Safe as Milk

Free as in…?

When Jonathan Scharz talks about free software, I can’t help but wonder whether he’s talking about free as in beer, or free as in freedom.

Free wine

I live in France, and just found out that Hugh MacLeod’s free wine to bloggers promo has been extended to French residents. The man has balls, sending bottles of South African Stormhoek wine to people who have the very best that Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Alsace and the Côte du Rhône have to offer on their doorstep.

It’ll be interesting to see how the wine fares in a taste test with the Givry I got earlier at Leclerc.

Updated to correct boo-boo

Air France update

I got this mail (verbatim) from Air France “cyberservice” this morning. Interesting read, even if it doesn’t really explain the variations in price I saw on different flights yesterday.

Cher internaute,

Merci d’avoir pris contact avec airfrance.fr

Vos remarques, que nous avons lues avec grand interet, appellent quelques
precisions sur la politique tarifaire d Air France.

Chaque Compagnie definit sa strategie commerciale en fonction de ses propres
criteres, mais globalement celle-ci repose sur deux

axes principaux : la satisfaction de la demande et l equilibre des couts.

Pour un meme parcours, differents tarifs sont proposes avec des dates de vente
specifiques pour des periodes bien determinees, ainsi

qu un quota de sieges limites pour certains d entre eux. Les tarifs les plus
interessants sont souvent les premiers vendus et les offres de

sieges fluctuent tres rapidement selon les demandes. De plus, en echange d un
prix attractif, ces tarifs comportent certaines contraintes

tels les changements de reservation non autorises ou un sejour limite.

A la date de votre devis, nous vous avons propose le tarif le plus interessant.
cependant, dans un contexte concurrentiel evident,

Air France doit adapter en permanence son offre commerciale et en particulier
ses propositions tarifaires.

Il est alors effectivement possible que notre offre soit evolutive dans le
temps, pour devenir plus attractive.

Ceci rejoint d autres types d activites pour lesquelles les pratiques
commerciales sont similaires a celles du transport aerien.

Nous esperons que ces informations vous donneront une meilleure connaissance de
la politique tarifaire de la Compagnie.

En souhaitant qu Air France sache garder votre confiance, nous restons a votre
disposition au 0820 320 820 (0.12 euro/mn) tous les jours
de 08h30 a 20h00 .

Cordialement.
L Equipe du Commerce Electronique

In other words, “we have cheap tickets for different dates. Sometimes, the price can come down dramatically if you wait a while, but usually the cheapest tickets get sold first.” Like I said, it doesn’t explain the way every flight on the Friday went from 42 euros to 71 euros in the space of 25 minutes (maybe they only had 1 42 euro flight left for that day?) but it’s incredibly frustrating to be “segmented” like this.

Joel Spolsky wrote about segmenting and said:

The airline industry got really, really good at segmenting and ended up charging literally a different price to every single person on the plane. As a result most people felt they weren’t getting the best deal, and they didn’t like the airlines. When a new alternative arose in the form of low cost carriers (Southwest, jetBlue, etc.) customers had no loyalty whatsover to the legacy airlines that had been trying to pick their pockets for all those years.

He also said that segmentation resulted in “a long-term erosion of customer goodwill caused by blatant price discrimination”.

I agree whole-heartedly.

Air France sucks monkey balls

(Two rants in a row, people will start taking me for Hub 😉

J’ai essayé de réserver un vol aller/retour de Lyon à Amsterdam avec Air France, départ le matin du 21 Octobre, retoure le soir le 22.

J’ai eu pour 700 euros, avec un prix pour l’aller de 320 euros HT.

J’ai changé mes préférences de vol pour choisir un retour le dimanche matin, le 23, à 6h30. D’un coup, les tarifs sont tombés à 161 euros TTC, avec le même place dans le vol de l’aller à 42 euros HT. En plus, toutes les vols des deux jours avais ce même prix affiché, 42 euros par place l’aller, et le retour.

