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Speaker Name	Colin Charles
Organization	MySQL AB
Type	Talk
Scope	General
Slides	Click to download
MySQL and the Architecture of Participation
Abstract	While MySQL has been open source-based from the start, the development process at MySQL has been fairly concentrated around the company itself. However, since 2006, the development model has changed, and it has generally entirely opened up: * ensuring that our already-opened tools are open enough (our bugs system at bugs.mysql.com, and our source control system with BitKeeper) * opening up Worklog, our detailed roadmap and specifications control system, for commenting on MySQL Forge * opening internal documentation from our closed Wiki onto MySQL Forge Wiki * opening our internal chat sessions, moving them from our closed IRC server to Freenode * starting with the Quality Contribution Program (QCP), and getting rewarded * patch reviews on the internals@ list (which is like the lkml equivalent for MySQL), with examples of the back & forth process before it gets into the patch queue; commits@ list for discussions surrounding commits * how to submit a good patch for acceptance – this involves test cases, documentation, and following the somewhat strict coding guidelines * examples of contributions that have made it into the tree, and how this happened * learn to code MySQL, via MySQL University * our recent summer of code participation also garnered us more patches * working in a distributed environment – get used to it, as all developers in the company do, so should you! In this session, Colin shares the experiences so far, concentrating on building up the network of connections between internal and external developers. The focus is to lower the threshold for external developers to contribute to MySQL.
Pre-requisites	Requires some understanding of C, when we go through some sample code reviews
Speaker Profile	Colin Charles started with the open source world, back in his high school days, and decided that at some stage he would have to contribute to the movement. While using StarOffice for school related work, he found it completely waning in certain areas; as a consequence he jumped to contributing to the OpenOffice.org project back in its heyday. After years of servitude, he decided to move to a new niche - operating systems, and the Fedora Project. Here he did many janitorial tasks, and even sat on the inaugural board of the FESCO for a little over a year. He worked actively on the Fedora/PowerPC project, Extras, and wrote articles for Red Hat Magazine. Feeling the itch, he felt he could make a difference in the database world, and look at things from the other side of the fence - he joined MySQL in the Community team, to bring in patches and new features from the outside world! He now spends much less time talking about OpenOffice.org or Fedora, and much more time talking about MySQL, performance tuning, benchmarks, and also contributing to this "young" open source project.

KRISHNAN SHANKAR Sun Microsystems (2007-12-07 17:21:17)

Very informative, esp. the links and pointers to contributing code, documentation, downloads, etc. The speaker gave a well-rounded talk.

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