Safe as Milk

A good day

Yesterday morning, Thomas, Paul and I made a surprise breakfast in bed for Anne.

Afterwards I went walking with Thomas to buy the newspaper, and we went climbing in a nearby playground. On the way home, we found a balloon from the previous evening and spent ages playing football with it. There were eddies of wind blowing it in circles, and most of the time we were playing against invisible opponents.

After his siesta, we went out to buy a christmas tree and get all the ingredients for a real traditional heavy Christmas cake (except they don’t have treacle in France). The kind that you hide under the stairs for 3 weeks before it’s just right to plaster with marzipan and icing.

Tonight, we decorate the tree and make the cake.

Update: Don’t bake a Christmas cake in a fan-assisted oven (or cook it in unassisted mode). It will dry out, and rather than slowly ripening, the cake will carbonise. The house did smell great, but I’m afraid the cake is mostly inedible. Will post a recipe later, if people are interested.

Bounties and the GIMP 2

Sven wrote a response to my analysis of a GIMP bounty in my blog.

From the point on that Daniel dissapeared, the bounties have been dead and there was nothing that we could have done about that. Your summary puts it like there would have been an offer on the table all the time. But there wasn’t. There was a deal between Mark and Daniel and that deal had failed. It would have been wrong to assume that there was still a valid offer at this point. Without clearly defined milestones, there are no bounties.

I disagree with that, since plainly, Mark considered the bounties were offered to the project, and weren’t a deal between himself and Daniel. In addition, for the 18 months between when the bounty was proposed and was pulled, to my knowledge, Sven didn’t send an email to Mark asking him about the bounties. I think a little more communication could have cleared up a lot of questions much earlier.

My biggest regret in the whole affair is that we could have announced the offer far & wide, and had maybe some new contributors, but because of this single perception that the bounties were somehow “a deal between Mark and Daniel”, a great opportunity went to waste.

Web traffic stats

First off – congrats to the KDE project for a new major release. With the performance improvements going into GTK+ and friends, and the performance gains in QT 4, the next generation of KDE and GNOME should both be smaller and zippier, which is brilliant.

I came across http://www.alexa.com via http://radar.oreilly.com today, and checked out the web reach of www.kde.org versus www.gnome.org – the results are pretty interesting.

The first thing to notice is that we’re both trending upward, albeit erratically.

The most interesting point, I think, is that over the last few days, when KDE made a major release, *both* projects got more attention.

Bounties and the GIMP

Finally getting this off my TODO list…

A few years ago, bounties became a popular way to try to get features written for free software programs. “I don’t have time or skills to offer”, the logic went, “but I have some money, and perhaps that’ll raise the priority of what’s important to me for some young student out there”.

The idea is sound, as far as it goes. Ximian pioneered it in GNOME, LinuxFund was founded on the principle.

Mark Shuttleworth has also offered bounties for a large number of projects, including a little-known offer of $30,000 to the GIMP project. I have written up the story of that bounty. I’m hoping that we can all learn something from it.

Alice and Bob

Andy: So I get the feeling the problem isn’t a real-life problem, but anyway. Since Alice and Bob are overlooking the same street, couldn’t Alice just take a picture of Bob sitting at the window showing her his watch?

Or Alice & Bob agree a protocol where they both take pictures of a given event every day (say, the number 7 bus going past, or nightfall, or the coffee-shop closing up), and use those to interpolate the series of photos for the day. That assumes both watches are linear, though. But that seems like a fair assumption.

The LGM logo

Every conference needs a logo, and we have ours:

I really can’t thank Andreas Nilsson enough for his work on the artwork. I just didn’t have to think about it. I seem to recall discussing ideas with him on a Friday afternoon, and waking up on Saturday morning with a load of goodies in my inbox.

In his words, he “draws the pretty pictures”. And I’m very glad he came to GUADEC last year to tell us that 😉

Libre Graphics Meeting news

Some news just in about the Libre Graphics Meeting – we will have a new free software project at the conference, Xara Xtreme. The details still need to be worked out, but it’s always good to see companies converting to the GPL.

In other news:

• Gerald Friedland, the creator of SIOX will present his work Friday morning.
• Inkscape hacker & artist Andy Fitzsimon has confirmed he’ll be there, and giving an Inkscape tutorial involving “workflow and nice tips & tricks”, which promises to be cool.
• Jon Phillips (again of Inkscape) will be talking about Creative Commons – which is particularly appropriate at a conference which is likely to attract top-notch content creators.

Board size referendum

I was delighted to see that the board size referendum was carried this morning, with 62% of the vote. I was disappointed that turnout was a low 53%, though.

I’d be interested in knowing what the people who don’t vote in foundation elections feel they get out of being a foundation member, and I hope that we can get turnout up past 60% for the board election.

Libre Graphics Meeting website

The Libre Graphics Meeting website is online at http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org – it’s a SPIP backed site, and I’m still trying to figure out the basics (like how the front page layout is done), and I’m looking for people willing to help out with the content. All offers welcome.

The banner to the left was designed by Andreas Nilssen, who also came up with the site’s other banner. Please feel free to use it to link to the conference site.

Many thanks to David Odin and pollux from CPE for getting the site hosted, and to Laotseu (Alexandre from ALDIL) for doing the site design and SPIP installation. And of course Andreas for the graphics.

Foundations summit

Tomorrow morning, I will be flying to Amsterdam for the foundations summit – a meeting of representatives of a bunch of free software based non-profits. So far, the Motley Bunch of organisations who will be represented are:

• GNOME Foundation
• The Perl Foundation
• Blender Foundation
• ObjectWeb
• Classpath
• Plone Foundation
• YAPC Europe
• OSI
• Web 2.0 (OK, Chris, you’re not a non-profit, but we love you anyway)
• Creative Commons International
• Mozilla Foundation
• Stichting NLnet
• Benetech
• Python Software Foundation
• KDE e.V.
• ASF

This is something I’ve been working on for a while now, and we deliberately kept it low-key to build up trust to talk about sensitive and confidential issues, and also to avoid a low SNR early on. But after a good start, and after over 6 months of good communication, the list is a really useful ressource, and word has started to get out – which is great.

We have a wiki, a mailing list with a growing membership, and this will be the second summit of its kind (I wasn’t at the last one).

We plan to talk about stuff which is essential to most non-profits, and which we all suck at mostly – governance, trademarks, legal frameworks, making sure the foundation fits into the community, and doesn’t try to dominate it. And also areas where we can better co-operate – on infrastructure, legal and accounting problems, for example.

Having a network of people in various organisations who are all friends and know what’s going on, and who can help solve each other’s problems, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I also plan to pop in to Bar Camp and see what those guys are up to. It should be lots of fun.