Safe as Milk

Sun and trust

Luis: Danese Cooper and Duncan Davidson (in the comments) have both written on the dynamics on Sun, which mean that managers are typically more interested in representing the interests of their teams to higher management, rather than the other way around.

Personally, I wish I had worked for more companies like that (I did work for Informix at one stage, where we had internal politics like that, and it was great to work there. Until they laid everyone off and sold cheap to IBM. Anyway…) – all too often, the lower down you are on the ladder, the further your orders are removed from reality – decision makers colour company strategy with their personal agenda, and you get a really funky view of the world from down there.

So yes, in big companies there is a lot of mistrust in the outside world. People talk about source code and “intellectual property” being the family jewels, and if you work in a company where a high level manager says “it’s not possible – you just can’t do that”, then that’s an issue that takes time to sort out.

And honestly, I’m now willing to give Sun the benefit of the doubt. Yes, OpenSolaris is under an MPL-alike licence and isn’t GPL compatible, for no particularly good reason that I know. But it’s still a free software licence, and that’s a huge advance on before.

(edit: Firefox/MPL comparison removed – Firefox is mostly dual licenced GPL/MPL)

SIGGRAPH

I can finally lift the veil on something that I’ve been involved with for a while now…

The Blender Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, the GIMP developers and the Uni-verse consortium have grouped together to hire and build a giant 20×30 island booth in the main aisle of the SIGGRAPH trade show in Boston in August. We had some help from an anonymous donor, and Ton has done a huge amount of work pulling all the strings together.

I’m really excited about this – SIGGRAPH is a huge show, and free software will be right in the middle of it – no more skulking in the corner of the “Open Source Exhibition” where the organisers hide the guys who can’t afford to be in the main hall and give then a 6×6 space to put up a computer – we have prime real estate.

I have all sorts of ideas about how GNOME and the GIMP can use this opportunity – from hob-nobbing with Hollywood types to showing off XGL, Cairo and all of the user interface work that people in the project have been doing.

I’ll be looking for volunteers over the next few weeks to halp with the stand – keep the dates in your mind when taking your Summer holidays – July 30th to August 3rd (exhibition from 1st to 3rd), Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

Article dans Journal du Net

J’ai répondu (tout comme Tristan Nitot de Mozilla) à quelques questions du Journal du Net pour une article intéressante: L’enjeu du financement des projets Open Source

Point clé:

…si nous comptons 200 personnes à plein temps […] ce ne serait pas démesuré de suggérer que Gnome représente un investissement annuel, reparti sur plusieurs sociétés, de plusieurs millions d’euros par an.

Non-technical GNOMEys

There has been some debate recently on how the project can attract more people outside of the male geek group. Shaun McCance made the point that non-technical posts in general are typically under-represented in GNOME.

This echoes closely what Mitchell Baker has been saying about Mozilla:

[…] filling [non-technical] roles often means bringing in people who haven’t “come up through the project.” These folks who are new to the Mozilla project need to be accepted by the development community in order to be effective. Status as a Mozilla Corporation employee isn’t enough.

and

If one’s skillset is something other than code, then proving oneself through understanding the intricacies of our code is at best inefficient and probably a blocker for many people. So the challenges are to find mechanisms for people in non-code roles to demonstrate they share the values of the Mozilla project and can make contributions that people want to support.

Conclusion?

Integrating non-engineering contributors takes a lot of trust and feeling our way gently. Those people joining us in non-engineering roles must trust that the technical contributors will give them a fair chance to participate, add value, become respected and gain influence and leadership. The engineering community must trust that these people who may be new to the Mozilla community and don’t have deep technical expertise are worth listening to and giving a fair shake.

In other words: Be excellent to each other.

But more than that, we need to start recognising when there is a skills deficiency in the project, and actively recruit people with those skills, drawing them the map of how the project works, and helping them become great contributors. There are a number of examples of non-technical people coming into the project and making an impact – Quim Gil, John Williams, Telsa Gwynne – but there are probably more examples of people who passed close by, felt the water, and went on their merry way without ever engaging, or being engaged by, the GNOME community.

So during the marketing BOF at GUADEC this year, I would like to focus on this – how can we make non-technical people interested in marketing GNOME feel like their work makes a difference.

Marketing is not just promotion – real marketing is a two-way dialog between the project and the market, with us saying what we do and why, and the market telling us how we can do better, or what they need that we’re not doing. And GNOME marketers will feel like a part of the project from the moment where something we do changes the project for the better.

Lightning Talks

We will be having Lightning Talks again this year at GUADEC!

For those who missed last year’s talks, we got wowed by (Dave Reveman?)’s wobbly windows and cubic workspaces, Jonathan Blandford’s demo of Evince, J5 showing off his worth on session management, and Sebastien Tricaud showing off Gscore, the first application to fully use Cairo for its rendering, among others.

This year, we already have some interesting candidates – for example, a GStreamer based media center, desktop tagging with Leaftag and a demo of the Pitivi non-linear video editor.

Sign up on the wiki to stake your claim for a lightning talk spot – there is no lower limit on the amount of time that you take, but talks are limited to 5 minutes including set-up time. It’s fast & furious, and a great way to get wider attention for your project or idea – pique our curiosity – people can always spend the rest of the conference hasseling you for details, show us why your work is great.

