SFD Planet
NOTE: The application period for this job ended on May 21st, 2013. Keep an eye on fsf.org/jobs for future postings.
This newly created position, reporting to the executive director, will work closely with our campaigns, licensing, and technical staff, as well as our board of directors, to edit, publish, and promote high-quality, effective materials both digital and printed.
These materials are a critical part of advancing the FSF's work to support the GNU Project, free software adoption, free media formats, and freedom on the Internet; and to oppose DRM, software patents, and proprietary software.
Some of the position's more important responsibilities include:
stewarding the online publication and editing process for all outreach staff; including copyediting, formatting, posting, and maintaining material on our Web sites; and sending out e-mail messages to our lists;
producing and improving our monthly e-mail newsletter the Free Software Supporter;
improving the effectiveness of our audio and video materials use;
editing and building our biannual printed Bulletin;
promoting our work and the work of others in the area of computing freedom on social networking sites;
helping to produce fundraising materials and assisting with our fundraising drives;
cultivating the community around the LibrePlanet wiki and network, including the annual conference;
working with and encouraging volunteers; and
being an approachable, humble, and friendly representative of the FSF to our worldwide community of existing supporters and the broader public, both in person and online.
A successful candidate will have strong editing skills, especially in the area of copyediting, and will take pride in working with a team to create consistently polished and effective materials.
While this is a job for a person who is passionate about technology and its social impact, it is not a technical position. The main technical requirement is the willingness to learn to use many new and possibly unfamiliar pieces of software, with a positive attitude. That being said, experience with any of the following technologies will be considered a big plus: GNU/Linux, Plone, Drupal, CiviCRM, Ikiwiki, Subversion, Git, CVS, Ssh, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Emacs, LaTeX, Inkscape, GIMP, Markdown, and MediaWiki.
Because the FSF works globally and seeks to have our materials distributed in as many languages as possible, multilingual candidates will have an advantage. English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Czech, and Malagasy, are represented among current FSF staff.
With our small staff of thirteen, each person makes a clear contribution. We work hard, but offer a humane and fun work environment.
The FSF is a mature but growing organization that provides great potential for advancement; existing staff get the first chance at any new job openings. If you're hired and don't like your job title, we might be able to change it. We're flexible like that.
The job must be worked on-site at FSF's downtown Boston offices. An on-site interview will be required with the executive director.
This job is a union position. The salary is fixed at $49k and is non-negotiable. Other benefits include:
Applications must be submitted via email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . The email must contain the subject line, "Outreach and Communications Coordinator". A complete application should include:
All materials must be in a free format (such as plain text, PDF, or OpenDocument, and not Microsoft Word). Email submissions that do not follow these instructions will probably be overlooked. No phone calls, please.
Applications must be received by 10:00am EDT on Monday, May 20th.
The FSF is an equal opportunity employer and will not discriminate against any employee or application for employment on the basis of race, color, marital status, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, handicap, or any other legally protected status recognized by federal, state or local law. We value diversity in our workplace.
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
Air/Nude is from 2011, and it remains my favorite piece of quilt artwork. So I’m reposting it for the Blogger’s Quilt Festival.
Air/Nude is 77″ x 23″ (yielding a life-size figure) unbleached cotton muslin, cotton batting, polyester thread.
She counts as “Air” in my 4 Eelements quilt series (my first large-ish quilts ever) because that’s what the model is wearing. Also, unless you look carefully you see nothing, just like air.
The photo above links to a super high res, 3,000-pixel-high version so you can zoom in on all the detail. These detail shots link to 960-pixel-high versions:
Evident everywhere is the influence of Leah Day’s Free Motion Quilting Project. In the section above you can see Free Motion Quilting basics like Basic Spiral, Pebbling,Feathers, Echo Rainbow, and Stippling, along with some of Leah’s signature designs like Brain Coral, Spaghetti and Meatballs, Flame Stitch, Ocean Current,Wormholes, Goldilocks, Chain of Pearls, Pebble Maze, Trailing Spirals, and Circuit Board. I started filling in the quilt on the right side, just over the foot where those very dense spirals are, and worked my way around counter-clockwise.
By the time I got to the head I had internalized many of those stitches, which became part of my vocabulary. It becomes difficult (and probably pointless) to say which patterns are “mine,” which are “Leah Day’s,” which are derived from vague memories of pen-and-ink shading patterns and old Zip-A-Tones, and which are simply failed imitations. (“Originality is failed imitation” – someone on Facebook. Bill Benzon, maybe?). Some of the spirally flame patterns I used in Fire return for a cameo here.
I had bountiful opportunities to try new stitches and patterns. As long as the negative spaces were densely quilted, it didn’t matter what was in them. I tried various hexagonal-based “snowlflake” patterns, like the one above. In the midst of my experiments, Leah posted this Icicle Lights pattern, which is much easier than hex-based ones. Below it is an homage to DNA molecules, and a “scaly micropebbling” experiment.
As you can see, the nude depicted is a real woman-person, not a professional model. Who was the model, you ask? Suffice to say I will not be sharing the “pattern” as open source code. You’re welcome to copy this quilt, but you’ll have to reverse-engineer it, or use another model.
Here’s what she looked like before stretching. Maybe vanity drove me to it – I may be a little saggy, but I’m not that saggy. The subtle white-on-white quilting technique relies entirely on shadow to reveal texture and outline, and only works if light hits the surface evenly from the side. The quilt was professionally stretched on canvas stretchers by 567 Framing. It took 2 and a half weeks, but was worth the wait.
Here’s “Air” leaning against the wall with her friends Earth, Water, and Fire, in my former apartment in New York City. I brought all these quilts with me when I moved to Urbana IL last Summer. Some of them will be in my upcoming art show at Sleepy Creek Vineyards – stay tuned!
Last Saturday, the Catalan LoCo Team did its Ubuntu Raring Ringtail Party at the Escola del Clot of Barcelona with some 80 people present in the different speeches and installs.
The day started with a little presentation about Ubuntu and Catalan LoCo Team. After that, there were two lectures from Sergi Grau: HTML5 and Android 4.2.
Simultaneously, on other room, it was the speech about the Free & Open Source Software Outreach for Women Program with Mònica Ramírez, Debian Developer.
After that, there were the talks about Metadistributions based on Ubuntu using Remastersys with Jordi Binefa and ChameleonPI (a Raspbian versions with games emulators for the Raspberry Pi) with its author Carles Oriol.
Joan de Gràcia presented the Linkat Edu 12.04, the official Catalan public school GNU/Linux distro, for the first time based on Ubuntu, and Jordi Binefa showed Free hardware with Ubuntu.
Meanwhile, on the install room, people worked on installations and clarification of doubts and we sold some LoCo Team T-shirts and gave away some Ubuntu installation and using guides.
As always, we ended the party with a draw of some T-shirts and an Ubuntu Handbook.
As you can see, after the party was completed, some of us went to lunch.
We are happy to announce plan upgrades are now available in Fremont, except not the Fremont you were expecting. Over the next few weeks we will be transitioning all of our infrastructure from Hurricane Electric’s FMT1 facility to their FMT2 facility, which is just a few miles down the road. FMT2 is a modern build-out, which we consider to be a great improvement over FMT1′s aging power and space restrictions.
We’ve networked both locations onto the same layer-2 LAN, so there is no need for IP swaps, no disruption in IP failover support, private networking will work as expected, etc. Essentially we have created one large LAN, despite hardware and Linodes existing in both facilities.
Henceforth, all new Linodes created in Fremont will land in the new facility. Performing the plan upgrade or resizing your Linode will transition you to the new facility. This is on a first-come first-served basis as we have limited availability in the facility until we physically move the remainder of hardware from FMT1.
For those with pending upgrades, you may log into the Linode Manager, view your Linode’s Dashboard, where you’ll have a new “Upgrade Available” box on the right-hand side. Taking the upgrade will simultaneously upgrade you AND migrate you to FMT2.
