Safe as Milk

Famous people supporting the Libre Graphics Meeting

…well, for some definition of famous (and certainly mine).

Without wanting to play favourites (I love all our donors) here are some names that stood out when I was reading through the donors list earlier: Michael Tiemann of OSI and Red Hat, Bdale Garbee, everyone’s favourite gentle giant from SPI and HP, Garrett Lesage and Andreas Nilssen from the Tango project and more, Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk, Ilan Rabinovitch, chief bottle-washer of SCALE, Nicolas Spalinger of the Open Font Project, Chris Messina, the man behind the original incarnation of SpreadFirefox, John Bintz, who gave a great presentation last year on using the GIMP and Inkscape for comic drawing, Andy Fitzsimon, Aussie artist & Inkscaper extraordinaire, Louis Desjardins, last year’s organiser, Eric Sink, future GUADEC keynoter and co-founder of AbiSource, Adam Sweet from the LUGRadio crowd (where are the rest of ye, lads?), Steven Garrity of SilverOrange, best known for his work on GNOME and Firefox, Mark Wielaard of Classpath, and the rocking Jon Phillips of Creative Commons and Inkscape.

Modestly forbids me from mentioning myself (damn!).

If you’ve been holding out until the last minute, notice is served – we are now closing in fast on $10,000 raised, and the campaign ends tomorrow at midnight, PST. I am hoping that we will reach $12,000, which would be a great achievement, even if it does fall short of the original $20,000 goal. To that end, I’ve just changed the campaign goal to be more realistic – let’s see if we can get $2,000 more in the remaining 36 hours.

Update: Jealous of all the attention other famous people were getting, the very famous Vincent Untz jumped in and pushed us over the magical $10,000 level last night. That was quickly followed by donations from the famous Behdad Esfahbod and the famous Paul Cooper. And I don’t know how I failed to mention a friend from ILUG, Padraig Brady, also famous in his own right. Thanks guys! Keep ’em coming!

Correction (for the record)

I just listened to LUG Radio 5×15, including my interview about LGM this year. And I have to make a correction. I have tried, but I cannot find any way to drag & drop or copy & paste a curve from Inkscape into the GIMP. I can go via the intermediary of an SVG, since importing gradients and curves from an SVG drop or load is supported in the GIMP, but I can’t figure out how to drag & drop elements from the Inkscape canvas into any other application – when I hit the edge of the window, it just starts scrolling. And cut/copy & paste isn’t any more successful.

Any Inkscape people out there able to set me right?

One interesting drag & drop thing I love showing to people is dragging a chart created in Gnumeric into Inkscape – the drop is a proper SVG, and you can ungroup & manipulate individual elements from the chart in your favourite vector graphics application. Which is nice.

Over $9000 now

The donations have really picked up again after the weekend, and with another $350 in uncleared e-Checks last night, we now have over $9000 collected (with $650 not yet up on the site). I wonder if we can get over $10,000 today…

A couple of Creative Commons questions

There are two questions about Creative Commons for which I don’t really have an answer, I thought that this might be a good place to ask.

1. Can a company use CC BY-NC (or any other NC licenced) music as hold music for its phone system? Since it’s a company, playing the music to eventual clients, at least one person I know has decided that he’s not allowed to use NC music for this purpose, but there doesn’t seem to me to be any commercial application of the music here. Is this a grey area, or is there a clear-cut answer one way or the other?
2. Can I distribute a translation of a document released under CC BY-ND-NC? Or does a translation count as a derivative work? And if I can publish the translation, does it also have to be under BY-ND-NC?

Update: The consensus seems to be that the answer to (1) is “this is unclear” and the answer to (2) is “of course I can’t”.

links for 2008-04-14

• Linux radio show – LugRadio
  “Dave Neary talks about the Libre Graphics Meeting, what it’s for, and how the LGM team are looking for donations to make this meeting happen” Thanks to the lads for having me on, it’s much appreciated.
  (tags: lgm08 libre graphics meeting lugradio)

196 donors, $7910 raised

The suspense is killing me – we’re approaching 200 donors and $8000 – I wonder which barrier will fall first, and whether we’ll reach both by this evening…

I am amazed to see this many people coming out to support us! Thank you all.

Update: The $8000 barrier fell first, with the 199th donation – which is either a $300 eCheck which has yet to clear (and is thus not up on the pledgie site yet) from Garrett LeSage or a $100 donation from Per Christian Henden which cleared straight away.

Including Garrett’s donation we’re now up to $8454, with 4 days to go, including today, until the end of the campaign.

links for 2008-04-11

• Linux.com :: Libre Graphics Meeting raising funds for developer travel
  “The conference allows the developers to collaborate, share ideas and code, cooperate on cross-application standards, and simply get to know one another” – Nathan Willis writes about the LGM conference and fundraising
  (tags: lgm08 libre graphics meeting freesoftware)

Libre Graphics Meeting stories: tell *your* story

I’ve been writing a series of articles on the things that have struck me about the Libre Graphics Meeting over the past few years. But I wasn’t there last year, and there were 150 people at LGM in Lyon, and close to 200 people at LGM Montreal. So over the next couple of days, I would really like to see others tellus about their experiences at the Libre Graphics Meeting, the memorable encounters they’ve had, the fall-out after the conference and those funny personal stories that characterise many conferences.

So come on everyone, share! I would really like to hear what other people’s experiences of the Libre Graphics Meeting are, as we head into the second week of our fundraising campaign.

Thank you Michael Tiemann!

The Libre Graphics Meeting fundraising campaign has now surpassed $6000, including our first thousand-dollar donation, courtesy of Michael Tiemann, board member of OSI and VP of Open Source Affairs at RedHat.

Thank you Michael, and thank you everyone else who has donated! Our community is now a bigger sponsor than Intel and Google, and is officially our biggest sponsor this year! Only $2000 more, and our community will be a Gold sponsor, and over half way to Cornerstone sponsor level.

Libre Graphics Meeting stories: colour management

Continuing the series of articles I started last week (part 1, part 2), the next fall-out which has come from past Libre Graphics Meetings is the movement towards colour management everywhere over the past few years.

Let’s look back to where we were 3 years ago. Outside of Scribus and CinePaint, there was essentially no colour management in free software graphics apps, in spite of the existence of a high quality color management library, little cms.

In 2005, that story started to change a bit – the GIMP started conserving ICC profiles in JPEG files and allowing the user to see the list of ICC profiles with the 2.3.2 release, in July 2005. Scribus added support for soft proofing in version 1.2.3 in September 2005. Krita released version 1.5 with support for color profiles in December 2005.

In the first Libre Graphics Meeting, one of the most popular presentations was by Marti Maria of little cms, who gave an overview of what color management is, how ICC color profiles fit into the picture, and finally what applications need to do to integrate color management support. One of the outstanding memories I have from the conference was Carl Worth of Cairo being very excited about the conference, and in particular about meeting Marti.

Since 2005, things have changed significantly.  Color management support has been completed for the GIMP in 2.4.0. Inkscape added support for ICC profiles in 0.44, in June 2006, soon after the first Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon, and this support has been further improved in the recent 0.46 release.

And since, color management has become almost ubiquitous – via the “ICC profiles in X” spec, all applications who support the spec (including, at last count, the GIMP, Eye of GNOME, Krita, UFRaw and Inkscape)  get soft proofing for your screen when X contains the ICC profile atom.

I’m not so presumptuous as to attribute the advent of color management to the Libre Graphics Meeting, but at least in the case of Inkscape, the work started at the conference. And for other developments, the bridges built and conversations started during LGM and other similar conferences has played a significant part in improving the state of affairs.