Safe as Milk

Wiki update

I added an “Upcoming events” section to the UserGroups page in the GNOME wiki and added Solutions Linux and Fosdem as two upcoming events where there will be a GNOME France presence.

I think that this kind of section is essential to make that page “live”. User groups aren’t just contact information, and many user groups have a presence at local conferences which most people don’t know about. So tell everyone about it – you never know who might drop in.

Fosdem

Thanks to Damien Sandras, there is a GNOME developers room set aside in Fosdem which GNOME people are free to schedule as they want, but currently there are no talks planned for it – there are 3 KDE talks planned.

I’m not sure who the person to contact is to be able to add and solicit talks (perhaps Damien could say?), but Fosdem is a great conference, and it would be good to have 3 or 4 GNOME related talks in the developers room.

Update: Dodji Seketeli is looking after the GNOME developers room for Fosdem, and so far several talks are planned, but the page hasn’t yet been updated.

So there seems to be some hullaballoo about Evolution being ported to Windows.

I agree that this is a Good Thing. The more choice we give people, the better off they, and we, will be. Plus, there is no doubt that porting Evo to windows will get it a larger user base, and some corporate acceptance. And it’ll remove lots of artificial barriers against having GNU/Linux or Unix on the server side. So all in all, yay!

But… (what follows is an experiment with “Stream of Thought”, so I may end up disagreeing with myself. This is healthy)

The main argument of people against this kind of thing is that if people can use all their free software applications on Windows, there’s no incentive to change platforms. Proponents argue that when the only piece of software that you have to pay for is your OS, the choice is obvious and you switch. So when you get into TCO fights with Windows people, they can now say “thanks for all the groupware, you have just reduced our TCO, making Windows an even more attractive proposition for the enterprise”. But then wa can reply “Sure – but we’ve also reduced the TCO for migrating to GNOME, since all those enterprise users don’t need any retraining any more”.

Of course, Microsoft will never argue that you can use free software on your Windows machine to reduce TCO – that would be hari-kiri of the highest order. But if they did, then I guess we have a counter-argument.

Also, in related news, Chandler, the Mitch Kapor backed groupware solution modelled on Domino, as far as I can tell, has had a change of direction. The guys over there have realised that big milestones which nobody uses have been slowing them down, so they are moving to what they call a “dogfood” model of development. That means that with their next version, 0.5, you will actually be able to do stuff like calendaring. Good work, guys! I hope that there has been some thought to coming up with an open standard for calendaring to share with the Evo and Sunbird projects (but I guess that goes without saying).

GUADEC update

Phew! Submissions “officially” closed last Wednesday, but we’re nice guys, and there has been a trickle of late submissions coming in since then.

We have not been able to get back to everyone yet, but let me assure you that we are not going to refuse papers just because they were late. However, after the weekend, the selection committee are going to start separating the wheat from the chaff, and once that starts happening, papers are more likely to be rejected.

There are 56 submissions so far for the papers track, including tutorials and BOFs. It’s not bad, but I thought there would be more. Perhaps it’s a little early in the year for people to think about GUADEC.

We will be looking for less formal things (BOFs, flash talks, module maintainer brainstorming sessions and the such) a little closer to the conference (before the end of March) for people who really want to be on the schedule. And I expect that there will be a bunch of ad hoc impromptu sessions during the event too.

Thanks to everyone who submitted papers, sessions, BOFs and tutorials!

Glynn: <troll> Maybe Sun don’t talk about GNOME much because they don’t know if they have permission to use the trademark?</troll>

Note to self:

eggplant = aubergine
zucchini = courgette

Sometimes it’s hard being a European English speaker…

GUADEC papers

How time has flown! It’s the 10th, and there are only 2 days left to get paper abstracts in for GUADEC 2005 (29-31 May, 2005, Stuttgart, for those who haven’t been paying attention).

I would love to see a beginner-heavy conference, with lots of the API people trying to show off their wares with practical sessions – we have already got a promise of an abstract for a practical GTK# tutorial, it’d be nice to have something for glade and libglade (say with ruby or python to get something nice up & running in an hour or two) – in fact, I would love to see 4 or 5 tutorial sessions in the hack-center with real audience participation.