Those not already in FMT2 will be receiving tickets containing details of the maintenance window and the move to the new facility. Stay tuned!
-Tom
During my last visit in Hong Kong I met a few of my usual friends and about 2 weeks later received an invitation to speak at the OpenSym + WikiSym 2013 which will be hosted in Hong Kong from 5 to 8 August 2013. Of course I’d thank Haggen for passing the message and the team behind the conference for the invitation.
I have decided to present my work with Open Education which happens to match the conference rather well (I was told), and will therefore summarize what has been done around Beijing since about 2006. The interesting part is that this project (named greenboard) covers a lot of different pieces ranging from hardware donation, curriculum design, using Free Software and customizing or translating the possible solution. It will of course talk about GNU/Linux, some of the GNOME and KDE educational applications we are using as well as putting it all together and allowing teachers to control the classroom. Since there will be researchers and communities flying from all over the world to participate for the event, I look forward to receiving good insights, get further ideas to improve what we have done so far and why not, expand to new territories.
As a side note the conference call for talks is still open, the submission deadline being on May 17, 2013. So feel free to either come and talk about something interesting or just drop by and say hi in early August if you are in town!
Culture Freedom Day is just around the corner and it’s not too late to decide to join the movement! Meant as an international day for Free Culture artists around the world to make themselves heard and known to the public we expect plenty of street concerts, gallery exhibitions and other local demonstrations of Free Culture work. Just as Satabdi Das from Kolkata, India you can join a local team, or create your own team in your area. whether you know free culture artists who can come and help you or just decide to broadcast a few free culture movies. Free culture is big enough and need your help to be famous!
For more information please visit the CFD dedicated website and don’t forget to spread the word. Note that we’ve also made a countdown and some banners which code and source file can be retrieved from our CFD wiki.
I haven’t written a blogpost for a while. It was mainly because I was too busy with all the events I organized or attended in the last three months. So here is a little recap:
And it’s not the end. On Monday, I’m going to EurOpen to talk on the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. And on May 21st, I’m going to LinuxTag 2013, probably the biggest Linux event in Europe. Life never stops 
The Software Freedom Conservancy has a plan to help all non-profit organizations (NPOs) by creating an Open Source and Free Software accounting system usable by non-technical bookkeepers, accountants, and non-profit managers. You can help them do it by donating now.
To keep their books and produce annual government filings, most NPOs rely on proprietary software, paying expensive licensing fees. This is fundamentally at cross purposes with their underlying missions of charity, equality, democracy, and sharing.
You can help Conservancy fix this problem by donating now. They seek to raise $75,000 to employ a developer for one year to make substantial progress on this project. Sounds like a good deal.
W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe also released a statement justifying the Working Group's decision. The proposal, which is supported by the entertainment industry and giants like Netflix, Google, and Microsoft, would endorse and facilitate use of proprietary Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in HTML, and would have a dramatic impact on streaming audio and video on the Web.
Defective by Design (a project of the Free Software Foundation devoted to fighting DRM) and a coalition of 26 other organizations publicly opposed the proposal in an April letter to the W3C. Last week, on International Day Against DRM, Defective by Design delivered tens of thousands of signatures opposing the proposal, and continues to collect petition signatures at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5.
Free Software Foundation executive director John Sullivan made the following statement:
"We and the 26,000 concerned individuals who signed Defective by Design's petition so far are extremely disappointed in the W3C's statement today. The situation is actually worse than we thought, because the W3C now appears to be bizarrely insisting that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is a necessary component of a free Web. We were under the impression that the standardized Web was meant to be a structure that mitigated against holders of particular proprietary technologies bullying Web users and developers, or extracting royalties from them as preconditions for participation. If companies want to do such bullying, they can do it on their own time and their own dime; the W3C should not help them or endorse them. In this statement, the W3C unfortunately hitches its wagon to the contentious and frankly irrelevant empirical claim that DRM is key to what Microsoft during the Vista launch referred to as a 'next generation content experience.' In adopting the doublespeak of the Hollyweb, the W3C is betraying the interests Web users have in experiencing the amazing universe of human culture enabled by the Internet. Instead, they are backing the desire of Netflix, Google, and Microsoft, to capture those users in media silos with walls enforced by proprietary software and criminal law like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (and similar laws around the world). Despite the W3C's claim to have listened, we do not feel heard. We will step up our efforts to stop them from committing this terrible error, including issuing a comprehensive refutation of this statement's reasoning."
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
John Sullivan
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
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Libby Reinish
Campaigns Manager
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
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###
This June 23-25 the CloudStack Community is holding their second open source cloud computing users conference in Santa Clara, CA. The conference is also your opportunity to share ideas, discuss plans for Apache CloudStack, and conduct workshops and sprints. There will be a hacker space where you can put ideas into practice assisted by members of the CloudStack development team.
Here are some videos of last years conference featuring speakers from Apache CloudStack, Citrix Enstratius, RedMonk, Basho, Nicira, Disney, Jenkins, Jclouds, Hortonworks, Sunguard, Xen and many, many more. Aaron Delp has a link to most of the slides here and other resources here.
The CloudStack Community knows how to play as well as work, and so evening events will offer attendees some fun and the chance to get to know others in the Apache CloudStack community. There’ll be ample opportunity to socialize and enjoy deep discussions during the event.
Get ready to immerse yourself in Apache CloudStack, and register today!
Important Dates
Apr 22, 2013: Call for Proposals Opens
May 12, 2013: Call for Proposals Closes
May 25, 2013: Program Announced
Jun 23, 2013: CloudStack Hack Day
Jun 24, 2013: Conference Proper Begins
Jun 25, 2013: Conference Ends
We’re pleased to announce the availability of Debian 7.0 (release notes) and Ubuntu 13.04 (release notes) for deployment within the Linode Manager in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. You can read our documentation in the Linode Library if you are unsure of how to deploy a Linux distribution in the Linode Manager.
Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) will be supported one year after the next major Debian release. The Debian project currently operates on a two-year release cycle, so the estimated EOL date is sometime in 2016. The 13.04 release of Ubuntu (Raring Ringtail) will be supported by Canonical until January of 2014. If you require a release of Ubuntu with a longer support life you can deploy Ubuntu 12.04 LTS which has support until April of 2017.
In addition to these new distribution offerings, we’ve updated our Debian 6 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS images. The Debian 6 image includes updated system packages and the removal of nfs-common and portmap. The Ubuntu 12.04 LTS image has been updated to Ubuntu 12.04.2 which includes a fix for the bug mentioned in our availability announcement in addition to the removal of the whoopsie package.
Cheers!
-Tim
Actually bicolor + outline color.
Reminds me of the sea.
Note: As Matthias Kirschner is on vacation, this edition of the monthly Newsletter is written by Erik Albers. Enjoy!
Document Freedom Day 2013Every year on the last wednesday of March, Document Freedom Day (DFD) takes place: the global day to raise awareness of Open Standards, organised by the FSFE. It has been amazing to see year by year how the message of freedom and Open Standards has continued to spread around the world. This year, there were 59 events in 30 countries, and many first time participants, including Niger, Indonesia and the United States.
Highlights from Document Freedom Day include more than a hundred press articles and blogs, Libre Office's publication of a new migration guide, support from Lawrence Lessig, and a storm of social media coverage and opening up discussions.
But let's not forget: all these events were organised by local groups. Among them were many FSFE Fellowship groups, a wide variety of other Free Software community organisations, and teams of friends who care about Open Standards. So, this is a big thank you to everybody who made this year's DFD so successful! It is awesome to see how Free Software and Open Standards connect people around the world. Read the extended report online.
Free Software Legal & Licensing WorkshopIn early April, we held our annual Free Software Legal & Licensing Workshop in Amsterdam. More than 70 Free Software legal experts from the Legal Network came together for two days in order to share their knowledge and discuss cutting-edge questions in the field.
