Safe as Milk

Upcoming travel

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be hitting the road again.I’m eager to meet up with Openwengo and GNOME people when travelling – drop me a line if you’re available.

• LinuxDays.ch, 23 & 24 May, Geneva:
  I’ll be giving two presentations during LinuxDays.ch, one on contributing to free software projects (including a focus on marketing GNOME) and one on the OpenWengo project, and our recent 2.1.0 release.
• LinuxTag, 31 May – 1 June, Berlin:
  A flying visit, I’m arriving on Wednesday evening, and flying out again on Friday. I’ll be on the look-out for GNOME people, and I’ll be giving a workshop presentation of OpenWengo.
• Journées du Libre, 15 June, Montpellier:
  A flying visit, I’m arriving on Friday night and training out again on Saturday evening. Looking forward to meeting up with people on Friday evening, and I’ll be giving a presentation on OpenWengo on Saturday.
• COPU Summit, 21 & 22 June, Guangzhou, China:
  I was invited to this last year but couldn’t go, this year I’ll be going along to meet with Chinese distributions and spread the Free Software gostpel to a high-powered group of executives from free softwarte companies and from the Chinese government.
• LUG Radio Live, 7 July, Wolverhampton:
  After exotic travel, I’ll be in the Black Country, telling LRL fans about the joys of OpenWengo, a great free software project that’s only going to get better. On condition that Anne my wife doesn’t need a lift to the hospital in the middle of the night. This will be my last travelling until after the Summer.

So there we have it. Aside from that, the company has organised a “retreat” for a few days in the South of France (oh, the pain) and I’ll be going up to Paris every week, as I have been for the last 6 months.

Ho hum.

Links

Some interesting stuff I’ve read recently:

• Ari Jaaksi on collaborating on free software:
  

  I’ve noticed that companies are seting up different forums and clubs to standardize/promote/develop Linux/open source based technologies for mobile/consumer/embedded devices. I have my doubts… I do not fully understand how they plan to work. I’d go directly to places like the kernel.org or to GNOME to get things agreed, aligned, and -the most of all- developed. These are the communities that do the actual work and I’m not sure how these additional forums add value.

• An oldish article from Stormy Peters on free software and patents:
  

  I’m starting to wonder if we in the open-source community need a grass-roots effort to address patent and license issues… [the] effective and realistic means to protect the health of the open-source development model and community is to take a page from the corporate playbook.

The story continues…

A bunch of updates since last month:

FOSTEL

FOSTEL went really well – attendance was over what I expected, but we still had enough food & drinks for everyone (thanks to the very generous “traiteur”) and the content of both the presentations and BOFs was pretty good. A smidgin more organisation, and a round of introductions to start off the conference (which I wanted to do, and promptly forgot) would have been perfect.

As it was, I spent all my time running around sorting out last-minute issues, although I did get to have a good chat with some people, particularly over dinner. It was particularly good to see Craig Southeren and Jochen Topf, who have been giving me help with the conference from a distance.

I am still waiting to attend a free software conference where no-one has any trouble with the projector, though.

Roll on FOSTEL 2007 in Germany.

OpenWengo

We’re still in a heavy pre-release push for OpenWengo’s next release of the WengoPhone (I know, I know, I didn’t choose the names). Marco Marongiu talked to myself and Philippe Bernery from the project to ask us a little about the project’s past, present and future on the cusp of a major release.

Tendonitis

In spite of some early optimism from my tendonitis (it’s funny now that 3 weeks ago I was still wondering whether I’d be able to run the marathon), a short 2km run and the advice of my physiotherapist put paid to any hopes I had of doing any serious running for quite a few weeks. In addition, I haven’t had the chance to do any biking for the last couple of weeks either, and I’m starting to feel some of that condition going. Hopefully I’ll still manage to be fit for a 10k in a couple of weeks so that I can at least do some running when my friend Dennis comes over.

GNOME board

As usual, lots of stuff is happening with the board, and as usual, there’s much of it that we can only allude to in the minutes. And a couple of people aren’t happy with the level of secrecy in the board.

It’s a tough problem because in the same way that a developer doesn’t necessarily want to release his code until he’s got a working first prototype, if I’m working on something through the board, I’m not going to announce it to the entire membership until it’s reasonably consequential – to boot-strap things, you get buy-in from important companies & community members and nail down important elements of whatever it is you’re working on before going public.

One example where I’ve been confronted with this was when I worked on getting a GNOME store in place by getting a preferred merchandising supplier – in the end, I went public when we were still in contract negociations with someone, which then fell through (for a number of reasons). Would it have been better to keep quiet about the project until I was certain of success?

Profile

Why anyone would want to profile me, I don’t know, but back in February, I sat down with Joe Brockmeier in SCALE and chatted to him about my free software past and more. We got a bit waylaid back then, and followed up by email. The result was the bass for a profile of me which came out on linux.com recently.

