php

This morning I was browsing some twitter, when I came across this tweet:

"Everyone who bitches about the GPL ... I'd like them to remove all the GPL software from their computers, and see how they get on."

Now, this is all apart of some brouhaha over Wordpress and it's templates or something. I personally don't care about any of that (I've long moved past Wordpress, as I find them to be bad open source citizens), but it did get me to thinking, as a person who does think the BSD license is a better open source license than the GPL, just how much of an inconveneince would this be? I certainly do rely on a bunch of gnu software that I'd just as soon not live without, like my playstation, or our dvr, and probably our router too. However I don't really have a choice in these things, and to be fair I don't think there is anything perticularly special about linux that makes it better for a dvr than you could do with BSD.

But let's consider things where I do have a choice, where most software developers have a choice, which is in the tools we work with and things we work on. This is pretty broard, so let's just consider the classic LAMP stack that most people work on. Apache is of course, available under the Apache license, so it's already in the clear. While I like Linux, I've long replaced it in my life with a mix of OSX, *Solaris, and *BSD, for computers where I get to choose the OS. Yes, our eeepc does run Linux, but I could probably switch that to some BSD system if needed. Likewise MySQL has always had the backseat next to Postgres or Oracle, and even the NoSQL fanboys have plenty of non-gpl options (Couch, Hadoop, Cassandra, Voldemort, etc...) to pick from. And finally, whether your P is Perl, PHP, or Python, all of those languages are available under non-GPL licenses. So, I guess the "LAMP" stack could go on.

Surely there must be some things though right? I started to think about other tools I work with regularly, like X and vim, and while I'm sure there are some tools that might be gpl, certainly many are not, and I'd guess between Solaris and BSD, I could make a GPL-free stack that I'd be comfortable working on, with software that is already available. This isn't to say I wouldn't miss anything. I love my recursive grep, find the -P argument for xargs amazing, and find BSD tar just crippling to work with. None of those would be as bad as losing screen, which is a must have for any serious server work. Of course there are alternatives for all of these (not that I know anyone who uses tmux), and I'd bet some of these features could be easily re-implemented in a BSD version if needed.

I think where this really get's you is in the software that has been built upon these base tools, perticularly in the area of PHP software development. A lot of people over that last 10 years have produced GPL lciense software, like Drupal, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, and more. I think most people didn't really think about there license choices back then (perhaps not now either); "if it's good enough for Linus". It's too bad, I know I'd much rather license phpPgAdmin under the BSD than GPL, but I think we're pretty much stuck at this point. I have noticed some newer projects (Habari for instance) have chosen non-GPL licenses; I don't know if that is a trend or anything, but it wouldn't hurt if it was.

phpPgAdmin 4.2.3 Released
-----------------------
4-13/2010

The phpPgAdmin Team is happy to announce a new bugfix release for phpPgAdmin. Version 4.2.3 fixes several long standing bugs and fixes some PHP 5 compatability issues in the 4.2.x branch. All users of phpPgAdmin are encouraged to upgrade to this new version.


Download
--------
To download right now, visit:
http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net/?page=download
(RPMs available soon)


Demo
----
To give the fully-functional demo a try, visit:
http://phppgadmin.kattare.com/phppgadmin4/


Deprecation Warning
-------------------
Note, this may likely be the last version of phpPgAdmin released on the 4.2.x branch. We are currently planning to release phpPgAdmin 5.0 this summer, which will support PHP 5+ only, and Postgres 7.3+. Legacy users should continue to use 4.2.3.


Regards,
The phpPgAdmin Team

Today I had a chance to sit through a sneak preview of Theo Schlossnagle's new talk Scalable Internet Architectures, to be delivered next week at Velocity 2009 (Dev sessions are an underrated side benefit of working at OmniTI). As always Theo packs a lot of good information into his talks; I could probably do blog entries on half a dozen ideas I jotted down; but I wanted to highlight something that he mentioned with regards to scaling websites via asynchronous services.

