Just a short heads up. I think the PEAR constitution elections are a good thing (tm). I know its sounds corny, but PEAR is mainly suffering from its own success. Its simply a huge project, with so many active developers, packages and downloads. I am confident that both of the proposals will help in improving collaboration in PEAR, mainly because they basically provide the same organization we used to have for all of PEAR (which worked great in the beginning), now for categories of related packages. I think this is exciting and with casting your vote (anyone who has a PEAR developer account, which is quite a lot of all of the people with php.net email accounts) you give the entire effort more credibility.

I was talking with Konsta from Doctrine on IRC about all the different authors of the various database abstraction related php libraries when I had a sudden inspiration: Wouldn't it be cool if we could get all of these authors on a single mailing list, where we could all discuss best practices, new discoveries, challenges etc.?

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.