Safe as Milk

Mad Props Eitan and Brad

During SCALE, Eitan Isaacson and Brad Taylor were demo animals on the GNOME stand (photo shamelessly linked from Scott Ruecker’s LXer article series) – I failed miserably to make good on my promise to spend at least a half-day on the stand – in the end, I was there for about an hour showing off the N800’s Jingle video call capability with Eitan, and demoing Dasher’s text input reasonably successfully.

At the end of Sunday, I was caught up jabbering away to people, and didn’t even get a chance to clean up the stand & say goodbye.

So – thanks Eitan and Brad, and goodbye 🙂 See you both next year?

Update: I found a nicer picture (with me in it) from Celeste Paul of KDE-usability – we had a nice chat and messed about with the Nokia N800s we had quite a bit. Yes, I know I need a haircut, no need to remind me.

SCALE – what a weekend!

I’m just on my way home from LA where I gave a presentation on OpenWengo during SCALE. It was standing-room only, and a bunch of people were sitting down at the back – and aside from the fact that I hit a PortAudio bug which stopped me from actually demoing a phone-call, it went pretty well.

It was good to meet Ted “Bible thumper” Haegar and Erin Quill from Novell (the company everyone loves to hate these days) who gave a very stimulating presentation on Xen.

I know they didn’t notice that I had dozed off (jet-lagged to hell) during their presentation because no-one threw any books at me – unlike the previous evening, when Mr. Jono Bacon demonstrated his over-arm throwing skills to wake me from my gentle slumber. The most amusing things about the incident were the way I didn’t spill my beer (while asleep, or when hit by the book), the bemused and confused look on my face straight afterwards (I honestly had no idea what had happened), and the enthusiastic defense of my cause by the man behind me who wanted to have Jono ejected from the hall (“That was totally uncalled for, man”).

Aside from that, I had a really good chat about community development, Ubuntu, OpenWengo and GNOME with Jono, and I also met up with Jay from MySQL, who does pretty much the same thing there. I also met up with Zonker, who tried to interview me (and discovered my talent for tangents). A great weekend was had, and I hope I will get back next year.

Solutions Linux update

I was contacted by a Belgian author of Ekiga who will remain unnamed to thank me for pointing out that he was not cool enough to make my list of cool people.

I met many people in Paris who didn’t get mentioned in my previous blog entry – including, but not limited to, the members of ALDIL, several members of Mozilla Europe, the guys from Silicon Sentier, several people from KDE France, OO.o France, Mandriva, RedHat, Novell, APRIL, Linux Auvergne, GNU/Linux Magazine France (hello Denis!), and many more. Oh, and a Belgian author of Ekiga.

Any implication of uncoolness was unintended, but being mentioned in this blog entry does not constitute proof of coolness. E&OE.

Life as a jet-setter

Solutions Linux

Last week I was in Paris for Solutions Linux all week – hobbling about on my sprained ankle, catching up with some cool people like Michael Meeks (with whom I profoundly disagree on some of the community-related stuff we discussed), Fred Crozat, Daniel Veillard, Dodji Seketeli and David Faure.

The dichotomy of Solutions Linux is the cohabitation of sleek professional commercial teams such as Novell (who undoubtedly paid a healthy six-figure sum for their presence at the show) and the Association Village – a bazaar-like environment which is kind of other-worldly. You can’t stand for two minutes at a commercial stand without someone coming up to you to bar-code scan your badge, and ask you if they can help you out. In the association village, you could probably stroll in, sit down, roll up a joint and make yourself at home in a stand without anyone asking you why you were there.

I went with a colleague, who said it was like walking off the main drag in Morocco and wandering into a market – “Did you notice”, he said, “that the smell changed when we came here?”

More travel

Next weekend, I will be travelling to LA for SCALE 5x – hopefully I will have some time to help Eitan with the GNOME stand aside from my presentation on the OpenWengo project and meeting other projects (which I really want to do).

I will also be trying my best to catch the first Ireland international to be played in the mythical Croke Park – kick-off at 8am local time in LA.

After that, I will be trekking off to Brussels to FOSDEM, where I will be giving a lightning talk on OpenWengo, and two presentations in the GNOME DevRoom – one on the promotion and marketing of GNOME, and a repeat of the presentation I gave in Brazil in November – attempting to explain how & why people get involved in free software.

From there, a short hop (via Paris) and I’ll be in San Francisco for eTel. It will be my first time in the Bay area, and I’m looking forward to meeting up with people I’ve only met online up until now. If anyone is interested in meeting up the week of the 27th of February, please drop me a line, and we’ll meet up.

Documentation survey

Andy Oram asked me to pass this on – and since he’s been giving us advice on GNOME docs, I’m happy to do so (very mercenary of me, I know).

Do you answer questions on mailing lists about how to use a
software tool or language? Do you write documentation, put
up web pages, or contribute to wikis about software? If so,
please take this survey to help O’Reilly do
research that will be published on the O’Reilly web site,
and may help software projects and communities get more such
contributions.

They’re only interested in hearing from people who do this for
non-monetary reasons.