Passing this forward for a good cause, hopefully some of you can help out.

The African Elephant Specialist Group (with the Asian Elephant Specialist Group) is working on the redesign of the AED to become a multi-species database, the first version of which is the African and Asian Elephant Database. With funding from USFWS we are hiring a developer to undertake the project. I've put a copy of the TOR and Functional Specification on my site, but for more information, please contact:

Diane Skinner
Programme Officer
IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group

PO Box 68200 - 00200
Nairobi, Kenya
Tel: +254-20-890605 - 12
Fax: +254-20-890615

Email: Diane.Skinner@iucn.org
Website: www.african-elephant.org

Note that the deadline for applications is May 11th, 2009.

Another quick blog update... I think search should now be fixed as well. After the import, I noticed all searching was broken, and also that many of the links when scrolling through the history would not work. This turned out to be two issues: the first was that my recent re-import of data uploaded this post which contained some invalid utf8 data. This meant that anytime the data was searched on, it would generate an invalid utf8 error, breaking the search. I'm unsure if I would have had this problem on 8.3 (we're currently running this on 8.2), but luckily I still have some code from a recent project where I had to ferret out invalid utf8 data, so that was relatively easily found and fixed, which fixed the search as a whole.

The next thing that I needed to fix was the broken permalinks. As it turns out, serendipity has a table to store permalinks based on configuration of your blog. As I hadn't dealt with that on the re-import, it was broken, so I simply needed to re-populate that table for the old (or is that new) entries. Much thanks to the guys on irc (particularly lluad) for helping me work through some regex issues.

So that should make it much easier to find and reference any of the old entries. As always, should you find any broken permalinks, please do drop me an email.

So, Wez tagged me for the 7 things, uh, thing. For some reason this chain feels appropriate given the turn of a new year, so here are 7 things (possibly wierd) you may have not known about me:

Over the Holidays I spent some time pushing forward with recovering my old blog posts and getting them loaded into the new blog. While the posts are now visible, not everything is 100%, so I thought a quick run-down of what works and what doesn't might be appropriate.

1. 90%+ of blog posts have been re-imported; I believe I have copies of the missing ones, but they didn't play nicely with the importer script. I'll probably get them up some day, but if you find you're looking for a specific one that doesn't show up, drop me a line and I'll re-import it by hand
.

2. Categories have been re-built for imported entries, so those following category specific feeds, you should see the related entries. I'm not sure it's 100%, but this is somewhat non-critical, so probably will be left as is. If you find something really wrong or think something is worth updating, just let me know.


3. Speaking of search, none of the entries show up in search results right now. I believe I need to store the text bodies in multiple places for the search code to work against it, but I haven't looked to closely at that. It is something I plan to fix though (actually I think all of search is broken now... woopsie)


4. Each entries unique identifier should have been preserved, which means that you should be able to map old entries to new ones with a little url hacking. For example, if you are looking for the old entry
   

   http://people.planetpostgresql.org/xzilla/index.php?/archives/149-out-parameter-sql-plpgsql-examples.html

   you can find it on the new blog by going to

   http://www.xzilla.net/index.php?/archives/149-out-parameter-sql-plpgsql-examples.html

   (This could probably be turned into a nice apache re-write rule, but that's up to the planetpostgresql.org maintainer, not me)


5. links and styles don't work in old blog posts; the links are there, but they got converted into some kind of wiki formatting during conversion. I probably won't go back and fix this, but again if you really need a specific post cleaned up, let me know. (Or if someone can come up with some generic sql replacement fu I can run, I'd be inclined to try it


6. Comments are all missing, but I think I have them all, and with the id preservation, this should be something that is recoverable, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Big thanks go to Magnus for the initial re-import script (even if it was in python). While I hacked it to do recovery in a different way, he worked out most of the hard parts which made things actually possible for me (although I am now much more familiar with python regular expressions than I ever imagined I'd be)