Un demi heure plus tard, j’ai essayer de réserver définitivement ce dernier formule, sans succès. La même combinaison de vols était affiché à 700 euros, et même des vols partant et arrivant plus tard avais maintenant le prix de 71 euros par place, pour un nouveau total de 212 euros.

Comment Air France peuvent expliquer ce politique de détermination de tariffs, et est-ce qu’ils croient vraiment que leurs clients vont accepter ce genre de traitement sans rien dire?

Carol and the GIMP

For a long time, Carol Spears was a positive contributor to the GIMP. She wrote tutorials, helped people out on IRC and on mailing lists, she mentored people who were a little shy or new to the community. And she re-wrote the GIMP website, to a stage where it was almost ready to replace the old one we’d had some the 0.99 days.

That’s when things started coming unstuck. Carol had several personal hardships around that time, which I understand and sympathise with. She had built up a lot of capital around the GIMP, and people gave her a lot of lattitude, and help. But she became discouraged with GIMP development when replacing the GIMP website took years, rather than weeks. She ended up blaming one or two people for that (including me, I think) more or less harrying them away from the GIMP for extended holidays.

And since then, we have still tried to get the old Carol back. She moved to California, where she stayed with a GIMP developer. She came to GUADEC in Kristiansand with a ticket paid for by GIMP sponsors. For a time, things looked like they might be getting better.

And yet, Carol persists in being incredibly anti-social. She gets incredibly aggressive any time anyone mentions photoshop, Windows, her lack of politeness, or any other of half a dozen loosely connected topics.

And she scares away potential contributors, the lifeblood of the project. The GIMP hasn’t had many new people for a while, but reading the mail she sent to Diana Fong after Diana was trying to contribute positively to the project stepped over a new boundary.

I don’t know how many times she has sent this sort of mail to well-wishing people who then silently went away. But this is the first time that I have seen this kind of thing from her.

I am no longer prepared to be associated with Carol. I’ve asked yosh to remove her gimp.org e-mail address. He may well refuse. If he does, he can remove mine instead.

GUADEC photos update

Thanks to everyone who replied. Especially Calum, who sent links to Google, which gave his photos for Copenhagen in the first 4 answers.

I have not found any group photos for Dublin or Seville, and I know that there weren’t any for Kristiansand or Stuttgart. But here’s a trip down memory lane for people who were in Paris and Copenhagen (count how many people were in the photo for bonus points).

Freedom is not having to ask permission

I have been thinking lately about why I do free software. Why do I spend so much time on a computer, rather than relaxing with the family after work? In general terms, why are we here?

The most important thing about GNOME (and the GIMP) is its community. It’s about being among friends. But communities don’t just materialise – they come together around ideas and goals.

So I found myself asking the question – what is the goal of the GNOME community? What is my goal?

Is it the software? GNOME’s great, but it’s not something I get orgasmic about. It’s not as easy to use or pleasant an experience as Mac OS X, say.

How about giving people cost-free software, is that the thing that keeps me ticking? It’s free, but that’s not what has me spending my evenings on the phone or at the computer. In fact, most users think that Mac OS and Windows are free too – since they come with the computer. Most people really don’t give a shit that we’re providing cost-free software.

There are a few things that keep me here. But the most important one is freedom. The freedom of the user, yes, but even more importantly, my freedom.

When I started working on free software (fixing GIMP bugs and helping out with gnect) in 1999, I wasn’t a very good programmer. And at work, I didn’t get the chance to improve. That would have been a promotion, and in spite of asking, I didn’t get it. I hadn’t proved myself.

Free software opened its arms to me. I learned more than I thought possible – learned how to code C properly, learned about GTK+, callbacks, idle loops. Finally had the penny drop on linked lists, binary trees, and a bunch of other elementary stuff that I suppose people learn in college. Mastered debuggers, source control, bug tracking… the list goes on. Anything I wanted to learn, I was free to do so.

It took me a while to figure things out, though – those early bug fixes, I used to feebly pipe up “anyone mind if I go ahead and fix this?” It took me about a couple of months to realise that I could just go right ahead – if something wasn’t getting done, it was up for grabs. And I grabbed with both hands.

