“My Open Source History”

Thoughts May 2007

Jyrki Wahlstedt

My Open Source history goes quite far, for me it is not fancy nor fashion. First in the role of a user of open source software I compiled and used GNU software as often as I could, and the environment allowed. This remained the same for several years, but a few years back, as I was teaching information technology, there was a Linux server there, I set up a FreeBSD workstation for myself, and used e.g. open source databases, MySQL and PostgreSQL, in the courses.

All the time I had been using Mac OS X as my main personal working environment and looked for some way to manage Open Source software in my system. This is, how I found out about DarwinPorts (currently MacPorts). Considering my background both in UNIX and Macintosh it is no wonder that I was attracted at once. I know about other systems like Fink, too, but MacPorts is closely related to the FreeBSD port system, as OS X is closely related to FreeBSD, hence it was a natural choice.

I used MacPorts to install some programs, but because I had used some open source programs elsewhere not available in MacPorts, I decided to start building my own ports for some of them. The first was pgAdmin3, the administration tool for PostgreSQL databases. The following package was a Finnish content management system called Midgard (allows web content stored in an MySQL database to be published using PHP scripting via Apache http server). These software packages need in turn other packages that also needed maintenance. Hence I am currently maintaining the following ports in MacPorts, either as a sole maintainer or as a co-maintainer with someone else: dialog, midgard-apache2, midgard-core, midgard-data, midgard-php4, pgAdmin3, php4, php5, postgresql7, postgresql80, postgresql81, postgresql81-doc, postgresql81-server, postgresql82, postgresql82-doc, postgresql82-server, py-macholib, py-modulegraph, py-py2app, py-pygresql, py-wxpython, py-wxpython26, slony1, swig, wxWidgets, wxWidgets-devel, and wxWidgets26. The python ports are not related in any way to PostgreSQL tools or Midgard, but I learned python during one of my teaching periods to show examples outside the main teaching language.

There is no present or future without history. Today and in the future I hope I can make world a bit better place by enabling people to use software written by developers in an easily manageable way.