While writing my thesis paper on open source in the database market I of course quoted Martin, MySQL AB's (ex-)CEO, with replying to Oracle acquisition attempts that MySQL AB "will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL,". Well things did not turn out that way, was instead of an IPO to lay the foundations of this large organization, MySQL AB was instead bought up by SUN. I have mixed feelings about this, but there is definitely one good thing now: People will now no longer have to be confused about MySQL vs. MySQL AB (I always hate company names where the main product has the same name .. do you hear me Oracle?).

.. well actually I was part of the Swiss national team that once again became a world champion in ultimate spirit, since we won the spirit prize in the mixed division. In the "normal" rankings we finished 8th out of 11. But at least we won the direct game against the only other nation representing the Alps: We beat Austria in an exciting opening match 9:8, even though they then went on the finish 3rd in the overall ranking. In other news I made it back home safely from Brazil, enjoyed Christmas and New Years Eve with family and friends back in Berlin and started my new job today at Liip. Yes, new job and all. The people checking out the schedule for PHP Quebec might have already noticed that I was listed as working for Liip a few weeks ago.

Having a great time down here in Brazil. So far a lot of relaxing at the beach. Next week the world championships will start. So I spend a bit of time practicing throwing and catching in the wind. And of course I also gave a talk at the PHP conference in Brazil. Very impressive conference. Quite huge, well equipped. My talk was shown in 3 other rooms because they did not have a room to fit the 500+ audience in one room. There was a guy translating my talk to brazilian. Its quite nice to just say a few sentences and then have time to think about the next sentences as you watch the reactions in the crowd. Anyways, the slides have been up on my server since a while already, but no link. So I have added the talk to the slides section.

I have complained about this IP protection blabla put forth by CLA protected projects previously. But I keep hearing the same (imho false) arguments that CLA's are a non issue. I was kind of shocked that neither the Zend nor the eZ Systems representative at the PHP Conference in Frankfurt was able to display that he actually knows what is in their respective CLAs. One issue is the one-way OSS, where due to the explicit copyright grant required, it becomes hard to cherry pick OSS code. While thats annoying, the bigger issue imho is the problem of the patent grant clause found in all CLA's I have seen (which all seem to be derived from the apache CLA). I keep bringing up this point until people who push CLA's will finally stop repeating lies about them. Saying that single developers do not need to worry about getting sued over patent infringements is simply wrong.

Thanks to the support of Hannes, the first couple of readme's are now reST'ed over on php.net. Actually this also includes a new readme which is essentially a port of the release process wiki page. Anyways to get things to work I had to modify my initial script a bit. After a chat with Hannes we figured out how the script should work. Essentially we have one script that does the rendering based on a list of files that is hardcoded, which results in some happy HTML'ed files. These then get served up by yet another script with all the nice navigation stuff, including user notes around them. Hannes took care of all of that. Simple enough. Anyone who wants to help out feel free to just port a readme to reST (note that our reST parser has some limitations atm, so better look at the current ported files for inspiration).