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.

I have not written a MySQL book, however before I became active on the MySQL scene I did write a book Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source. It's a book about open source community ethichs and business models, and non-software incarnations of open source such as Wikipedia. MySQL is of course in it, because the dual licensing business model is covered. It was originally published in Finnish, and a certain Mårten Mickos was one of its first readers too - his feedback was my first contact with him.

I later translated the book to English, but it still has a little Finnish bias to it, for instance emphasising Linux and Linus Torvalds who was a celebrity in Finland already then (yes, to the general public. He would get invited to the independence day ball at the president's castle and such.) Later on it has always disturbed me a little that when writing the book I somehow completely missed that MySQL is a Finnish born piece of software. Since the company was registered in Sweden, I somehow thought Monty and everyone else were also Swedish, I had completely missed they in fact had studied in the same university as I did at the time of writing the book, and Monty lived an hours drive from me. (Nowadays we live even closer.)

I will bring some books with me if you want to by one that I can sign. But I'm a little limited by how many books I can pack on my flight, so if you really want your own copy, you can also buy one now from lulu.com (or Amazon) and bring it with you.

The book is of course available online as open source itself, so if you just want to download the PDF then I can sign your iPad or Kindle or something...

And please come by so we can discuss philosophy, ethics, business models, sharing and what not.