There will also be lots of space for poster sessions, BOFs and brainstorming sessions – the emphasis is on inclusion, and having the conference be fun and exciting. We’ve already planned flash talks, and will soon be opening invitations for them – so even if you only have a small thing to share, take your 2 minutes, and over-flow to a poster or BOF to discuss things in more depth.

People should leave GUADEC on a high with a big buzz saying “those guys *ROCK*, I love GNOME!” – we’re not talking about appealing to the LCD, but about showing people the power of the developer platform, and the coolness of the desktop platform.

So come on in, step up to the plate, and share your passion and your experience, GUADEC is for solving the problems that are annoying you and recruiting new hackers to help.

Oh – closing date is the 12th. Abstracts, with a photo and a short bio, should go to guadec-papers@gnome.org before Wednesday night – there might be a short extension, but don’t count on it.

I have been wondering recently whether Free Software communities without a *good* “benevolent dictator” eventually reach a critical mass and implode. I’m not sure, but it’s a thesis worth considering – projects or user groups who get so self-involved that they lose sight of the greater world, and eventually fade out of existence.

There are a few historical examples of this, notably mailing lists and IRC channels (I remember when #linpeople on openprojects was *the* place to go for pretty much any Linux configuration problem, it is now low-level chat). This is inspired by #debian’s dishonourable mention in the LinuxJournal poll in the “bad neighbour” section – the free software/open source member who walks the walk but doesn’t talk the talk.

A few examples of projects that have dangerously walked the like, and eventually either pulled up their socks and re-concentrated on a high-quality user experience – not just with the application, but more importantly in community interraction – or were superceded by a group/project which did are MPlayer (still precariously attached to their old reputation) and sodipodi.

I worry sometimes that the GIMP as a project is in danger of becoming irrelevant too. In general, user’s experiences in the GIMP community are negative, because of a perception that we set the friendliness bar too low, and the technical bar too high. There are lots of mailing list, IRC and bugzilla exchanges where users are expected to read lots of docs, and “inform themselves” before contributing, and often the replies are a little too curt for my liking. I love the GIMP, but sometimes it is very frustrating to see the comments that new contributers get from some people who are established.

Another thing that got me thinking about this was the recent thread on g-d-d about whether there should be an MP3 profile in SJ – I don’t know what an audio profile is, and I haven’t ever owned a CD recorder, so I haven’t used SJ yet, but it seems obvious to me that most users want to write MP3s. Encouraging use of Oggs by making writing MP3s difficult isn’t making things easy for users, who surely are the people you want to make happy… Ideally, you would (similar to other applications) make writing MP3s easy, but have writing oggs be trivial, and the default.

Does free software need to stay friendly to stay relevant, or is a barrier to entry a reasonable way to raise the SNR on community forums, freeing up developers for the “hard” questions?

I’m meandering… but it’s food for thought.

GUADEC papers

I just sent a mail reminding people that the GUADEC papers submission deadline is coming up.

I think it’s important for people to send in submissions, because GUADEC is pretty much where we set a direction for the project for the year (and years) to come. We want GUADEC to be the rockingest free software conference of the year, and that means having people get a vibe going – by talking about cool stuff, sucking unsuspecting bystanders into their funky world, stuff like that.

Tutorials, brainstorming sessions and BOFs, flash talks, poster sessions, we want all this stuff. The planned talks branch of GUADEC is just one bit, and it probably isn’t even the most important bit.

Oh – and since there are currently fewer submissions than talk slots, we may yet have the Czech Biotechnologist Jens Würlinger giving a talk on the reproductive cycle of the Arctic tern, and how it relates to biohasard propagation (I think he sent the paper to the wrong address, but you never know).

So unless you want to hear Jens talk about terns for 3 hours, get your ideas in soon!

Brian: The “Optimise for GIF” feature basically destroys a bunch of data which doesn’t change from one layer to the next, effectively creating a visual diff between successive layers to have as little as possible information in them, and still have the same animation.

The problem is that the operation destroys a bunch of user data, and this is one of those situations where we assume that the user knows what they’re doing. The GIF plug-in saves what you give it.

We could have an option in the GIF plug-in, have it on by default, and optimise the image as an export operation when someone saves a multi-layer image as GIF, I suppose. But if the user wants to keep all the info, we’re not going to tell him he can’t (we can also unoptimise animated GIFs, by the way). That would need a bugzilla number then…

Michael: Isn’t it better to use visudo to edit the sudoers file, rather than editing it by hand?