J5’s Blog

For those of you who haven’t seen Tomeu Vizoso’s blog on the hackfest we are trying to pull together this is a second call to PyGObject, Python 3 and GtkIntrospect hackers who might want to join us in getting the future of the Python bindings to GTK sorted out.

At issue are a couple of roadblocks to the continual maintenance of the the bindings. First is the lack of support for Python 3.0 and second is the unclear picture of how GNOME 3 effects us. The current plan is to finish the work done on PyGI (Python GObjectIntrospect support for PyGObject), at the same time making sure it all works under both Python 2.x and Python 3.x. Moving to the PyGI bindings should make the maintenance burden somewhat lighter for our busy maintainers.

If you have something you can contribute and are interested in attending our hackfest please take a look at the wikipage and e-mail myself or Tomeu. While this is being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, you don’t need to be a Foundation member to be considered for an invite. We hope to be finalizing things soon and getting a budget to send to the board for approval.

Many people feel that in the open source/free software community openness is about letting everyone become privy to any comment/decision/situation that may happen within a project. For the most part this is the goal we strive for but at the end of the day there are things that should remain private until they become real concerns for the public at large.

The issue is we have diverse communities that rarely agree 100% even among the best of friends. It becomes counter productive when these disagreements become the source of misinformed news articles without general consensus allowed to form within the community itself.

Forget the community for a minute. As individuals we often need to think before we speak in order to make sure we say exactly what we meant to say. The same goes for diverse groups. They must work out the directions they go in in an atmosphere that is free from the chilling effect of having to watch what they say because their intentions may be misinterpreted.

There is also the point of being able to freely express an opinion without fear of outward reprisals. There is a reason Democracy subsists on the concept of private ballots. It allows even the most unpopular opinions to at least be registered while individuals can be sure they won’t be ostracized. The openness comes from being free to dispute results, protest and influence them through public action, not from knowing the individual’s specific vote.

We strive to be inclusive with everyone who has a stake in what we do but when it becomes counter productive one needs to redress the situation so that we continue to move forward. It does no one any good to dwell on speculation from quarters which are ill informed and just looking for traffic grabbing sensationalism. It is perfectly fine to exclude them from discussions they have no stake in and let them feed on the results, judging the community based on its final actions and consensus.

For those who are going to FUDCon on the FUDBus, expecially those flying to Boston first, remember to bring your Passport.  Luckly these days they check both ways but at one point you could get into Canada without a passport but would be screwed on the way back. In any case I thought I would remind people as I had run into a problem where I didn’t check for my passport until a week before my sisters wedding in Italy. Sure enough I couldn’t find it and ended up having to get it done the night before I left. Not to mention the years it took off my life trying to figure out the best way to tell my twin sister I might not be able to make it to her wedding See you all at FUDCon!!!

Having followed its development for a long time now and used other video editing software I can say that PiTiVi is an awesome app that is only going to get better. Sure it isn’t perfect yet but that is software development for you. It takes time to get all the features in and make them solid.

One of the great parts of Open Source Software is you get to see it develop and grow. It is also one of the biggest misunderstood aspects of such software. In a world where people are gripped by the next best thing – a collective psychosis of product ADD – where patience is no longer a virtue but an outdated notion of an age long gone, evolution is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Just a reminder that even products that seem to just appear overnight, in reality had long periods of closed development to receive polish (and even then they aren’t always great but for some reason people tend to forgive shortcomings in something they bought as opposed to something they got for free).

Knowing the drive behind the developers working on PiTiVi I am confident that in time PiTiVi will become one of the prime examples of FOSS development. For now it is useful enough for some my basic editing needs and every time I try a new version it just gets that much more useful. Keep up the hard work!!!

For various reasons I am staying out of government politics these days but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stay away from a bit of controversy when it comes to my beloved Open Source crowd.

I remember at one Boston Summit, being held at the MIT Stata Center, where Luis Villa, our much appreciated lawyer in training (or is he an actual lawyer yet and more importantly can we start cracking lawyer jokes?), was holding a Marketing BOF. In this BOF we ended up listing things that GNOME didn’t do well in which someone who was not part of the GNOME community but rather an invited guest took the session to mean that GNOME was in serious trouble and was folding in on itself.