The GNOME Foundation to work with SFLC

For many years, the GNOME Foundation has had pro-bono legal help through Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati – they have helped us with a lot of issues from drafting trademark usage guidelines and contracts through auditing our bylaws and lodging trademark registration papers.

But some issues have needed an in-depth knowledge of our project, our values and our community. Treademarks in particular is an area where the interplay between copyright, trademark and community is particularly sensitive, and needs expert knowledge of free software as well as expert knowledge of the law.

Last year, we welcomed the SFLC onto the GNOME advisory board as a non-profit advisor. The foundation and SFLC announced today that we have now become the SFLC’s newest client.

We will continue to use WSGR’s services for most of our legal needs, but for anything which touches on our stature as a free software project, we will now be able to call on the very special expertise offered by the SFLC.

Thanks are due to Luis Villa for proposing this idea and bringing the parties together, and Anne Oestergaard for finally bringing things to conclusion.

GNOME Live CDs II – the return!

They’re back! And this time, they’ve got company.

Two years ago, Luis Villa took up the cross and made sure that there was a GNOME LiveCD for GNOME 2.10 and GNOME 2.12 – he was joined in that journey by a band of companions like Marcus Bauer, the man who made sure the 2.12 Live CD was available in 12 languages.

After a couple of releases of a lapse, they’re back! We have revived torrent.gnome.org (with many thanks to Corey and Michael from OSU OSL for installing the server so quickly, and for providing the rack space and bandwidth, and to Intel for the 5U (!) server that it’s running off, and to Olav for getting things configured).

Ken van Dine is the man to send all the accolades – he’s one of the people behind Foresight Linux, the most GNOME friendly distro around – they release with the latest GNOME release on the same day as GNOME.

Not only do we have a LiveCD ISO image for download this time, though, we also have VMWare, QEMU and VHD Virtual Server images available for all you virtualisation freaks out there.

LiveCDs and VM appliances are good for a few different things – giving away at trade shows and conferences, showing off GNOME to your boss without having to spend all day installing, or writing and testing GNOME software for the latest platform without being on the bleeding edge for all your user needs.

So head on over to torrent.gnome.org and start seeding.

GNOME annual report

Here’s my foreword to the GNOME annual report which I just announced on foundation-list. The report is available on the Foundation website. This is the first time we’ve done an annual report, and I’d really love to hear what people think of it.

Dear Friends,

All traditions need a starting point, they say. What you now hold in your hands is the first annual report of the GNOME Foundation, at the end of what has been an eventful year for us.

Each year brings its challenges and rewards for the members of this global project. This year, many of our biggest challenges are in the legal arena. European countries have been passing laws to conform with the European Union Copyright Directive, and some, including France, have brought into law provisions which we as software developers find it hard to understand, but which appear to make much of what we do illegal. We have found ourselves in the center of patent wars as bigger companies jockey for position with offerings based on our hard work. And we are scratching our heads trying to figure out how to deal with the constraints of DRM and patents in multimedia, while still offering our users access to their media files.

But for each of these challenges, no matter how much they weigh on our minds, we also have liberating moments when we feel like the work we have done is changing the world. GNOME software will be included on the 1.2 million laptops which will be distributed to every Libyan schoolchild, ensuring that the world gets a new generation of free software developers in 10 or 15 years. The blood and sweat that we and other free software developers pour into our work has made it possible for people to have a real alternative to monopolistic hegemony—even if
we are not yet at a level where mass adoption is realistic. Social movements like the Software Freedom Day and the Free Culture movement spread our ideas far and wide. The enthusiasm and passion in the eyes of the people who use our software, and who love it for the price, but also for the freedom and community, makes all those evenings and nights spent in front of a screen feel worth it.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams, Eleanor Roosevelt once said. And so I give you the first GNOME Foundation annual report — the first of many. I invite you to join us in sharing the burden of our difficulties, and in celebrating our many successes. Let the future be ours, because our dreams are beautiful.

Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation, Chair

The future of GNOME?

A few days ago, I was asked for an interview what I thought the future of GNOME held – in the context of the recent LUGRadio episode (where GNOME’s lack of direction and leadership was cited as a major reason why we’re not making any revolutionary change to the desktop) I thought it was relevant and worth wider distribution.

We will see is one of two things happen – either GNOME will grow beyond what it is currently, and develop a number of different façades which will become GNOME releases (such as OLPC GNOME, LinEx GNOME, Enterprise GNOME, Home & Small Office GNOME, etc) or we will end up shrinking to something smaller than we currently are – the most important GNOME product will be the platform, which will then be re-used by third parties to build the interfaces they’re interested in on top of it.

We have already started to see this trend – distributors cherry-pick the applications they are interested in for their own desktop projects, which are then themed and targetted for their core audience. The variety of platforms and human interfaces being built upon the GNOME platform is dazzling – these go from small form-factor interfaces like the Nokia N800 and the Maemo application framework and OpenMoko and GPE through to innovative interfaces like Sugar from OLPC, which is totally unfamiliar to someone used to the GNOME desktop, but which is undeniably GNOME based. Even the major distributions have modified the GNOME interface to suit their needs – the OpenSuse, Red Hat Enterprise and Ubuntu desktops all behave in different ways, and have different target audiences.

