what will stay the same, and on why Sun’s acquisition made sense for MySQL, for Sun, and — most importantly — for community. Most of all, though, we plan on discussing with you, answering your questions, and learning from your experiences in working with MySQL (the product, the company, the community).

You can drop by unannounced. However, we’d like to know how much drinks and snacks to ask Hilton to prepare. And that’s why I’d like you to email Jean-Jérôme Schmidt (jjschmidt at mysql.com) and tell him you think you’ll attend. This is especially if you’re from MySQL or from Sun. Remember, we hope to lure many Sun employees to quit early on Friday afternoon and attend the meetup with MySQL community members and MySQL GmbH employees!

Since well before I joined MySQL in 2001, I have had contact with now-members of the four-headed management team of Germany’s top-notch PHP experts and solution providers Mayflower GmbH.

Mayflowers and MySQLers frequently pop into each other at PHP conferences and other Open Source events, and meet informally under various circumstances ranging from Christmas parties to Biergarten discussions. It’s always interesting to exchange thoughts on virtual companies, Open Source, business models, IRC, scrum, and finding developers (some of which have worked for both MySQL and Mayflower, incidentally). And by sheer coincidence, Mayflower’s Munich headquarters is now about 150 metres from where I live, in the same street that I look out at from my home office (Mannhardtstr.). This time, they copied us, though — I arrived first and they became neighbours several months later …

So you can imagine that I was happy last Friday when I had asked Johann-Peter Hartmann to come to celebrate life under the Sun “with a colleague or two”, and he brought in all three other members of the Mayflower leadership quadruplet: Albrecht Günther, Björn Schotte and Gregor Streng. We had miso soup and sashimi, with hot sake and green tea, at Jin’s Heaven Takumi another 200 metres towards Isartor. Delicious food, good drinks (they wondered I hadn’t brought along salmiak vodka) and entertaining discussions.

Looking forward to more of the same with Mayflower over the years to come!

Next Thursday 6 March 2008 at 17:00-18:00 CET, there will be a panel on “The Commercialisation of Open Source” at the Future Talk Booth in Hall 9 (Stand A30) of the CeBIT fair in Hannover, Germany. One of the purposes of the panel is to publish the Open Source Yearbook 2008, the fifth in a series of yearbooks produced by a team around Professor Lutterbeck of the Technical University of Berlin.

I’ll be one of the panelists, representing MySQL AB. Other panelists are from OpenOffice.org, Citrix, the Zope user group, and the Free Software Foundation.

For the book, I wrote a chapter called “Architecture of Participation: Taking part in Open Source at MySQL“. It describes our attempts at MySQL at increasing the level of participation by our community in the development of MySQL, which has traditionally been very centralistic in its development model.

If you read German and want to have some fun at the cost of other business models than that of MySQL AB, I recommend you to read the comment “Windows Closed Source Yearbook appears at CeBIT” on heise closed.

Links (all in German):

• The Open Source Yearbook home page: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/
• Blog note on the CeBIT panel: http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/blog/207
• Newsticker item at heise online: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/103860/from/rss09
• Fun comment on Closed Source Yearbook: http://www.heise.de/ix/news/foren/S-Windows-Closed-Source-Jahrbuch-2008-erscheint-zur-CeBIT/forum-132986/msg-14504436/read/
• My article “Architecture of Participation: Teilnehmende Open Source bei MySQL“: http://www.heise.de/open/The-Architecture-of-Participation-Teilnehmende-Open-Source-bei-MySQL–/artikel/104253

The World Tour starts on IRC next week!

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed 5 March 2008: Ian Murdock, 7am PT/16 CET. Ian is the ian of Debian and Chief OS Platform Strategist at Sun Microsystems. Wikipedia puts it like this:
  

  Since joining Sun, he has led Project Indiana, which he describes as “taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris,” making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system.

• Thu 6 March 2008: Simon Phipps 6am PT/15CET. Simon is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems. Sun’s Executive Bio says:
  

  [Simon is] co-ordinating Sun’s extensive participation in free and open source software communities, promoting consistency and best practice and actively participating in the global conversation they express. Prior to this appointment he co-founded Sun’s pioneering staff weblog facility at blogs.sun.com. Simon joined Sun in mid-2000.

• UPDATED: Wed 12 March 2008: Bob Brewin 9am PT / 18 CET. Bob is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer for Software at Sun Microsystems. Sun’s Executive Bio says:
  

  His responsibilities include technical leadership for developer products and application platforms, including the Java platform, mobility, enterprise software and business integration products. Within this role, some of his key areas of responsibility include Sun’s expanding role in the development of Web 2.0 technologies, improving the developer experience, and alignment and integration of our platforms, technologies and tools.

I’ll also be there, and so will several other MySQLers.

The purpose is for us to come to where the MySQL users are, online, for an informal chat. We’ll try our best to answer your questions!

Instructions:

1. Start your favourite IRC client. In my case, that’s X-Chat on my Mac.
2. Connect to the irc.freenode.net server.
3. /join #mysql. That’s the channel we’ll be in. At least I will also be on #mysql-dev (for those who hack on MySQL Server itself, as opposed to use MySQL in their own apps) and #mysql.de (in German).

Chat to you on Wednesday and Thursday!