I only noticed this after finally meeting him in the flesh at LinuxTag – Aaron Seigo bears an uncanny resemblance to Franck Ribéry, French footballer extraordinaire (except for the scars that Franck got going through a windshield as a kid and the funky hairdo).
The proof?
Aaron Seigo
Franck Ribery
I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday for three days in LinuxTag 2008 to meet up with some members of the maemo.org community, see old friends, and generally chat with as many people as possible.
After arriving, I managed to get out for a run, which was surprisingly pleasant – ourhotel is quite near the Tiergarten behind the zoological gardens, so while running around I accidentally went past some lovely landmarks, and managed to scout out a nice beer-garden beside the Neuen See where we had some nice Weisswurst last night.
It’s been fun so far – I met up with Quim and Marcell on Tuesday, and Kate, Peter, Niels and Marius yesterday. I spent a lot of time wandering around playing “spot the familiar face” – it was great catching up with Jochen Topf from Open Street Map (formerly FOSTEL organiser), Vincent Untz and Joe Brockmeister who are here for OpenSuse, Nils and Florian from OpenEmbedded and GPE.
I ran into Anne Oestergaard too, and it was great chatting with MaryBeth and Rob from OpenMedia Now, Knut Yrvin from Trolltech, and most of the KDE eV board who are here this week too – I met Aaron Seigo for the first time, after years of email conversations, and Sebastian and Cornelius are here too.
With so many familiar faces, it can be tempting to just talk to people you know, but I do like meeting up with new people at these things too – and the number one conversation starter I’ve had this week has been Big Buck Bunny – my kids love this cartoon, so much that Tuesday they watched it on repeat for an hour. And it goes down well with the adults too. Mad props to Ton, Sacha and the gang on the great success – they have attained their goal of an accessible cartoon to follow on from the “arty” Elephants Dream.
Already today we’ve heard Cat Allman from Google telling us about Google Summer of Code and GHOP, and the always entertaining Knut Yrvin on QT. After Knut’s session the maemo.org track starts, and I will be reporting as much as possible. Nick Loeve (trickie) proposed having a Wiki sprint today, and if I can get critical mass (and critical internet access) for that, we’ll do that a little later.
I received my copy of Big Buck Bunny today, and I’m leaving for Berlin tomorrow morning for LinuxTag.
I’d like to be able toshow BBB on my Nokia N810, but when I copy the AVI file from the DVD onto the tablet, it doesn’t load (“File format not supported” it says). Same goes for “Elephants Dream”. The same also goes for the Nokia N800 (although there I just get a message the there is no application that can manage the file format).
Can anyone point me towards the codecs I’ll need to get this working tonight, please? I’d hunt myself (really I would) if I wasn’t packing a bag and putting kids to bed.
Thanks Lazyweb!
I was interested to read the exchange around Matt Asay’s “dealing with system integrators” post last week.
What it comes down to is when you’re a free software producer, if you want third parties installing and commercially supporting your software to partner with you, you need to offer something in return.
If my company wants to have some free software commercially supported, I would laugh any integrator who suggested buying a subscription to the commercial version, and who refused to start working on integration until I’d purchased if there were no benefit in that for me. I would insist that the integrator installed & supported the Free version, unless there were very compelling features I needed in the commercial version.
If Alfresco had tied the hands of the guy in front of me behind his back, I would go find someone with no such constraints to support the software.
So for the three people involved in an official integration partner deal (Alfresco, the integrator, and the client), all three parties must have some interest for the deal to happen.
The client wants cheaper, high-quality software. If the commercial offering gives compelling features, he may pay for it. If it doesn’t, he’s not an idiot.
The integrator wants to make some money on the support deal. If being an Alfresco partner gets him more leads, more deals, more clients, more money, then he’ll go for that, and will pay an annual partnership fee, your annual training seminars and any other costs you associate with being a partner. If partnership is a mill-stone around his neck restricting what he can offer his clients to keep them happy, he won’t.
Finally, Alfresco, the software producer, wants as many copies of their software installed worldwide, and they want to ensure high quality local support (so they have an interest in having a high-quality partners network). They also want to maximise the number of installations of commercial versions, and thus have an incentive to ensure that the commercial offering is compelling for people who will be paying for support.
