So I guess the argument that Monty is putting forth is that MySQL's future depends on some company exploiting their ownership of the MySQL copyright. As in, he feels that MySQL future will fall apart if there isn't a company that makes its money by dual licensing MySQL under some proprietary license. Amazingly enough Stallman, chief hater of all things proprietary, agrees. Hell seems to have frozen over. I however humbly disagree. The MySQL community has already left the dual licensing model behind. Sun has never shipped the "best" MySQL version, the community has!

I am currently touring the US as part of the CodeWorks 09 conferences, where I am holding a 3 hours tutorial on database driven PHP development. So far my sessions have consistently been less attended than the talks on testing, OO and security that are running as well. So it goes. I guess the plus side for the attendees is that I can spend more time addressing their personal needs. My tutorial essentially is based on all my previous talks on database for which I have updated all the relevant slide sets. I have also added an introduction to PDO to get things started. Since all of that will never fit into 3 hours, I let the audience pick which talks they want to hear. Unfortunately so far the Doctrine ORM talk hasn't been picked, but I am getting better and better at holding the talk about the telephone directory application and I think the work I put into making this talk very much code based is really playing off. However the slide that seems to get the most "aha, that is really cool!" is the slide about optimistic locking.

Long ago I had a project where we needed to generate Word documents. We ended up using a fake X-Server running OpenOffice and some queuing mechanism to manage the fact that each OpenOffice instance could only handle one conversion job at a time. No fun, but it worked, does not scale amazingly obviously. Back then I of course also tried the KOffice converter which is easily run with little overhead via a CLI interface. Unfortunately it wasn't really up to the job in terms of Word compatibility.

I think I have mentioned Picok before on my blog. This is a system that lets users arrange and configure a number of portlets in order to be able to keep themselves up to date with what's going on in various web applications, similar to iGoogle and netvibes. The difference is of course that this system is entirely open source, so companies can install Picok in their intranet and give Picok direct access to all sorts of internal applications that they could not make available to iGoogle or netvibes. What makes this project all the more exciting is that this system was initially developed as a closed source application for the Raiffeisen bank in Switzerland. This was the first time for me, where I had the opportunity to be part of open sourcing such a large chunk of code.

A while back I blogged about helping out on the IT side of things or the un-informed.org project. A couple of people have replied and said they were interested in helping. In order to facilitate this, I have registered a project on google code and committed an initial version. Does not do much atm, but it features the current database schema concept and admin generator modules for the core entities. The step would be adding support for the various many to many relations. I hope I will have some time next week together with my co-worker Jordi to work on this. Check out the MySQL workbench schema file if you want to get a visual overview of the schema. That file should be fairly uptodate, though the definitive schema is defined the doctrine config file. Seems like there is even a MySQL workbench plugin to help in round-trip exporting/importing to this format. I have committed a little getting started file for anyone to wants to play with things, but for anyone experienced with Symfony, these should all be no brainers. I will be fairly liberal with giving people commit access. All that is required are a few sane patches or even just an email to the developers mailinglist with a detailed plan. There is also a #uninformed IRC channel on freenode now.