Xaprb

If you’ve been holding out for that golden opportunity, now’s a great time to get involved in Maatkit.

Until now I haven’t really made a conscious effort to open-source the decision process and get people involved; Maatkit has been largely driven by so-called “real-world needs,” as perceived through my little lens on the world (and emails from the whole Percona team telling me when something’s wrong). I guess I am likely to remain some kind of benevolent dictator, because I created Maatkit and historically I’m the main hacker. But it doesn’t have to stay that way, and the project and users will be better off if it doesn’t.

So I’ve been trying to break out of the rut of just having some little email exchange with people using the tools, and bring things onto the Maatkit mailing list for discussion and voting. Two mailing lists I’m lurking on (Drizzle and PostgreSQL hackers) have inspired me to do this. And the person who jumped into innotop maintenance set up a whole slew of mailing lists right away, which was also educational for me — it really is beneficial.

Right now if you jump on the mailing list, you can vote on topics such as breaking backwards compatibility with command-line options for the purpose of consistent and easy-to-learn options for the future.

And I have honestly gotten intolerant about the volume of email I deal with, so when someone emails me personally I usually tell them bluntly to take it to the list, so others can learn and contribute, instead of making me the single point of contention in the knowledge-sharing system, and denying others the opportunity to learn.

So — my point is, go participate, and let’s make Maatkit more Open Source, not just Free Software.

Further Reading:

• Open-source database developer mailing lists
• Does MySQL really have an open-source business model?
• What does an open source sales model look like?
• MySQL: Free Software but not Open Source
• Measuring open-source success by jobs