The bitter-sweet taste of open source

From an essay of Paul Graham: (Original essay here)

That’s why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don’t switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it’s a better browser.

It’s not that Microsoft isn’t trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can’t pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.

I’m a professional programmer, eventhough I use open source to do ocassional jobs and I certainly enjoy the work in the open source community, I do tend to agree with Joel Spolsky on an interview he offered on the radio about the different types of software licenses and software economy in general. Open Source take us, professional programmers, to the edge. Here’s the original interview in mp3

Here’s a good thread on Open Source vs Commercial

The point is, Open Source value comes from Darwinian selection and thousands of volunteers all over the world, who are willing to do things for free, who are, some of them amateurs, that want to try how far they can go and who offer their code for free. The only thing Commercial software might have in its defense is Support and sometimes you get good quality support on open source forums.

How can software companies survive open source? I frankly don’t know.

Reg exps, they’ve always been my favs

Today I had a busy/kind of caotic day at work, not much of coding, just preparing excel files out of the SQL Server tables to hand to a translation team. It was soo time consuming and all I wanted was to get back to programming.
Anyways, feeling a little bit frustrated today, I arrived home and remembered I had this job a friend wanted me to do to filter some footers from email messages, I had to remove the original messages from the text.

My target phrases would be like the following ones:

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005 16:14:10 -0500 "Eric Marr"
<northland@charterinteret.cam> writes:

--- <fe.sola@infom.cu> wrote:

On 8/1/05, Belayer via sql-l
<sql-l@groups.ittoolbo.cem> wrote:

So it definetely cried out for regular expressions.
I downloaded the best tool for testing reg exps.
The freeware Regex Coach
My thumbs up for this tool,
I'll donate some money to it as soon I as clean up my CC, heh.

I came up with some reg exps that needs some extra tuning,
they are here on this text file
(Blogger complains of script injection, hehe)
Text file with RegExps

The php function for the final clean up
might come in a following post.
Cheers,
PG