Safe as Milk

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?

OpenWengo summit

I just announced that Wengo will be hosting a summit of contributors to the OpenWengo project on the 18th and 19th of January. The OpenWengo Summit will be our first opportunity to meet, get to know each other, and plan the future of the project.

It’ll be in Paris, in the offices of Wengo which has a great night-life and some fairly run-of the mill sights to see.

More information is available in the OpenWengo wiki.

Back from DAM3

I got home from Portland yesterday afternoon – I’m really starting to feel the jet-lag now. It’s only the second time I’ve had that much of a difference in time-zones, and I’m currently a time-zombie.

I’ve had a chance to reflect on the last few days, and have come to a conclusion. It was good, but not great. We had some more break-outs on Friday, and I had some great out-of-band conversations with people I’ll definitely be hooking up with very soon.

In no particular order, here are a few things I noted during the conference:

• The Wall of Laptops is evil in this kind of meeting
• Quim Gil said to me last GUADEC that there’s a Spanish saying that all work should be done with food on the table (or something like that) – and I can confirm that most of the valuable connections were made during breakfast, coffee breaks, and dinner & drinks
• The presentations should really have been 5 minutes per project – 10 minutes max – self-censorship was sorely missing
• It was a pity that we were missing some projects which made it difficult to make good headway on some issues – we discussed packaging and installing 3rd party software and improving upstream/downstream co-operation, but most of the distributions weren’t well represented, for example
• I was sorry Aaron Seigo didn’t make it
• I am hugely optimistic about audio after the audio session – perhaps inappropriately. We’ll see
• A couple of the break-out sessions were unfortunately rat-holes – there was no real resolution possible (at least, with the participants involved) – talking about DRM and codecs support for example was depressing

I was also involved in a discussion about what we need for ISD documentation, which was pretty aligned with what people have been saying around GNOME – we need to focus more on tutorials and coherent developer stories, rather than API docs (which are pretty good). Someone coming to GNOME should have access to code snippets showing how to use the APIs for more complex tasks. And we should have a book on GNOME development.

Desktop Architects Meeting 3

I’m in Portland for the Desktop Architects Meeting 3 at the moment, representing the OpenWengo project.

It’s been good – although the presentation sessions have been numerous, and have over-run, eating into break-out session time (which is what everyone is really here for).

Yesyerday, I was at the sound break-out, with people from Helix, Jack/ALSA, RedHat, Fluendo, LTSP, LSB and others. It was a good session, and took the right tack. We talked about what was needed to create an environment where we could solve the sound problem on Linux.

For those who aren’t aware of the sound problem on Linux, the problems
are that you have about 6 or 7 sound APIs you can develop against, and none of them work nicely together; all of them support some subset of the use-cases that ISDs creating sound apps need, and those subsets all overlap in some way; there is no agreement on what the scope of a sound API and sound system for Linux should be.

The end result for the user is that when you go to a web page that includes flash, your music player stops working, or your browser freezes up until your music app quits, or any other number of issues that are created when different apps use different sound APIs.

It should be noted that pretty much everything is possible right now – with at least one API.

So the first goal is to work out that scope – agree on use-cases that should be enabled in the basic sound API, and work out how we can move from where we are now to a place where all of those use-cases are possible with a high-level sound API.

The plan for that is to get all of the actors involved together on a mailing list, including application developers, platform developers, distributions and low-level sound APIs. We need agreement on the sound story – the use-cases and scope, and have at least one face to face meeting to work out how to go from talk to action, and hopefully between now and next year, we should have something which ISDs like us can use and know that things will Just Work.

I unfortunately missed a second break-out on packaging, installation, dependency management and upgrades – choices are horrible.

A second set of break-out sessions is planned today – looking forward to going to an ISD session, if we have another one.

Free Software World Conference, Badajoz, Extremadura, 7 – 9 February 2007

Without much ado, the Free Software World Conference has been getting itself together for next year. The conference will take place in Badajoz (updated) in Extremadura (the home of LinEx) on the border with Portugal. The dates are set for the 7th to the 9th of February.

It might be a hard place to get to, but the conference got such a good review last year and the year before that I’m hoping to go. But with SCALE happening on the 10th and the 11th, that might be hard to pull off.

The Call for Papers is open (but only available in Spanish at the moment) until the 15th of January. It would be really great to have some GNOME oriented presentations there. I have no doubt that José Angel is already on the case

Newsbruiser problem

Elijah: you need to set a password (assuming this is the same problem Calum and I had).

Fear of losing

Dom: Fear of failure can be a big issue getting anything done, and failing publicly is even more scary.

For what it’s worth, last year I think you lost because of the way you came into the race – as a negative candidate disagreeing with a referendum decision. Given the work you’ve done on legal issues for the foundation this year, I think you would make a great board member, and I’m sorry you didn’t run.

