Hello Paul,
What does HW require that is not supplied by the MySQL community edition? Or is it a licensing and usage issue, though I can't see anything on their website to suggest that.
MySQL AB (MySQL's makers) are/were adamant that interfacing the MySQL Community Edition with any commercial (non-GPL) software constitutes a 'derivative work' and is thus disallowed under the GPL.
Unfortunately *very* few people were interested in using MySQL (or SQL databases in general) with Hauptwerk (even most sample set developers have and prefer their own tools, rather than SQL databases), and interfacing to any given database product is a lot of work for us, so I don't think we could justify adding a new interface for another database server apart from MySQL.
Crumhorn Labs used to re-sell the 'MySQL Classic OEM' licence at cost price, which was a perpetual and much cheaper licence than the per-year MySQL Enterprise licence that MySQL AB now seems to concentrate on selling. However, unfortunately it just wasn't viable for us to continue to re-sell those MySQL licences due to lack of demand.
If anybody is interested in getting a MySQL licence for use with Hauptwerk, I'd recommend speaking to MySQL AB to see if they can sell you a MySQL Classic licence directly. As Brett mentioned, as soon as you have any valid (non-GPL) MySQL licence, we can enable the MySQL interface in Hauptwerk for you at no cost.
If people want to use Hauptwerk with databases other than MySQL, perhaps there are some free third-party tools already that can export/import XML files to those databases? Perhaps some of the more powerful XML editors have native functions for that?
There are also plenty of third-party XML editors to be found, some of them very powerful, as alternatives to using SQL databases. E.g. a simple free one that allows easy editing of Hauptwerk's ODFs in table views is XML Marker, listed on our links page:
http://www.hauptwerk.com/support/links/
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.