Some tips on lightning talks from perl.com will help you make a killer presentation:

• Prepare. Don’t stand up without an idea of what you want to say.
• Avoid slides. You’ll spend precious time setting up your laptop. If you use them, have everything set up, and test with the projector before your talk.
• Get to the point. Introduction is fine, but if you’re not into the meat of what you want to say after 30 seconds, you’ll run out of time.

Update: Thanks to Daniel Glassey for letting me know he wasn’t the wobbly cubey guy. I’d like to know who it was though…

Welcome to our newest board member

For the benefit of those not subscribed to foundation-list and foundation-announce, I’d like to make a board announcement on here:

When Luis announced to the board that he wanted to resign a couple of weeks ago, the board discussed our options – referendum or co-option. We felt that co-opting a new member onto the board, on the basis of the election results last December, was the best way to select the newest member of the board. Our decision was made easy by the fact that since the election, this person has gone on to become a heavyweight in the GNOME community in very short order.

So without further ado, I’d like to announce that the board has decided to co-opt Quim Gil onto the board into the vacant position left by Luis Villa, effective immediately. We’re all sorry to see Luis leave the board, but I have a feeling that this means we’ll be hearing even more from him in the future. I’d like to wish him all the best in his budding legal career.

Trademark exploitation agreement

I sent a mail to foundation-list yesterday with a template for a trademark agreement intended for use in merchandising agreements.

It would be great to get some comments on it from legally-minded people, even if they’re from IANAL, before we propose this to companies like Killermundi.

Initial schedule ready

So, the first draft of the GUADEC schedule is ready – just waiting for publishing, and it should be online over the next couple of days.

I’m a low-tech kind of guy, and the process for doing the schedule was sufficiently interesting I thought I’d blog about it.

First, I taped together some A4 sheets, and drew out the schedule shape we’d agreed on – 3 parallel sessions, X hours for lunch, Y keynotes per day, etc.

Then I wrote the names of the accepted talks on sticky notes, color-coding them according to their track & stream.

And the sticky notes attacked the paper. A first quick draft was easily shuffled until I had something I was more or less happy with. And a few photos and a rough stitch later, here’s the end result.

GUADEC authors notified

Last night I sent out 33 acceptance mails to people who had presentations accepted for the core days of GUADEC. We now need to arrange those talks in a schedule which will annoy as few people as possible – it’ll probably be done in July 😉

I would like to thank everyone who helped with the selection of papers – it was relatively pain free this year. Those people are Ross Burton, Rodrigo Moya, Edd Dumbill and the ever-present Quim Gil. All these people are rock stars, and should be hugged in Barcelona.

This year we have made GUADEC’s core days lean and mean – there will be 6 keynote sessions, the conference opening and closing, the GNOME Foundation AGM, a lightning talks session, and 33 presentations, split along the lines of theme and target audience.

The “target audience” idea seemed to catch some people off guard, so I’d like to explain it a little, since most of the accepted papers will not be where they were proposed.

User: Showcasing an application, or API, that is shipped with the GNOME desktop, or a closely remlated application. The APIs are part of our products as well, and third party developers are important users of the platform product.

Developer: Talks aimed at GNOME developers – people working on improving core GNOME applications or APIs. Most of the talks were submitted here.

Client: Poeple who will pay for GNOME, or sell GNOME, in one way or another. Third party developers fit in here too, GNOME deployment stories, writing vertical applications, GNOME marketing; that kind of thing.

We got the fewest applications for the client day, so many of the talks there will only be tenuously associated with the theme. But since there was so much confusion about the categories, I thoughth it would be useful to (re)explain them.

Disruptive technologies

Calum says:

Part of the reason StarOffice (and by association, OpenOffice.org) is “just as complicated and feature overridden as the real thing”, of course, is that whenever Sun tries to take out feature X, customer Y complains and stops buying it. Being disruptive is so much easier when you’re starting from scratch with nothing to lose 🙂

I have two reactions to this:

1. What, you mean like Mozilla? Firefox started from the Mozilla suite, lots of customers, and 3 to 5 percent market share. OOo is probably around the 3% market share. What customers?

2. I don’t live in the US, and I’ve never heard Howard Stern’s radio show. But I did see “Private Parts”, which I thought was a very funny film.

   Stern was a disruptive technology – one of the first “shock jocks” to hit the mainstream market at a big network. There’s this one scene in the movie where the Washington station where he’s working is just about to cut him, because all their old, traditional sponsors are deserting them in droves. But Stern knows that the listenership figures are flying up, and the sponsors will follow the listeners.

   Just as the station is reaching its breaking point, and the director is saying once again “That’s it, you’re out”, newer, bigger, better sponsors start rolling in, and the station hits a new high, with Stern as their headline act.

   All disruptive technology has a break with the past, where old assumptions get turned on their head, and the people who can’t keep up hop off the train or get left on the platform. But the visionaries, the ones who know that their ideas, if brought to their logical conclusion, will change the world (or at least US talk-show radio) persist, and take those short term hits because they know that just over the next summit, we descent into the lush green valleys of the promised land.

   OpenOffice.org and GNOME both need to be a bit more like Stern.