Matt Asay proposes the following definition to the answer what consititudes an "open source company" that I blogged about yesterday: "An open source company is one that, as its core revenue-generating business, actively produces, distributes, and sells (or sells services around) software under an OSI-approved license."

So the blogosphere seems to be in an uproar regarding what constitutes an "open source company" and what doesn't. This seems to have been spawned by a blog post by Nat Torkington. While working on the OSCON program he stumbled over what he deems as questionable entries, since he does not feel the relevant backing companies are sufficiently "open source".

So I am not much of a C hacker .. I never really got into pointers and stuff like that. PHP is so nice and easy. However I still want to give back to C based OSS projects I care about. A while ago I setup a wiki to track todo items for up coming PHP releases and other release related information. The page sees varying activity, but I think its helped Ilia a little bit for his 5.x releases. Its not that relevant for Derick's work on the 4.4.x branch, as that one is about bug fixing and not feature additions. Where I am really hoping it will make a big impact is with PHP 6. I am hoping that the list of todo items will assist in making sure that the next major version of PHP is all around thought out. More importantly the idea is also to make it more transparent to end users what changes they can expect or at least prepare for.

On my last project I was asked to make life a bit easier for translators, by allowing them to get immediate visual feedback from changes they make. Now I have done something like this before by simply allowing editors to authenticate which then gives them an "enable edit mode" button. When clicked, the current page is reloaded with "edit" buttons next to anything that should be editable. Clicking on the edit button would bring up a popup window. Submitting the form in the popup with the modified content would trigger reloading the opening page and viola, the modified content is visible. Simple solution, but obviously not really useful for AJAX applications, mainly because the reloading of the page would not preserve the state of the interface properly and I also wanted to tweak some other aspects.

I have blogged about meeting up with Georg, Peter, Andrey and Ulf in Frankfurt last November to discuss the mysqlnd project. What is mysqlnd you may ask? You can find an answer in the FAQ section of the newly released mysqlnd project page on mysql.com. However, for the lazy reader I will briefly say what it is about