Safe as Milk

Free software whoring

Bryce Harrington has written a very thought-provoking blog on running free software communities. An extract:

The way to maximize the value gained by a FLOSS project is to grease up the skids and make it extremely easy for new users to begin contributing. Sure, 90% can’t, 9% won’t, 0.9% will but not very much, but that last 0.1% can well be worth it. […] Don’t think of the free desktop simply as an alternative to proprietary desktops. Instead think of it as a platform for large scale open collaboration. […] Take the rules, tools, architectures, and lessons we’ve gained in software collaboration and recast them for “data development”, and I think the free desktop’s success will be impossible to stop.

Worth a read, especially as a binome to Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick’s “Poisonous People” talk.

Marathon training

For the past while, I have been running quite a bit, in training for a marathon. I have no idea why – I was never a fan of jogging – but the idea of running a marathon started teasing me last Summer, and I finally decided I was going to do one. At the point where I went searching for candidates, and chose the lucky winner, the Annecy Marathon on the 29th of April, the die were cast and there’s no turning back.

To get into the habit of running, I trained for and ran the Marseille-Cassis on Hallowe’en weekend – I got through the 21 kms in 2 hours and 1 minute (I beat the 2 hour pace-maker by a couple of minutes, she had faded in the heat at the end). The unusual think about the Marseille-Cassis is that you start at an elevation of 0, between kilometers 6 and 10 you climb from 100m to 320m elevation, and then from kilometers 16 to 20, you go back down to 0 again. It’s very tough on the knees and hips, but great fun.

Next weekend, in Brussels, I will be asking myself whether this is worth it – will the madness ever end. I have a 21km run to do according to the Hal Higdon training schedule I’m doing my best not to ignore, and I’m planning on doing it in Brussels early Saturday morning (with thanks to Martin Sevior for the link to the very useful gmaps-pedometer site).

How early? I figure if I want to be at the conference for 10am, I will have to be running by 7. So getting up at 6.30 ought to do the trick.

Which brings me to ask myself: is it marathon or masothon?

Get a First Life and the SecondLife trademarks

I am not a Second Life resident, and so far I have not had the inclination to become one. But this message from Linden Labs in response to the very funny parody site Get a First Life brought a big broad smile to my face – and gives me ideas about the ways in which the GNOME Foundation should be handling trademark issues. Talk about turning an opportunity for bad press into good press.

(via Jim Fruchterman of Benetech, one of my heros)

FOSTEL 2007 in Paris

I’ve been quietly pulling the threads together in the organisation of Yet Another Summit over the past few weeks – FOSTEL 2007 will be held in Paris, France on the 4th and 5th of April.

The summit will follow a similar format to the one which worked so well during the Libre Graphics Meeting last year – a small number of quality presentations on the major themes of the conference, with lots of time & space to meet people, have BOFs, hackfests, interoperability sessions and other fun stuff.

The guiding light for the summit is communication with free software. The main themes for the summit are telephony, VoIP and messaging.

A good number of interesting participants and projects are already committed to attending, with more and more confirming each day.

If you’d like to come, sign up to the wiki and the fostel-list@fostel.org mailing list, where all the fun announcements are going to go.

If you want more information, or would like to help out with the organisation (I need all the help I can get!), or need financial help getting to the conference, mail me at any of the addresses that Google turns up. If the spammers can find me, then so can you 😉

Mad Props Eitan and Brad

During SCALE, Eitan Isaacson and Brad Taylor were demo animals on the GNOME stand (photo shamelessly linked from Scott Ruecker’s LXer article series) – I failed miserably to make good on my promise to spend at least a half-day on the stand – in the end, I was there for about an hour showing off the N800’s Jingle video call capability with Eitan, and demoing Dasher’s text input reasonably successfully.

At the end of Sunday, I was caught up jabbering away to people, and didn’t even get a chance to clean up the stand & say goodbye.

So – thanks Eitan and Brad, and goodbye 🙂 See you both next year?

Update: I found a nicer picture (with me in it) from Celeste Paul of KDE-usability – we had a nice chat and messed about with the Nokia N800s we had quite a bit. Yes, I know I need a haircut, no need to remind me.

SCALE – what a weekend!

I’m just on my way home from LA where I gave a presentation on OpenWengo during SCALE. It was standing-room only, and a bunch of people were sitting down at the back – and aside from the fact that I hit a PortAudio bug which stopped me from actually demoing a phone-call, it went pretty well.

It was good to meet Ted “Bible thumper” Haegar and Erin Quill from Novell (the company everyone loves to hate these days) who gave a very stimulating presentation on Xen.

