Open Source & Free software

Free Alaa of Egypt who is detained for peaceful protest. A blogger, Open Source activest & freedom of speech believer. I got the chance to meet Alaa last year in Egypt at an open source workshop, very honorable man.

More Info.

Today Albawaba launched it's OpenSource software Projects site. Big thanks goes to Zaid for introducing the first project, cqGreylist.

This is a dream come true Hopefully more projects in the future.

The long awaited MySQL release is out. Probably the most 3 important new features are: Stored Procedures, Triggers & Views.

I've always liked MySQL because it was a stripped down version of bigger RDBMS, and this is why it was lightning vast, I feel they were pressured to go this direction. It would be really hard to add these features without a performance hit. It would be cool if we can see some benchmarks soon!

Freaky news, Oracle buys Open Source company Innobase. A very smart thing to do if they want to kill MySQL...

Innobase are the developers of the most interesting engine type in MySQL; InnoDB.

From ESR's Blog

What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs
to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to
something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a
Satanist orgy?

A must read....

Currently I'm writing an article on the state of Open Source and PHP in the middle east. As you would have probably guessed googling didn't give much useful information. I would like to know about your experiences using them. What are the difficulties that are stopping OpenSource from being mainstream? Why didn't OpenSource get a chance in our educational system?

Any information would be valuable, elaborate, innovate and send me whatever you have

I've been interviewed by LinuxJournal this week. The interview is about some Open Source projects in Jordan, and my involvement in PHP. I must say I'm really honored to be interviewed by LJ.

I thank from all of my heart Tom Adelstein who during this interview not all became someone I enjoy talkin' to, but a real close friend. I'm honored that I know Tom, I'm learning alot from him every singel day. I'd like to also thank abdelqader Jaradat & Steffen Macke for their extraordinary help by providing me information about BMFO.

Your feedback is highly appreciated.

Read the Interview.

The photos are online.

I will be giving a presentation on the 30th this month. Check program details. But before that I will be attending the ICT4D workshop in Damascus! I'll be leaving sunday evening with Isam.

In 2 weeks I will be travelling to Syria to join the Regional Meeting on ICT4D that will take place in Damascus. Then I'm going to Aleppo to speak in the Open Source conference organized by AUF, University of Aleppo & NOSSTIA.

I'm really looking forward for both events

after travelling 18 hours or actually 19 if you include the way from home to airport I reached my destination; middle of no where, hehe. I'm currently in the breathtaking Gaustablikk Resort to attend EZ summer camp 2005. Had to take two buses from Oslo in a 4 hour trip to get to Rjukan. There the really nice CEO of ez was waiting, he drove me and 4 other participants to the resort. The country is so beautiful, so green, nature is amazing!

Yesterday was one of the weirdest/craziest days in my life, I need at least 2 hours to write about that, will do when I get some time

There will be an open source event in Al-Israa next week( Wed 20th, April ). Thanks to the efforts of Issam Hambouz for making it happen. The guys built a website for the event.

I will be giving a levture about Free & Open Source Philosophy

This is a bit late. Here are my presentation slides for FOSS 2005.

The title of the talk was

Building Interactive Web Sites Using FOSS (PHP).

Power Point( 541 KB) Open Office(431 KB)