So I visited Barcelona this weekend spending some time with my friends Wim, Thomas and Julien (and a tiny amount of time with Johan :). I even got to witness the arrival of the Fluendo office water cooler; which is final proof we are a real company :)
Spent friday with Thomas trying to go over the GPL to figure our what exactly it says and formulating questions on issues we need clarified. Our goal is to have a lawyer approved FAQ for these things to post on the GStreamer webpage and put into the GStreamer Application Writers Guide. This is likely to be some issues in regards to the current batch of GPL licensed applications, but hopefully we can have a good exception text for people to add to their license which makes shipping plugins for patented formats toghether with these applications possible.
On Saturday we had a company meeting to discuss our short and medium terms plans. One of the major things to come out of that for my own part was that I will be starting working for Fluendo sooner than originally planned. Which meant I had to shave of 3 weeks from my planned vacation. Australia and Africa both took some heavy cuts which mean for instance that I know only we stay for one week in Sydney and only for a weekend in Perth.
Anyway spending this week in Barcelona really gave me a boost in regards to Fluendo. For instance working with Thomas on going through the GPL really opened my eyes to how much more fun and interesting it will be to work with really smart people who are at the top of their field. Unlike my current situation where so many of those I meet makes me want to give up any notion that there is something glorius to be found in mankind (sorry for the lack for faith Ayn :)
Speaking of patents. Was sad to see that the European Union took a big step closer to US style software patents. While there is still some hope that the European Parliament can turn it around again, things are looking bad. And while I can envision certain scenarios where Fluendo might profit from such patents I think the long term effect could easily be that the only ones earning any money on software is lawyers, and the only type of small ‘software’ companies viable in the end being the Eolas type.
Tobias sent me a nice SVG version of the Firefox logo, which I think will be a perfect fit for Nuvolla. Think I mail it to David to see what he thinks. I also got a SVG Gtk+ theme last night which I hope to take a closer look at tomorrow. Maybe it is what is needed to make artists aware of what is possible with Dom’s new engine.
Anyway tommorow is set aside to do a lot of GNOME, SVG and Fluendo related tasks so I know more after that. Today I am going to see my local fotball team play against the team who has won the norwegian series for the last 12 years :)