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 :)

We had a batchelor party yesterday for a friend of mine. Started with some Go-Cart driving, followed by paintball; then to an appartment for a vorspiel including having a nice looking stripper stop by; and then ending the evening out on the town. A fun day, and I am definetly going to try paintball again.

Plan for today is just taking it easy while trying to figure out why no GStreamer applications that use the gstinterface stuff will not link for me (but it seems noone else has this problem) and do some gnome-theme-extras bugfixin.

Ok, so I get a fixed amount at work each year to buy clothes etc., since I am leaving I need to use this money as I will not get it in cash no matter what. So I took along my sister yesterday and went shopping for clothes. When spending a relativly big amount of money quickly is the goal you can easily end up like I have today wearing jeans purchased for 275 Euro, which is definetly the most expensive jeans I have ever bought.

Happy to see so much good work on GStreamer these days. Owen Frasier-Green is back and has been updating the Mono bindings. Our Matroska friends are still hard at work porting GStreamer to Windows, with most of the basics done and Windows specific plugins next on the tasklist. Wim Taymans seems already in full action at Fluendo commiting a Theora encoder just yesterday. Ronald, Benjamin and David is also steadily fixing bugs moving the obscurity level of our bugs upwards. Hopefully we soon have a Ogg muxer ready and the autoplugger code needed to allow Colin to activate tag editing in Rhythmbox before GUADEC along with a GStreamer based Totem working like a charm :)

On Java: I read James Gosling weblog where he says that it would be problematic to put Java under something like the LGPL (putting it under the GPL makes it next to useless IMHO) due to wanting to protect developers from having to worry about the plattform ‘forking’. This is bogus. The Java plattform is already ‘forked’ in the way he describes; mostly due to Sun being slow and incorporating fixes into Java proper. For instance my current employer, Oracle, has been forced to ship its own JRE and browser plugin for the last 4 years since the one available from Sun has had bugs and issues. Only know have the official Sun jdk/plugin incorporated enough of Oracle’s fixes for Oracle to have started looking into certifying our ERP applications with it. And not only have Oracle felt the need to maintain our own ‘branched’ Java for all these years, but as anyone using our software knows we do not support the use of new versions of our own plugin/jre until we certified them for use with the Oracle 11i ERP package. So already today what Goslings ‘fear’ will happen if they make the JVM free software is happening. So basically nothing will change if Sun makes Java free software in regards to API predictability. Small developers will just continue supporting the version released as the official one from Sun as that is all they have resources to do.

jdub, svu: I am not sure I fully buy the ‘proof’ here. The issue is much more complex than one person quiting Debian being the ultimate proof. First of all I need to say that as a singular example the flags are probably without ‘value/meaning’, but as one component in a bigger picture and trend it might be of importance.

What is boils down to is what a free software community is about and what drives its members into action, ties them together and brings in new people. In that context being as edible as possible might not actually be ‘the right solution’.

To explain my thinking I like to use the recent process of choosing the Democratic candidate for their upcoming US Presidental election as an example. To simplify it, you had Howard Dean, the candidate who (dared) speak boldly and hold some relativly controversial standpoints on one side and you had the ‘edible by all’ candidate John Kerry with the typical politician fuzzyness/political correctness on the other side.

The initial reaction would be to say ‘hey, Kerry won so being very round in the edges was once again proven to be the best strategy’. Well I beg to differ, our short term needs is not having as many people as possible like us, but have as many people as possible being enganged enough in what we do to actually help out. And from this point of view Howard Dean ‘won’ over Kerry. He had a order of magnitude more people activly invovled in his campaign.
Or in other words; if you are building a house it is much nicer to have 10 people willing to help out than having a 1000 people giving you applause for taking on such a big task alone.

