Interview with Philippe Gamache, Part 2 (0)
Here’s the 2nd part of the interview with Philippe Gamache (Part 1 here). As stated previously, Philippe Gamache is opening Sensio Canada offices with a new training session due soon.
The web frameworks mentioned above were all released to the public and owned by its “developer community”. Symfony, in the other hand, seems to be tightly associated with the Sensio Labs Company. Do you see it as a threat since Sensio can orient the framework’s roadmap towards
their own private interests?
Sensio Labs is the primary sponsor of symfony, but its no way completely ties to us. There is programmer in the core team that comes from different companies, like Yahoo. In fact, many of their newer sites are made with symfony. Hundreds of plug-ins are made from people all around
the world.Like I said before, open source projects work on the principle: I take and I give back. But sometime giving back is difficult. Let me explain. There are three generals trend is open source software: developer community, foundation base and company’s base. For some companies, the only way to give back is paying for the service.
Community base development usually lack some focus and programmers usually are doing this in there spare times and have a day job, or are already paid by a companies to give back.
Foundation base development, have more focus and you can pay them. But, because they don’t have any others means of funding, only a small part is actually give to full time development.
Companies base projects, usually have focus, bases on there clients. Sensio Labs had hundred of clients over the last ten years, those experiences drive symfony development. So when you what to give back with money, you give it by helping yourself again, at the same time:
training and professional consulting.
Sensio Labs are opening Sensio Canada this fall, the first office in North America. What are Sensio Canada’s plans? Are we going to see you in local dev events such as codefests or barcamps? Or it’s more about Enterprise support & consultancy work?
To be fare, the US office did open at the same time. Sensio Labs what to offer different services in Canada, that is usually divided in main areas of expertise. Audit and Consulting: benchmark, audit (technical, methodological), Open-Source expertise, and symfony certification. Integration and development: Customized solution providing (Internet, Intranet, e-commerce…) with Open-Source technology. Training: inter and in-company, symfony seminar (elementary, intermediate, expert,
hosting/operating). Technical assistance: expertise mission, training, technical assistance / development.We will add a new area of expertise: security. I’m now working on some PHP security training and it should be available soon. There will do security audit at the same time.
Remember, symfony is an open source project, so we do participate to many camps. We actually already have a symfonycamp. But, I’ll be at the PHP Codefests, barcamps, etc. I’ll encourage any new employees to do the same. In fact, I’m working to revive the local OWASP chapters (Open Web
Application Security Project).
Do you have any examples of websites that used the symfony framework?
http://www.mobivox.com
http://delicious.com/
http://answers.yahoo.com/
http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/
http://www.Francesoir.fr
http://go.edgehill.ac.uk
http://www.housetohome.co.uk
http://www.marieclaire.co.uk
http://symfonians.net/
