.. but if you try, sometimes you get what you need. Those are the lines from one of my favorite Rolling Stones songs. Like many of us, I have some ideas of how to improve PHP. Like many of us, we have to accept that the powers that are might not agree. More often than I would like to see the reason for this has been more politics and general chaos on the internals mailinglist. In the past weeks things have improved a bit, but for a while it seemed unbearable. People seemed to insist on repeating themselves endlessly only because they feared that their argument would end up forgotten. This is not too far fetched, because currently the main course of action to get something in is asking for it often enough until the opposition is too busy or on vacation. At the same time I would argue that a lot of what makes PHP the most successful web language on the planet is its agility, which would be lost if we put all too complex processes into place.

Ok, at least they tried. But it seems SAP has for now put their attempts to rest to smoose up a bit closer to OSS. I guess Oracle-InnoDB deal send enough shockwaves around the SAP HQ to kill of any of the little wishpers that had made the surprising MySQL-SAP deal happen in the first time. Now things have come full circle again, MaxDB development is not only back at SAP as I have noted before, its also back to closed source development. At the same time most big European OSS companies seem to end up in the hands of US based companies.

No, this is not a blog post on the endless battle between end user and developers as a result of them not understanding each other. No, this post is about "what determines the value of a software/service company". Is it the number of end users or the developers/service people?

I used to hate to travel. But I am starting to like to travel more and more. I like going to new places. I like my life Zurich, but I also love Berlin and all the great people that live there. Of course I also want to see my family in Florida. Meet with all of you guys at conferences around the world. And last but not least, play Ultimate Frisbee all around the globe. That being said, I was also taught to not trash the planet. Zak recently reminded us that we should therefore try and take a step back from all this traveling and figure out how we can live within this ever more connected world in a more responsible manner. However, I also do not want to feed into the frenzy that traveling is the only thing people should think of when it comes to cutting down their CO2 emissions. Of course the most direct and reliable way to reduce CO2 emissions is to constrain ourselves. If we are unwilling to do that, we should at least optimize and that is what this blog post is about.

I came across this very thought provoking blog post by Brain Aker of MySQL and /. fame. I think he raises some very important points about OSS development and how to create a successful new project. However some of the advice can also be applied retroactively to existing projects. I especially find his comments regarding "old boys clubs" important. Sometimes when you have a successful project it becomes hard to manage the influx of new people. So the old boys start to feel most comfy when they ignore the new guys. Patches are a good basis (though you still need people to have a look at the patches) of judgement to let new guys in. After all with good patches the project should be moving forward. I think in PHP we have a very similar policy to the "Three Commits, Ding, Ding, Ding" policy Brain applies. And that is a good thing.