Open Source

Shakespear? Yes, sure

Daily Post, a blog that suggest a topic to write a blog post about for each day of the year, raises an interesting question: do you think Shakespear existed? Apparently, a few people doubt the fact because there is way too much work credited to him for a single person to create.

While I’m not that big on history in general and Shakespear in particular, I do have an opinion on the “too much work” reasoning. I’ve heard it before a few times and it was wrong every time I’ve heard it.

15-20 years ago, before the Internet was mainstream, most of the Russian connected people were using the FidoNet. As with any community, there were celebrities in FidoNet, and one of them was a writer under the name of “Alex Exler”. He was credited with so much stuff that rumors were going around that Alex Exler is not really a person, but a creative group of a few individuals. It turned out to be false. Alex Exler is a somewhat known writer, and a very well-known blogger on the Russian web. These days he has a website as Exler.ru. The website is updated daily with movies and gadgets reviews, opinions on software and political news, personal experiences and what not.

10-15 year ago, when I was just getting into the world of Linux and other Open Source software, I’ve heard rumors that Alan Cox is not really a human, but a bunch of goblins working underground around the clock. Alan’s contribution to Linux kernel and many other software projects was huge. More so, he seemed to have never slept. His patches were coming out any time of the day, he replied to his emails within minutes, and also managed to somehow follow all the discussion at Linux Kernel Mailing List (aka LKML) – a mailing list known for its huge traffic. Of course, Alan Cox is not a bunch of goblins. He is a very talented and productive individual.

Without knowing too much about Shakespear, I think that it is much more probable that William was a very talented and productive individual rather than he never existed or he was a group of people.

Zed Shaw : Why I GPL

Zed Shaw, the guy behind a lot of code and several books, shares his thoughts on why he is now switching from simpler, more permissive licenses like BSD and MIT, to GPL. Most of the Linux people and GPL fans would easily guess the reasons, since they’ve popped up in pretty much every license related flame war. But it’s nice to hear from someone who did actually experience the theory, and who really knows what he is talking about.

I’ll always be an open source developer, but quite frankly, we’re dying off because the companies who use our software do not give back. The irony of the situation is that, in order to improve my motivation to do open source, I have to charge for it.

I obviously won’t ever charge an open source project, since they are honoring the unwritten contract: If I give, you give.

But the days of quick-flip corporations and ingrate programmers making money on my software are over. My new motto is:

Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.

If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you. If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.

Welcome to the GPL camp, Zed.

CakePHP 2.0 released!

I’ve been a bit all over the place these last few days, but I knew that this was coming shortly – CakePHP team released the new and much improved version 2.0 a couple of days ago. There are a lot of changes. And I do mean a lot. Here are some of my favorite:

PHP5 support. CakePHP was working with PHP before, of course. But in this release, support for PHP4 was dropped and all code has been updated to utilize PHP5 goodies.
Lazy class loading. Previous versions of CakePHP could easily get slow with a lot of models. There were solutions like Containable behavior and others. But it was annoying never the less. CakePHP 2.0 is much improved in this regard. It only loads things that are actually needed and used. That is a huge performance improvement.
Improved Console. The new Console is so much better that I’m even considering using CakePHP 2.0 for some of my non-web-based projects. It’s that good!
PHPUnit. Previous versions of CakePHP were using SimpleTest framework for unit tests. CakePHP 2.0 switched to the de facto standard PHPUnit. Tests are now easier to write. And integrating CakePHP projects with other Quality Assurance tools should be a breeze.

There are, of course, more changes. These are just the top few that I am particularly glad about.

Also, CakePHP 2.0 release is special to me. It’s been a long while since I participated in the development process of an Open Source project. I usually just report bugs and provide help via forums and blog posts. I did more than that with CakePHP 2.0. I actually wrote a couple of patches that were accepted and merged into this release. They were no rocket science, but a contribution nonetheless.

If you haven’t tried CakePHP before, now is the perfect time to do so. If you have tried older CakePHP versions, you’ll find this one to be much of an improvement. If you have tried it already, please share your thoughts in the comments. Let me know what you think of it.

Fedora 17 is a Beefy Miracle

The community has voted on the name for the next release of Fedora Linux. The name ‘Beefy Miracle‘ has won the voting race. It got most of the votes despite all the noise and protests from the ‘serious’ people. Personally, I am in favor of this name for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I don’t see Fedora as a ‘serious’ distribution. Not in the enterprise kind of way. It is a bleeding edge Open Source project which is supposed to be fun. And it is. So, nothing wrong with a funny name.

Secondly, for those who do promote Fedora in the enterprise environments, there is really no need to use the name. They can still reference the release by number. And Fedora Linux 17 sounds strict and official.

Thirdly, through the history of all Fedora releases, there were just a few names that I actually understood and could remember. ‘Beefy Miracle’ is easy to remember.

Fourthly, there were too much hype of different vegetarian cultures recently. I have nothing against that. But as a huge fan of meats, I’m glad to see any kind of meat promotion. Be that beefy or porky – I don’t mind at all.

Fifly, c’mon people – it’s just a name. It’s not a project or person name. It’s a release name. No matter what it is, in a year or so it will fade away. Like all the others did. Seriously, who can still remember Heidelberg, or Stentz, or even Laughlin?

What Was Your First WordPress Version?

James Huff of Weblog Tools Collection asks the questions: what was your first WordPress version? Since I’ve been using WordPress for a few years now, my memory got hazy and I didn’t quite remember. It took me a couple of minutes to dig the truth out.

According to my archives, I’ve migrated this site from NucleusCMS to WordPress on April 9, 2005. A quick check with WordPress versions history suggests that my first WordPress version was 1.5. It was released on February 17, 2005. Version 1.5.1 was released on May 9, 2005 and I’ve upgraded to it, not migrated.

So, for six and a half years I’m using WordPress and I’ve never regretted it even once. That’s quite an achievement, I think. Huge thanks to WordPress folks. I hope that you will continue to bring us more WordPress awesomeness for years to come.

What was your first WordPress version?