There will be a book signing opportunity at the MySQL User Conference, more precisely at the Expo Hall Community Reception on Wednesday evening. You will be able to meet and talk to authors of great MySQL related books. ...and myself.

Some more recent readers of this blog perhaps never realized that it is a spin-off of a book I wrote years ago. I still write occasionally about open source business models and community stuff, but perhaps that is drowned by increasing amount of hard core database topics.

Reader Andrew Moore - who happens to be my collague at Nokia and a great DBA - has submitted a Kindle version of the book. I've now added it to the download page.

Thanks Andrew!

I was recently pointed to a startup called Lastwear, who has gotten their seed funding via Kickstarter.com (also a new acquaintance to me). With an eye to the topic of this blog and namesake book I wrote some years ago, this is some great news in so many ways.

Reader Tomi Nousiainen sent me this sunny and relaxed greeting for Midsummer, which he allowed me to share with all of you.

Sun has been saying it for more than a year now, but we wanted action, not words. Then they open sourced Solaris, but we were not interested in that, we only wanted Java. Then last week it happened...

I'm glad that somebody has already asked how he could contribute to the collaborative version of Open Life. We came to the conclusion that the collaborative edition will be a completely new book, written in collaboration by all of us who want to be a part of it. The new book will be called "Open Life 2.0" as a working title. The "old book" will be referred to as "Open Life 1.0"

If you've had a look at the fine print you'll already know, the book cover was made using Creative Commons licensed images from the Internet. It is in itself supposed to be a testimony of how you can publish books and other things as part of an Open Source continuum. I wanted to make a nice cover image and I wanted to find and use only images licensed under suitably licensed pictures. Even if I could have used some clipart too, in this case I did not want to do that out of pure principle. I wanted everything in the book to be Open Source.

I'm back home, after flying around Europe last week and ending up in Vaasa on Friday to attend the Open Source seminar arranged by the Vaasa Applied Sciences University and their EU funded Business in Open Source program.