April 2, 2008
freesoftware, gimp, libre graphics meeting
2 Comments
In only two years, the Libre Graphics Meeting has become a hugely important meeting place for free software graphics developers. With surveys showing that the main gaps in the Linux desktop offering now are graphics applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Visio, AutoCAD), the conference becomes even more vital to the advancement of the free software desktop.
A few weeks ago, I got a heads-up from the Libre Graphics Meeting organisers that we weren’t doing so well on the sponsorship front as we have in the past. The major cost center for the conference will be subsidising travel and accommodation for volunteer developers who could not otherwise attend.
And so, today, we launch a fundraising campaign! With the help of Pledgie and the GNOME Foundation we have set an ambitious but necessary target – we hope to raise $20,000 in community donations over the next two weeks.
For those who appreciate the projects that this conference supports (including Inkscape, Scribus, GIMP, Blender, Krita, Open Clipart, …) and have been looking for a way to support them, then please give generously. And spread the word! To get the word out, embed the following in your webpages:
Thank you all for your support.
March 27, 2008
freesoftware, General, work
16 Comments
I was talking to someone yesterday (who will remain unnamed) about perhaps providing a modified version of some GPL software for them. Unfortunately, he told me that his hands were tied on the issue since a directive came from the head legal guys that the company was not to distribute any GPL software which might, eventually, be infringing on the company’s patents. Why? Because to do so is to make a promise, on behalf of the company, to provide a royaly-free worldwide irrevocable patent licence grant to users of the software. Once the Pandora’s box is opened, the patents are worthless.
At least one person has told me that the guy was probably just politely telling me that he didn’t want to pay for what I was offering, and that the whole patent thing was just an excuse. That’s certainly possible, but in this case, I don’t believe it to be so. I’ve heard “no thanks, we’re not interested” often enough that I know how to recognise it.
If this is true, I am sure that these guys are not alone – there are companies out there who are consciously not participating in free software projects for fear of losing the opportunity to monetise their patent portfolio.
Am I the only one who finds this state of affairs perverse?
March 12, 2008
freesoftware, gimp, libre graphics meeting
2 Comments
That’s the only question I can think of when I come across this gem, from the wiki page collecting demos for Libre Graphics Meeting 2006 (I’ve put an archive of the old LGM page back online, minus the MySQL database which had the news items):
So, you’re an artist, and your favourite program (or combination of programs) isn’t in the programme. Why not offer yourself up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of demos?
In Greek mythology, Deimos was the god of dread or panic, which seems strangely appropriate.
The word demonstration comes from the latin demonstrare, to explain completely. Monstrare in turn comes from monstrum, meaning “divine omen or wonder”. So we can think of a demonstration as a demystification.
The word shares its roots with monster, meaning something we don’t understand.
So demonstrations are dreadful affairs where we demystify monsters.
If you feel up to the task of scaring off other people’s monsters with a big flashlight, sign up here to give a demo. It could be as simple as using Blender to create an animation, or as complicated as drawing a square in the GIMP.
Can’t remember what I was up to when I wrote that, but it must have been late…
March 4, 2008
freesoftware, marketing
1 Comment
Putting this on my blog for posterity. This is the presentation I gave at Primevère with a bonus final slide containing links to stuff which we referenced during the Q&A session at the end of the presentation.
February 26, 2008
freesoftware, gnome, maemo, marketing
No Comments
Last week I was in China for the first Linux Foundation/COPU China Developers Symposium. I met a bunch of people for the first time, including Jonathan Corbet, Matt Keenan and Andrew Morton from the kernel, Fred Muller, Ollo, Pokey, Anthony and all the others from the Beijing LUG (thanks for the welcome guys!), and Angela Brown from the Linux Foundation.
I also got a chance to catch up with some people I had met before including Jim Zemlin and Bill Weinberg, both of whom had very encouraging things to say about GNOME in mobile platforms. In fact, I will be organising a meeting of GNOME Mobile at the upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, Texas in April.
