Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I’ve setup an overlay website + subversion repository for NX/FreeNX packages for Gentoo. Like the PHP overlay before it, it’s a place for us to work quickly and collaboratively on improving the ebuilds and documentation for NoMachine’s NX and the GPL’d FreeNX packages.

There isn’t much to see tonight, but myself and scruggsj will be getting the site sorted out as quickly as possible. Feel free to drop by in #gentoo-nx if you want to chat, need help, or want to contribute. Because it’s an overlay, you don’t have to be a full-blown Gentoo developer to come and help!

It looks like the problems I’m having w/ FreeNX testing are due to my Linksys ADSL router, so I’m going to need some help testing FreeNX. With that in mind, I’ve added packages for FreeNX 0.5.0, and nx-x11-1.5.0, into Portage. They’re package.masked for now, until they’ve been more widely tested.

It’s known that FreeNX isn’t working on AMD64 at the moment. I don’t run AMD64 myself, so I can’t look at the problem first-hand. If you feel like helping out with patches, please check out bug #103274.

I’m not running modular-X11 yet, so if you are, and you have (or need) patches for NX, please see bug 125088.

Planet PHP has been abuzz all weekend since the first preview release of the new Zend Framework. It’s a preview, so what’s there can hopefully only get better

One thing I don’t think has had fair praise has been the Contributor License Agreement. Anyone who wants to commit to the Framework has to sign the Contributor License Agreement first. If you’re using someone else’s code in your product, it’s important to know that all the third-party code is their’s to relicense in the first place. It’s one less thing to worry about when you’re trying to sleep at night (And, in a scripting language like PHP, where anyone can audit the code you ship to your customers, it’s a fair worry)

As the FAQ says, if you contribute code to the framework, you’re not signing over all rights to your code to Zend. It’s still your code; you’ve just granted Zend a license to use the code in the framework. That’s very generous of Zend - they could easily have used their position to gobble up all the rights to all contributions. But I think that it’ll also turn out to be the keystone that makes the Zend Framework much more successful than the alternatives.

Getting this sort of thing right isn’t easy. Gentoo’s had its own problems with a copyright assignment agreement for new developers a couple of years back (which I believe still haven’t been totally resolved). Maybe we should take a look at what Zend have done here, and see what we can learn?