with 'open source' tag
what is 10% of php worth?
i am listed as one of the ten members of the php group. most of the php source code says it is copyright “the php group” (except for the zend engine stuff). the much-debated contributor license agreement for PDO2 involves the php group.
could i assign whatever rights (and responsibilities) my membership in the php group represents to someone else? how much should i try to get for it? i mean, if mysql was worth $1 billion....
i am still disappointed that a way of evolving the membership of the php group was never established.
being known for being you
mike kruckenberg shared his observations from watching mysql source code commits, and jay pipes commented about this commit from antony curtis which had him excited. now that’s how open source is supposed to work, at least in part.
i replied to a later version of that commit to our internal developer list (and antony), pointing out that with just a little effort the comment would be more useful to people outside of the development team. “plugin server variables” doesn’t really do it justice, and “WL 2936” is useful to people who can access our internal task tracking tool, but does no good to people like mike.
the other reason it is good to engage the community like this is because it is very healthy for your own future. being able to point to the work i had done on open source and the networking that came from that have both been key factors in getting jobs for me. i’m sure it will be useful next time i am looking, too.
producing open source software by karl fogel (hardcopy) looks to be a very good book about the human side of producing open-source software.
blogging.la follows up on the old proposal for the city of los angeles to adopt open source and apply the money saved to hiring more police officers, and finds that the proposal appears to have gone off the rails. i wish i could say i was surprised.
but something that comes out in the report filed about current open source usage by the city is there are several departments using mysql, including the city ethics commission, and several others that think they could use it. cool.
democratizing development
democratizing innovation by eric von hippel is a fairly dry, academic business book, which made it tougher than i had expected to get through. there are some interesting observations and insights in the book, but they are perhaps too few and far between. you can read the book online.
over on planet mysql, the related topic of distributed version control has gotten some attention, with some shout-outs to free tools for doing distributed development. (i’ll add one for mercurial.)
ian bicking tries to argue in favor of centralized scm systems, but i think he’s neglecting the cost imposed on the center of the project by such centralized systems that the distributed systems do a really good job of distributing — you can impose something even better than his proposed “we don’t accept patches, we only accept pointers to branches in our repository” — “we don’t accept patches, we only pull changes from publically-available repositories.”
i can’t imagine the security nightmare of providing global check-in access to everyone, and the complexity of tools that would be required to manage the layers of dead-end branches.
left hand, meet the right hand
james gosling, who inflicted java on the world, had some interesting things to say about open-source companies:
Open source vendors also came under fire, with Gosling sideswiping MySQL, JBoss, and Red Hat: “They say that they are running their businesses based on services.
“These businesses are more hype than reality. If they don’t have a [longer term] economic model…they are going to have a really hard time.”
apparently he didn’t get the memo.
but i guess if anyone would be an expert on companies that lack financial viability, it would be an executive at sun.
i also love the other juxtaposition in the article: mysql isn’t open source because “no one is allowed to do check-ins,” but java is open-source, because the source has always been available.
city of angels to adopt open source?
a few los angeles city councilmembers have introduced a measure to have the city study using open-source software, and putting the possible money saved towards hiring new police officers. it sounds like a great plan, and i hope to get around to writing my city councilmember soon to encourage her to support the motion.
speaking of my city councilmember, i have gotten four calls from her campaign in the last few days. one of them was actually from the councilmember herself (before this open-source motion came up) due to some sort of mix-up by her campaign staff that led her to believe i had some issue i wanted to discuss. as i was sucking on the world of warcrack pipe at the time, i was in no mood to talk to her. then today was call number four, and i pointed out to the caller that if they called me again, i would almost certainly not vote for her in the upcoming primary. (the only other call i’ve gotten is from the bernard parks mayoral campaign.)