I know they didn’t notice that I had dozed off (jet-lagged to hell) during their presentation because no-one threw any books at me – unlike the previous evening, when Mr. Jono Bacon demonstrated his over-arm throwing skills to wake me from my gentle slumber. The most amusing things about the incident were the way I didn’t spill my beer (while asleep, or when hit by the book), the bemused and confused look on my face straight afterwards (I honestly had no idea what had happened), and the enthusiastic defense of my cause by the man behind me who wanted to have Jono ejected from the hall (“That was totally uncalled for, man”).

Aside from that, I had a really good chat about community development, Ubuntu, OpenWengo and GNOME with Jono, and I also met up with Jay from MySQL, who does pretty much the same thing there. I also met up with Zonker, who tried to interview me (and discovered my talent for tangents). A great weekend was had, and I hope I will get back next year.

The adventure continues

After my initial organisation of the Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon last year, Louis DesJardins in Montreal valiantly volunteered to carry the torch on to 2007 – planning for this year’s conference is going nicely now (at least, now that we’ve sorted out a website, and gotten all the DNS issues ironed out, thanks to Craig Bradney, Peter Linnell and Andy Fitz).

The line-up is looking good, and Louis has out-done himself (and certainly out-done me) with the amount of stuff organised. I’m very impressed.

This morning brought me another pleasant surprise – not only has the torch been carried on, but the idea virus has spread the conference beyond its original frontiers to Brazil – as part of FISL 8.0, some Grazilian Free Culture, Free Software and Free Art nuts will be organising the Libre Graphics Meeting Brazil. Rock!

Solutions Linux update

I was contacted by a Belgian author of Ekiga who will remain unnamed to thank me for pointing out that he was not cool enough to make my list of cool people.

I met many people in Paris who didn’t get mentioned in my previous blog entry – including, but not limited to, the members of ALDIL, several members of Mozilla Europe, the guys from Silicon Sentier, several people from KDE France, OO.o France, Mandriva, RedHat, Novell, APRIL, Linux Auvergne, GNU/Linux Magazine France (hello Denis!), and many more. Oh, and a Belgian author of Ekiga.

Any implication of uncoolness was unintended, but being mentioned in this blog entry does not constitute proof of coolness. E&OE.

Life as a jet-setter

Solutions Linux

Last week I was in Paris for Solutions Linux all week – hobbling about on my sprained ankle, catching up with some cool people like Michael Meeks (with whom I profoundly disagree on some of the community-related stuff we discussed), Fred Crozat, Daniel Veillard, Dodji Seketeli and David Faure.

The dichotomy of Solutions Linux is the cohabitation of sleek professional commercial teams such as Novell (who undoubtedly paid a healthy six-figure sum for their presence at the show) and the Association Village – a bazaar-like environment which is kind of other-worldly. You can’t stand for two minutes at a commercial stand without someone coming up to you to bar-code scan your badge, and ask you if they can help you out. In the association village, you could probably stroll in, sit down, roll up a joint and make yourself at home in a stand without anyone asking you why you were there.

I went with a colleague, who said it was like walking off the main drag in Morocco and wandering into a market – “Did you notice”, he said, “that the smell changed when we came here?”

More travel

Next weekend, I will be travelling to LA for SCALE 5x – hopefully I will have some time to help Eitan with the GNOME stand aside from my presentation on the OpenWengo project and meeting other projects (which I really want to do).

I will also be trying my best to catch the first Ireland international to be played in the mythical Croke Park – kick-off at 8am local time in LA.

After that, I will be trekking off to Brussels to FOSDEM, where I will be giving a lightning talk on OpenWengo, and two presentations in the GNOME DevRoom – one on the promotion and marketing of GNOME, and a repeat of the presentation I gave in Brazil in November – attempting to explain how & why people get involved in free software.

From there, a short hop (via Paris) and I’ll be in San Francisco for eTel. It will be my first time in the Bay area, and I’m looking forward to meeting up with people I’ve only met online up until now. If anyone is interested in meeting up the week of the 27th of February, please drop me a line, and we’ll meet up.

KDE hackfest in Wengo offices

We have some guests in the office today – David Faure, Laurent Montel, Benoit Jacob, Eric Pignet and Laurent Rathle from KDE (and KDE France) dropped by for a hackfest working on KDE 4. I did everything I could to slow them down, of course, but they were having none of it.

It was good to meet people from the KDE side of the fence, and David even gave us a presentation on some of the new stuff in QT 4, which was very well received by all involved.

Wengo is a proud sponsor of the KDE stand during Solutions Linux this year – drop by their stand if you want to see a demo of the latest releases of KDE or the Wengophone (if we manage to have working network).