Time moved on. Who cares if I had no marketing experience? I’ll learn it. So I joined the GNOME marketing team. No administration experience? Well, the GIMP needed someone to organise a conference, and no-one jumped. I said it sounds like fun. Fell into being the GIMP release manager, joined the GNOME board, organised a GUADEC or two.

All along, the thing that struck me was that apart from a couple of cases, I never had to ask permission. I was free to explore my own limits and no-one jumped up to say “You can’t do that”.

Free software fills a void in my professional life. Free software taught me that I could learn and grow without someone telling me that I could.

Freedom is not having to ask permission.

Looking for GUADEC photos

As I said in this mail, I’m looking for photos from old GUADECs (Paris through Kristiansand) to show the evolution of GUADEC. Can anyone who has archives of photos online contact me at bolsh at gimp.org, please?

Blogging about work

If you want to blog about work, but are afraid to because of what will happen if someone at work reads it, does that mean that

• You know in your heart that blogging about work is wrong,
• You’re working for the wrong company, or
• You should blog about work so that the issue will come to a head?

Color management in the GIMP

With the recent GIMP 2.3.3 release, color management in the GIMP is now well past what we have had before. Recently, someone asked me what color management is, in simple terms, so I wrote the following. There might be some error in here, unfortunately I don’t always have the time to research what I write. Corrections welcome.

Color is one of the most subjective things around – what are “red”, “green”, and “blue” quantitavely? Every input device has a slightly different perception of color – try scanning a photo with 2 different scanners, or taking a photo of the same scene with 2 different cameras. The results will be almost, but not quite, the same.

There are similar problems for output – two screens will show the same data with slightly different colors, and the same image printed to 2 different printers may be different.

Usually, the differences are small enough that we don’t really care (although if you do the test, you might be surprised at how big the difference is). But for print work and graphics design, color is everything. We want to start from a photograph, have colors from the photo appear exactly the same on the screen, and then after airbrushing away those freckles and printing the photo, we want the colors to look the same as the original.

Company logos and art-work are chosen with their colors by meticulous people who couldn’t tolerate a slightly different shade of pink being in the logo than the one they chose – imagine a graphics designer ripping his hair out while passing a billboard add saying “No, no, they ruined my work.” because the charcoal grey he had chosen was slightly darker than the printed result.

So to address all these issues, an international standards body was established, to decide what color is. In fact, there are two groups – the first, the CIE (Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage) defined the standard for colorspaces, and the ICC (International Color Consortium) defined a standard way to convert between these standard colorspaces and device-specific colorspaces. The CIE colorspaces are XYZ for linear additive color (plates in a printer, or diodes on a screen, for example) and La*b* for “perceptive” color – which doesn’t quite work the same way. So a value in one of these colorspaces is the same, everywhere.

They also defined a means of converting from these standards to other colorspaces. Our typical RGB colorspace represents the way light waves combine to create color. CMYK, for cyan, magenta, yellow, blacK, is the way that paints mix to generate colors (since paints absorb rather than reflect colors, this is called a subtractive colorspace – as you know if you’ve ever painted, when you add more & more paint to a mix, the color gets darker & darker, until every addition just gives a murky brown).

The means to changing between colorspaces is a color profile (also called an ICC profile). These can be embedded in images to say what colorspace was used to capture the data, to allow it to be converted to XYZ, and from there to another colorspace.

High-end scanners and digital cameras embed these profiles in the images that come from them. Screens and printers have profiles associated with them too. So we can load an image, and by applying the embedded profile, in combination with the display’s profile, the projection on the screen should be exactly the same as what we started with. And by combining with the printer’s profile during printing, the result on paper will look the same too.

This functionality has long been missing from the GIMP, but now we have it. Admittedly, it is of limited usefulness while we are limited to 8 bits per channel, because the application of a color profile results in what is called banding – when you squeeze one colorspace into another, sometimes colors close together map to the same color in the output, which means that we lose some quality. However, this is a massive step forward over what we have had until now.