phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:20:22
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), Micheal Cottingham (Techie-Micheal), Adam Reyher (AdamR)

On this episode, we’re all pumped up in anticipation of the OSCON 2009 convention taking place this week in San Jose, California. OSCON (O’Reilly Open Source Convention) is one of the biggest and longest-running events focused on free and open source software, and thanks in part to the fact that it moves from Portland, OR to the Bay Area for the first time this year, phpBB is going to be there via our OSCONvasion 2009 Bay Area phpBB Users Meetup, exclusively sponsored by phpBB Weekly.

And so, as we get ready to mobilize to San Jose, we dedicate this episode to free and open source software. We discuss what free and open source software is, what it means (note the oft-quoted “Free as in speech, not as in beer”), and some of its history. We also discuss a bit about some of the legal documents that helps keep free and open source software free and open source, such as the Creative Commons licenses and the GNU General Public License (including some discussion about the differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3 and other GPL variations). We also discuss a bit about the idea of copyleft and how these licenses use copyleft to extend the freedoms and rights normally reserved by copyright. And finally, we talk a bit about how open source is actually helping to make all kinds of software better, and how it helps make phpBB and many other PHP-based web programs better as well.

If you’re going to be in the Bay Area this week, we hope that you’ll come to OSCON. There’s a bunch of free events and a great Expo Hall with lots of great exhibitors, all of which are available to you with a free Expo Hall Only registration. And of course, our OSCONvasion 2009 meetup, which will have involvement from lots of team members, live phpBB demos, and much more. And if you can’t come, we will be streaming OSCONvasion 2009 on a special phpBB Weekly episode this Thursday evening, and everyone is invited to listen live and join in on our TalkShoe chatroom and ask any questions you want to the panel that will be presenting, just like we did at Londonvasion last year! We hope to see you in person or in spirit (via the internet) on Thursday! It’s sure to be a blast.

Our last phpBB Weekly Poll Question was “What would be the most likely impact of enabling Quick Reply on your board?” Here are the answers:
“The front will fall off.” 8 votes / 31%
“The energy saved by not loading the reply forms will qualify me for a tax rebate for being ‘green.’” 7 votes / 27%
“The ‘Post Reply’ button will go on strike and accuse me of hiring scabs.” 6 votes / 23%
“The earth’s magnetic field will suddenly turn upside down, and we won’t be able to hang things on refrigerators ever again.” 3 votes / 12%
“Truckloads of pointless ‘I agree’ replies to sort through.” 0 votes / 0%
And 2 “Other” answers:
“The universe WILL implode! And ketchup will taste like mustard.”
“It still doesn’t make me coffee ”
Total Votes: 26
There will not be a Poll Question this week, our next poll will be announced next Saturday.

The MOD of the Week is Syntax Highlighter by UseLess, and the Style of the Week is polyethylene by Zergall.

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Download MP3 Episode (50.8 MB)

Episode Duration: 1:28:42
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples) and David Lewis (Highway of Life)

Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts/.

We thought that we would have a nice, short episode this week, but unfortunately, we love to digress so much that this episode ended up lasting a cool hour and a half! Nevertheless, we didn’t get as off-topic as we have tended to do during our past few not-live episodes, and for that, I guess we should be commended (?).

On this episode, we start by having David recap his experiences last weekend at Joomla!Day Vancouver (and the other sightseeing that he did in Vancouver in general). During the discussion, we end up covering things such as how the Joomla! folks had some interesting phpBB feature requests based on their unique point of view on how phpBB could be run, as well as some of the different ways that the Joomla! teams and community are organized, etc.

Afterwards, we take a look at the recently-released Londonvasion 2008 schedule, looking at each planned presentation and what will be talked about at the event. We do not know yet whether or not anything will be streamed from the event, nor do we know final details on what kind of coverage we’ll be doing from the event, since all that is still subject to change, but we’ll keep you posted.

Finally, Firefox 3 was released this past week, and so in honor of it, Douglas points out a Firefox Add-on for phpBB in addition to the MOD and Style of the Week: phpBB Canned Responses for Firefox 1.5-3.0 by Pumazooma (NOTE: this is still in beta!). In addition, as usual, the MOD of the Week is Automatic Daylight Savings Time (DST) for phpBB3 by MartectX, and the Style of the Week is RonPaul2008 for phpBB3 by blackraven007.

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