Forcing integrators to sell commercial copies of the software before doing integration doesn’t in itself make those versions compelling. In fact, if you force extra conditions like the ones Matt outlined, you run the risk of helping a renegade unofficial Alfresco support network to spring up. You’re selling free software, they’re free to support it without going through you. If that happens, you have a short-term gain for a long-term loss.
There has been some criticism recently of Nokia and its handling of maemo – improving the state of affairs is one of the reasons why Quim contacted me and asked me if I’d be willing to work with the project to improve things.
The key to solving any problem is straightforward:
This is similar to Federico Mena Quintero’s characterisation of profiling code. In fact, a surprising array of problems are suitable for attach with measure, change, re-measure, rinse, repeat.
The over-riding arc I’ve been hearing so far is “Nokia is hoarding control over the project, and aren’t doing enough to help the maemo community”. I think that’s a mite unfair, and often I get the feeling that people on the mailing list are confusing a reality where there are problems, but they are poorly characterised, and malicious intent on the part of Nokia.
Some examples:
So I plan to apply this optimisation technique to various problems in maemo. For each proposal I make, I will be looking for feedback from Nokia and the maemo community to see if it is a step in the right direction.
For a start, I will be proposing policies for access to maemo resources, including maemo.org email addresses, the maemo trademark (which is of course linked to the email addresses), and any parts of the maemo platform which community members don’t feel are sufficiently open.
My goal is not to get everything open in doing this. It is to make clear the limits of the maemo project, and in this way ensure that expectations on both sides of the equation are coherent. I hope that Nokia will accept the proposals I make, but even if there are arguments against, I believe those arguments can be open, and clearly understood by all involved.
* I don’t believe that there has ever been ambiguity about this – all of the tablet which can be open is open, but some decisions to use closed components were made in the interests of product differentiation, cost and other reasons. The N8x0 is not meant to be a completely Free product (unlike the Neo1971 or OLPC, which do aim to be completely Free). What we should insist on is that someone buying an N8x0 has all of the tools they need to paperweight it with custom, non-Nokia, software, and access as much of the hardware as possible with free software.
Following up from my previous post, there has been some interesting discussion in the comments and elsewhere. One issue in particular came throughh in a couple of comments.
Ted Ts’o is gushing in his praise of the Eclipse project:
Look at Eclipse; it was released by IBM in November, 2001. Within 2 years, it had something like 80 companies participating in the code development, and in less than 2.5 years, a non-profit organization was founded where IBM didn’t even have a majority of seats on the board.
And Michael Meeks brings up the subject of OpenOffice.org governance (which he has written about frequently in the past – by the way, Michael, I can’t find an easy way to link to individual journal entries of yours):
Faced with serious, persistant maladministration and injustice in the ‘communities’ Sun controls – what can you do?
Indeed, Sun has a ways to go make sure that projects they free have a non-negligible contribution from people outside their organisation, and OpenOffice.org is probably the most compelling case for an independent non-profit that they have right now. You have all the elements – significant industry buy-in to the project, multiple companies investing time, financial and human resources in building on the project.
In the comments I argue that OpenOffice.org should consider setting up a 501(c)6 (a trade association) as Eclipse did, to ensure both community and industry participation in the project:
OOo as a project is really too big to be easily accessible to a volunteer community, but the project has succeeded in gaining industry support – an initial board would doubtless include IBM, Sun and Novell as major members, but might also include CollabNet, the French ministry for the interior, maybe NeoOffice and StarXpert?
In any case, the structure of a trade organisation, which aims more to have an ecosystem than a wide-open community, seems more appropriate for a project like OOo. It provides all of the things which Michael Meeks has been calling for – an independant governing body which owns trademarks and copyright, and is answerable to companies and communities in proportion to their contributions.
I also think that it’s important to separate governance in the sense of marketing, infrastructure and industry relations from technical governance. In the case of the Eclipse Foundation, it’s important to note that IBM is still by far the greatest single contributor of code:
And while it’s absolutely correct to laud praise on IBM for Eclipse, it’s worth noting that even now, 7 years after the project has been freed and 5 years after the creation of the Eclipse Foundation, 75% of the committers work for IBM, and an even higher percentage of the check-ins come from IBM employees. So yes, the project has succeeded in establishing an independent governing body, but code talks, and IBM still talks loudest.
