Safe as Milk

The latest UnThing: Coworking

Anyone who has worked for long periods from home gets lonely. You miss having a coffee machine where you can complain about the problem you’ve been having or chat about your dog’s gastritis. You miss eating with other people. You miss having office noise around you (OK, maybe not so much that one).

So here comes coworking. What is it? It’s a shared space, somewhere where you go to get your human interraction while working – an office with café culture, someone’s apartment with an open door day for people tired of working alone.

Interesting idea. The next step is shared living space, for those of us who spend a lot of time travelling, and prefer to stay with like-minded people rather than in hotels.

GNOME and sponsors

Fernando: Your blog entry just got pointed out to me by Luis. It raises an interesting question about the relationship of GNOME to its main sponsors.

GNOME (through the GNOME Foundation) gets a lot of support from companies – in particular our advisory board members, Sun, Novell, RedHat, HP, IBM, Debian, the FSF, and the more recent additions Nokia, Imendio, OpenedHand, Canonical, PalmSource, Intel and the SFLC.

Part of the problem that we’ve faced in the past is that we go to the well for very concrete things – advisory board dues, GUADEC, the summit, a new server… or a local conference. To the company, it all comes under the heading “GNOME”.

Ideally what would happen is that we would go to the company once, with a detailed list of activities for the year, have one single purchase order for “GNOME”, and then at the end of the year publish an annual report of all the things we’d done with the money (including sponsoring local conferences) to prepare the terrain for the following year.

There are a number of reasons why that might not be a great idea. First, companies might like to support the foundation, but not sponsor one particular conference. Second, we still want to get one-off sponsorship from companies not on the advisory board. Third, all our biggest sponsors will already have their sponsorship bundled up in the foundation, reducing the scope for the organisers.

But the existing situation is untenable – it’s easier for someone to justify a one-off payment of (say) $40,000 than five separate payments for $10,000, $15,000, and 3 x $5,000. So we do need to figure out a better way.

One way to improve things would be to offer sponsorship packages, varying from “Advisory board membership” through to “Deluxe cornerstone strategic partner”. We will need to work out reasonable levels for those packages without making things too complicated, and pitch the idea to advisory board members to work out the details. And of course, it’ll force us to be much more open about what we do – there are a bunch of things that the foundation has helped with this year which either haven’t gotten much attention, or which we haven’t really shouted about. When I get a chance, I’ll make a list…

In short, I’m not surprised that Nokia hasn’t sponsored you, but the foundation’s sponsorship of Fernando’s plane ticket is coming in part from Nokia and their support, so don’t be too hard on them.

And the Ultras go to…

Back in June, Sun gave us two Ultra 20s to give to deserving GNOME hackers and announced the donation at GUADEC. Finally, we can reveal the recipients:

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We tried to think of two more deserving recipients, really we did.

Schumi – Alonso

The cynic in me agrees with Damon Hill’s analysis that Schumacher will go into the Brazilian grand prix trying to figure out how he can manage to score 10 points without having Alonso score any. Here are two scenarios which have come to mind.

• Massa the missile. Massa qualifies ahead of the Renaults, and (either into the first turn, or after trying to slow down Alonso for a few dozen laps, and finally having him try to overtake) Massa takes him out à la Schumacher 1994. Bye bye constructor’s championship, but hello driver’s title
• FIA to the rescue. Alonso has previously had trouble with penalties (in Monza and Hungary) and Renault have had some equipment banned in the middle of the season this year (which coincided with Ferrari’s recovery). what are the odds of an Alonso disqualification either in qualifying or during the race?

Oh – and Calum, I’ll thank you not to mention the weekend’s international football.

svn tagging

Michael: Try ‘svn cp -m “Creating a tag/branch” . svn+ssh://server/directory/tags/test_tag’

Begining of a Great Adventure

I have never been paid to work on Free Software, and have often wished I was – I would have loved to be able to spend my working day striving towards a grand goal that I am passionate about and believe in. But circumstances (and a lack of backbone on my part) conspired against me, and so for the first 8 years of my professional career, I have never been paid to do what I am passionate about.

Until now.

At the start of November, I will be joining Wengo, where I will be working on growing the community around the OpenWengo project, a Free Software, open-standards based VoIP softphone (and instant messaging client).

It’s a big challenge, but one I am very happy to take on. Talking to people at Wengo has convinced me that there is a real willingness to open up the development process and be a good citizen in the free software world, which is a great starting point. My first job will be to look at the development processes of the company as it is, and identify ways that we can make that process even more open, even more welcoming to new contributors.

It’s going to be a fun ride.

550

There’s nothing like lots of new people tasting freedom for the first time to get your day started. DAM brings us the story of a migration of part of a French group to GNOME-based thin-clients. 550 clients being served by 10 servers.

And thanks to the wonderful work that has been done recently to make free software applications cross-platform, even the people who have to use Windows on their laptops get to join in the fun, using Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.