Topics discussed this year included recent court rulings, patent-related developments, and transferring Free Software licensing ideas to hardware. Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian's (now former) project leader, delivered a keynote speech, describing the community perspective on legal issues.
Several talks at the conference were covered by LWN, for example those by Eben Moglen, Daniel German and Anthonia Ghalamkarizadeh.
FSFE welcomes Ceata as associate organisationA new foundation from Romania and Moldova has joined FSFE's program of associate organisations. Ceata has been promoting Free Software and culture since 2008, and in February this year was officially incorporated. The group, based in Bucharest with local chapters in Cluj and Chișinău, organises conferences on Free Software, Free hardware, and Free culture. Ceata also develops their own applications, translates programs into Romanian, and participates in international campaigns. Fundația Ceata and FSFE will now join forces and work more effectively on promoting software freedom in Romania and throughout Europe.
Something completely different The German Parliament (the 'Bundestag') has voted on a joint motion against software patents. The resolution urges the German government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs. The Parliament's resolution reminds the government that, under the EU's Computer Programs Directive, software is covered by copyright, not patents. It calls on the government to finally put the directive's "copyright approach" into practice, and make German law more concrete in this regard. It also points out that the restrictions which patents impose are incompatible with the most widely used Free Software licenses. The winner of the election for FSFE's Fellowship GA is Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild. The election period for this year's Fellowship GA seat ended on March 15, and proved exciting to the end. Thanks to all Fellows who participated in the process and made this a valuable experience for the Fellowship and for FSFE. Please welcome the latest Fellowship group, from Bari, South Italy! The way the group was formed was unprecedented in FSFE history: As a former GNU/Linux user group, 15 people joined FSFE simultaneously to create a new Fellowship group. According to the members, they took this step in order to be more active on a political level in future. The chancellor of the "Freie Universität Berlin" has asked all staff to use exclusively 'Apple iTunes U' for the publication of University materials, such as recordings of lectures. To access University resources therefore, students now have to use Apple iTunes, which excludes users of Free Software operating systems, and includes a variety of anti-consumer measures to lock them in to the service. FSFE has written to the chancellor explaining why University resources should be available without software barriers (German). As part of the Ask Your Candidates campaign, FSFE has sent out 'voting benchmarks' ("Wahlprüfsteine") for all three elections in Germany, that will be in autumn this year. The aim is to obtain public statements on Free Software policies and committments from parties which are hoping to be elected. Some responses have already been received and will be published soon. FSFE participated in the Chemnitzer Linuxtage conference this month. The FSFE booth received lots of attention, and many people approached the team to ask about campaigns. Free Your Android proved to be a hot topic, generating many questions and ideas. Reinhard Müller, FSFE's Financial Officer, gave a talk entitled "Free yourself: how to save the world in five easy steps", and Erik Albers, Fellowship Deputy Coordinator, gave a presentation on Free Your Android. Erik was in Freeing frenzy this month, and delivered the same talk at Cebit in Hannover, Germany. The conference organisers filmed and hosted a video of the talk, but unfortunately only in Adobe Flash. From the planet aggregation: Hugo explains why the HTML5 <video> tag has been a failure and still is. He argues that we need to weigh in to the political process which is shaping HTML5, and to fight the surrounding Fear Uncertainty and Doubt to keep the Internet a place where everyone is free to express themselves - without having to ask for permission or signing a restricted-patent-license. Mia Julia Eley encourages women that are interested in technology and engineering to apply for GNOME's Outreach Program for Women. "Plenty of women out there have skills that could benefit the Free Software movement and the barrier to entry should be clearly understood" she states. Torsten Grote reports about the latest changes in CyanogenMod's [http://www.cyanogenmod.org/] privacy policy. Before, they were collecting anonymised data for statistical purposes including the option for everyone to opt-out. Suddenly, this opt-out feature was removed and a tracking feature was added that sends the collected data to Google Analytics, too. After some days, the first decision was reversed, that means you have the option to opt-out again. But, still, if you agree that your data will be sent to CM, it will also be sent to Google Analytics. Read all details on Torsten's Blog. Paul Boddie reflects about "The Academic Challenge: Ideas, Patents, Openness and Knowledge" and argues why Universities should insist on freedom of knowledge instead of just defending openness of knowledge. Read why there should be no commercialisation of academia and no monopolization of ideas. Did you already set up your Fellowship card? If not, you might be interested in a 'How To' which was made by Jens Lechtenbörger to support the already existing Fellowship How to. Beside this, Jens Lechtenbörger also explains why, for privacy reasons, Ubuntu users should not update to Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04, but instead stick with version 12.04 LTS. Finally, some fun: Henrik Sandklef shows how to use your calendar for artistic purposes, in this case to illustrate the Fellowship Plussy Get active: oppose integration of DRM into HTML5FSFE, FSF and other prominent organisations defending digital freedom have prepared a joint letter to the World Wide Web Consortium and its member organisations urging them to reject the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal. This proposal aims at incorporating support for Digital Restriction Management (DRM) into HTML5 and might become a threat to Free Software users. Please join us in calling on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its member organizations to reject the Encrypted Media Extensions proposal (EME).
Thanks to all the Fellows and donors who enable our work, Erik Albers - FSFE
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I attended the OpenWest Conference in Orem, Utah, and have to say its one of the best community organised conferences. There were over 840+ people at the conference (with more walk-in’s), representing a greater than 100% growth rate compared to last year’s conference.
I gave a talk about MariaDB, and its safe to say that we’ve got many new features that that it’s getting very hard to go in-depth in a span of an hour.
One of the highlights for me was attending talks. I give so many talks, and spend a lot of time talking to people about MariaDB and MySQL, that I very rarely get to see other talks or learn new things. So OpenWest was very welcome from that aspect.
On Thursday, I saw a wonderful presentation by Dave Wellman on Hadoop 101 and the Big Data Hype. That’s an excellent slide deck with lots of animations. Rasmus Lerdorf gave an excellent presentation on PHP in 2013 – very detail oriented, I learned a lot about PHP 5.4.
The highlights for Friday were the two morning keynotes – both Rasmus Lerdorf and Mark Callaghan gave thoughtful speeches. I gave my talk (thanks for the nice words Mark), received lots of good questions and feedback (thanks to being right before lunch), attended Mark’s MySQL Q&A which was a great conversation for an hour. Many were interactive. I stuck around for Steve Meyers presentation Database Optimization for Web Developers, which was a 2hr tutorial and a good walkthrough.
Overall, a great time at the conference. Not to forget all the social time chatting with Mark and Steve. I’ve enjoyed my trip to Utah (first time here), and thanks to Steve for having us speak about MariaDB, and the captive audience.
Related posts:
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Today I downloaded Fedora 19 alpha to give it a spin. Some quick notes.
You can get MySQL by asking for the package community-mysql-server. This is 5.5.31. If you ask for stock “mysql” (i.e. yum install mysql-server), you automatically get MariaDB 5.5.30 (mariadb-server).
Fedora 19 runs systemd, so there is no longer /etc/init.d/mysql to start/stop/restart. So just do systemctl enable mysqld.service. Then perform: systemctl start mysqld.service. Replace start with: stop/status too. You can disable it too if you want.
MariaDB 10.0.2 compiles cleanly on Fedora 19 with gcc-4.8. Just perform: yum install bzr gzip tar gcc gcc-c++ make libtool bison ncurses-devel zlib-devel automake autoconf cmake. Get the source code (I just downloaded it). Do BUILD/compile-pentium64-max. Wait. Run make test. Enjoy. Refer to build environment setup, generic build instructions.
If running in a VM, set aside 15GB to ensure you always have sufficient space (I personally use 20GB as I like to test various upgrade scenarios too.
Related posts:
We just hit a few inflection points at MakerBot. It's an exciting time for the company and the industry.
