Safe as Milk

Dave Tierney, where art though?

O lazyweb, O lazyweb, I lost contact with an old friend when he went to the Falklands on a research contract, and came back to Ireland after I left for France. I don’t have an email address or anything, and I would like to get back in contact.

Can someone tell Thomas David Tierney, marine zoologist extraordinaire, graduate of UCG (that’s NUI Galway for you youngsters), known to his friends as David Tierney, and to his closest friends as Wurz, to drop me a mail, please? Alternatively, if you have his email address, please send it on to me. Last I heard he was working in the Marine Biology Institute in Ireland (marine.ie), but Google’s been no hope at all.

Thanks for your help!

Marketing GNOME: third-party developers

Over the coming weeks in the run-up to GUADEC, I’ll be dumping my brains about some of the things I’d like to propose during the marketing BOF to develop the ideas I listed recently on marketing-list.

First up is third party developers (more colloquially, ISVs, but since most of our third-party developers don’t sell anything, that doesn’t seem appropriate).

Greg Kelleher from IBM told me that initiatives aimed at third party developers have three levels – high, medium and low touch.

1. High touch is when the person meets a developer or trainer in person – interractive training sessions and workshops, or conference presentations fit here. This kind of interraction is the most beneficial for the recipient, but is a one-to-few effort.
2. Medium touch is a rich, interractive experience without the human contact. Something like webcasts, conference videos and streaming, online seminars. These often provide the possibility for interraction, and allow a greater number of people to attend, with the loss of human contact.
3. Low touch is our website and printed supports. API and interfaces documentation, tutorials, books, training manuals, archives of previous high and medium touch materials. This is passive learning – the developer comes to us to look for what he needs, spends as much or as little time as he wants, and leaves with no human interraction whatsoever. KDE has started an interesting initiative in the area, aiming to produce high quality distance learning paterials for a full QT/KDE course.

So – how are we doing now? Not as brutally badly as you might think – our core APIs are pretty well documented (with some notable exceptions), we are building up some tutorials, GGAD is still a great reference book, although it could do with a freshening up (like many of the tutorials, unless things have changed since the last time I looked), we stream and archive GUADEC presentations.

But we are not doing any high touch training, we’re not organising any web seminars, we’re not yet doing anything similar to OSDW. Even though we have lots of documentation, developer.gnome.org is missing a bunch of stuff it really should have (how hard is it to add a Google search-bar to the site?). In spite of our rich bindings, it’s hard to figure out how the API docs map to each of the languages.

Beyond that, we don’t sell GNOME books or developer kits on the website, and we haven’t really tried organising our third party developers to get them talking to each other.

So that’ll do for training & information diffusion. I haven’t even touched on application certification, which is a huge opportunity for us, as well as being enormously useful to third party developers.

Pet Firefox peeve

Have you ever been working on a blog entry in firefox, and hit Ctrl-W instead of Ctrl-X by accident (or by habit)?

I don’t know how many times it’s happened to me, but it’s often. And always annoying.

Recently, I noticed a dialog when I tried to close on some website I can’t recall – “you have unsaved work, are you sure you want to close the window?” – I don’t know whether it was some Javascript in the page, or whether it was Firefox patched by Ubuntu, but I was very grateful.

Is this possible? Can I please stop losing unsaved work when there’s a form with text inputs on the page I’m closing by accident?

Last chance to join the fantasy world cup

So far we have a fair few teams signed up to the Fantasy World Cup I mentioned before. Now is your last chance – you can join after the start of the tournament, but you won’t get any points for matches before you join, so it’s better to join up now.

The silent majority

Seth Godin: It’s easy to confuse people who are passionate and loud with the majority

An Australian solution to a global problem

Daggy music is one way to make the hoons leave an area, because they can’t stand the music

Who knew that Barry Manilow could become such a force for public order.

Link(s) of the day

Way back at the start of 2005, nineteen Ethiopian youths were given cameras and asked to document their lives in a photo blog – the result was Ethiopia Lives.

At the end of the year, due to some technical issues, the site ceased being updated and now the photo blog is housed on Flickr.

Not only is the standard of the photography excellent, the stories and the images give you an insight into what life is like for normal Ethiopians, far from the almost dehumanised photos of famine you associate with the country in the West. It’s what Hugh MacLeod calls “reaching people on a human scale”. And it’s very effective.

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.