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The best way to do open source.

It’s the weekend, so it’s a good time for a digression.  This blog post from Matt Trout describes a lot of the code work he’s done for Perl, and what he thinks the best contribution is.  The important part is the end of the post.  He notes that for all the code he’s added, the best return has come from encouraging others to contribute.  The net result has been a magnification of effort, as more people donate time.

The reason I’m posting this is to note that DragonFly, as a community, has been excellent so far at providing a low-drama environment for people to have ideas and contribute work.  Keep this in mind; the best benefit to DragonFly isn’t lines of code, but people welcomed.

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Bulk build speed stats

I recently did a bulk build of pkgsrc on two similar machines; the only significant difference being extra CPU work being done on one system, and Hammer snapshots on the other.  However, they’re diverging in speed over time, which is interesting but not yet conclusive.  Read my post about it for more details.

A good benchmarking project would be testing Hammer with snapshots on and with snapshots off.

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Upcoming pkgsrc freeze; new binaries now

The freeze for pkgsrc’s 2009Q2 release starts this Sunday, the 14th.   The 2009Q2 release should follow two weeks afterwards, which will be very close to the time of the next planned DragonFly release.  (2.4, in case you weren’t counting.)

I’ve just finished a new build of the 2009Q1 packages for DragonFly 2.2, and it’s available on http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/packages – setting BINPKG_SITES or using pkg_chk can get you these latest versions.

I plan to have a 2009Q2 package set for DragonFly 2.4 as soon as possible after release.

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License reading

Here’s some lazy Sunday reading about software licenses.  Before you panic and quickly click away to something more fun, these are not flamewars.

This InformIT interview with David Chisnall of Étoilé talks about various things, but has an interesting note about BSD code and Apple about halfway down.

I think this is a much better way of encouraging corporate involvement in open source than legal bludgeons like the GPL. The BSD license is easy for even a non-lawyer to read and understand, so there is no confusion when using BSD-licensed code.

I’m thinking about this because there are people who still can’t figure out the difference.

Along the same lines, I was surprised by the number of open source programs found just by license listing in the new Palm Pre.  I wish I had a spare $200.

Wandering even farther off topic, is Étoilé what Windowmaker should have evolved into?