The biggest shift was last September when we launched the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer and the new MakerWare. By being made with a chassis of powder coated steel and with a number of refreshing updates, it's a machine that professionals can feel proud to have on their desk. The wooden machines we made were awesome and each of the 3 previous generations were leaders in the category at that time, but the Replicator 2 is black. The users that have shown up to get this new MakerBot are a mix of professionals getting a jump on the innovation process.
MakerWare was a shift away from ReplicatorG. It's a lot easier to use and streamlines the whole process of moving a digital design from your computer to your MakerBot. Our software team worked hard to make it simpler and more powerful.
In December we moved offices. At the old botcave, I had rented anything on the block that we could put desks into and it had become a rabbit warren. With our new office, I focused on keeping things simple with simple desks and we spent our buildout money on nice ergonomic chairs. People work hard at MakerBot and it's a lot easier to work hard when you've got good posture in a nice chair.
Thingiverse Customizer is an application that runs on Thingiverse that allows people to make things that can be customized. This new class of customizable things is huge. It means that a lot of people who haven't thought of themselves as designers get to jump into the world of digital design. Want to try it? Check out the lithopanes project, as seen above and make an awesome 3D model!
At MakerBot, we're making great partnerships with companies that innovate. We worked with Nokia to create backs that go right on the Lumia series phones. We've teamed up with Autodesk to do some wonderful things too.
MakerBot is hiring! We've got a lot of work to do and we're looking for people to help us. Go to the MakerBot jobs page to check it out.
This is all just some of the stuff that we're working on. The game is on and we're focused on making wonderful things happen in the world.
As a CEO, I've grown a lot. I used to be the guy who wanted to do everything myself and now we're 200 people and I've got a team that reports to me and each one is a ninja in their field. I love coming to work. I enjoy the people I get to work with. Life is busy, full of hard work, and good!
There is an interesting discussion going on in the Fedora Board and it gathers a lot of ideas. Some of them also say that we should give up defaults, or Fedora as an end product. I opposes such a direction and here is why:
Giving up defaults means giving up Linux newbies because it’d lead to the situation I call “new restaurant experience”. You go to a restaurant you’ve never been to and they give you an endless menu with tens of items usually strangely named. All you know is that you want a good meal, but you’re lost because you have no experience with the cuisine, you know almost nothing about the meals (except for ingredients) and you still need to choose something. Then the waiter comes to your rescue: “What meat do you like? Beef? Great, we’ve got this great meal with beef. You’ll love it! Would you like to give it a try?”, “Sure I would!” Or he could just say: “Beef? Great, we’ve got a huge selection of meals with beef, here see the section Beef.” Would it help you? I can say it wouldn’t help me and when I’m in an unfamiliar location, I’m looking for restaurants that have simpler menus and predictable meals just to avoid such situations.
It works the same way with software. When my friend gave me a CD with Knoppix, I saw that Linux was quite nice on the desktop and I decided to give it a try. Knoppix was just a live distro, so I was looking for some more solid distribution. All I knew was that I wanted Linux for desktop. Someone told me that Mandrake was the best option for desktop and I went for it. I was glad that they had defaults (environment, apps,…) because I could not possibly make a qualified decision since I knew very little about Linux, and I trusted Mandrake that they chose a good selection for me. Mandrake’s default environment was KDE and I was satisfied with it enough to stick with Linux. After some time, when I was settled, I explored other options and found GNOME a better option for me. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate KDE as the default option at the beginning. It helped me.
Having defaults is about guiding. You tell newbies what you think is the best experience for them and it’s usually all they want to hear. Once they get more familiar with the distro, they can explore other options and find out that there is a whole world out there. Exposing the whole selection to new, unexperienced users is not helpful, it’s discouraging. The other day, one friend of mine told me that he needed Ubuntu or Debian to install one product that is supported only on these distributions. Because he had no experience with Linux, he asked which one. Well, I told him Ubuntu because I knew that was the quickest and easiest way to his goal: having that product up and running. Just compare ubuntu.com and debian.org. Ubuntu gives you a very easy way to download and install it while Debian reveals all the complexity right at the beginning. Great for those who know exactly what they want, otherwise simply discouraging. And Debian still has defaults.
Having defaults is about focus. If you want to make a good product, you need to focus. It’s another thing Ubuntu did right (not any more with all that tablet/TV/mobile craze). It’s better to have one solid and working solution than ten unfinished and broken ones. If you have defaults, you know what really needs to work and you can focus on that.
Having defaults is about responsibility. A distribution is a huge selection of software. Something works better, something works worse. But it’s our responsibility that what we push to users as defaults is well maintained and has some future. I’m not sure if we can tell that about all desktop environments and window managers we’d have to equally offer if we had no defaults.
I believe having defaults is very important for Fedora Project. If we should have some default selection, it should be by use cases. You want a Linux for your desktop? Here is our product for desktop. You want to run Linux in the cloud? Here is our product for cloud. I know that choosing defaults is difficult and brings long discussions. But giving it up just because it’s difficult is like hiding head in sand.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate every new desktop environment, window manager, or application that is available in Fedora repos because freedom of choice is great, but having defaults doesn’t limit this freedom.
Making Fedora just a platform for other end products goes actually far beyond giving up defaults. Fedora would lose a lot. If you don’t have your own end product, you pretty much lose a lot of your visibility and brand. “Selling” a platform to users doesn’t make any sense because users (and most developers, too) don’t care about the platform what’s behind the product. They would use e.g. GNOME OS and just a few of them would know that there is actually some Fedora behind it and even fewer of them would care. Would it help bring more contributors? I don’t know, but I guess it probably wouldn’t. People get more likely attached to the product they’re using. While I like GNOME and I’m also a GNOME Foundation member, I’d rather switch to a different environment and stay with Fedora than stay with GNOME and switch to another distribution. This kind of attachment is very important for getting people involved and contribute. Without being the product people are using, we’d lose the ability to build such an attachment.
There was actually an attempt to build just a platform upon which others can build their products – Unity Linux. And it never took off. They never attracted enough developers while Mageia, another derivative of Mandriva which is also an end product, is doing much better. I still think a distribution like Fedora is the best wrapping for what’s called a Linux system. While e.g. GNOME is the face of the system, it’s Fedora who has the expertize from the kernel up to the desktop.
Another question is if any community would be interested in building a product based on Fedora. Why wouldn’t they choose Debian at the first place? By becoming just a platform, Fedora would lose a lot, but would we get something back, someone else on board? I doubt. And OS products generated from our own community? Regarding desktops, the GNOME part of the Fedora community might able to produce a solid desktop product, maybe KDE, too. But that’s pretty much it. I don’t see any other spins that are strong enough to build and promote products on their own.
Again, don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see Fedora as a great platform to build on, but I’d rather have Fedora as a great product to use and I don’t think that building a great product prevents us from being a good platform to build on. However, I’d encourage people to build things in Fedora rather than on Fedora.
And what would be my vision for Fedora?
A truly free and community general-purpose operating system that aims at people who create things and build solutions. It doesn’t matter whether they are designers, developers, admins etc.
The Digital Freedom Foundation announce the registration is open for Culture Freedom Day celebration and will be celebrated the 18th May 2013 for a second time.
They are expecting more participants this year and therefore they will also ship a startup kit to all pre-registered team (team registered before April 14th). If you want to organized this event you can create a wiki and register your team on the following link:
[1] http://wiki.culturefreedomday.org/CreateYourEventpage [2] http://www.culturefreedomday.org/cgi-bin/register.py
What is FREE CULTURE?
For many Free Culture is the logical extension of the Free Software philosophy applied to cultural and artistic work, initiated in the mid eighties by Richard M. Stallman. The term “free culture” itself was originally the title of a 2004 book by Lawrence Lessig, considered a founding father of the free culture movement. Mr Lessig has indeed succesfully channeled this natural evolution into a dedicated movement for people who cared little about writing software and created specific licensed specifically tailored for work of art rather than software.
