On June 10, 2006 I had gotten commit rights to the Drupal contrib repository and uploaded my new Drupal 4.7 module: Footnotes.

Actually, I had created this simple Drupal input filter for this site, openlife.cc, that I created when publising the English translation of my book Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source. I wanted to have a simple way to have footnotes within HTML, without having to number them and format them myself. (Same functionality that is common for any word processor.) Drupal's input filter framework made it very simple to add an fn tag. You can see it at work if you read the online version of my book from the openlife.cc web site.

I finally did the migration to Drupal 7 for the Footnotes module this weekend. See Release notes and project page for more information.

With this release I also announced my intent to hand over the module to a new maintainer. Since I'm now increasingly active with affairs in the MySQL community, both hacking as well as other community tasks, it is prudent to not let old projects dangle without attention but to formally hand them over to fresh minds.

I just released version 2.5 of my Drupal module: Footnotes. Over 1100 sites now run this module that I originally created as a simple tool to allow my own book to have footnotes in the text.

This version adds some bug fixes and a new feature: support for the Views API allows you to get the body part and the footnotes part separately. All of these were by AlexisWilke, thanks!

With the issue queue emptied (kind of) I'm now looking forward to releasing a Drupal 7 version of Footnotes soonish.

Some time ago I was asked to do a study of our most popular open source projects to assess 1) what governance models are out there and 2) if the governance model has any effect on the project's success (such as size of developer community) on the one hand and on the other hand on the business of the related vendor(s). Some of the results are quite remarkable and have general applicability, so I wanted to share them here:

(Small updates done on 2011-07-14. OpenJDK size clarified on 2012-05-21.)

Last week I announced internally that after my paternity leave ends next year, I will not be returning to Monty Program.

When I joined the company over a year ago I was immediately involved in drafting a project plan for the Open Database Alliance and its relation to MariaDB. We wanted to imitate the model of the Linux Foundation and Linux project, where the MariaDB project would be hosted by a non-profit organization where multiple vendors would collaborate and contribute. We wanted MariaDB to be a true community project, like most successful open source projects are - such as all other parts of the LAMP stack.

Last week I finally uploaded to Drupal.org the Vineyard theme - ie the theme I created and use for openlife.cc. Releasing the theme as open source is something I always planned of doing, but never really got round to it. I'm especially proud of the fact the theme looks different than most Drupal themes I've seen, so I hope others can use this as a basis for creating nice sites.

It seems last week was a popular weekend for programming hobby projects, as it wasn't only me who was having fun with some recreative programming. Yesterday I published a new version of my Footnotes module for Drupal.

I've been enjoying a nice vacation - the Sun is shining, so to speak :-). But a couple of days I've enjoyed upgrading www.openlife.cc to a newer drupal version, and also adding some much delayed blogging and Web2.0 enhancments.

Notes about the upgrade process (Drupal 4.7 to 6)

I had never upgraded openlife.cc, so I had to go through 2 major version upgrades. To do this, I created a staging site on my laptop so I could spend several days fixing things that would and did break when upgrading.

I have to confess I'm kind of a wannabe hacker. I think of myself as a developer, yet in practice I always end up being a customer facing person like a Sales Engineer, a Trainer or basically anything where you do more talking than coding. But there is this tiny little Drupal module, footnotes, that I'm actually the proud maintainer of for several years now.