First of all a public announcement: If you have some media files that are giving you playback issues with GStreamer, please please submit a bug report to bugzilla. Ronald is fixing issues left and right and need more testcases. So if you have any kind of mediafile you want supported in Rhythmbox, Totem, Muine, Amarok or whatever please bugzilla them. bugzilla.gnome.org -> product GStreamer.
On to Fluendo stuff. I been working on product descriptions and pricing models for the last few days (in addition to having a fever and a bad cold). When you are a small company entering a market where some big players involved you need to feel confident you will be able to handle some hardball tactics. Partly wondering how the free software communtiy actually is able to compete with Microsoft considering their enourmous resources I started thinking of the community as a ´ ‘whack a mole’ game and microsoft as someone doing the whacking. This version of the game however has the special feature that it is gradually growing as the game progress with more and more mole holes popping up. So while Microsoft are easily able to do some serious whacking on the mole holes of their choice they are forced by sheer number of mole holes and the speed at which moles pop up from said holes to leave more and more mole holes alone at any given time. And as their attention shifts between different areas of holes the moles pop back up in the mole holes they turns their attention away from. So by this analogy the way to win the game, being one of the moles, is having enough resources to survive hiding out down in the hole for those periods of time when the giant is able to focus on whacking on you, knowing that the increasing number of moles popping up elsewhere will force the giant to shift his attention soon away from your area of the board. And of course eventually even the big powerfull giant will collapse of exhaustion :) You can only whack moles for so long.
Guess we be going to the Creative Commons launch in Spain on Friday (sorry Julien it is around 10 in the morning). Part of my want to go to the Italian one in December too, as Lessig himself is supposed to be there.
Since we are using so much Python code in our software I suggested we make Fluendo boxer shorts with the text ‘Want to see my python’ written on them. Nobody else seems to like the idea.
It turns out that Johan Dahlin has seen to many of those movies about white men discovering a remote tribes in the Brazilian rainforest and then being choosen as king to be catered for in all respects by the young women of said tribe. Luckily Andy Wingo on the other side has discovered that similar movies made in an Africa setting are not rooted in reality. So things work themselves out somehow :)