I guess if you’re being paid to write docs, your primary motivation is assumed to be your pay-check.

Fluendo releases proprietary codecs

I wanted to congratulate Julien, Christian et al at Fluendo on the release of their codec bundles this week. According to the arstechnica article:

Fluendo’s codec release is bound to stir up controversy and generate criticism within certain segments of the open-source community. A small but vocal minority of Linux users vehemently oppose the commercial sale of proprietary codecs for the Linux platform since such codecs limit user freedom and impede open redistribution. Critics are likely to perceive the sale of codecs as validation of proprietary software business models and a tacit rejection of open-source ideals.

Au contraire, I think it’s great that a company is offering for-money sale of commercial codecs – it’s infinitely preferable to “free” codecs that people are downloading and using – often in non-compliance with the GPL (“but that’s OK, we download them separately, and we’re not redistributing the aggregate work”).

People should realise that proprietary codecs are just that – proprietary. And if they cost money, that’s a great way to realise.

I wish Fluendo all the best with their shop.

Thought of the day

GNOME is not a project which is independent of commercial interests, as much as we fancy ourselves as that.

On the contrary, commercial interests are all around us – several modules change maintainership when the maintainer leaves a company, and most of the committers on many modules come from one or two companies.

The question, then, is not how we go about integrating commercial interests into the project, but how we mould the commercial interests already in the community so that they are community-friendly. The best way to do this is to first recognise the existing commercial forces, and to evolve the project so that GNOME can become a true center of collaboration and communication.

Help us budget for user groups!

I just sent a request for proposals from user groups to the gugmasters mailing list. The board needs to know how much help user groups need for the year to budget properly, and although we will leave some slack for ad hoc last minute requests, having lots of info up-front will be very useful.

Anyone working with a user group who would like to make a proposal should sign up to the gugmasters list today, and help us out. Thank you!

SVN migration

To answer the several people wondering abuot why we’re migrating to Subversion for GNOME, I have a few thoughts.

We’re currently using CVS, which ucks for a number of reasons which everyone agrees with. File moves, support for grouping changes to several files into one logical entity, efficient branching and tagging, versioned metadata – these are just some of teh features you expect from a revision control system that CVS doesn’t have. So moving to something else makes sense.

Of all the other version control systems, one (Subversion) has succeeded in fulfilling a number of criteria:

1. Providing and communicating a migration route for CVS users – not just converting a repository, but also migrating your daily use from one to the other.
2. Being included by default in pretty much every distribution.
3. Generating copious documentation, making life very easy for repository admins.
4. Providing an admin-friendly ACL permissions system for repositories.
5. Providing a firewall-friendly way to get source code.

So there are a bunch of good reasons to move to SVN, and the only argument that people have against it is that “everyone knows that distributed’s better”.

For distributed systems, the observation I’d make is that there are several distributed revision control systems (bzr, baz-ng, svk, tla, Mercurial, git, …) so (assuming there’s agreement that’s the way to go) which one do you pick? Obviously there’s some argument about the Right Way to do distributed version control – otherwise, why so many to choose from?

Also, none of those systems has reached a level of maturity and acceptance that you can reasonably expect every developer to have it installed – so you’re adding an entry barrier (compiling the revision control system) for everyone who you want to build your stuff.

In short, the move to Subversion makes a lot of sense for GNOME, and a move to anything else would need a lot of good arguments backing it up before you could even consider it.

Bkor: One small correction – the board did not ask the infrastructure team to move to SVN – Jeff was the release manager at the time he asked, and it was in that capacity that he made the request. The board has never (in my memory) discussed version control systems.

Yet Another Mailing List

A while back, I asked the list administrators to create a mailing list for me, which I have been meaning to get populated by chasing down everyone I know who should be on it. Unfortunately, circumstances have conspired against me doing taht the proper way, so now I’m resporting to a blog broadcast and an email to foundation-list 🙂

The mailing list I created was discussed at the marketing BOF in GUADEC: the GNOME User Groups masters list – modelled on the UK’s lugmasters list, this list will regroup representatives of various user groups around the world, to encourage collaboration and planning, sharing of information, organising common actions where useful, sharing experiences and generally making the GNOME Foundation aware of all of the things that are going on around the world.

The list will also be useful in the other direction – often, the foundation is contacted about an event where GNOME should probably be present, and we forward the mail on, but a central place to make sure people are informed what’s going on would be useful – it will also be useful to finally this year have a significant GNOME involvement in Software Freedom Day.

So – if you are involved in a GNOME User Group, and would like to know what others are trying, or co-ordinate an event with your neighbours, sign up – I expect to see at least one person from all the user groups on the wiki by Christmas.

For information, this mailing list will be ruled by my iron hand, and I will insist on people respecting the Code of Conduct.

In unrelated news, I got re-elected to the GNOME Foundation board – thank you to everyone who voted for me, I think we’re going to have a great year. Congratulations also to Quim, Jeff, Glynn, Vincent, Anne and Behdad. Participation this year was slightly up on last year (211 out of 346 = 60% versus 47% last year) – is this a sign that the board is doing better, or a side-effect of the membership renewal problem last month?