Today morning I came across this piece of writing -
Does GPL still matter?. The whole article is based on a few anecdotes
from CEOs and marketing droids. They have gotten quite a few points
wrong in the article.
GPL is a developer friendly license. The basic premise of the GPL is
that the user should not subtract from the freedom he gets when
redistributing software. GPL is not restrictive. It merely insists
that whoever takes from the common pool must contribute back to the
pool.
I would like to point to these 2 articles in support of GPL -
I attended the Hackers and Founders meetup yesterday. It was a high
energy meetup and I liked it. When I walked in, I was already 2 hours
late but there were still quite a few people around. I walked in,
took a name tag and tried to "merge in". Merging was easy - the folks
were friendly and did not mind if you joined the discussion.
Some observations
I did not have a good answer for "what are you working on right
now" . This made me realize that from a technology
perspective, I have not worked on anything interesting for some
time now. I have tinkered with a few things in the past 6 months
(man!), but have not really done a deep dive on any of them.
There was a focus on programming language in the group. I am not
sure if the choice of a programming language is really a big deal
when creating a webapp. Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Java - all have a
good web framework. One of the arguments was that it would be
difficult to organize PHP code in a coherent manner. In my
opinion, that is a matter of discipline instead of language.
I did not find people thinking of totally different ideas. Or
maybe, the folks were not telling those ideas . The ideas
floated around ads, community, social networking, websites etc.
I am not a unique case when it comes to the case of creating a
startup. A few folks there had a regular job and were planning on
side projects.
If you are using macports, you will notice that git svn init will give
you this erro git: 'svn' is not a git-command. This is because the default build of the macports git does not build git-svn. You can do the following steps to fix this
sudo port deactivate git
sudo port install git +svn
Be preapeared for a long build - this will pull in svn and related dependencies.
A few days back we were trying to optimize a sql query that was using an ORDER BY clause. When we ran an EXPLAIN on the query, we saw that the query was Using filesort and Using temporary. Since this query was run quite frequently, there was a benefit in optimizing this.
I had been under the impression that if your query uses filesort and then has to use temp tables for sorting, you cannot do much to save the query. However, that is not the case. If you have an index on the column being used to do the order by , mysql will use that index for sorting. Of course, there are caveats to this, the most important one being
The key used to fetch the rows is not the same as the one used in the ORDER BY:
SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE key2=constant ORDER BY key1;
Hence, if you have a query which requires to be sorted, and it is being run quite frequently, it makes sense to add an index on the column on which you are doing the sort.
. This made me realize that from a technology
perspective, I have not worked on anything interesting for some
time now. I have tinkered with a few things in the past 6 months
(man!), but have not really done a deep dive on any of them.