Life is so good, it gets better every day

GUADEC Times

Really good fun at GUADEC this year, though I know even less people here than the previous year – all good signs for the success of GNOME I guess. Still, as usual, awesome opportunity to catch up with a whole bunch of friends. It’s certainly been nice hanging out in my home community, and feeling relatively at ease before getting back to Indiana work, and the happenings at OSCON next week.

Had some good GNOME Foundation discussions – a relatively successful board meeting on Sunday, and membership meeting on Monday. I hope to post the slides to this soon.

Indiana Talks

Had 2 relatively successful talks about Indiana over the last couple of days. Caught up with the folks in Sydney, and then later the folks in Dublin – good to hear from the ground about what they think of the project. Some of the slide transitions won’t make too much sense without the narrative.

And for anyone conributing to opensolaris.org, take bits of this with a pinch of salt – everyone’s doing a rocking job already.

Update: Tim has some details of the meeting, including a podcast feed of the talk.

Simon on IT Conversations

Simon’s bang on, as usual, in his interview on IT Conversations. On talking about Jonathan’s recent invitation for dinner –

I actually think that approach is a really good approach. If I look back to the status of the Java platform with Debian 2 years ago there was a great deal of mistrust, and there was all sorts of antagonism taking place. Much of it was based on the fact that people weren’t talking to each other. The seeds of the OpenJDK being GPL were laid in the fact that we had conversations between the different players. So, one of the things that I did right at the start of that process was fly to Amsterdam and go have breakfast with one of the leaders with the free Java community, and ask him ‘Why he hated us?’, and try and sort through what the problem was. He explained what the problems were and I could say that there were some good faith failures that Sun had there.

Identifying one of the things that Sun is really getting right these days. There’s a lot of dialogue going on, and a lot of listening. It’s all very encouraging generally.

Speaking in Sydney

Alan announced this month’s SOSUG meeting, and it’s going to be another opportunity for me to talk about Indiana – so come along if you’re keen to hear about it, Monday 9th July 2007, 6:30pm in Sun Solution Centre, 33 Berry St North Sydney – after giving a quick overview (along with some OGB updates), I’ll probably be listening for the most part to get a real feel for the issues that other people have had.

Shuffle to the Gym

Jayne and I bought a shuffle at the weekend in the encouragement to start our new regime of getting more exercise during the week. Previously that week I forked out some cash on getting a pair of nice Asics. Nothing is going to stop me now.

Day 1: I have a cold.

The Inner-workings of OpenSolaris

As Jim Walker blogged, Bonnie gave a talk recently at FROSUG – worth listening to if you want to hear the various bits and pieces that are going on behind the scene within Bonnie’s team. I’m listening to it right now, so I’ll upload an mp3 when I’m done.

Update: The MP3 is here. Hrm, we should probably have these sorts of things going onto dlc.sun.com somewhere.

Indiana at OpenSolaris Ireland User Group

Tim put me down for an IEOSUG talk when I get back home in July. So on Thursday July 12th, drop along and hear about what Project Indiana is, ask some questions and how you can get involved! Given that I only have 4 days in the country, I’ll probably have a Guinness in my hand – I’ll try to make sure I have a few to hand around too.

Ian Murdock on Open Source on the Air

Thanks to James for interviewing Ian on the latest issue of Open Source on the Air – some good discussion about Indiana, among other things.

New Zealand Open Source Awards

As Jeff mentioned, absolutely awesome to see the New Zealand Open Source Awards (and also, more recently, to see the wonderful Pia as a judge). It’s a great initiative within New Zealand, and I hope it’s a big success. If nothing else, it’s going to be a monster party in Wellington on the night of the awards with the various open source rock stars out in force!

OpenSolaris, PPC and the Community

Someone pointed me to the recent set of threads (Kill PPC port) on ppc-discuss, which is nothing more than an extension what has been happening at times within the wider community. I can appreciate the deep frustration and tension from both sides of the line, but I think some basic diplomacy and patience is needed. This is new ground we’re all breaking and it will take time.

Don’t forget for a second that we’re all working together on this one. We’re a community, and disappointingly, we’re not looking like one at times. We need to have a mutual respect and trust for each other at the core, otherwise I fear that all credibility will be lost.

So I’d call out to everyone to get to know your community, both the independent and Sun employed contributors. It will help a massive amount. Subscribe to their blogs, Flickr or Twitter feeds and find out what makes them tick, because only then will you begin to appreciate who they are and where they are coming from.

Be the community.