OStatic

The developers of PHP announced last week that PHP version 4.4.9 is now available. This would not be remarkable in and of itself, except that the developers also indicated that this would be the last release of PHP 4.4. If PHP were commercial software, its end of life would be cause for panic in some quarters. The end of life of an open-source project works differently, of course. It does mean that the official development group will no longer spend time and energy fixing bugs in these old versions. But that's where the similarities between proprietary and open-source software ends.

Successful open-source projects have strong communities. What can you do to ensure that the community around your project is as strong as possible? At least two talks at today's OSCon in Portland, Oregon, will address this issue. They will look at antipatterns, things that are known not to work when building a community. These talks come just a few months after the publication of Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody, in which he describes how society is changing as a result of the fact that the Internet massively reduces the cost of communication, publication, and distribution.

After a long search, the Linux Foundation has found its community manager for its LSB Developer Network. The Linux Foundation has tapped Brian Proffitt, longtime managing editor of Linux Today, Enterprise Linux Today, AllLinuxDevices, LinuxPR, and JustLinux.

OStatic: For readers who aren't familiar with Linux Today, could you give a bit of background on the site and yourself?

Brian Proffitt: Wait, who's not familiar with Linux Today? Are you kidding me? Have you been talking to those people at SourceForge again? Boy, what characters...

PHP is not the sexiest language, and many people are quick to point out its deficiencies for Web application development. However, PHP is one of the most popular open-source projects, with a huge following, and many installations. Given that it is a relatively stable project, you might expect the PHP development team to be resting on its laurels. But no; in addition to a regular bug-fix release, the PHP QA team is sponsoring a test fest, in an attempt to improve the language's automated test suite.