Triumph in FOSS Skies – Tong Hui's Blog

Report for COSCUP 2017

In the early of the month，as a GNOME Foundation member, I participated in the 12th COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coder, User & Promoter). From 1996 to 2017, COSCUP has made significant contribution for promoting free and open source in Taiwan. This dozen years or FOSS promoting made Taiwan as much as contributor grows faster than any other Asia country, so I would like to learn what make Taiwan FOSS career successfully, and also advocate GNOME in this conference.

There were thousands participants join COSCUP 2017, and more than 80 talks and workshop by hundreds of free and open source communities contributors and promoters.

As a GNOME Foundation member, together with Bin Li, we have a task to promote GNOME and collaborate with Local Free Desktop community in this COSCUP.

I also gave a short talk together with Mandy Wang in this COSCUP. We talked about how to recruit my girlfriend into FOSS and ‘train’ her become a GNOME contributor.

My talk with Mandy Wang (Photo by Vagabond, CC BY-SA 2.0)

China-Taiwan contributors Meet-up

At BoF (Birds of Feather) session in this COSCUP, Mandy and me from mainland of China, together with Franklin Weng (KDE-TW), zerng07 and freedomknight from Taiwan who works much more on localization of GNOME and KDE. We had a local free desktop meet-up that night.

Firstly we reviewed what we done past years, and communicate what difficulties we met and how we solved. And then we chatted what we should do and need to do to promoting free desktop in China and Taiwan.

By chat with Taiwan contributor I learned so many experience, so it could help us to do more than before.

With some staff of COSCUP 2017 (Photo by Vagabond CC BY-SA 2.0)

Finally, Thanks all hundreds of volunteers who working in COSCUP, make this event wonderful and awesome!

Glad to be a Mentor of Google Summer Code again!

This year I will mentoring in FedoraProject, and help Mandy Wang finish her GSoC program about “Migrate Plinth to Fedora Server” which raised by me.

While, why I proposed this idea? Plinth is developed by Freedombox which is a Debian based project. The Freedombox is aiming for building a 100% free software self-hosting web server to deploy social applications on small machines. It provides online communication tools respecting user privacy and data ownership, replacing services provided by third-parties that under surveillance. Plinth is the front-end of Freedombox, written in Python.

This idea mainly about migrate Plinth from Deb-based to RPM-based, and make it available for Fedora Server which will running on ARM machines.

The main goal of this idea is to make Plinth works fine in Fedora Server or Minimal flavor, due to Plinth write APT commands hard coded, so it is better to make it more adoptive for RPM. The secondary goal is to make a RPM package for Plinth from source and setup a repo for it, so that everyone who use Fedora could use Plinth. Honestly to say, it is not a easy-hand task for GSoC student although I marked it “Novice” in Skill Level.

Mandy who were selected for finishing this idea is super adopted in my mind, because she write a very clear graph for how she will do in this GSoC.

It will start this May 30. I believe we will finish this mission successfully!

Fedora 25 Release Party in Beijing

December 10th, Fedora Chinese User Group (FZUG) held the Fedora 25 Release Party in Peking University. There were more than 30 people attended, most of them coming from Peking University, Fedora community, Beijing GNU/Linux User Group and other distribution communities, there also were little people who works in local Red Hat.

Continue reading “Fedora 25 Release Party in Beijing”

Outreachy 2016, I mentoring!

As Outreachy required for students, when this program starts they should post blogs every two week, but no such requirements for mentors. However, as a Outreachy mentor, I plan to share what I am thinking during this time, and post what I’ve learnt by the end of some mile-stones.

I would like to record some notes and thinking in blog posts, but may not so frequency as weekly, maybe monthly. As for language, I prefer English for that, but some reason, I am not good at writing English essay, so that I may post some Chinese blog future.

Before start…

In 2015, I am a mentor of Google Summer of Code, and mentoring two students for a project that implement a OTR (Off-the-Record) for a web-based IM tool. So I am confidential to apply being a mentor in Outreachy.

Before, I am a GNOME Foundation member for more than five years, doing localization and promoting GNOME as well as other FOSS project and philosophy in China. Actually, I raised two idea for this round of Outreachy. One is building a full-function event website to replace GUADEC website, but I found a new project named open-event could cover; Another is adding OTR (Off-the-Record) encryption support for Empathy. This idea dead due to Empathy are no longer developing and the developer said he never implement OTR any more.

Continue reading “Outreachy 2016, I mentoring!”

Software Freedom Day in Tsinghua University, Beijing

September 24th, Fedora Zhongwen User Group together with Beijing GNU/Linux User Group and Tsinghua TUNA Association, held a Software Freedom Day event. There were more than hundreds free software enthusiasts attended the event.

Talks starts from 2 PM, first is the organizer who from TUNA in Tsinghua and maintain a mirror server which include Fedora, speak out that what TUNA mirror works and TUNA community works together.

Continue reading “Software Freedom Day in Tsinghua University, Beijing”

Fedora 24 Release Party in Beijing

July 30th, Fedora Chinese User Group(FZUG) held the Fedora 24 Release Party in Red Hat Beijing Office. There were more than 30 people attended, most of them coming from Fedora community, Beijing GNU/Linux User Group and other distribution communities, there also were little people who works in local Red Hat.

The release party started at 2 pm. First of all, Zamir Sun(zsun) who are the most active man in Fedora Chinese User Group gave a talk about Fedora 24 new feature and how to join in Fedora community，contribute to Fedora project.

Continue reading “Fedora 24 Release Party in Beijing”

Report for COSCUP 2015

Last month，as as Fedora Ambassador, I participated the 10th COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coder, User & Promoter), from 1996 to 2015, the COSCUP has made significant contribution for promoting free and open source in Taiwan. This TEN years or FOSS promoting made Taiwan as much as contributor grows faster than any other Asia country, so I would like to learn what make Taiwan FOSS career successfully.

This is my second time participated COSCUP as a speaker, last year I also made a speech too.

Overview

There were thousands participants join COSCUP 2015, and more than 80 talks and workshop by hundreds of free and open source communities contributors and promoters.

As a Fedora Ambassador, together with another ambassador Alick Zhao, we have a task to promote Fedora and collaborate with Local Fedora community in this COSCUP.

Continue reading “Report for COSCUP 2015”