To know more about this event you can visit their official website at http://www.culturefreedomday.org
More than 75 participants from Zamboanga Peninsula attended the event, which aims to introduce the Firefox OS and Firefox Marketplace in the Region. Mozilla Philippines team who is present on the event is Mr. Jean Austin Rodriguez, Mr. Kemuel Domanog , Ms. Joyce Domanog , Mr. Robert Reyes and me as the one who organize the event.
Starting with the community meetup event with the first lecturer from Mozilla Philippines, Mr. Jean Austin Rodriguez who introduce Mozilla, Mozilla latest products, tool and innovation.
After the event, we have our organizer dinner at Distrito, Paseo Del Mar with our Students volunteer .
An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is:Unfortunately not every format is an open standard, or, in other words, doesn't comply with the previous points. If the proposal to have DRM on HTML5 is accepted, HTML will stop being an open standard, since it will stop complying with the second requirement of the list. In more detail: the proposal on the table is called EME (Encrypted Media Extensions). An HTML document can include EMEs, and the specification of EME enables the website to require a certain "Content Decryption Module" (CDM). And here lies the problem: CDMs aren't standards (much less open standards!) and the EME specification doesn't include or refer to any specification of any CDM. In other words: the definition of open standard we just saw isn't complied, because to implement HTML5 we have to implement EME, which has to accept any CDM, which isn't a standard and so we cannot implement. In other words, with an example: I make a website, and put there a media object (video, for instance) using EME, and I specify in the HTML document that the EME object needs the CDM module (which is a form of DRM) called "OneTwoThree". Now, if you want to see that website, you need a web browser that knows how to undertand HTML5 and EME (both possible since there's the specification), and the browser then needs to get the CDM called "OneTwoThree" (imagine it as being a browser plugin, not unlike Flash) and use it to play the video. The problems are obvious now: what if the CDM only exists for one specific Operating System? What if the CDM isn't free? You know... the thypical problems of a non-open standard format.
- Subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
- Without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves;
- Free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model;
- Managed and further developed independently of any single supplier in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
- Available in multiple complete implementations by competing suppliers, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.
So without further ado I will show you a beautiful photo of the balloons we are sending for HFD (taken by Pockey and licensed under CC-BY to HFD):
Now why did the HFD swag leave only today (instead of Saturday as they should have)? Well I think I suck at LibreOffice: once a year I am used to take my “latest” copy of LibreOffice and remember how to print labels for all the teams in the world. SFD is of course a lot bigger than HFD but it’s been going on since 2004. Either way it kind of used to work, with a lot of glitches, but it was working. The last time I used LibreOffice I felt I had to complain to one of the main developer and so I found out that I was running a two year old release. This time after trying the latest available version under the latest Fedora and not being successful I went for an upgrade and am now running release 4.0.1! Yes, 4.0.1! Well let me tell you that not only the “optional” address line that some teams have and some don’t always print and there is no way to automatically do without it, but worth, even after selecting “database” as source (the other modes didn’t find the sheet whether under 3.6 or 4.0.1) I ended up with 11 pages of 8 labels for 53 teams. Yes you read me right… that is somewhere between 81 and 88 mailing addresses. What happens is that LibreOffice simply duplicates some of the addresses it takes from the database, and not next to one another, just randomly. So while the first 5 pages printed ok (oh yeah, they print only odd page numbers. So page 2 becomes 3, 3 becomes 5 and so on. I have no idea why but that’s the standard way) I started to find a second team from Japan. We only had one team in Japan, so I checked: same name, same address. Then next to it was the same team from India, then a new team, then a redundant team and so on, without any logic. After trying different “technique” to get only 53 teams in my labels, I had for only choice to finish the printing under a non-free office software running under a non-free operating system. This was a lot easier in many ways and I really pity the people who have no other choices. In fact I truly wonder how they manage.
Let me show you a beautiful second photo bearing the same license as the previous one, so you’ll be even more happy to have registered early:
All is not lost and I will join the few people who have complained about the feature being less than usable for office workers. Hopefully the new bug miscalculating the number of recipient will be easy to correct and the whole clarity of the function will start to take shape. I sometimes really wonder how people use free office software, not being a user myself. And often the five minutes a year I dive in end up taking me the whole week and not wanting to go back. Hopefully those five minutes will be more valuable this year!
Today is "I love Free Software Day", and as I had a meeting with Peter Stuge about CoreBoot, I decided to contribute to #IloveFS with hugging a developer:
Peter is contributing to CoreBoot, libusb, libssh2, and also to the xmpp client imcom. Thank you very much Peter, that you are hacking for freedom!!!
Following on a recent security announcement from the Moinmoin wiki security team we have had to take our wiki farm down in order to verify that no exploit had been used and to patch the wiki engine. Most likely we will have to force a password change for all the wiki users and hope to have the wiki back online by the end of the week.I like it when I have the opportunity to talk to people with whom I usually just write e-mails. So before my vacation, I made a side trip to visit some FSF activists in Boston.
So Sunday morning I had a nice walk with Joshua Gay, FSF’s licensing and compliance manager and former campaigner, exchanging several ideas for the future. In the afternoon I met Richard in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). One of the main topics we discussed, was how to prevent Secure Boot becoming Restricted Boot. Although most of the time, Richard is on the road, giving talks about our freedom, it was also interesting to see where the e-mails are typed I receive. From all the literature I saw standing around in his office, I could spend hours there, just reading.
Each Sunday evening a group of Free Software activists meets at Grendel’s, next to Harvard campus. Was really good to meet all the like minded people there and talking about Free Software advocacy. After we had to leave at Grendel’s Deb Nicholson, Donald Robertson (FSF’s copyright and licensing associate), and I went to another bar and continued discussing about Free Software licensing, how to talk to politicians about Free Software, and a lot of other stuff. Deb, Donald, and I realised around 3am how late it is, so yes, we had a very good conversation.
Monday, was public holiday (John and I realised that very late in planing my trip) so I was not able to meet all FSF stuff in the office. But I had lunch with Richard and John Sullivan (FSF’s Executive Director) exchanging some more ideas, while eating vegetarian Arabic food. Afterwards Deb was so nice to show me some other places in Boston, which by the way felt very European to me. In the evening I was invited to cook together with Benjamin Mako Hill, and a some other Free Software activists. If you ever have the opportunity to cook together with Mako, do it! Even if you are not interested in good Free Software discussions, just the cooking is worth it! I lost the “who can eat most of the vegan turkey?” to Mako, but I am still proud of being the second.
After the dinner at Mako’s there was no need for breakfast, so before I had to go to the airport to continue my journey, I went to FSF’s office, to shortly met Nico Cesar, FSF’s system administrator, and have a short meeting with John and Libby Reinish FSF’s new campaign manager to exchange some ideas about future campaigns. Afterwards I had to hurry getting my plane, worked on some other tasks, and then enjoyed my holidays.
Thanks a lot to all the people in Boston. It was so good to meet you there in person! I am looking forward to see you again. Perhaps next time in Berlin, or at a Free Software conference in Europe. For Deb and Mako it will most likely already be at FSCONS on November 9th to 11th in Gotenburg/Sweden, where you also have the possibility to talk with them.
Mapping out the road to 13.04, there are a few items with high “tada!” value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled. While we won’t talk about them until we think they are ready to celebrate, we’re happy to engage with contributing community members that have established credibility (membership, or close to it) in Ubuntu, who want to be part of the action.
This would provide early community input and review, without spoiling the surprise when we think the piece is ready. It would allow community members to work on something that will be widely covered at release (at least, on OMG 
)
The skunkworks approach has its detractors. We’ve tried it both ways, and in the end, figured out that critics will be critics whether you discuss an idea with them in advance or not. Working on something in a way that lets you refine it till it feels ready to go has advantages: you can take time to craft something, you can be judged when you’re ready, you get a lot more punch when you tell your story, and you get your name in lights (though not every headline is one you necessarily want ).
