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Wanted: Experts for "Open Innovation" Discussion Panel

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

For OSCOM 4, I am organizing the discussion panel “Open Innovation” which takes place Sept 30, 16:00 – 17:45 (more information below). If you feel like you could contribute to the discussion as an expert, please write to me in private and let me know your field of expertise. Actually, everyone is an expert on something – so please do not hesitate to contact me!

The discussion will be a kind of brainstorming session that could well end in chaos or deep enlightement – depending on the moderator (me) and the attendees. If you come as an expert, I might ask you some specific questions on your field of knowledge and the other participants might do the same as well. Experts do not need to prepare any presentation, just be there, have an open mind and enjoy the experiment.

So, let me know: sandro dot zic at zzoss dot com

Cheers!
Sandro
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Discussion Panel
Open Innovation: Learning from Open Source

The fundamental strength of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) community is how it allows collections of very different groups and individuals to cooperate, develop, innovate and share.

This discussion panel seeks to bring together the forward thinkers attending OSCOM to discuss the specific characteristics of innovation in the FLOSS community and how they could be adopted by business leaders, educators, scientists and politicians.

The panel will discuss:
* the cultural norms, economic factors and technical mechanisms that the FLOSS community relies on
* the broad cultural norms and economic dynamics of various major non-FLOSS communities
* how and why these norms and mechanism are different
* where and how the strength of the FLOSS movement can be shared with other cultures and organizations, from companies and universities to activist groups and non-profit organizations.
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Informatik 2004 & KI 2004

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Now that summer’s over, the second half of this year’s conference season starts. For me, conference hopping resumes in Ulm/Germany, which is just around the corner of my new home town Biberach. Actually, it’s two conferences in one from September 20-24: Informatik 2004 and the other on artificial intelligence.

I will definitely attend the following two workshops (because I am interested in the topic, but as well because I help out the organisers):

Algorithms and Protocols for Efficient Peer-to-Peer Applications

Open Source Software in an Industrial Environment

Haven’t decided yet which other sessions to attend, there are just too many interesting things going on…

Thanks to Alexander Kaiser who made me aware of this fantastic event and who helped me get the ticket 😉

The Secretary to the Cathedral's Friends Resigned

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

If the company MySQL is the cathedral in the bazaar, then Zak Greant was the secretary to the cathedral’s friends – he recently resigned.

His official title was “Community Advocate”. Once, he described his work to me like this: “Imagine MySQL AB as a person that acts in a social environment, then me and David Axmark take care that this person behaves properly in the Open Source community and is accepted within the group.” The last 2 years, Zak was mostly concerned with the licensing issues that arouse when the MySQL client library became GPLed.

Zak’s two main concerns were – not only concerning the licensing issues – to fully understand the Open Source community, not only that of the MySQL database, and to make the community understand the company MySQL, the reasoning behind their actions. I have attended several of Zak’s talks at conferences and it always amazed me, how well he tried to balance out the interests of the company and the community. I write “tried”, because not all interests could be satisfied, as some of them have a conflicting nature.

It was Zak’s respectful behaviour towards anyone contacting him that made him a person as well respected by the community. His respect for others is deeply rooted in his professional approach and work ethics as well as his believe in the principles of the Open Source community and good social behaviour in general.

I am very much looking forward to see what he will be doing in the future and who will hire him. For MySQL, it must be hard to find someone as committed to the job as Zak was, also someone as eloquently acting within the community. MySQL is loosing a skilled and experienced secretary for the cathedral’s friends – but I am pretty sure, that Zak will stay with the friends of the cathedral.

Session at PHP Conference: Build and Installation Tools

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

With the advent of PHP 5 and the push to the enterprise market, professional build and installation environments for PHP applications become more and more important. My session at this year’s International PHP Conference discusses pros and cons of such a build system and compares existing solutions like PEAR Installer, Phing, ZZ/OSS Installer. Furthermore, I will take a look at the Java world and identify missing tools that would be nice to have in the PHP world.

MySQL FLOSS License Exception Discussed at OSI plus Community Crisis Management Analysed

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

A substantial thread discussing the MySQL FLOSS License Exception has evolved on the mailinglist of the Open Source Initiative.