So back to the flag issue. Yes doing things that might be controversial might turn some people away, like jdub’s URL was an example of, but as my example above was meant to hightlight so taking away all controversy might eventually be more damaging; as some small controvesy is a smaller risk for us than stagnancy caused by lack of engagement from developers would be. So my worry here is not the flags, I was done with them after the last round, but that it will be the first step among many towards diluting the underlaying values that makes contributing to projects for volunteers (like myself) interesting. Free Software is not just about producing a product, if it where then we are nothing more than stupid people working for free, it is as much about promoting some clear values associated with it; like freedom of information, equal access to the basic infrastructure of our society and help bridging the digital divide. These values are much more important for my motivation for working on free software than being able to write my email in a program I can download without paying.

Me and a friend tried playing TripleA yesterday, a clone of the old Axis and Allies boardgame. The graphics and gameplay worked nicely enough, but the network code seemed a bit flakey, after the 7th lost connection during play we decided to wait until the next version before trying again :)

Ok, so there is this book thing people are doing now:
The instructions are: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

She moaned in exstacy as Georgio pushed into her hungry and insatiable love nest.

Saw 50 first dates at the cinema yesterday. Not nearly as funny as I thought the Wedding Singer was when it was released. What suprised me the most however was seeing that the US censors had rated it at ‘R’ originally (set down to PG-13 after a complaint). Tells me that US cinema censors need their head examined, sometimes I am wondering if the US is trying to immitate Iranian standards for censorship; here in Norway it was rated ok for 7 years old.

A nice calm Saturday with no special plans. Been going through my mailbox trying to reply to some of the mails and deleting old stuff. Updated my copy of GStreamer and was happy to see that a lot of work has been going on with getting GStreamer working under windows with the Microsoft compiler. Going through my mail I happily noticed that Ronald Bultje has been going over almost all the playback bugs I filed and fixed them. Guess I need to see if I can find any more troublesome files :)

Most things are now up and running only bad item being running my mail, xchat etc. through VNC since I don’t have a keyboard and mouse connected to my old computer anymore and my laptop doesn’t have Linux installed atm due to a harddisk crash.

Now I need to start looking into stuff for GUADEC, like accomodation and the planned rafting trip.

Finally 100% done with the appartment!..the bliss. No more packing and moving stuff, no more trips to the garbage dump with old furniture, no more cleaning, no more companies to contact to fix electrictity, internet etc., it is all done :) I handed over the keys to the appartment to the new owner this morning. Now I am ready to focus on my future instead of my past :)

Need to get a new gnome-themes-extras relase out. Got lots of bug reports on the current one. Also need to get back on track with GStreamer, actually need to get back on track with being online at all :)

This has been a really bad week. Caught in the crossfire between tasks at Oracle, tasks in regards to moving, tasks in regards to Fluendo, tasks in regards to GNOME and tasks in regards to friends and family. So now at the end of the week end I have a bad conscience towards all mentioned tasks who are either not done yet or only partially done. I hope to get done of some of the tasks today and tommorow, but since I have to go away for 3 days starting on Sunday for Oracle, so I am worried there is still some time before I feel I have done all I should.

Been packing and transporting my stuff like crazy for the last few days. Rediscovered that moving is actually a lot of work. Glad to see my hours at the gym has paid of somewhat since I was able to do lots of heavy carrying without getting badly exhausted.

So from today I have actually moved out of my appartment and moved into my mothers house. While I do have the appartment until the end of the month I figured I had already moved so much stuff out that it was getting a bit to spartan to keep living in the appartment. Not living there will also enable me to cancel electricity etc. right away and save a little more money. Money saved is money earned some wise people have said.

Think that the move will be completed next weekend, including cleaning the appartment to make it ready to be taken over.

David Vignoni has added a lot of new icons to the Nuvola theme in CVS. I really really need to get a gnome-themes-extras release out now. Especially since the last official release fail to compile with GTK+ 2.4.

I also ordered the new offical GNOME 2 programmers book. Looking forward to reading it and a big thanks to everyone involved for making it happen.