Been a weekend filled with some work, some movie watching, and some on general leisure like taking a forest walk. Almost none free software work. Been wondering a bit what to do, not really been in a summary mood in a while, I think I need to try and pass the torch onto someone else. Not been that much GStreamer work from me either lately, although I did do some cleanup of CVS head in regards to package building. Personally I think I am getting frustrated with our inability to make releases. CVS head is in my opinion unreleasable cause it doesn’t build the ffmpeg plugin which in turn provides most of our codecs. Stable I guess can be released, I think I probably do a release during next week with the fixes that are in there. Think we have reached a point where someone (me) just have to go ahead and make the releases or we will get stuck in CVS limbo for eternity. Currently I feel everyone is waiting on something undefined to happen.

Only thing that I have been progressing on is gnome-themes-extras which is moving along nicely. Think our next release will truly rock.

I think a major gift of the internet is access to people you would never have access to otherwise. This is basically the basis for free software, giving you access to the actuall developers of the software you use. But free software developers are not the only ones becoming accessible.
I tried posting to Lawrence Lessig’s blog asking his opinion on the SCO claim that the GPL is preempted by US copyright law, linking to Eben’s article on news.com. Although I didn’t get a in dept reply he did reply:


I’ve not read the claims, but anyone claiming the GPL is “illegal” because “preempted” by US copyright law is someone who knows nothing about preemption or US copyright law.

I think SCO botched its FUD campaign with the latest leak of proof from the SCO conference. With the people like Bruce and Linus being able to show the exact history of the code SCO’s credibility has been severely bruised. Of course once again I am disapointed with the level of quality of the reporting in maintstream media on the issue. Good thing is that a lot of the major trade press is writing about the proof of origin presented, the bad part is that the journalists tend to seem so utterly clueless. Some articles I have seen seem to think it matters which Unix source code the lines where actually copied from; like ‘yeah, these 10 lines might be in BSD licensed unices out there, but the 10 lines in Linux has been copied from AIX/SCO/Irix and due to this is a copyright infringement’…..

I hope the people who actually wrote the code that SCO now claims ownership of, who Bruce tracked down, will take SCO to court, maybe by getting the new Red Hat legal fun to pay for the legal costs.

Managed to get GStreamer CVS head packaged yesterday and same with Gst-plugins. Now I just need to get the ffmpeg plugin building using David Schleefs automake patch and I think we are ready to release 0.7.0. The last fixes to make everything parallel installable is in and working well which makes it possible for us to do frequent dev series releases without hurting the stable install people have.

After that we have releasing a new 0.6.x on the schedule, I have come to the conclussion that we should do a 0.8.x series for GNOME 2.6 as maintaining the old stable branch has become a pain as it has moved ended up rather different from CVS head as time has gone by. Hopefully for GNOME 2.8 we are ready to do a GStreamer 1.x stable series. It has taken us a long time to get here/there, but I think that getting the design and core technology right has been an important enough goal make it worth the extra time. If we want to compete with Windows and MacOS we need well designed solutions not a collection of hacks enabling video playback.

Ok, its friday 15th of August and I have my 30th birthday, scary…

Argh, so now it seems we need to write a new playlist widget for gst-player. Not sure how we missed it however, I was sure we had gone through everything and arranged for a relicense, but I guess there had to be one item forgotten. Well such is life :)

Spent time last night working on g-t-e, a release is now imminent, maybe even today unless I need to stay late at work.

Fun stuff, it has been so warm here in Oslo that my home computer has stopped working properly :) Or actually it is the IBM disk I have which also earlier has shown overheating issues, but which has behaved well ever since I moved it much lower in the box, but with the high temperatures over the last few days it seems the issue is back. Well good excuse for me then to do something else, like how I cleaned my entire appartment this weekend.

Was shown that gDesklets
made a release this weekend. Can’t help, but feel I should take some credit/blame for it as I always suggested gDeskcal as a starting point when people wanted something like Arlo’s Konfabulator or KDE’s Karamba for GNOME.

Would be a bit funny if they where able to integrate Javascript support into the framework and enable it to run Konfabulator apps.

Also wondering a bit about the GNOME related announcements from Suse over the last few months. Considering their partnerships with both Ximian and now Sun one could it could seem like they are preparing to get serious about GNOME.

thomasvs: I digg the sound profiles stuff :)

So a boring few days has gone by with tons of work related tasks, what is even sader is that my fantastic build system for Oracle Applications and Linux seems lost, which means I need to spend my own time on redoing it from scratch.

Been wondering if I should comment on the Novell buying Ximian thing, but the fact is that I don’t really know what to think. I mean having Novell on the GNOME team is a sure plus and if this move do give Ximian deeper pockets and more business credibility then that is great. Having worked in two large companies myself and seen a lot of such aquisitions from the outside I do worry that a lot of the things that made Ximian cool and fastmoving will get strangled inside the huge established organisation that is Novell. Seeing the statements from Novell CEO etc., over the last few days has given me the impression that they are going into this with the right attitude and a will to make it something really positive. On the other hand there is a looong way between the decissions being made and the people doing the work in such a big company. I fear that the Ximian people might feel like they are wading in syrup when they need to do something different from this day on.

MichaelCrawford: Being rated a master or not on Advogato has nothing do to with the amount of time you spend working on free software. People’s rating is about how well they know you and how good they think you are, you can also only become Master afaik if someone who is already a master themselves certifies you as such.

Anyway I spent some time yesterday evening hacking on the gnome-themes-extras-package again. Integrated the new very cool Amaranth GTK+ theme from Andrew and did many other additions and fixes to the themes.
I also moved the Smooth theme engine into its own directory structure which sent me on a long row of cvs add’s and remove’s before I figured out what I was doing wrong. It seems I hadn’t removed the CVS dirctory in a subdirecty moving it over so that whenever I did cvs add and cvs commit the code got added to the old placement in CVS. When updated CVS afterwards it placed the files back in the old dir, which made me remove them which removed them from the new dir when I updated again, which as you might figure made me scratch my head in confusion a couple of times, especially as the cause-effect connection wasn’t always that clear due to timing.

That said with the latest addtions from David Vignoni and Michael Doches the themes in the package are looking really nice. Not 100% complete, but the incompleteness is moving from critical components to less critical components.
The new Metanetics theme is also looking quite good, but we still lack a Metacity theme for it and there is also a lot of work left on the icon theme. I still hope to be able to do a new release this week, but maybe without Metanetics if we can get the Amaranth Metacity theme ready.

A true weekend weekend for me, Saturday I visited a friend and we played Socom online on his playstation 2 well past midnight. Sunday where spent at the beach just enjoying the sun and the scenery.

Did get a new batch of icons from David Vignoni for Lush and Nuvola making them both more complete for some of the core stock icons. Did also manage to put in some good work on the new Metanetics theme I am doing with star and ajgenius.

Haven’t done much GStreamer stuff in a while now, partly cause I am waiting for some help with getting the ffmpeg plugin building with the rpms again.

Also got reminded of the danger of delaying the ordering of airplane tickets today. Last week I found tickets on the days I wanted at lowest fair, today only the return ticket was available. Managed to find a good solution anyway by going to a different airport on the way down, but for a moment I saw the price of the trip increase drastically. So anyone reading this; book those tickets!