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musings of an unemployed programmer
Friday, April 26 2002The more programming (and reading about programming) that I do, the more of an open-source zealot I become. I've come to believe that a programmer should donate the bulk of his programming work to the common cause of free software. To make money, a programmer should be hired for the skills demonstrated in his open source projects (and his familiarity to the products he's released), applying them to the specific programming tasks of an employer. In my view of the ideal future, programs have no monetary value but the work of programming is well-compensated. This is precisely what's happening to music under the influence of file sharing. In the future, all canned music will be free, but you'll still have to pay if you want to see the music live. (Full-disclosure: I'm still unemployed, though I'm doing more programming than ever before.)
In keeping with this mindset, today I released my Flash Chat as an open-source application under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The irony, of course, is that it only runs on a proprietary Microsoft-compatible backend (such as an IIS web server). Hopefully someday I'll find the time to port the server-side code to a legitimate open-source backend such as PHP. If you want a copy to try on your own IIS server (and any Windows machine can be made an IIS server - the chat does not need a database), go to my ASP sample page.Later in the day, the irony of my open source project being written in ASP was starting to bother me, so I searched the web to see if there were any utilities to automate the tedium of porting pages from ASP to PHP. I found an open source freeware application called ASP2PHP and immediately downloaded it to try it out.
I couldn't get its recursive folder translation function to work, but I could make it translate individual ASP pages, which was almost as useful. Unfortunately, though, the resulting code will need considerable hand-tweaking. Some of its unhelpful activities include:- The translation of user function calls into arrays
- The translation of one-line IF-THEN statements into gibberish
- Any reference to the File System Object precipitates a translator crash
Nonetheless, the tool is open-source so (should I find the time) I could theoretically contribute to its development and make it better able to handle my style of VBScript. I can imagine a more robust version of this tool being very helpful for the cause of Open Source, since the entire VBScript world, as it exists now, depends on proprietary software to run.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020426 feedback
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