Clearly, when you see groups like ACCESS, Nokia, OLPC, Sun, Novell, Red Hat and pretty much every other software producer and distributor in the free software market opening up their own internal sources, their preference is clear – they want to encourage common spaces of collaboration, and concentrate only on differentiation.

The project has the choice of embracing this trend, and becoming a place where this kind of targetted development happens in a co-ordinated (free software) way, or letting the trend pass us by, and have each distributor in the market have their own specialised interface, or search for collaboration elsewhere, and simply use the GNOME platform as just another building block.

GNOME user groups around the world

I used one of those sites that generates a world map from country lists to see what amount of the world was covered by GNOME User Groups:

I know of a few smaller groups (like in Seattle, although I don’t know if Lion has actually done anything with that) and there are certainly countries represented by GNOME Hispano and gnome-fr which I haven’t put in there – I’ve tried to limit myself to countries where I know that there are GNOME User Group members.

There are some surprising absences from the list – the US, for a start.

It seems like US-based GNOMErs think of the foundation as their GNOME User Group. This year, there are exactly 0 US residents on the board, and only one North American (who’s actually an Iranian). So don’t let that myth take hold.

We need local volunteers like Eitan and Brad to man stands and spread GNOME Love thick in conferences like LinuxWorld Solutions, EclipseCon (kudos to Billy Biggs and Ben Konrath for taking this on), OLS, SCALE, the Desktop Linux Summit (which probably isn’t going to happen this year) and OSCon, as well as a decent contingent of people representing us at things like DDC, desktop architects & FSG meetings.

I would love to see an initiative to create a GNOME US Users Group, or even state-wide GNOME User Groups (or even US LUGs who let us know they were fans of GNOME).

This echoes what Jono Bacon mentioned about the Ubuntu community – up until a few months ago, there were no grass-roots Ubuntu advocacy groups in the US. Anyone have any ideas why that might be?

FOSDEM

It’s Sunday afternoon in FOSDEM, and I’m just adding one or two slides to compliment the presentation I’m giving this afternoon – which gives me a minute to sit down and think on everything that’s happened since we got here.

I travelled to FOSDEM with Mathieu Stute of OpenWengo on the surprisingly fast Thalys, which gave me a chance to write my presentation on “Developing GNOME through marketing and outreach” (shortened to “Marketing GNOME” on the title slide).

Thanks to Bader for proving one of my early points after the talk – he said “you know you didn’t talk about marketing, you talked about promotion”. We spend too much time talking about metaphysical questions like “what is GNOME” and “what is marketing”, and not enough time actually making the easy wins in outreach. The main point I wanted to get through with this presentation are that there are lots of ways that grass-roots movements can do outreach, but that we have now got most of the useful infrastructure in place to allow the project as a whole to benefit from that outreach, and create the feedback loop which will improve GNOME over time.

Some simple things that you can do as an individual:

• Talk to your local council and get in contact with their CTO to see if there are plans to use free software
• Talk to the college professor you know asking if he’d like to have students do a free-software related project next year
• Offer to do a talk to the local LUG/college computer club on free software and GNOME
• Write articles for the local paper/magazines
• Ask local magazine editors if they’d like to include a GNOME LiveCD or OpenCD on their cover

All of these things come from the same principle – people aren’t aware that there are free software community members everywhere – a local counsil would like to use some stuff, but they don’t know about the local LUG, and no-one’s thought to go and talk to them. Magazine editors are looking for content, but don’t know who to ask. Trade stands are being organised, and people ask the GNOME Foundation if we can run a stand, the answer is almost always “I don’t know”.

I also gave a lightning talk on OpenWengo which was well received, I think – and I’ve had lots of chats at various stages with Yannick from Nokia and Simon and Daff from Collabora about Telepathy and its relationship to OpenWengo.

Yesterday evening, had a good dinner (expensive, and not very copious, but nice) with a bunch of people from the FLOSSFoundations group – I don’t remember all the names, but Gerv from MoFo, Allison Randall from TPF, Cornelius and Sebastien from KDE eV, Greg Stein, Sander Striker, colmmacc and others from the Apache Foundation, and Leslie from the Google Summer of Code were there – we had a good & varied chat which went from energy through to hacking, accountants, trademarks (as usual) and governance. Oh – and Belgian beer.

Today is chill-out day in FOSDEM – everyone’s a little dehydrated, a little hung over and a little tired – which makes for a nice chilled atmosphere. I am still getting over people walking around at 10 in the morning with a bottle of Orval in their hand…

For those wondering, I didn’t manage to get up and get running at 7am on Saturday. I finally got on the road about 7.45 – and planned on running a little over an hour just to tread water for the week. In the end, I got lost in the outskirts of Brussels (running South on the East side of the park, rather than North on the West side), and ended up running about 11 miles, which is close enough to keep me on schedule for the marathon.

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.