Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:50 UTC
I find myself once again in Portland, OR at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. This year, I’m giving a talk on memcached. The talk is on the PHP track, but the concepts can apply in any of the other languages represented at OSCON, so if you’re interested in memcached and how to use it, stop by on Wednesday at 5:20pm.
In previous years at OSCON, I’ve stuck mainly to the PHP track. This is because I have a lot of friends who are speakers, and so I’ve attended their talks to learn from and support them. This year, though, I’ve decided to focus on some of the other languages represented here, particularly Python and Erlang. This morning, for example, I attended Steve Holden’s Python In 3 Hours tutorial. Tomorrow, I’ll be attending the Practical Erlang Programming tutorial, and later this week, I’ll get Just Enough C for Open Source Projects.
So, today, one of the more interesting features I learned that Python supports is the concept of closures. Here’s a simple example from the tutorial:
def adder(n):
def add(m):
return m+n
return add
add20 = adder(20)
print add20(2)
l = []
for i in range(100):
l.append(adder(i))
print l[13](22) FYI: There’s been some discussion surrounding a recent patch proposal to add closures and lambda functions to PHP.
At any rate, it’s good to be back at OSCON this year, catching up with old friends, making new friends, and expanding my knowledge of open source languages.
By the way, I’ve brought along with me 10 elePHPants who need good homes. If you want one, it’s yours. You just have to find me in person and let me know. They’re first-come, first-serve.
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Tags: closures, erlang, memcached, opensource, oscon, oscon08, python
Tue, 11 Jan 2005 14:40 UTC
Via Donna Wentworth of Copyfight: IBM announced today that they will be granting open access to 500 of its patents to developers of open-source software. This does not mean that IBM is no longer interested in the patents or will no longer hold them. On the contrary, IBM plans to maintain ownership of the patents while providing royalty-free access to open-source developers. This move will likely spur open-source development of technologies recently restricted. Specifically, Linux is poised to benefit greatly.
From the New York Times:
“This is much broader than the contributions we’ve made in the past,” said Jim Stallings, vice president for standards and intellectual property at I.B.M. “These patents are for technologies that are deeply embedded in many industry uses, and they will be available to anyone working on open-source projects including small companies and individual entrepreneurs.”
I.B.M. executives said they hoped the company’s initial contribution of 500 patents would be the beginning of a “patent commons,” which other companies would join. I.B.M. has not yet approached other companies, Mr. Stallings said.
This is a novel idea: responsible patent holder giants stepping forward and allowing the open-source community royalty-free access to develop innovative technologies. Here’s to hoping this sets a precedent and a wave of the future.
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Tags: ibm, linux, opensource, patents
Thu, 5 Aug 2004 11:09 UTC
I logged on today to find a very interesting and controversial article at DevShed.com (via this post) concerning the future direction of PHP. In short, the author surmises that the changes made to PHP 5, essentially making it more Java-like, are a step on the path to a Sun-influenced, if not owned, PHP. It presents some stark evidence, all circumstantial of course, that points to this direction, saying that “the long-lasting popularity of LAMP environments (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) will soon be replaced by SLOP environments (Sun, Linux, Oracle, PHP).”
I’m not sure whether I can agree with the author. However, he makes a good case, and it is definitely a troubling matter. I cannot imagine that the PHP Group, who have thus far seemed very committed to Open Source, would transfer the countless hours of hard work by developers to a corporate entity, giving it to them as their property. Furthermore, it is the PHP Group and not Zend that owns the copyright on PHP, the language. And, even if Zend sells the Zend Engine to Sun, and manages to somehow get the PHP Group to transfer PHP to them as well, there are versions of PHP still under an OSS license that can be taken by the developers and forked to maintain an open-source version, perhaps on parrot (as mentioned by Rasmus and others).
In summary, I don’t know what the future holds for PHP given this startling news, but perhaps Harry Fuecks, who also adds to the controversy discussion, summed it up best by saying, “I find the conclusion somewhat tabloid.” In short: it’s all hype.
Let’s keep PHP where it belongs: in the Open Source community.
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Tags: opensource, parrot, php, php-group, sun, zend