After the conference, Angela organised a tourist trip for a gang of us to climb the Great Wall at Badaling and visit the Forbidden City and Tianemen Square on Thursday, which was great fun. Although after the field trip which we had with the BLUG gang after dinner on Wednesday evening I don’t think either myself or herself were in the greatest of form.
I gave a presentation entitled “2008, year of…” where I poked fun at the annual articles we get at the beginning of the year claiming that “this year will be the year of Linux on the desktop”, and yet…
Every year, we have seen significant gaps being filled – in the early ’90s, it was application gaps, like Evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Eclipse. There was the advent of successful funding runs for free software-based companies like Ximian.
Then it was corporate support. RedHat, Sun and Novell threw their weigh behind free software and bet on GNOME. Ubuntu making a distribution designed and tailored for a mass market), and increasingly momentum from ISVs who now target the free software desktop. Most recently, IBM releasing a beautifully integrated Lotus Notes comes to mind, previous examples of major ISVs targeting Linux include VMWare and Adobe.
We have seen the importance of standards and data take center stage with the standardisation of ODF, and the move by a number of governments to insist that all public data be stored in open formats – resulting in the (flawed) standardisation process of OOXML being launched by Microsoft.
In addition, we have seen new paths to market open up for Linux based PCs – WalMart selling Everex PCs, OEMs finally offering Linux based desktops, and Dell, Lenovo, HP shipping laptops with a free software OS pre-installed.
We have also seen considerable momentum in GNOME-based UIs outside of desktop computing – hand-helds from Nokia, phones from OpenMoko, lab measurement devices from Vernier, set-top-box applications, and of course OLPC and the Eee PC.
And through it all, a healthy peppering of massive institutional deployments – Extremadura and Andalucia, the Korean government, the French gendarmerie, Sao Paolo’s telecentros project, PSA in France, and on and on.
And so, as I look back over the decade which saw Linux have its first Superbowl ad, I wonder at how far we’ve come, and I believe I can say without being ridiculous that the ’00s has in some sense been the decade of Linux on the desktop.
We have not yet made a breakthrough in market share, but we have momentum in every sector – the quality of our platform, the number of ISDs developing applications for GNOME, the number of organisations investing cold hard cash in using, developing and deploying our work, the size of our user-base. I am enormously hopeful that we will continue to make progress in the coming years.
February 4, 2008
freesoftware, gnome, guadec, marketing
No Comments
I can confirm two more keynotes for GUADEC! Yay!
Eric Sink is a co-founder of AbiSource, and author of an informative and influential blog. In particular, Eric has written some series’ of articles which might be considered essential reading for those interested in the business of software development: Marketing for Geeks and the Business of Software. Eric has eschewed the software megapoles of San Francisco and Boston to start his latest company SourceGear in Champaign, Illinois.
Leisa Reichelt is a User Experience Consultant, based in London UK, but recently of Sydney, Australia. Most of the work she does is in interactive media (web, iTV, mobile and the like) and she uses a mixture of User Research Techniques, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and Usability skills mixed up with a background of Project Management, Producing, and Account Management to help define the requirements for a project, understand (and often define) the content and functionality involved, and design a structure (or architecture) and interface.
Leisa has been doing this kind of work for about ten years, under various guises, including project management, account management, web producing, information architecting, user experience designing, interaction designing, digital strategising and generally evangelising all the things she thinks are good about the internet and networked technology in general. She’s recently gone completely mad^Wfreelance.
These come after the confirmation of Matt Webb, co-author of Mind Hacks, as well as being a design consultant, who has already confirmed his attendance.
There is a fourth keynote which is currently very likely, but not yet confirmed, so I’ll keep mum on that person for the moment, except to say that of the 4, it’s the one I’m the most excited about.
January 15, 2008
freesoftware, work
4 Comments
Following on from my previous post, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what comes next professionally for me.
