Re: Re: downloads...genuine?

Hello Wez, on 08/26/2005 09:13 PM Wez Furlong said the following:

If you can keep that firmly in mind when you next post, and think about how to stop that happening next time, I think everyone will be happier.

Wez, I am afraid there are several misunderstandings here that need to be cleared to help you to realize why certain things turned out to be the way you noticed. First let me tell you that, intentionally, I am not commenting about the sad episodes of the past because, among other bad consequences, certain revelations may cause damage to Zend business, which is not my purpose, as it would be bad for the PHP present and future in general. Such matters are related to very bad things that happened behind the scenes, so it is natural that neither you nor many of the core PHP developers are aware. Please do not ask me to comment that now. For me those are waters that passed the bridge a long time ago. If you are really curious, you may want to talk to George Schlossnagle, Zeev Suraski, Rasmus Lerdorf, maybe they will bother to fill you in about the dirty details. So, if you keep your attention to this thread notice that: - You accused me of making up the fact that Zend is indeed paying for advertising PECL, when it seems that only you were not told about that fact - You accused me of never having contributed to PHP with code, when I have started submitting patches in 1998. - You blame me for making references to phpclasses.org as if I am abusing of anything, when in fact the references to phpclasses.org were meant to give you an example of things that worked, from which you can take some ideas to help you to motivate more people to contribute to PECL. You see, when you act like this you are pushing the thread to the personal side, despite I was just trying to help by pointing things that could be improved. So it was never my intention to act against you or anybody in particular. This pattern was very common in many of the sad episodes that involved me in the past. What is different now, is that I am patiently trying to not take anything personal, despite you have already taken that path. Therefore I am ignoring the messages with personal tone because it would only lead to more waste of time and opportunity to effectively cooperate. Another aspect that I feel that I need to clarify is to why I make references to phpclasses.org. Please allow me to tell you a bit about the relevant details of the site story. The site was started in 1999 as a means to distribute ready to use components in the form of PHP Classes. In 2001, with the end of the dot-com era, many of us were laid off or the Internet companies to which we worked just bankrupted. At the same time my first son was born. Then I thought to myself that it would be great if I could work on something from home on a project of my own so I could stay close to my family and enjoy doing something pleasant that benefits the PHP community in general. Who does not want that? One of the ideas that I had was to work on something on the PHP Classes site from which I could generate some revenue. Placing paid advertising was one of the ideas but that only works well if the site has significant audience. You get more audience if you provide more content of interest to that audience. So I decided to invest all my efforts on providing means to motivate more and more authors to submit their classes. Many things were implemented to provide greater motivation to the contributing authors. Fortunately that worked sufficiently well to generate enough ad revenue and keep me working at full time on the PHP Classes site and related projects. So since then it is my full time paid job. My point is that many of the things that I often point out as suggestions, are based on things that worked well in PHP Classes. I am not saying that what worked well in PHP Classes will also work well for your projects, but at least you are getting a constructive suggestion from somebody that tried something that may (or may not) work well for you. My suggestions are meant mostly for your reflection. If you do not agree and follow my suggestions I will not be upset. Also about the PHP Classes site, some people seem to dislike the site because of some details of operation. However such details are there to help more and more authors to contribute. Some people that dislike the site are actually PEAR enthusiasts, so they take PHP Classes as a competitor site that threatens PEAR. One aspect that they ignore is that not only some features of the PHP Classes site ended up being copied by PEAR, but also the fact that many authors encouraged to contribute to the PHP Classes site were so pleased that they felt encouraged to contribute to PEAR. Therefore I think that taking both sites as competitors is silly.

As for your suggestions; yes they're nice ideas, but a critical problem we have right now is that nobody has time to do anything about it. When I invoke the "patch is better than words" clause, it's not an excuse, it's a plea--nobody has time to argue with you (especially since you are so good at it), and if you spent that time on a patch instead, even if it needs modifying, everyone is already one step closer to making things better.

Sorry, Wez, I do not agree. Some improvement that I suggested do not directly benefit me, so I am not motivated to take time from my projects to use in another project to which other people can contribute. Other things are probably too complex and imply the agreement of so many people that it would be pointless for me to advance with a patch. Even if I did, there would be no guarantee that my patches would be accepted. OTOH, the history demonstrated that if I just suggest certain features and tools, chances are that soon or later somebody agrees on implementing them. To demonstrate what I am talking about, here are a few examples of things that I suggested and ended up being implemented by somebody else, in some cases providing dramatic benefits to PHP and its community. - Memory allocation debugging support I suggested placing conditional code in memory allocation functions to provide early detection of bugs that cause memory block overrun or some other kind of corruption that made PHP crash. I offered to develop the code. Rasmus objected. Zeev agreed and contributed the necessary code. - Output buffering support I suggested a means to trap PHP output, buffering it in a way that could be captured to a string. Andi agreed and implemented. - Smarty I suggested that the template engine that Andrei was planning, generated ready to execute PHP code to make it much faster than the usual string replacement solutions. Andrei agreed and implemented. - Built in SOAP client and server classes Andi asked for suggestions for PHP 5 features. I suggested the development of a built-in extension that provided classes to let developers inherit and implement custom SOAP clients and servers. I claimed that it was very important for PHP present and future. Zeev and Andi disagreed. 3 years later Zend hires Dmitri Stogov and put him in charge of developing an extension just like I described which is PHP 5 SOAP extension. I understand that you may have not been present then or do not recall when I made these suggestions, but the PHP mailing list archives are there to demonstrate that I made the suggestions of these important features and they were implemented by somebody else, despite I never contributed with code. The important part is not whether it was me that suggested, but rather that somebody suggested and helped that way despite he did not contribute with code. So suggestions can also help without patches. As for the problem on how do you motivate people to contribute more and better, my most important tip is to: - Provide means to let them gain something from their eventual contributions. I am not talking explicitly about money but in some cases it may help. In other cases it can be means to provide ego satisfaction, job opportunities, etc.. I gave you some suggestions by explaining things that worked well in PHP classes. Now, it is probably time to think more and code less and see what could be done about PECL to motivate people to contribute more and better. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/ PHP Reviews - Reviews of PHP books and other products http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/ Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html