It feels like early Summer here. I have no idea whether I'll be able to go to XML Europe next week: it will depend on SARS travel restrictions here in Toronto. I am supposed to be on a panel there, which I think is one I suggested, so I'd feel guilty if it didn't work out!

On the other hand, not long afterwards I have XML Query meetings in Gaithersburg MD (USA), and then www 2003 in Budapest, hungary. So I could do with less travel!

I had started to write an article about why people get involved in open source and Free projects, but I see there were two other articles on the same theme, so I'll put mine aside for now.

I have been playing with Galax, an open source implementation of the latest public XML Query draft. It doesn't do collections yet, so you can only query on a single XML document at a time, but it's useful for getting more familiar with the language. Be warned, if you try it, that its W3C XML Schema support is incomplete, and in particular doesn't handle mixed content right. The underlying query engine does handle mixed content, though, and the binary release seemed to work fine under Mandrake Linux 9.1 that I use.

I don't yet have a good feel for where XML Query will be used. I'm sure it will be used. There are already quite a few implementations, both open source and proprietary, and companies like IBM and Oracle and Microsoft are represented on the Working Group, so it will surprise me if there isn't support for DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server once the spec is final. Well, I have been surprised before. But if there is vendor support, I can see XML Query being used by database people to produce XML that's then processed by XSLT by webheads. And in that case, the fact that XML Query has a syntax closer to SQL and C than to XML may actually be an advantage, I suppose.

jaldhar, I apologise for oversimplifying. The article I mentioned didn't say that overall mental health (or any other sort of health) is better in India, though, but only that long-term recovery rates for specific conditions were better.

I strongly agree with you about community.