ZoneMinder Forums

Lee Sharp wrote:I am very concerned here, as I will be selling Zoneminder.

please read GPL before selling ZM, you can charge for media that you use to transfer copy of ZM to your custmer, you can charge for any services that you provide in connection with ZM, you can charge for warranty protection, but you can't sell ZM itself.

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html

and dont forget to donate please

that was my idea too.. charge for hardware, setup, support, training. no charge for zoneminder.. but will pad the price to allow for a donation per customer.

Also. this is a project that I am very interested in. And will support it also with any code changes and/or addons that maybe benificial to all the zoneminders out there.

But using a db like postgresql/firebird is very important to me since I have started to fall in love with stored procedures, views, triggers, etc. it has made my perl, php, ruby code cleaner with my projects.

I have started looking over the code.. OMG.. mysql everywhere..hehe So I see the task of making some kind of central db handler for the C/CPP code is going to be fun. I love perl and have worked with the DBI alot so that shouldnt be to hard and the same goes with PHP. Though I may make my code work with PHP ver 5.2

Though it looks like several people maybe trying to do the same thing and since there is no central cvs/svn it will be fun to see whos works out for the best.

I will post my results if I am able to get something working.

Perhaps I should be more clear. I have made a business of "selling" open source solutions. I do not violate the GPL, and tell my customers that they can get the software free. What I provide is a supported solution that includes free software. You pay me so much a month, and get a supported and monitored firewall. The fact that it runs m0n0wall is not really what I am selling. I also have a desktop that works for a flat fee, and that happens to run Ubuntu. That would be the case with Zoneminder. We would sell hardware, installation, and support. The software is free. We have no problem competing with free, as we add a lot of value.

As to supporting Zoneminder, you bet! I am very active in supporting those projects that are core to my business. This includes user support, development, contributions, web space, and in one case a hotel for vacation of a developer. None of the projects I "sell" consider me a leach. If Zoneminde becomes core to my business, the first thing I would do is set up a few torrent clients in different parts of the internet so that the torrent downloads are as fast as a direct download. There is not a big need for mirrors when torrents are well populated...

Which brings me back to my original concern. I see no reason I can not deliver mysql as part of a FOSS system. If I am incorrect in this, please let me know. (Also if there are any other encumbrances to selling a preinstalled ZM system)

Hi All

With the talk about Postgress over MySQL and so on, iam would like to my 2 cents, from what i posted back in 2005 there is no problem in using MySQL.

On the other hand, it is allways a good thing for a system to be open minded, but that is allways equal more work for the developer since he/they will have to do more programming and allways remember to update the schema's for the diff. systems that they suport, so if you want your system to be able to talk to more than one database server you need code to handle it, and you need a diffrent sql setup for each database server you want to support (hence the more work). From expirence this can mess up a new distrobution of the software becurese you forgot somthing, but then again you allow the user to use the DB Server he/she wants, so it is allways a question of should you support more or shouldent you.

I will be changing ZM to be more db agnostic very shortly. As I have mentioned before I did have a postgres fork off of 1.19.3 (I think) which worked pretty well be soi much has changed that the merge would be a nightmare. The db structure has to be quite radically changed to support postgres so I'm not sure that an upgrade path would exist from 1.22.3 for existing users.

I am considering splitting the project to have a 'stable' branch with incremental changes and a 'testing' branch in which things like postgres could be added without risking peoples stable installations. Then as features bed down they can be merged back in to the stable branch. I am just a bit worried that once it splits we may end up just drifting apart

Splits never go as planned. For a good example, look at m0n0wall and pfsense. The documentation guy for both projects is the same guy. Many shared developers. And still the split doesn't pass much back... You just get to many people "with a good idea" going in different directions.

what would be nice is some layer that allows someone to make a db backend.. so..lets say that mysql is the official db module supported and will always be updated by the zoneminder group. Then get maintainers of the other db modules like postgresql,firebird,sqlite etc to keep those backends upto date.

Yes.. coming up with some infrastructure like that would be mind numbing when mysql is so built in right now. we could even come up with a generic way to update the db schemas like what adodb for php can do. I suppose c/c++ code will be the most fun since there is already adodb for php and dbi for perl that handles most of the calling conventions.

It might be interesting to see if the m0n0wall/pfsense webgui would be good for all the configuring and setup of zoneminder. It has a nice consistant look. Though I was looking into something that could be easy to add to portals or template engines.

That way it can be embedded easy into the look and feel of a website or intranet. I usually write code that writes code so that output types can be easily changed without changing the source material. But that may not fit within your design goals.

which leads back to a good backend with non db specific calls from the front end would allow alot of different front end design possibilities.. web based, pc based, phone/java based. Never needing to actually connect to the database but to use some kind of protocol between client and server (*plenty of them out there*)

Sorry for rambling along here. I just see so much potential but would hate to see it with people going in their own directions

may i reply to this thread to ask how agnostic is now zoneminder with respect to databases? does it now support postgres natively? and sqlite?

thanks : )

I was just wondering whatever came about this. I'm a 100% PostgreSQL guy and would love to see this amazing project support for both PostgreSQL & MySQL.

Anyone have any info / updates about PG integration / support for future releases to Zoneminder? I would love to see such an amazing software like ZM support a more widely used enterprise database like PostgreSQL. Anyone have any info or updates on this?

Use PDO for database portability/agnostic between vendors.

PDO is fast, native since PHP 5 and imperative for PHP 6.

PDO – PHP Data Objects – is a database access layer providing a uniform method of access to multiple databases.

Why you Should be using PHP’s PDO for Database Access