Re: [PHP4BETA] php and MS SQL Server....

Hello Stig, On 06-Mar-00 12:31:25, you wrote: >> I don't agree that packages should have to Open Sourced to be distributable >> by PEAR. Like myself, many developers would like to retain control over >> their packages regardless if someday they will make them Open Source. If >> Open Source is a requirement, I'm afraid that many developers simply won't >> contribute. >I don't understand why do you think making something open source makes >you lose control of it? There are hundred of open source projects out >there that prove this not to be true. Just look at GNU Emacs, how many >features went into GNU Emacs without Richard Stallman's blessing? You know that is not exactly like that. When you Open the source of your software for others to contribute, you have to make concessions so that people don't leave you because of major disagreements on the progress that developments should take. I don't have a problem with agreeing with somebody that contradicts me as long as he bases his views on solid arguments. The greatest problem arises when you are working on a project for which the solutions to the problems are still being designed. A bad design decision may compromise the whole future and lead to situation where you may have to dump large portions of code contributed by others. That is bad for you if you don't do it and compromise the work you depend on or bad for the contributors that often don't understand and don't agree the need for dumping his hard work. So, I'd rather develop stuff on my own, at least until the design is solid and it is ready for conflict-safe contributions. As for instance, Metabase, the design is very solid now but it still needs a few important things that I won't to add before I feel it is ready to Open the doors for development cooperated by others. One of those things is BLOB support. Another thing is handling hard to detect DBMS like those interfaced by ODBC. There is also a lateral problem regarding the way documentation is being generated. I have developed a large meta-programming package based in XML that among other things has a module to generate documentation in multiple formats. Opening the source of Metabase, implicitly means that I need to open the source and the technology that was used to develop the meta-programming package. I do plan to do that at a later stage but only when it is ready for the Bazaar. >PHP's being open source has not exactly stopped people from >contributing, has it? Unfortunately, yes. That brings back the sad episode of HTTP PUT method support patch that I developed for PHP. Not only I was descriminated because my request for a CVS account was ignored, but the patch was deliberately left out for many months even there were at least two feature requests entered in the bug database by other users that also wanted to have HTTP PUT method support in PHP. I needed that in project that I was working 2 years ago with colleage for a university. Since nobody was willing to integrate the patch nor willing to let me do it, I had to use shell scripts to handle PUT method uploads, which I really didn't want to do because I had to generate .htpasswd files to control the access to the uploads page. Anyway, since there was this descrimination stalling my patches to be integrated in PHP, I gave up even considering writing any other patches regardless how much useful they could have been. For instance, this project's goal was to develop a system that would allow people without great technical knowledge to upload documents to a repository. If the user uploads HTML files, the system is able to scan the documents and detect relevant single or multiple word expressions that associate the document with some context related with other documents. After the analysis, the system recommends links to the related documents that, once approved by the user, the links are inserted automatically in the document. This is nice but parsing HTML documents in PHP it is a pain. As with any other interpreted language, doing many interations over data is very slow task for PHP. A good alternative would be to use W3C libwww to handle that. I was willing to do it, but after the descrimination suffered before, I felt discouraged and never bothered to do it. The project was working, but the document analysis is still very slow. There are plenty of uses for libwww. If we think just of HTML parsing, I can imagine useful applications like document indexing for search engines. Perl comes with the HTML::Search package that does precisely that with libwww. PHP could already be benefitting from libwww support if I was not ruled out before. So, to answer your question, yes, being Open Source has nothing to do with being Open to contributions. Open minded people take contributions even for projects that are not Open Source. PHP is not a good example of an Open Source on which people are not stopped from contributing, as there is at least one precedent and the exclusion was certainly not technical reasons. I'm terribly sorry that I had to bring this up again. If you don't like it, I like it even less because nobody likes to be ruled out from contributing from something that you are encouraged with a flag of being open but than you are disappointed. If you don't like the situation, maybe you have to fix things on your side. Regards, Manuel Lemos Web Programming Components using PHP Classes. Look at: http://phpclasses.UpperDesign.com/?user=mlemos@acm.org -- E-mail: mlemos@acm.org URL: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ PGP key: http://www.mlemos.e-na.net/ManuelLemos.pgp --