Safe as Milk

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.

Fantasy World Cup

So – a world-changing event collides with a world-stopping event at the end of the month, when GUADEC is happening right in the middle of the FIFA World Cup (TM) (hope I don’t get sued for saying World Cup (TM) or Germany 2006 (TM)).

I have signed up for Channel 4’s fantasy world cup competition – it’s just for fun. The idea is simple – you make your dream international team by picking 11 players in a 1-4-4-2 formation with no more than 2 players coming from any given country. Your players get points for appearances, saving penalties, keeping clean sheets, scoring goals or making key passes. They lose points for goals conceded and cards.

And I’ve created a friend’s league – the idea is to have a bunch of people sign up their teams and then join the league, and we can find out who’s got the best team as time goes on. The end of phase 1 is the first cut-off point of the competition, and it falls right at the start of GUADEC, just before our football competition. So head on over, sign up a team, and we’ll have a little friendly competition to see who’s the besty judge of football in Villanova.

Once you’ve signed up, the league PIN is 8992 (you’ll need that to join the league).

Quote on DRM

Yann Zitouni, présentateur Couleur3: “Le problème avec des protections anti-piratage, c’est que ça emmerde surtout ceux qui achètent la musique”

Planet GIMP

I happened across the GIMP user frappr map today – I was thinking of creating one, in fact, when I found out that there were two – http://www.frappr.com/thegimp exists as well!

It would be great to merge these, and have a really good map of GIMP users and developers around the world. So, get to it! And if you’re on neither, well, add yourself to http://www.frappr.com/gimp straight away. Tell them Dave sent you, you get a 20% discount.

Address hunt 2

Excuses pour l’interlude commercial.

Pour ceux qui cherchent un appartement à Lyon, j’ai une affaire à vous proposer… nous vendons le notre, un T3 de 80m^2, avec salon, cuisine équipé séparé, deux grands chambres, hall d’entrée, à proximité de Place Rouget de l’Isle dans le 3ème arrondissement. Il y a également une place dans un parking fermé, et une cave de 6.5 m^2.

Les rendez-vous sont par téléphone (06.07.62.23.06) ou par e-mail à moi-même (comme toutes les spammeurs de la planète peuvent attester, ce n’est pas difficile à trouver).

Address hunt

O lazyweb, O lazyweb… can anyone tell me where I could find the postal addresses of Vicente Fox, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Néstor Kirchner, Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez? These guys are heads of state, so it couldn’t be too hard to figure out where they live, but I have not found a postal address for any of them after a good while dossing off work^W^W^Wsearching on the internet.

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.