Some quotes:

Essentially, they’re trying to retrofit via a licence exception some of the licence semantics of LGPL. (Rick Moen)

As for the MySQL License Exception, I believe its interpretation of the effects of the GPL, and its description of what happens when you create *collective works* with MySQL and other open source software, is accurate. I also happen to believe that this “Exception” doesn’t need to be an exception at all, because that’s how the GPL should be interpreted anyway. “Independent and separate works” can never be forced under the GPL if they are not *derivative works* of GPL programs. The MySQL folks have tried to eliminate confusion about their licenses by stating in their own words what the GPL and LGPL really do anyway. (Lawrence Rosen, OSI)

In way of a brief update, the exception is currently being reviewed by our lawyers and then should be going through to our CEO for approval. (Zak Greant, MySQL)

Actually, v0.2 of the exception will apply to both client and server. (Zak Greant, MySQL)

It is interesting to see how MySQL has made its way out of the PHP community when switching the client code to GPL by introducing and openly discussing the license exception. I think it would be appropriate to label it “community crisis management”, a new discipline for future business consultants in the FLOSS market 🙂

Essentially, the trick that did it is common-place: once there is a conflict, only a pro-active strategy can re-ensure trust between the involved parties. No doubts, that MySQL has been late to actively seek for a solution with the PHP devs in the beginning. I guess that the delay is correlated with the experiences that MySQL made in the lawsuite with NuSphere, because MySQL had to thoroughly think through all the potential implications of a license exception to never let happen the NuSphere problem again. Given that in the future even bigger players (only an oracle can tell who…) could use wholes in the license exception to damage MySQL, one can understand the still very careful proceeding.

OSCOM Germany to be founded at LinuxTag

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

OSCOM Germany [1] will be founded at LinuxTag [2], on June 26th 2004. The not-for-profit organisation brings together developers and users of Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS). LinuxTag is Europe’s largest Open Source event.

OSCOM organizes events, promotes standards and undertakes projects to further the state of the art of Open Source Content Management. OSCOM promotes Open Source Content Management solutions as powerful, affordable and flexible replacements for proprietary products. With the founding of OSCOM Germany, the first national sub-organisation of OSCOM International [3] will come to life.

The birth of OSCOM Germany will happen at a session of the free congress, Saturday June 26th, 10:00 [4], where some OSCOM members will present the organization.

Please subscribe to the OSCOM Germany general mailinglist [5] to keep up-to-date or to contact the members.

[1] http://de.oscom.org
[2] http://www.linuxtag.org
[3] http://www.oscom.org
[4] http://www.linuxtag.org/2004/talk.do?id=e121
[5] http://oscom.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/general-de

4th Conference on Open Source CMS – Request for Papers

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

There are many PHP CMS out there and the next conference on Open Source CMS is ahead, organized by OSCOM with assistance from the Apache Software Foundation.

Take a look at the OSCOM.4 Request for Papers and feel free to propose a session. Of course, anyone is invited to attend at ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich, Switzerland, Wednesday, Sept 29 – Friday, October 1, 2004.

Let me know if you come: please ping- or trackback this entry, or write a comment. See you there!

How to Patch a Buggy Package with ZZ/OSS Installer

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

I had to do, what developers really don’t like: patching a third-party class package due to a bug for the forthcoming release of one of our software products.

The package I had to patch is PEAR::Archive_Tar because of a yet unfixed bug I have reported some time ago. The application depending on that package is the forthcoming release of ZZ/OSS Installer. I was able to use the installer itself to apply the patch due to the fact that the ZZ/OSS Installer is itself developed and installed with the ZZ/OSS Installer – I love russian doll architectures :).

Creating and applying the patch was as simple as:
1. Fix the bug in Tar.php.
2. Put the fixed Tar.php in a package called com.zzoss.pear.archive_tar.patch.
3. Make sure in the deps element of the package.xml that the patch package has a dependency on the PEAR::Archive_Tar package.
4. Add this package to the application.xml of the next ZZ/OSS Installer release.

What happens when installing the application with the ZZ/OSS Installer is that the Tar.php file from PEAR::Archive_Tar gets overwritten by the fixed Tar.php from com.zzoss.pear.archive_tar.patch, because of the dependency definition.

Harry Fuecks Comments ZZ/OSS Installer

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Harry Fuecks took a look at ZZ/OSS Installer and his honest comments clearly describe the status of the application and its potential.

Yes, true, the latest release of the installer is a development release with known and still-to-be-found bugs 😉 We are collecting feedback from the community on new features and hidden bugs, that’s why we did this early release. Meanwhile, development goes on and we are fixing bugs and implementing new features for the next release 1.1.0dev2.

Although the application itself is not yet superstable, I believe it is good enough for experienced PHP devs to start deploying their applications with it. Developing and installing applications that entirely or partly consist of PEAR-like packages, is much easier with ZZ/OSS Installer compared to PEAR Installer, because there is e.g. automatic dependency resolving built in. This tutorial on deploying phpMyAdmin with ZZ/OSS Installer gives you a basic idea how to procede.

Should you encounter any problems, feel free to contact the ZZ/OSS Installer developers via the mailinglist, IRC, etc. as stated on the ZZ/OSS Installer project Website – we’ll do our best to help you. The nice thing is, that once you have a working ZZ/OSS Installer on your system, it is pretty easy to install the latest version with this installer from CVS sources.