For the first time since I arrived in France, I have no full-time job. But this time, I know the lay of the land, I have 5 years experience extra, in varying roles (including the GNOME Foundation). I have never felt so free to explore projects that I want to work on, and think of different ways to make a living.
One thing is for sure… I don’t see myself going back to being an employee straight away. I would need to get a hell of an offer to consider it. Now that I have the freedom to work on the projects I feel are worth it, I will not be giving it up lightly.
First things first, the low-hanging fruit. Through Wengo, I have been in discussions with lots of people in VoIP, and I will continue to do work related to OpenWengo – in particular, I will be working with companies who can deliver customisation services and support on the WengoPhone getting them clients. Through the ground-work which I have been doing over the past year, I believe that there is a demand there which will not be drying up any time soon.
Following on from my cat-herding experience on the GIMP, and with OpenWengo, I will also be available for product management and project management on projects I believe in.
Finally, I will be Yet Another Free Software Community Consultant – following in the trail blazed by some of the stars of our community. Through long involvement in the free software world, and intimate knowledge of the dynamics of free software non-profits, I believe I can help companies interested in free software get the best for their investment dollars. You want to know how to have salaried employees work well with volunteers? You are sponsoring a project and wondering why you haven’t seen a snowball effect of patches yet? You’re wondering what governance model is appropriate for your pet project? You have a project you’d like to financially support, but you’re not sure how to do so effectively? I can help.
Beyond that, one thing I am sure of: the thing which drew me to free software is the “worth” of it. What we do is important. Not just a way to spend time, like a community drama society, or something where your work benefits only yourself, like running a marathon. What we do changes the world. At a first level, we change people’s expectations of software. We wipe out the assumptions people have about software production and distribution. We change the way programs get built.
But at another level, we allow people access to technology which they’ve never had before. We provide millions of lines of real-world code, helping to create a generation of software engineers better prepared for the world than ever before, and idealists to boot. We are helping bridge the digital divide.
After spending so much time on something so important, I will not be going back to work on any project where the only thing I get out of it is my paycheque, as important as that is. I have lots of thoughts rolling around in my head, but that sweet-spot where my skills, passions and desires meld into a clear idea has been evading me. I really don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m loooking forward to thinking about it.
January 14, 2008
freesoftware, openwengo, wengo, work
10 Comments
For the past few weeks (actually, the past couple of months) I’ve been holding my tongue waiting for things to clear up a bit in relation to work. I now have a pretty good idea of where I’m at, and so the time has come to break silence and reveal all.
Along with a number of my ex-colleagues, I was laid off by Wengo last November. Recently, that was noticed by a journalist who follows the OpenWengo project and got announced on the community mailing list.
At the time of the lay-off, a number of us had planned to take over maintainership of the project, move the hosting somewhere else, redo a web-site, and create a company around the project (with the business model of providing customisation services and support). Unfortunately, for a number of reasons I won’t go into, after 5 weeks of work on the new company, that fell through. And so, at the beginning of last month, I started looking around for an alternative solution that I could announce to the OpenWengo community, and to companies building offerings on top of the software.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing explicit I can say yet – the people concerned are still in discussions – but it’s looking like the OpenWengo project will not remain without a maintainer for long. As well as a lot of interest from a number of different companies, there are a number of people in the community who have proposed to pull in the slack, if needs be. That is the great thing about free software – AbiWord didn’t die with Abisource, Mozilla didn’t die with AOL’s withdrawl, and OpenWengo will survive without Wengo.
And so what about me? Well, I still plan to be involved in OpenWengo, in some way. I’m waiting, in some sense, for the battle lines to be redrawn and for procedural questions to be worked out, but I am still interested in working with companies who want OpenWengo customisations, and I plan on helping the project towards its next stable release (2.2) and beyond, on helping the community overcome the tricky step of whether or not to move to the new data model and engine CoIP Manager.
Aside from that, I now have to make a living somehow. And I’ll tell you more about that in a little while.
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