I commented on Jonathan Schwartz's blog on his "Helping Dolphins Fly" post. I was not surprised to find that the blog is moderated. I mean its well worth the manual time to keep the blog of your head honcho clean. I don't remember what I said exactly, but I did voice some concerns about the fact that I have not really seen participate much in the scripting world. Suffice it to say my post was never published. It seems I never have anything nice to say about big cooperations. So I want to try something new for a change: Saying something nice about big cooperations.
First up is MySQL err .. SUN. Since they got scooped up they qualify as a big cooperation (of course). I have really appreciated the bulk of the work that MySQL AB has done with their database but also with their general participation in the community. While there is always something to nitpick about, the fact of the matter is that when you look at the bottom line, MySQL AB has been pivotal in the life's of so many of us because of the way MySQL AB behaved. Again I want to stress that I am not only talking about the great product, but also the many hackers (that continue to contribute with all sorts of OSS software and know how) it has given a home and its hard work in building up a company that has served as the role model for so many other companies. Of course, you always have more critical things to say about the people/companies/products you know best but there is a reason you know them well: because you care!
Now I also want to mention another company that people will be more surprised with getting praises on my blog: Oracle. I am sure that the PHP world is a crazy place for Oracle. I am not talking about the fact that PHP is obviously leading the web, this makes their involvement a no brainer for us people in the PHP community. But they managed to get that, which others still havent or it took them much longer to get there. But more importantly they have managed to make working with them, from the perspective of the community, a more or less painless process. They have people like Christopher Jones, that keep us in the loop of what's going on with Oracle without resorting to non technical sales pitches. He is also around to forward tricky questions about Oracle to their internal developers. But more importantly they have helped fund developers inside the PHP community to tweak PHP's ability to talk to databases and Oracle in particular. I cannot stress the importance of this too much. Instead of constantly hassling the community with CLA's, they just focused on getting the job done. While its obviously also in their best interest to do so, others do not seem to figure out how to stay practical in this lawyer infested business world.
So Thanks MySQL AB, now SUN, and thanks Oracle! Let's hope that one day I have something nice to say about IBM (well I did have some nice things to say about the Thinkpad series but they sold off those).
Very nice comments Lukas. I agree that Sun and Oracle have shown a growing commitment to open source in recent years. It's good for business, it just took some companies a while to understand that. :-)
IBM is also a strong proponent for open source. They are sponsors or contributors to many projects such as Eclipse, Linux, OpenOffice, Xen, Apache projects, and many others. For more information see http://www.ibm.com/linux/opensource/
When I worked on the Zend Framework, I also collaborated with IBM developers who contributed ZF's DB2 adapters.
By the way, we can still refer to MySQL AB (the company) for now. According to the press release, the transfer to Sun won't complete until Q3 or Q4 of 2008.
Well the story with IBM is that they insist on having their own guys do the work, but at the same time they are unable to work within the legal structure of php.net. So they keep pushing their legal frameworks onto php.net.
Ok ok .. I should really note that IBM has contributed a lot of tests as well as the initial documentation for PDO.
