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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged phpMyAdmin
Free Software: Behind the Scenes
by on January 15, 2019
We wrote a few weeks ago about how Conservancy has several projects that support new people or less technical people and help bring new people into free software. We also support many projects that most folks probably don't think about very often. Many of our projects exist relatively outside of the spotlight and facilitate the creation of free software by providing tools, systems and infrastructure for developers.
Testing and Automation
Once you've got some code, how do you make sure it works everywhere you want it to -- in the way that you want it to? Testing and automation. Selenium is a suite of tools for browser automation. The W3C recommended their WebDriver tool as the best tool for the development of a more accessible and collaborative web last year. Just a few short months ago, we welcomed Reproducible Builds, a project that attests that your build is safe and uncompromised. The integrity of code is critical if you care about user safety and true software freedom and that's why each build needs to be tested and verified using a free software tool.
Interoperability and efficiency are also important. Projects that ignore this can find it hard to increase adoption. QEMU is a generic and free/open source machine emulator and virtualizer that helps developers build programs that work on different kinds of hardware. This lets developers create free software that works on all kinds of machines and with all kinds of hardware. Buildbot is a framework which enables software developers to automate software builds by scheduling different pieces of work. Both tools help developers create software that is useful to all kinds of users on all different systems.
Freedom All the Way Down the Stack
It's a little easier to expain why you want software for the tools that users directly interact with, but what about the tools that most users never see? The bits that talk to the hardware, the pieces that turn on your machine and the code that powers the internet also need to be free. You can't mix and match fee and non-free code and be sure you are getting all of the benefits of user freedom. That's why we are proud to spport so many projects that live close to the bare metal and work on critical interstitial bits that don't always get a lot of press.
Samba removes barriers to interoperability and is standard on nearly all distributions of Linux. Samba is what allows GNU/Linux and Unix machines to access file and print servers that are designed with Windows users in mind. This kind of hardware to hardware level interoperability makes it easy for folks to choose a free operating system for their personal machine, when their workplace or school isn't ready to switch.
Harvey OS provides a fully free operating system with a very compact kernel in which all resources are treated as files. This provides Unix users new ways of working with permissions and applications. Coreboot is an extended firmware platform, which provides users with a lightning fast and fully free boot system for desktops, laptops, servers and tablets. Start with freedom as soon as you boot!
We must have a free software foundation to build on top of, if we ever hope to offer users a completely free computing environment, both online and off. Linux XIA is a protocol stack for Linux that uses eXpress Internet Architecture (XIA) to enable a more trustworthy and interoperable internet while also improving continuity for network users.
Metalink is dedicated to improving downloads. Metalink makes it much easier for people — especially those in areas with inferior Internet connections — to download Open Source and Free Software. Just one non-free piece in the puzzle can counteract the intention to provide user freedom, privacy and security by that free software developers are working to provide throughout the rest of the stack.
Nuts and Bolts
We love supporting tools that free software developers use as part of their workflow to create more free software. We host three version control systems at Conservancy; Git, Mercurial and Darcs, which is a distributed revision control system written in Haskell.
We also support projects that help developers maintain their internal code. Kallithea is a free software source code management system that we use for many of our own scripts and systems. It lets teams easily maintain different versions of internal code projects. phpMyAdmin is a free and open source web interface for the MySQL and MariaDB database systems. It's a mature project that helps folks administrate their web-based MySQL instances.
Conservancy believes that everyone deserves full software freedom, without backdoors or exceptions. Developers deserve free tools and users deserve freedom all the way down to the bare metal. We don't live in that world just yet, but it's got to be built one piece at a time. Many of our projects aren't famous, but they're all important for securing full user freedom and that's why we support their work here at Conservancy.
Highlights: Conservancy's Recent Free Software Development
by on June 26, 2018
Conservancy helps our projects in so many ways, but one of the most exciting and direct ways is that we directly fund software development and other work for our member projects. We look forward to keeping our community regularly updated on the work we fund, since it's a great way to learn about milestones in communities that you might not follow regularly.
Clojars
We helped Clojars set up a grant program Clojurists Together to help the community identify and fund critical Clojars development including code, infrastructure fixes and documentation.
Clojars is a community repo of free software Clojure libraries. One of the most popular projects is Bruce Hauman's Figwheel tool. Figwheel allows developers to write reloadable code that compiles instantaneously to Javascript while you work. You can learn a little bit more about why he built Figwheel on his blog. But basically, you can use a Lisp dialect to make great looking websites without ever stopping to compile - win-win!
Lee Hinman worked on updating the API and other features for clj-http, a widely used base HTTP client. You can check out the code for yourself if you like!
Godot
In the GDNative world, Thomas Herzog made lots of progress on 3D rendering and environmental reflections, both of which are key for an immersive game world. Next up, he's planning some more work on sky texture and the C++ bindings for the Godot Engine.
Juan Linietsy implemented support for CSG ("Constructive Solid Geometry") in the Godot Engine. In games, 3D work can be extremely time-consuming and is often out-sourced. CSG allows game designers to build simple environments they can use to visualize game play on their own. Read Juan's whole post to see some sample shapes and learn more about how it all works under the hood.
Rémi Verschelde also spent time getting Godot (and it's code base) ready for this year's Google Summer of Code interns and promoting the project locally at a Danish gaming event. You can see here that he also made Godot's documentation ready for translation. He was even inspired by (fellow Conservancy member!) PHPmyAdmin to script a way to gather all the templates together into one monolithic file.
PHPmyAdmin
Michal Čihař has been spending time looking at how to make Docker work for PHPy Admin and tidying up the website. Meanwhile, Maurício Meneghini Fauth spent his time making way for the switch to PHP 7.1 b y removing some dependencies, doing lots of refactoring and pulling out PHP 5 code. phpMyAdmin has been around for nineteen years, so we're really glad to see them keeping pace with current tech in order to serve the next generation of web administrators!
If you saw something excting here, we encourage you to get involved in these projects. Nearly every free software project could use your help with translation, testing, documentation or something. You can also donate directly to our member projects or Conservancy, if that's more your style. Thanks for supporting free software!
