Giuseppe Maxia recently told me about a book that he could recommend – it’s called “Producing Open Source Software – How to run a successful free software project” by Karl Fogel (ISBN 0-596-00759-0).
I ordered it at Amazon.de (and was astonished that they could ship an English book within 24 hours – mostly I have to order English books from the US Amazon, where books are also shipped very quickly but it can easily take a month until the book is finally delivered) and started reading. I have only finished the first chapter so I can’t tell much about the details. But it still looks interesting: it tells about the philosophy of Open Source Software and why most Open Source projects fail (assumedly 90 – 95 %). The first chapter forecasts that it will show the pitfalls and what should be done to minimize the risks that an Open Source project will fail.
It sure isn’t a bad book for everyone who’s interested in Open Software, how it works and what the philosophy behind it is – and most likely, most people who like MySQL (or other Open Source Software) will also be interested about the topics of this book.
If you’re interested, check out the O’Reilly website at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/producingoss/index.html.