Foz do Iguaçu – water, lots of it

I was in Brazil last week, thanks to the funding of the GNOME Foundation, at Latinoware, giving a presentation “Getting started in free software” – a personal description of how I got involved in free software, and the lessons I have learned through it. I spoke about my experiences in the free software world, including my time with the GIMP,GNOME and OpenWengo. Before going, I didn’t really know what to expect. This was my first visit to South America, and while I had heard lots of good things about the free software community there, nothing prepared me for what we saw.

Joao Bueno of the GIMP at the falls

Foz do Iguaçu is a small town in Western Brazil dominated by two impressive landmarks – the Iguaçu falls, a dazzling array of waterfalls that stretched for several kilometers on the Argentina-Brazil border, and the hydro-electric power station at Itaipu, the biggest operational hydro-electric power station in the world. Latinoware was held in the grounds of Itaipu, about 2 kilometers from the dam.

On Wednesday, I got to visit the falls – an amazing experience. The array of wildlife on show is unbelievable, with Toucans, lizards, spiders, and the Wilber-like coati, the mascot of the town. And then there is the falls. According to Wikipedia, they consist of about 270 waterfalls, along a 2.7 km stretch of the Iguaçu river which divides Brazil from Argentina.

Itaipu is also amazing. The power station generates 25% of all of the electricity needs of Brazil, and 95% of the needs of Paraguay. One turbine of the Itaipu plant is 10 meters in diameter, and generates 700 MW of energy – more than enough to fulfill the needs of a city the size of Lyon.

I also got to visit Ciudad del Este, a free trade zone in Paraguay, across the Parana river from Foz. It reminded me of those no-man’s-land cities you occasionally see in spy films. This one city represents 60% of Paraguay’s GDP. You could buy anything – electronics, arms and clothes are apparently the most popular items.

The amazing Latinoware crowd

Thursday morning, I gave my keynote presentation in Itaipu. As I said, I didn’t know what to expect – the last thing I was expecting was 1200 free software advocates, mostly between 18 and 25 years old, coming to the conference. Aside from the size and age of the crowd, one other thing surprised me – the amount of women. A rough estimate put the number of female participants between 10 and 20 percent – coming from Europe, where we’re used to counting on the fingers of a few hands the number of women at a free software conference, seeing hundreds of women at the conference was a refreshing change. One last surprise was waiting for me in the opening addresses – several politicians, including Marcus Mazzoni, a former guest at GUADEC, and member of the regional government in the state of Parana, spoke of free software not just as a way of cutting costs, but first and foremost about sharing and community. First and foremost, free software is a social and cultural phenomenon in Brazil. I doubt many French politicians understand so well what free software is all about.

Women in Free Software

My presentation went well, I think – perhaps because the point above is one I hold close to heart. Free software is all about communities forming around ideas, and those communities are human. Almost everyone who gets involved in free software development gets involved through a friend. I also talk about the motivating factors people have which make free software attractive to them – and the thing that ties us together, I think, is the feeling that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, that we’re taking part in a movement, which is slowly changing the way the world sees technology, and the way technology gets created. We are changing the world.

Brasil – first impressions

It’s my first visit to Brasil, I’m still in Sao Paolo airport, and my first impressions are not yet made.

My first impressions of airports have been made for years, though, and nothing here changes any of my experience-driven broad generalisations.

“Duty Free” booze in Paris was more expensive than the same stuff in the superstore – they made up for it by having a good range of €100 – €500 collector bottles. Meh.

I bought a beer here in Sao Paolo airport, and paid twice what I would outside the airport (6 reals), and have spent 40 reals on international call cards and 20 reals on 2 hours wifi.

The exchange rate is somewhere between 2.30 and 3.00 reals per euro, depending on how badly you’re getting fleeced by the bureau de change, and whether you’re buying or selling euros. So taking 2.50 and a rough rate, that’s 8 euros for 2 hours wifi – which is expensive anywhere, never mind in Brasil. And I can’t figure out how to find an SMTP server I can send mail through.

Am I the only one who finds the mentality of fleecing international air travelers at every opportunity is really counter-productive? Surely places would like to make a good first impression? How about doing away with airport surcharges for taxis, and making an airport discount for anyone coming off an international flight?

I just found out that because of a last-minute conference rescheduling, I’ll be giving a keynote at Latinoware – talk about adding pressure. I tested the new laptop (a Dell D420, which does indeed rock once you get the widescreen sorted) with a CRT behind it, and it didn’t work too well – I’m hoping that by stopping the 915resolution hack at boot and constraining it to 1024×768 the projector will work. If not, I have not yet completely removed windows, dual boot to the rescue.

Latinoware 2006

Next week, I will be in Foz do Iguaçu in Brasil, to attend Latinoware 2006. I will be giving a conference on how and why we do free software – not so much from a technical point of view, but from a human perspective. It will be pretty similar to the presentation I gave last month in Lyon at les Journées du Logiciels Libres in Lyon, France.

This will be my first time in Brasil, and I am very excited about it – I hope I get a chance to go and see the falls – I’ve heard great things about the Devil’s Throat. I’d also love to get a chance (but I don’t think I’ll have time) to take in Itaipu, the world’s second largest hydro-electric power station after the Three Gorges in China, and a big GNOME user.