Safe as Milk

maemo.org track in LinuxTag

So far, the maemo.org track has been great – very informative. Some highlights:

Gary Birkett (better known on IRC as lcuk) gave a short talk on how and why he got involved in memo.org – an interesting perspective on motivations of volunteers, and a classic “scratching your own itch” situation. He’s developed a text reader which works in full-screen, and has smooth scrolling with finger & stylus (like the iPhone).

Niels Breet is the maemo.org webmaster. He was an active community member doing great work, who has recently been funded by Nokia to work on project infrastructur. It’s an interesting model of community funding – Niels explained that his boss is the maemo.org community, even though it’s Nokia who’s paying his wages. He talked about some of the things that he’s working on improving, including the newly published maemo.org packaging policy (PDF), and fixing the repositories mess to make it easier to upload software to a central maemo extras repository.

The main presentation to close out the morning was Quim Gil talking about the maemo.org strategy of Nokia over the next couple of years. Without going into details, he talked about the next two versions of the platform, Fremantle and Harmattan. Fremantle will continue to be primarily GTK+/Hildon based, and QT will be integrated into the platform in the Harmattan release.
Quim then talked about the role of community in maemo.org and tablet development. He mentioned that Nokia have recently invested in 3 roles (webmaster, bugmaster, docmaster) where the people being funded answer primarily to the community. This represents a big investment in the community.

His major announcement was that he was launching 10 days of community brainstorming on two subjects: the 100 Days community plan and maemo.org 2010, defining short term goals for the community, and helping Nokia define the mid-term goals and strategy for the project. He also announced the maemo summit, to be held in Berlin on the 19th of September, after OSiM World, and finished with a call to arms. Nokia is looking for real community input and action, and wants help finding the right balance between the commercial constraints involved in producing mass-market devices and the community requirement for transparency and openness.

After lunch, we had some presentations of some of the cool apps which have been written by community members for the maemo platform.

Alberto Garcia of Igalia presented Vagalume , a beautiful and well-integrated Last.fm client for GNOME and maemo tablets.

Florian Boor presented the GPE application suite which includes a bunch of small applications targeting handheld form-factors.

Urho Konttori, who has since become a project manager in Nokia, talked about the UKMP media player, UKTube YouTube downloader & plater, and some other applications which he has written for the maemo platform.

Next up: maemo.org platform hacks, and “what’s next?”.

Live from LinuxTag

I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday for three days in LinuxTag 2008 to meet up with some members of the maemo.org community, see old friends, and generally chat with as many people as possible.

After arriving, I managed to  get out for a run, which was surprisingly pleasant – ourhotel is quite near the Tiergarten behind the zoological gardens, so while running around I accidentally went past some lovely landmarks, and managed to scout out a nice beer-garden beside the Neuen See where we had some nice Weisswurst last night.

It’s been fun so far – I met up with Quim and Marcell on Tuesday, and Kate, Peter, Niels and Marius yesterday. I spent a lot of time wandering around playing “spot the familiar face” – it was great catching up with Jochen Topf from Open Street Map (formerly FOSTEL organiser), Vincent Untz and Joe Brockmeister who are here for OpenSuse, Nils and Florian from OpenEmbedded and GPE.

I ran into Anne Oestergaard too, and it was great chatting with MaryBeth and Rob from OpenMedia Now, Knut Yrvin from Trolltech, and most of the KDE eV board who are here this week too – I met Aaron Seigo for the first time, after years of email conversations, and Sebastian and Cornelius are here too.

With so many familiar faces, it can be tempting to just talk to people you know, but I do like meeting up with new people at these things too – and the number one conversation starter I’ve had this week has been  Big Buck Bunny – my kids love this cartoon, so much that Tuesday they watched it on repeat for an hour. And it goes down well with the adults too. Mad props to Ton, Sacha and the gang on the great success – they have attained their goal of an accessible cartoon to follow on from the “arty” Elephants Dream.

