Yesterday we had an entire day at Liip dedicated to various talks, workshops and hanging out together. It really reminded me again what an amazing company Liip is. Its really what I wished m company back in Berlin should have been. Fun, smart, successful, productive, agile, good. At any rate I wanted to mention the stuff we are working on in terms of OSS. Obviously Chregu and myself are active on PHP. Jordi is also an active member of the PHP.net community. But we have other less known stuff that should also get noted, like Jackalope, Mahara, Picok, GottaGo and Okapi.

W00t! 5.3.0 stable is out. Never expected it to take this long, but its a lesson to keep faithful to the "release early, release often mantra" in the future. At some point a branch can just get too big, that it becomes close to impossible to release it. While I do appreciate the various thank you (or in the case of backslash haters "drop dead") emails, I want to highlight that all I really did is take over the tasks that require at most a bit of patience and certainly no technical skill (well I did have to update a few websites, but even there I needed Hannes to fix all my typos).

It almost happened, but it didn't for now. Originally we planned to release today. But again a few issues came up, even with Johannes deciding that sleep is for the weak, it just seemed unwise to announce the release today. So we pushed things back a few days, so the new date is June 30th (meaning it will be a Tuesday release). This also gives the documentation team, who have been expanding the 5.3 docs like crazy, a few more days to beef things up even more. Now is really high time to ensure that you have a PHP 5.3 compatible release of your software ..

There is currently a heated debate spawned with the creation and subsequent announcement of a more or less final decision made by a select group of people at php|tek. Now I am a friend of openness, but I have a hard time remembering any significant existing project within the PHP community that actually changed its coding guidelines. For all I know the main CS in the PHP world originated in the Horde project, but adopted and expanded by PEAR, got adopted and expanded by Zend Framework. See the pattern?

Looks like there is hope yet for the owners of the MySQL copyright to bring around their development. There is a proposal (actually it seems its already decided to ahead with it) up on their public wiki that details a development approach that could finally become compatible with the real world, rather than managers checking off feature lists. Maybe its too late already, but maybe its just in time to "fend off" the increasing competition for who provides the best MySQL distribution.