So, we thought we would extend the invitation to people who trust us and in whom we have reason to trust, to work together on some sexy 13.04 surprises. The projects range from webby (javascript, css, html5) to artistic (do you obsess about kerning and banding) to scientific (are you a framerate addict) to glitzy (pixel shader sherpas wanted) to privacy-enhancing (how is your crypto?) to analytical (big daddy, big brother, pick your pejorative). But they all make the Ubuntu experience better for millions of users, they are all groundbreaking in free software, they will all result in code under the GPL (or an existing upstream license if they are extensions to existing projects). No NDA’s needed but we will need to trust you not to talk in your sleep . We’ll also need to trust you to write code that is thorough and tested, stuff you’ll be as proud of as we are of the rest of the Ubuntu experience. Of course.
There’s also plenty going on that doesn’t warrant the magician’s reveal. But if you are game for a bit of the spotlight, bring some teflon and ping Michael Hall at mhall119 on Freenode.
Starting October 3rd to October 5th, ITTF (Information and Communication Technology Fair in Kosovo) was held for the eighth time in the Palace of youth & sports in Prishtina. FLOSSK in collaboration with OpenLabs from Albania (http://openlabs.cc/) participated by presenting some of the projects such as: 3D printer, WeMakeIt Arduino Kit (http://wemakeit.co/) , http://prishtinabuses.info...
This is the most basic programming that you could do with an arduino uno.
It just endlessly turns the light built in the arduino on and off.
So, after having an arduino uno and a usb cable to connect it to your pc, you would want to have also the arduino software....
We’re happy to announce the release of OpenDisc 12.09, just in time for the 2012 Software Freedom Day, featuring 27 updates:
Audacity 2.0.2, Blender 2.63a, ClamWin 0.97.5, Dia 0.97.2-2, DjVuLibre 3.5.25+4.9, Firefox 15.0, Freeciv 2.3.2, GanttProject 2.5.5, GIMP 2.8.2, GnuCash 2.4.11, HTTrack 3.46.1, Maxima 5.28.0-2, Miro 5.0.2, LibreOffice 3.6.1, Pidgin 2.10.6, PokerTH 0.9.5, RSSOwl 2.1.4, Scribus 1.4.1, SeaMonkey 2.12, Sokoban YASC 1.577, Songbird 2.0.0, Stellarium 0.11.4, SumatraPDF 2.1.1, Thunderbird 15.0, TightVNC 2.5.2, TuxMath 2.0.3, VLC 2.0.3, Battle for Wesnoth 1.10.4
We’ve also changed our donation policy for those wanting a physical copy, rather than downloading the ever growing (1.7GB) size of the project image. Now any donation of $10 or above will ensure you receive the latest version of OpenDisc, via airmail to any location in the world. This replaces the old $20 donation for two copies, as most people we spoke to either didn’t want/use the second disc and in most cases passed along their copy to friends after using it.
More changes are coming soon, so be sure to follow our tweets for updates as they happen.
Thanks to the community, the SFD countdown is now available in 15 languages which are: English- Catalan – Français – German – Chinese simplified – Persian – Portuguese – Arabic – Greek – Ukrainian – Estonian – Spanish – Serbian Cyrillic – Serbian Latin – Russian. If you would like to localize the SFD countdown to your language, simply follow the instruction here on http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CountDown
It’s in fact very easy to help us promote Software Freedom Day! On top of placing this SFD countdown, you can also tell the world if you are organizing, attending, participating or speaking at a SFD event by placing one of these banners on your website / webpage / blog and link it back to http://www.softwarefreedomday.org.
Happy SFD event preparation!
Religion is responsible for generating and sustaining most of the racism, sexism, anti-(insert minority human subgroup here)-isms... it gave a voice to the bigotry, established the privilege, and fed these things from the pulpit for thousands upon thousands of years. What sense does it make to throw out the garbage bag of religion yet keep all the garbage that it contained?
I can't help but see social justice as a logical consequence of atheism. I'm for getting rid of all the garbage.That social justice would be seen as a logical consequence of atheism is quite astounding. I certainly admire the social justice atheists for putting social justice and atheism together, as opposed to choosing only the latter. And yet, the very reason these posts were written is that sexism was discovered --- no! --- within the ranks of atheism!
Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history -- and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.
If you follow our streams at Identi.ca, Twitter, Google+ or Facebook, you’ll have noticed that we pushed out the first installable Kolab 3.0 release yesterday. I lack the words that adequately describe how excited I am about this, to be honest.
This is not a full release yet, mind you, as we are just getting ready to sprint, so this is not yet feature complete – a pre-alpha, if you will. It is however nearing feature equivalence for the 2.3 series, so we are quite confident for the upcoming Kolab 3.0 release. Whatever we manage to complete during the sprint, including whatever the community manages to come up with during the sprint, will then end up in the Kolab 3.0 release.
In order to make that even easier, we’ll also have a series of talks during the sprint, starting with a Kolab 3.0 walk through by Jeroen van Meeuwen, our Systems Architect, who will give you the tour de force of what has been done for Kolab 3.0. On Tuesday Christian Mollekopf will talk about libkolab which provides an API for any technology that wishes to integrate with Kolab 3.0. Never before has it been more easy to hook other technologies up with Kolab.
Wednesday and Thursday will then be covered by the Kolab Systems Web Powerhouse, Thomas Brüderli and Aleksander Machniak, the original architect and author, as well as the most active contributor of the Roundcube Web Client and the new Kolab Web Client which incorporates Roundcube and adds more groupware functionality. Their talks will be about the new ActiveSync stack we have been experimenting with, and the next generation of the web client, including the new skin.
With regards the new skin, Michael Krautwasser, Roundcube’s designer for many years, has provided a new set of designs for the Kolab Community Web Client and seeks comments. You can find them at
and your comments are best sent to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
So if you want to take a look, help iron out last glitches, participate in the sprint remotely or on site, here are the installation instructions for the pre-sprint pre-alpha Kolab 3.0 release. More information on the sprint is found here and of course on the Kolab Community Wiki.
Hope to see you next week in Berlin!
Almost half a year ago I had the pleasure to write the Kolab 3.0 primer, and ways of getting involved. Optimistically I scheduled the release for May/June 2012 in that posting. Attentive readers may have noticed that it is no longer June and Kolab 3.0 hasn’t been released yet.
So perhaps it is time to provide an update and overview.
The main culprits for delays in this first release done by the new team are pretty much the usual suspects: Everything is more work than expected, you end up having to do more than you initially planned, including unforeseeable interruptions and there was less help than you hoped for.
The good news is: We’re almost there.
Much work has gone into the invisible underbelly of the technology, starting from the Kolab XML
format itself. Christian Mollekopf has done an unbelievable amount of work on libkolabxml and libkolab, the refactored Kolab XML format, and its API with wrappers in multiple programming languages to make Kolab integration as easy as being able to call the API to manipulate Kolab objects.
Christian also put Kolab XML V2 format support into libkolab so that clients using libkolab can work against either version of the format, and largely finished a migration tool from version 2 to version 3 to provide users with a data upgrade path. And finally he re-based Kolab support in the KDE Kontact client that is the basis for our desktop client on libkolab for the KDE PIM 4.9 release already. In fact thanks to some supersonic packaging in the Fedora community I am already using libkolab with KDE PIM 4.9 rc 1 against all my Kolab 2.3 servers.
Also we had to shed the dependency on the outdated Horde 3 framework for Kolab 3.0, which meant a good deal of conceptual work, such as coming up with a new Free/Busy System or dealing with conflicts in ways that are far superior than anything Kolab has ever done while maintaining full off-line capability, one of Kolab’s great advantages over other solutions.
When looking at these pages it should become obvious how much time has gone into truly understanding the problems at hand and resolving them solidly in a way that is publicly documented and allows participation from anyone in the community.
Enabling participation is in fact what we spent a lot of time on throughout the past months, from the Kolab Community web site relaunch, over the IRC meetings for Kolab 3.0 planning and development, to the hiring of Torsten Grote as Kolab Evangelist who went to work on the community resources straight away and is your dedicated community-go-to-guy-for-all-things-kolab, all the way to the intermediate release of Kolab 2.4 to make it easy for people to get Kolab servers up and running that would allow to tap into and participate in the ongoing development.
That release also featured quite a bit of work by Jeroen van Meeuwen, our Systems Architect and specialist for the most complex set-ups that scale to hundreds of thousands of users or do things that are widely considered impossible. Again much of that work has happened in the background, but will be fundamental for a lot of things you’re about to see Kolab doing in the next years to come.
Among these things are trimming back LDAP schema extensions to ensure that Kolab integrates into existing directory services more easily, be they in pre-existing corporate infrastructures, in products that wish to integrate Kolab, in cloud offerings or in proprietary directory services where Kolab provides the first bridgehead for migration towards more freedom of choice and Open Standards.
Also Jeroen and Christoph have been giving a lot of thought to how resource management should work, because our experience all too often was that many things were not done right to enable the kinds of work flows and scenarios people wanted to implement – not just in Kolab, but pretty much anywhere. So we gave this one quite a bit of thought that Jeroen shared on his blog.
Other parts are configuration management, including the REST inspired API for configuration of the server and the server underlying configuration management which will allow using any kind of configuration management in the future. And of course Jeroen was the key person to get the 2.4 release out of the door, as well as many other things.
The first application to make use of that API is the new web administration front end developed by Aleksander Machniak, one of the main Roundcube developers on staff at Kolab Systems. Already available within Kolab 2.4, this web admin interface is independent of the kind of directory service or configuration mechanism used in the background and extensible to virtually any scenario. If you wonder how it looks, Jeroen put some screen shots up on his blog. And last but not least he has spent much time on getting our documentation up to speed.
But of course it wouldn’t be a proper release without something falling victim to triage. In this case the victim is Server Side Akonadi. While it will add truly magical capabilities to the Kolab server, we designed the Kolab 3.0 release such that it would remain an optional component to make sure we preserve the ability to scale all the way down to small embedded devices. So because it is optional, and because we did not want to delay the release further, we have put it at the back of the priority chain and removed it from the list of blockers. But you should expect to find it in one of the next series 3 releases.
And of course we haven’t stopped at having given Roundcube its push to the 0.7 release and developing our new web interface on top of it. We’re now also trying to think about how that next web client should look like and how to bring things together with the desktop clients.
For this we are working together with the professional designer who is also responsible for the current and future Roundcube skins, and you can find some of his designs for the next generation web client of Kolab online here. If you have comments, we’d be happy to hear your input and receive your help.
In case if you want to get involved in any of the areas we’re working on, the upcoming Kolab 3.0 Technology Sprint in Berlin is perfect place for that.
This is also where we will be working on finishing of some of the more exciting things we’ve been playing with, such as ownCloud integration for the web interface. This is something we already have sketched in our webmail.klab.cc demo instance and several people have found this close to usable. So we’re overjoyed that Frank, Arthur and Georg of ownCloud will join us for the sprint and invite others who have technology or projects that would work with Kolab in interesting ways to also join us during that week.
And we particularly invite packagers for all the various distributions out there to join us for the sprint. Because we would love to have Kolab 3.0 be natively available on all platforms just weeks after it is released, and make its way into the upstream distributions. Doing this ourselves for all distributions is more than we can reliably ensure, especially since we also have to take enterprise distributions such as Univention Corporate Server (UCS) into account that add substantial work on that front.
Also, we’re not just developing the next generation server, we have also just enabled Mozilla Thunderbird & Lightning for professional usage with Kolab through plenty of work that has gone into SyncKolab by Niko Berger who has joined Kolab Systems to also provide a professional maintenance path for supported users.
And naturally there are still customers who want support as we do all of the above.
So even though I would still have plenty of things to feature I guess it should have become obvious that we have been far from inactive and I truly feel honoured and somewhat humbled to be working with such a great team of dedicated professionals and great minds.
A lesser group could not have achieved that much in such short time, and Kolab 3.0 when it comes out this summer is going to be one exciting piece of technology. I hope you’ll give it a try and will check out our company web site for how we can assist you in your professional needs.
But now, the magic incantation: Go forth and make Kolab 3.0!
Microsoft has built an impressive new entrant to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market, and Ubuntu is there for customers who want to run workloads on Azure that are best suited to Linux. Windows Azure was built for the enterprise market, an audience which is increasingly comfortable with Ubuntu as a workhorse for scale-out workloads; in short, it’s a good fit for both of us, and it’s been interesting to do the work to bring Ubuntu to the platform.
Given that it’s normal for us to spin up 2,000-node Hadoop clusters with Juju, it will be very valuable to have a new enterprise-oriented cloud with which to evaluate performance, latency, reliability, scalability and many other key metrics for production deployment scenarios.
As IAAS grows in recognition as a standard part of the enterprise toolkit, it will be important to have a wide range of infrastructures that are addressable, with diverse strengths. In the case of Windows Azure, there is clearly a deep connection between Windows-based IT and the new IAAS. But I think Microsoft has set their sights on a bigger story, which is high-quality enterprise-oriented infrastructure that is generally useful. That’s why Ubuntu is important to them, and why it was worthwhile for us to work together despite our differences. Just as we need to ensure that customers can run Ubuntu and Windows together inside their data centre and on the LAN, we want to ensure that cloud workloads play nicely.
The team leading Azure has a sophisticated understanding of Ubuntu and Linux in general. They are taking a pragmatic approach that will raise eyebrows around the Redmond campus, but is exactly what customers want to see. We have taken a similar view. I know there will be members of the free software community that will leap at the chance to berate Microsoft for its very existence, but it’s not very Ubuntu to do so: let’s argue our perspective, work towards our goals, be open to those who are open to us, and build great stuff. There is nothing proprietary in Ubuntu-for-Azure, and no about-turn from us on long-held values. This is us making sure our audience, and especially the enterprise audience, can benefit from the work our community and Canonical do no matter where they want to do it.
Windows Azure IAAS is in beta. If you are using the cloud today, or interested in it, I highly recommend you try it out. There’s no better way to make yourself heard over there.
After two years, Catalan LoCo Team returned to IES Nicolau Copèrnic School in Terrassa, near Barcelona, for an Ubuntu release party, this time 12.04. Again, the organization lied basically on the school teachers and we achieved a full and varied activity schedule. With 5 simultaneous tracks, perhaps it’s the party where we offered more variety for activity picking in every moment.
Install party, two simultaneously lectures, GPG and CAcert signature party, game room and an Ubuntu Server Jam.
We started the journey with the overture session where we explained Ubuntu, the LoCo structure and the different activities through the day.
The sponsors, and the school was one of them, got those practical bags for the first 150 registered to the party. Quite a success had them.
Some school students offered a special canteen service for us ubuntaires so we could breakfast and lunch, plus coffee at very low prices. That way, the kids rise money for final terms trip.
A lot of people came, we had more then 200 registered people and that was apparent on the speeches. This picture is from the Enlightenment speech that got more people than Enlightenment desktop users in all Europe. That speech was repeated in the afternoon by popular demand.
Good organisation is noticeable in the small details. Posters so people don’t to get lost at the school. In this floor there were three rooms to go, until we had to open a fourth due to people not fitting in the install room anymore.
Install party room plenty of people as usual. Each time it is easier to install Ubuntu and sharing discs with other OS gives less and less problems.
Games room gave moments of relaxation and fun to the youngest.
And the final draw, where the gifts from the sponsors were given: mice, webcams, speakers and an Android 4.0 tablet.
Again, I want to thank organisers, sponsors, kids from the canteen, real ubuntaires (without them this would not have any sense), and all passerbys that came for sharing the party.
We’ll see on the next one, Festa Quàntica at La Mina.
There are two major terms connected to software you can freely use, study, share and improve: Free Software and Open Source. Based on them you can also find different combinations and translations like FOSS, Libre Software, FLOSS and so on. Reading articles about Free Software or listening to people involved in Free Software often raises the question: Why do they use one term or another and how they differ from each other?
Historically, Free Software was the first term, created somewhere around 1984 together with the Free Software definition. In 1997 Debian, a project aiming to create a completely free and community based GNU/Linux distribution, defined the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) as a check-list to decide whether a program can be included in the distribution or not. In 1998 the Open Source Initiative was set up as a marketing campaign for Free Software and introduced the Open Source definition by copying the DFSG and replacing “Free Software” with “Open Source”. According to a public statement by Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the OSI and author of the DFSG and Open Source Definition, the Open Source term was introduced as a synonym for Free Software. Perens eventually decided to return to the roots of the movement and to speak about Free Software again. This historical development shows that both Open Source and Free Software describe the complete set of software licenses granting the right to use, study, share and improve the software.
In the course of time people came up with even more terms. Today, terms such as Libre Software, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) or FLOSS (Free, Libre and Open Source Software) are often used to describe Free Software. In some cases people also use terms like “organic software” or “ethical software”. Often the motivation for these terms is to stay out of the terminology debate and to avoid confusion generated by words like “open” or “free”. At the end those terms create more confusion than they help because they virtually invite people to search for differences between the terms where actually no differences exist, regarding the software they describe.
In short, these different terms share the same historical root and describe the same set of software, although the choice of one term over the others highlight different aspects of Free Software.
Today the Free Software movement is a large and diverse community. People have different interests in Free Software and different motivations to take part in this movement. But these differences are not necessarily related to the language they use. There are many people using the term Open Source and highlight the social and political dimensions of Free Software while on the other hand there are a people in our community who prefer the term Free Software but concentrate more on the practical benefits. This means that the terms Open Source and Free Software are not a good criterion to identify these different motivations.
Beside individuals there are also many well known organisations in the Free Software ecosystem. Many of them play an important role and emphasize different aspects of Free Software. For example, some organisations focus on the technical direction of Free Software projects, some on legal aspects, some on political, social and ethical aspects and some focus on license evaluation. These organisations typically have decided to use one or another term and sticked to it. But this should not lead to the conclusion that the term they use is the critical factor regarding their motivations. The critical factor are the people driving the organisation and the goals of the organisation as such. The practical experience with different organisations and people in the community shows that the line can’t be drawn along the language they use.
This diversity is good, as it reflects that Free Software provides many advantages in many different areas of our life. But we should not divide our community just by the term someone prefers. No matter what term someone uses and what his initial motivation is, at the end most of us work on the same set of software and on the enhancement of software freedom and any other aspect of Free Software.
There are three entities in the Free Software movement which people look to for evaluations of Free Software licenses: The Debian project, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Most of the time they come to the same conclusion. In some corner cases they may disagree. In such cases the differences do not lie in different terms or different definitions, which as already shown have the same origin, but in the fact that it happens quite often that different people come to different conclusions for challenging legal questions. It would be a big mistake to use these cases to divide our community.
Looking at Free Software licenses there are two main categories, protective or Copyleft licenses and non-protective licenses. While Copyleft licenses are designed to protect the rights to use, study, share and improve the software non-protective licenses allow to distribute the software without those rights. Sometimes people think that the terms Free Software and Open Source are used to distinguish between protective and non-protective licenses. The lists of Free Software licenses by Debian, the FSF and the OSI show that both protective and non-protective licenses comply with the Free Software definition and the Open Source definition. This means that neither the terms Open Source and Free Software nor the different definitions are suitable to distinguish between protective and non-protective licenses.
Protective licenses and non-protective licenses are sub-classes of Free Software licenses recognized by the Open Source Initiative and the FSF. Copyleft or non-Copyleft is not a criteria suitable to distinguish between Open Source and Free Software, both terms describe the same set of software.
When looking at software we have to distinguish between the software model and the development model. While the software model describes the attributes of the software (e.g. free or proprietary) the development model describes different ways to develop software. As described at full length in “What makes a Free Software company?” the different development models are defined independently of the software models and work for both Free Software and proprietary software. Development models that leverage the advantage of an open and collaborative community can show their full strength in combination with the Free Software model. However this does not mean that an open, collaborative development process is a criterion for Free Software. There are Free Software projects developed by a single person or a company with little or no outside input. On the other hand developers of proprietary software have adapted collaborative development models to fit into their software model, e.g. SAP with its partnership program.
While the development model can be a crucial factor for the success of a software project it is not suitable to distinguish between proprietary software and Free Software or one of its synonyms.
If all these terms describe the same software people may wonder why I insist on using the term Free Software. The easiest answer is that I simply have to choose a term if I want to talk about Free Software. As explained in the article all the terms describe the same set of software, therefore I don’t see any value in combining them (e.g. FOSS or FLOSS). Quite the contrary, this combinations often create more confusion than clarity. So the remaining terms are Free Software and Open Source and I decided to stick with Free Software.
Free Software is the oldest term. All other terms have their roots in the Free Software definition. It is a good tradition in science to use the first term and definition given by its author. Furthermore it is also advantageous if a term can be easily translated into different languages. This enables people to talk about Free Software in the most natural way, in their first language. In many cases Free Software even translates unambiguously into other languages, e.g. “logiciel libre” in French, “software libre” in Spanish, “software libero” in Italian or “Fri Software” in Danish which avoids the ambiguity between freedom and price of the English word “free”. I believe that it is important to use a clear terminology. I want to convey a strong message about freedom. Language is important because it frames how people think about a subject. Different terms focus on different aspects, even if they describe the same software and the language we use influences our thoughts about a subject. For me freedom is a core value of Free Software and I want that my language reflects this.
Free Software, which is easy to translate in different languages and emphasises the aspect of freedom for individuals, business and public institutions, together with the clear definition provides these values. All this makes Free Software the right choice for me and I invite you to follow me.
For historical reasons there are different terms to describe software that is free to use, study, share and improve. All terms, Open Source, Free Software or one of the combinations have the same roots and describe the same set of software. When it comes to people and groups within the Free Software movement we see a large diversity of motivations, different people or groups focus on different aspects of Free Software. But whatever the motivation may be it is not the doing of the software, it is the people. Neither is it possible to distinguish the people according to the term they use nor is it the business of the Free Software movement or part of the Free Software definition to find and define groups within our community. The Free Software movement identifies Free Software and works on the enhancement and adoption of it with all its positive aspects. Regarding licenses, different groups agree in their evaluation of Free Software licenses except for some corner cases which shows the complexity of legal documents but not a division between people, movements or software along the terms they use. Protective (Copyleft) and non-protective licenses are sub-classes of Free Software licenses and are recognised as such by all groups in the Free Software movement. These two categories are not suitable to separate Open Source and Free Software.
Even if all these terms describe the same set of software the terminology we use is still important because it frames how people think about a subject. Different terms focus on different aspects, even if they describe the same software. I want to put freedom first, for me freedom is a core value of Free Software and I want to respect the naming by the founder of the Free Software movement. These are the main reasons why I invite you to join me and speak about Free Software.
But no matter which term we use, we should not allow people to split our community just because of different terminology. At the end most of us work on the same set of software, improve it and foster software freedom no matter what our motivation or preferred term is. The community needs to stay together to have an impact on all levels of involvement and to improve Free Software in all aspects. Don’t let others use the strategy of “divide and conqueror” to harm our movement.
In this context you should also read “It’s time for the community to take charge of its brand”.
Edit: The Comment by Bob McConnell shows that maybe the point “copyleft vs non-copyleft” needs to be addressed more explicitly. Therefore I added the sub-section “Protective and non-protective licenses” which was initially planed but got lost somewhere in the process of writing the article
Two months left to the celebration, real work is actually really starting now 
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Happy Culture Freedom Day to all
Chatting with friends and old colleagues I thought I would tell you more about my experience with precise. You can read more on that here and the first update here.
Mostly everything works as of today:
That’s all for now.