Already today we’ve heard Cat Allman from Google telling us about Google Summer of Code and GHOP, and  the always entertaining Knut Yrvin on QT. After Knut’s session the maemo.org track starts, and I will be reporting as much as possible. Nick Loeve (trickie) proposed having a Wiki sprint today, and if I can get critical mass (and critical internet access) for that, we’ll do that a little later.

Hello Neary Consulting

So, never let it be said that I am original when it comes to thinking up names.

I finally put the website for my company, Neary Consulting, online earlier this week. There’s not much there for the moment, but I have written before about what I expect my core activity to be: helping companies rock as community members.

Two situations come to mindimmediately.

• You have a free software product, and you’re having trouble building up a community around it. 95% of the contributions coming into the project are from your employees, and you’re spending a bunch of resources on community liaison people who don’t seem to be getting many new contributors in.
• You have a hacker working on some free software that you’re using in your products. Every change you ask him to make seems to take longer, since he has to maintain a separate branch for all the work that he’s doing. Once every few months, he comes to you and insists that you should update to the latest version of the upstream project, and every upgrade seems to introduce new interesting bugs, and causes a few regressions, as the merge always takes a few weeks to get right.

In both these situations, the problem is likely to be that you’re not interacting well with the people outside your company. Your hacker isn’t working on getting his work upstream, or doesn’t understand the changes which might conflict with his work. Or your free software project isn’t taking off because most of your team don’t understand this community stuff much, and anyway, didn’t you created the community liaison guy in the first place so that they wouldn’t have to?

I’m caricaturing, of course, but many organisations will recognise themselves in these two scenarios. And I think I can help make things better in both cases. Not perfect, but better. How? By helping engineers and managers understand community dynamics, and work to align their investments, expectations and development practices to get the most out of their interactions with free software communities.

Patents and the GPL

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?

OpenWengo not in limbo

I have seen a meme spread over the past few days which I’d like to correct, and hopefully nip in the bud.

The OpenWengo project did not die with the withdrawl of Wengo. Nor is it in limbo.

The torch has been passed. (PDF) Finally, in late January, the news was announced. The project has a new maintainer, Vadim Lebedev of MBDSys. Vadim has been involved in the project from the beginning – he was hired by Wengo to write the back-end code for the first prototype. His company has experience providing customisation services on top of the software. He’s absolutely the best person for the job.

I have known this for several weeks, but was asked not to announce it until an agreement had been reached between Wengo and MBDSys. I alluded to this, as Marco indicated in his blog entry, in my previous entries on the subject, as well as in email to the mailing list.

To repeat myself: this is the great thing about free software – the project can outlive the founder. Spencer Kimball and Peter Mathis lost interest in the GIMP – it took 6 months to get over that speedbump, but the project outlived them. If Alfresco goes out of business, there are enough individuals and companies invested in the project that it will live on.

Wengo has withdrawn from the OpenWengo project, and yet development continues, people are still investing in it, volunteers are still working on it. Life goes on.

Welcome to the new way of doing things.

Next up…

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.

Breaking my silence

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.

Journées du Libre à Montpellier

I was going to blog about my demo/presentation of OpenWengo at the Journées du Libre à Montpellier, but it seems like I’m not on the agenda, in spite of having had a session accepted.

I don’t know whether I’ll still go or not – but I’m a bit annoyed about being forgotten.

Away for a few days in the sun

My bosses at Wengo have organised a few days away for everyone in the company to relax together, get to know each other outside work, announce some news and generally pamper us a little – I’m not one to complain about a little pampering.

For these few days, I will not be reading my email. I’ll be back in the normal world with internet access on Saturday.

In the meantime, I’ve packed swimming togs, sports gear, sandals, … all I need now is a good storm & I’ll be set.

Not in Berlin

For those who had planned to go to Berlin especially to catch the Openwengo workshop on Thursday, I am sorry to let you know that I will be in Paris for some important meetings, and won’t be attending LinuxTag this year.