Aside from that, I want to reply in particular to something that Ted said in his comment:
Community governance is hard? I’m going to have to call bullshit on that. It really isn’t hard. What’s hard is letting go of control, which Sun has proven to have an extremely hard time doing.
I agree – letting go of control is hard. And I’ve seen many companies struggle with it – Xara, Wengo, Sun, to name a few, and other companies skirt the issue by unashamedly keeping control – Trolltech, MySQL, Alfresco, JBoss, SugarCRM come to mind. It’s a question of expectations. When a company says “sure, we’re happy to work with you, on our terms”, you know where you stand.
But starting a project on Sourceforge, putting 4 years worth of code on there, telling your team of (proprietary) software developers “now you commit there”, and then expecting that Poof! like magic little Code Gnomes start appearing from out of nowhere to make your project better is unrealistic. It really is the difference between “organic” (grown from scratch, by developers for developers) and “non-organic” (code is liberated en masse) projects. If you have absolutely no governance guidelines whatsoever, who’s the maintainer? The manager who manage[ds] the development team in your lab? How well does that work?
I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 from 7.10 today – I set the upgrade going when I went away for lunch, half hoping that it would be done when I got back. So here’s my experiences so far.
All in all, not what I’d come to expect from Ubuntu, although not an unfamiliar experience for me over the years. Perhaps a straight install would work better than a second dist-upgrade on a system that has actually been lived in. I haven’t tried everything yet, obviously, and I’m looking forward to seeing if there are any improvements in the support of my webcam’s driver – although I’m not holding out much hope.
Funny, this post has been in my drafts for months… in relation to my earlier post, and since a trademark issue is at the heart of much of the recent OpenSolaris controversy, the time felt right to finish & publish it.
Many moons ago, there was a discussion on the FLOSS foundations mailing list about trademarks for the Nth time, after Simon Phipps proposed having a BOF on the subject at OSCON.
My initial reaction was “I hope that people find something new to talk about”, I’ve been involved in many conversations on the application of trademark law to free software projects, and typically, the range of reactions is:
There are lots of data points between all of these (Linux, Open Source, Eclipse, Java, …) which go from the “we didn’t register the mark, and we regret it” which perhaps apply to Linux and Open Source, to “our trademark is a certification mark” for Java. I would say the most common reaction is “we have to register the trademarks! But we have no idea why, or what that means for the project.”
I’ve been annoyed by some of the Sun-bashing that has been going on over the past few months and years. I’ve written in the past about my belief that Sun are trying to do the right thing, and my appreciation for the investment that they’ve put into projects I care about. And yet no matter what they do, it seems like there are nay-sayers working to undermine Sun’s community-building efforts at every turn.
Here’s a few examples of Sun-bashing that I’ve seen recently:
I feel like a lot of this rhetoric is self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say often enough “Sun is a bad community player”, then Sun’s projects will seem unattractive to prospective volunteers.
All of this completely ignores the many great free software people who are working for Sun – to name just a few, Glynn Foster, Simon Phipps, Dalibor Topic, Ian Murdoch, Rich Burridge. These people are extremely clueful about free software and community interests. And the message which we have seen consistently from Jonathan Schwarz over the past couple of years reinforces that there is a commitment to free, community developed software, and there are many capable people working towards that commitment within Sun.
So why the difficulties? Many of them, I think, are project specific, and stem from this fundamental fact:
Community governance is hard.
Lots of people are up in arms because Red Hat’s desktop team released a statement containing this: “we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future”, and Ron Hovsepian said “Novell’s Suse Linux at the desktop is unlikely to be popular with consumers in the next three to five years”. To me, this is not defeatism, it is simply an example of positioning in action. Last year at Solutions Linux in Paris, I did a little experiment, designed to show that Mandriva have a problem with their positioning. I asked several people to tell me what market they thought the following popular distributions targeted:
The answers were unanimous:
