J5’s Blog

The Open Video Conference just ended yesterday. I attended the first two days and just stopped in briefly during the hack-fests yesterday before having brunch with some old highschool friends and heading back to my parents house where my dog and car were stashed.

I can say without a doubt the turnout was amazing and even though not everything I heard all weekend was positive it was a giant leap forward in then understanding of the importance of Open Video and culture. I won’t put a figure on how many people attended but some of the upstairs talks were standing room only and after the first day some of the organizers were lamenting that then needed to get bigger rooms (consequently some of the talks were swapped the next day). Speaking about the organizers, they ran an incredibly smooth ship and should be thanked and praised for their efforts.

The Good

Apps

I was mainly there looking to see what video producers wanted from FOSS application developers and to support the PiTiVi/GStreamer teams on behalf of the GNOME Foundation. It is amazing to see the PiTiVi non-linear video editing app at such a usable state. While Edward Hervey (bilboed on irc) gave his mini presentation on PiTiVi I was busy hacking up a “How To Make Chocolate Truffles” video from pictures and clips I had laying around.

Afterwards I showed him some of the bugs I encountered in the 0.13.1 release and he just rattled off, fixed in git, fixed in git, fixed in git…etc. Sadly the releases are tied to GStreamer releases (which is a good thing from a development/bugs standpoint but not so good from a user standpoint given the early stages of PiTiVi) so we won’t see an official release soon. I plan on trying to automate a Fedora Repository at some point just to be able to view the progress without breaking my system.

The point is PiTiVi is about 90% there (and perhaps 100% in git) to be able to support my needs for basic video editing in terms of stability and basic tools. That should be pretty reflective of those who need to do things like screen casting and interview style video blogs. Some advanced features like effects (look at Cheese for some examples of this already working in an app) already exist in GStreamer and just need to be integrated in PiTiVi’s UI and rendering pipeline.

There was also a show of Cinelarra but more interesting is the GTK+ fork Lumiera which unfortunately is not usable yet but the direction they are going in (GTK+ interface and some GStreamer integration) looks like a great re-start in the case of pro level editing tools.

Also of interest in the pro level space was Blender which seems to be the pro project with the most momentum and features for pro’s. At least that was the initial reaction from some on the Red Hat media team. The dev’s did admit that the functionality is limited to what they needed during production of Big Buck Bunny (and other productions currently in the queue) but that in those areas it is rock solid. It is interesting to see a UI designed with different usability profiles. For instance one of Blender’s usability criteria is the avoidance of repetitive strain injury. To combat RSI mouse clicks are evenly divided between left and right mouse clicks.

Bassam Kurdali, one of the Blender developers and animators, came up to me later in the conference and said he had noticed me using PiTiVi to edit my video. He was impressed at the simplicity and slickness of the interface and how far along it is. There is plenty of room for different approaches and a real potential for cross pollination between the pro tools and the every day end user tools.

What Content Producers Want

Speaking of end users we got to hear from a bunch of them who let us know how we could support them. One of the biggest themes was that Windows tools suck and those who taught others couldn’t just tell them to go out and buy a mac (praises were heaped on iMovie and Final Cut Pro). They really want an easy to use tool, with the unfortunate note that it would have to run on Windows. One really good thing is that a lot of the non-tech content producers understood the need for free codecs. However in the end they just want a simple way to render down to DVD, You Tube, Daily Motion, iPhone, etc. and don’t want to deal with formats.

I ended up collecting a bunch of buisness cards and am toying with the idea of starting a feedback group with content producers which would get them involved in improving GNOME App usability from the perspective of those who are not yet familiar with the GNOME workflow. If we are serious about expanding our reach we need to go beyond our current self selecting internal feedback loops. The goal wouldn’t be to get these people using GNOME (though giving them a way through the apps wouldn’t be a bad thing). It would be more about getting groups outside of GNOME/Linux to be part of the process of improving GNOME. Will it be fruitful? I don’t know but it is an interesting experiment with a potential huge payoff for a little bit of effort.

Sita Sings the Blues

This good section wouldn’t be complete without the mention of Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley which is a feature length (82 minutes) animated film released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You have complete rights to watch, screen, remix and redistribute the film as long as you abide by the license. I do suggest you watch it and if you like it buy the DVD or simply donate to encourage more works like this (I bought the DVD for $20). Not only is Nina a content producer but she is heavily involved in advocating her distribution methods, going as far as documenting the process that went into releasing Sita under a creative commons license and in her work with QuestionCopyright.org.

Mozilla and the Open Video Contest

I was very impressed with Mozilla’s involvement and their push for Ogg Theora to become a base line codec for the HTML 5 video tag. They are also helping launch the upcoming Open Video Contest which would see the winner flown to the 2010 South by Southwest conference. We should probably run some sort of sister contest to encourage GNOME users to submit entries.

The Bad

It wasn’t all roses. While I feel we are reaching independent content producers way more than I would have though at this point, some of the big companies still don’t get it or are afraid of Open Video implications.

Adobe

It must be said that Adobe has been somewhat good at working with the community over long periods of time but that they just never get around to resolving key issues. What really surprised me was when on one of the industry round tables the Adobe representative pointed to their release of the Flash documentation as a shining example of this relationship. After checking with a developer of an alternative flash implementation I was told those documents are pretty much useless. Due to bugs, some of the spec just doesn’t work as written and other issues makes it impossible to write a third party Flash player.

YouTube/Google

While reportedly Chrome will ship with Ogg Theora support their flagship video site YouTube seems afraid to do so. Their rep at the round table stated some pretty audacious things such as continuing the myth that Theora wasn’t good enough when clearly that argument was directly debunked (the side by side comparisons were even playing on HDTV’s at the conference).

Even more of an issue was the representative’s idea on what Open Video meant. He declared that they would love to support Open Video but that it meant letting anybody do whatever they wanted and that doesn’t work from a buisness perspective.

Open Video isn’t about wild west, trample on rights. If anything it is about balancing the rights of content producers, end users and fair use. From what I read, YouTube’s position is that they are the 1000 pound gorilla in video distribution and at the end of the day they only believe in a user’s and content producer’s freedoms if it is walled behind their own servers. “All the world’s video” indeed.

The solution there is to drive traffic to sites like Daily Motion and Blip.tv which understand the issues involved.

Conclusion

Nothing is perfect, but we are off to a really good start. In the end it is up to us to keep the momentum going and eventually produce a better experience within the complete Open Video stack, from content production to delivery. The web was built and exploded around the concept of open technology. Let’s continue to make sure this is the case going forward. The last thing we want is the web to become the domain of a few, with creativity being stifled by restrictions in the non-open parts of the stack.

The project I have been working on for a long time now has seen it’s first (beta) release. Meet Fedora Community, a consolidation of the various Fedora Infrastructure bits into one UI with a focus on usability. The unique thing about this site is that it doesn’t replace the other Fedora Infrastructure bits. It uses them as backends and mashes together the data into one view. For instance you no longer have to go to the bodhi update tool after checking on a build in koji. Instead you simply look at the build tool and if the package is able to be updated you will be presented with the option to do so. It will also point you to the correct log if an error happens in the build.

Right now it is geared towards Fedora packagers but in the future we hope to be adding a lot more functionality. Since the concept revolves around small applications running in a dashboard the possibilities are endless. Think live server status for sysadmins or up to date Fedora news for users. As always, because Fedora stands for Freedom and Community we will be emphasizing upstream collaboration which we owe a great debt for making all of Fedora possible, and Fedora Community’s code will always be licensed under AGPLv3 and compatible licenses.

To learn more you can grab the podcasts (in ogg vorbis format of course) or go to our project page.

Dear Foundation Members,

In the past, by this time, the Board would have already sent around the GUADEC call for hosts. In largely closed door meetings it would have been decided where next year’s GUADEC would be held, announcing it at the current year’s conference. Since this has been a year of significant change (this is the first year GUADEC is being co-located with Akademy) we would like to get more input into the process and find out what our members want to see come next summer, as well as how to best pick the winning location.

We have decided to postpone the call for proposals until after this year’s GUADEC has concluded. We fully expect to discuss the topic during GUADEC at the foundation AGM, as well as on the foundation list to find out what you, the members, would like to see happen next year. Please feel free to talk about your likes and dislikes about this year’s conference and if you don’t get a chance to attend, what would make you more likely to attend next year.

As for those who wish to make a proposal, a formal call for hosts is not a prerequisite for starting the process. If you can, we encourage you to meet with us and other attendees at this year’s conference and get a head start by starting the drafting process sooner than later. You may also contact us with questions you may have.

On behalf of the board,
John (J5) Palmieri

As a culmination of all the positive momentum that has been going on the past few years all the important Open Video players will be gathering at NYU’s law center for the first of hopefully many Open Video Conferences on June 19th.

The interesting part of this conference is it isn’t exclusively a tech conference. According to their website:

Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s much more to Open Video. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

If we have any hopes of success in bringing the general public an understanding of our views on the importance of openness and freedom, forming a larger community with like minded content creators is the next logical step and another piece of the puzzle.

I will be attending the conference as a representative for GNOME. Others should consider registering and attending to represent their own media minded project. I hope to see you there.

View Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 locations in a larger map

I’ve started a publicly editable Google map for this years GUADEC/Akademy Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I’ve added a few of the recommended hotels and the conference venue so attendees can get an idea of the distances and locations between each place. Please add any information that would be useful to attendees including the rest of the hotel list, event locations and gathering spots. I hope to see a lot of new and old faces at the conference in July.

UPDATE: Behdad pointed me to a more complete map.

On the heals of having my talk accepted I’ve booked my flight to this years GUADEC/Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Much thanks goes out to my manager Tom “spot” Callaway for finding funds for my airfare. I think it shows a lot of support and commitment from Fedora/Redhat even though I am not in the Desktop group anymore.

My talk is happening sometime during the core days and I will be talking about Open Web Services, open data exchange between projects and melding server side and client side to build an open community of applications. After working on d-bus and seeing the success a standard IPC platform has brought the richness of our desktop I believe it is time we expand that meme to include standard application interaction across the physical barriers of the Desktop. It is time to bring the (N)etwork back into G(N)OME while keeping true to our Free and Open Source roots.

When people think about economics they usually just think in terms of money but economics is about understanding the flow of limited resources within systems in an effort to make those systems more efficient (or if you are cynical making those systems be more efficient for a specific group). Money is just a system we have used to quantify the worth of those resources to counteract the inefficiencies of bartering. Since money has the ability to be traded for almost any resource (including money itself) it holds a lot of power and has become the focus of most of economics.

However, in the Open Source community a majority of our transactions do not include money. At least not directly. In fact, a majority of our capital is payed in the measure of time and effort; both by the consumers and producers. Both are highly limited resources which in the Open Source world aren’t really given the thought they deserve.

First consumers often give the impression that they think producers have all the time and energy in the world but only a small portion of the community can be classified as producers, and even a smaller subset are full time producers. The only way to grow time and energy in an efficient way is to get more people to become producers. The power of Open Source is not that it is freely available but that anyone can become a producer. Providing that producers work together in some sense of a direction, Open Source growth should be exponential and eventually overtake proprietary development in terms of an efficient economic model and generation of capital. That is why the GPL and other reciprocal licenses are in the long term a better model as they prevent the “picking up and going home once the market expands” syndrome - though there are other forces that effectively prevent that for projects under other licenses. That is all another post though.

The other place where both time and effort are not given enough thought is in the use of the final product. In fact many projects fail to productize their efforts, choosing to leave that up to vendors. I cringe when I hear things like, Linux can do anything you want, you just have to configure XYZ. I don’t know anyone who truly wants something that can do everything. They want something that can do what they want without too much time and effort put into it. Every time we require our users to expend time and effort that is resources they are spending. If the cost is too high they will simply look elsewhere. Believe it or not, the worth of time and effort are readily quantifiable by looking how much people spend a year on unneeded conveniences. It is pretty high.

An example of time and energy wasted is logging into open services. Logins are inevitable but why in a world that prides itself on community are we beaten to the single signon party by the likes of MS Passport or Google checkout? Taking an example from Sound Juicer, the cd ripping app, I have a number of cds which I pick up at local venues because I heard something I liked when walking by. Sound Juicer gives you the option to upload track info to the MusicBrainz database. Unfortunately all this option does is bring me to a login/signup screen after I took the time to enter in all of the track data. Having to get yet another account for something I don’t really care about anymore because I already have the track info is just too much effort to spend so I end up just closing the browser window. Sound Juicer and MusicBrainz does get the consumer seal of approval for making it easy to grab track info when ripping my cds but they missed an opportunity to convert me into a producer which would bring even more value to their consumers. In fact the track grabbing functionality is so transparent - no configurations needed, no extra actions are required - that it is a quintessential example of how an app should be productized. Why adding to the DB isn’t more wiki like or federated with other open services, such as wikipedia, slashdot, lwn, distributions, etc. is somewhat of a mystery. It isn’t a mystery altogether though -

Time and effort on the producer side needs to grow and producers need to work closer together, building bridges instead of just looking to grow their own little island. The Open Source ecosystem, while priding itself on community has often neglected to build technology which works like a community. More cohesion between these islands allows them to grow and innovate on their own but still act as an integrated/efficient experience for the user, minimizing the time and effort it takes to use our software. By having an integrated experience all the way to the producer level we have more of a chance to convert consumers to producers thereby adding more time and effort capital to the entire ecosystem. Make it easier to both consume and produce in the Open Source ecosystem and traditional economics will take over to propel it to the mainstream as it has done in small subsets such as in the business server market.

One of my biggest pet peeves is this argument:

You’ve done ***************** this much “good” so you are obligated to do more (and to my benefit first). If you don’t do so the world will implode.

I especially hate it when the person making that argument benefits from that good but doesn’t think they should contribute to it.

I do however agree with this argument:

You have done ******************* this much “good” and as a result have benefited from that good on average more than others, you have an obligation to keep putting in as much as you can. I am a beneficiary of your good and will try to add to it but I may lack the ability to contribute in any meaningful way.

On the philosophical side:

Is it more moral to get paid for the above arguments’ “good”, which frees you up to do more of the “good” or to do something else for a living with results being the scope of your “good” contributions are less than they would have been?

Those questions I don’t think there is a real answer to.

And no Spot, I’m not going to suddenly quit, I just sometimes wonder why I chose to be a public free software developer when it means I have to deal with anonymous idiots or break my own moral code on censorship.

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Stormy, our very own Executive Director, talking about the two new additions to our advisory board and the future of GNOME.  Rock on!