What this person failed to realize is that self introspection and acknowledging ones weaknesses is the first step to becoming stronger. In our case it was the first steps to becoming a stronger community.

It is with this in mind that I read Henri Bergius’ great synopsis on the Apple MagicMouse vs the Open Office mouse design. It illustrates one of Open Source’s short comings with mitigating complexity. To stereotype us collectively a bit, we are like Sheldon from the show the Big Bang Theory. Sheldon can solve complex theoretical physics questions in his sleep but ask him to engage in simple social interaction and he hides behind condescension and excuses the interaction as unimportant.

Similarly, ask us to solve a complex computer problem and we will do it but ask us to make it easy to use, something the masses would go out and spend money on, and the same indignant statement seems to permeate every discussion about it – “that’s not something I would want to use”. Ok, so the analogy isn’t fair because as a group we are as diverse as any other but from the amazing things that we have produced it is clear that collectively we have a hard time hiding the complexity of it all. For some reason Apple is able to promote ease of use and they get praised for it but when we try to promote it we hit a wall of cynicism – “You’ll have to pry my user interface from my cold dead hands!”

So the question is will we ever learn how to mitigate complexity or will we just leave that for others to add as a competitive advantage? Is our end goal to just be a building block of modern technology or will we be the finished product itself? I don’t have that answer but I do know it is something we need to introspect on. We need to ask ourselves these hard questions, not as acknowledgement of failure but as acknowledgement of the fact that we can always do better by honestly and without cynicism, examine our weakest points. As other parts of the industry learn from our successes in development and internally implement changes based off of the Open Source model, we too need to look at their successes in the mass market and see what we learn from them.

I managed to make it to the Beer Summit and the last day of the Boston Summit before succumbing to the inevitable jet lag. From what I heard the summit was again a success and I would like to thank Jon Mccann, Colin Walters and Ajax for pitching in and running the various aspects of the Summit and everyone else who came to make GNOME rock. As always we thank Henry Holtzman for being the MIT faculty backer of the conference and Walter Bender of SugarLabs for doing some leg work for us. The delegation worked so well I think I will save some of my stress levels next year by finding others who would like to help out.

Where scheduling was concerned, we had a little hiccup this year with other GNOME related conferences scheduled at the same time. Let me end the confusion and state emphatically that we will be having the Boston Summit next year at the same time, Columbus Day Weekend, October 9th, 10th and 11th. Further more, there is a chance we may be able to hold it in the newly built Media Lab building. No promises but there are those with some pull who would like to see this happen.

As for avoiding conflicts in the future, the board and ad-board should coordinate more instead of relying on a “who announces first” race condition to dictate scheduling. The board knows the dates of all the conferences they are going to run or sponsor well in advance, as well as having the dates of a number of other conferences readily available due to the fact that they often fund a number of members to attend these events. Utilizing this community resource is a good way to avoid future conflicts. I am also sure the community run travel committee would be happy to coordinate travel funding activities with other conferences that are related to GNOME but not run by the Foundation.

See everyone next year.

For those attending the Boston GNOME Summit this year the open bar social, affectionately known as the Beer Summit will once again be held at Flat Top Johnny’s with four reserved pool tables from 8:00pm-closing on Sunday October 11th. Chat about the latest GNOME technologies over some beers and a friendly game of pool. It is our way of saying thank you to our contributors and community.

I myself will be in Italy until the 11th so I may or may not be able to make it out depending on how I feel but I have left the conference in the capable hands of Colin Walters, Jon McCann and Adam Jackson. They will be there to make sure you get your coffee, find your hacking room and enjoy yourself during the summit.

For those not at the AGM during GUADEC I had announced confirmation on this years GNOME Boston Summit in October at MIT.

Details

Dates
October 10th, 11th and 12th

Location
MIT Sloan Building (E51)
Cambridge, MA
Rooms 315, 325, 335, 345

Hackfests

As of right now we have funding thanks to Novell to hold one hackfest the week before the Summit. The content of that hackfest is yet to be determined. As always since hackfests are focused on getting specific teams together so that they may plan projects face to face, travel sponsorship will be done via invite and handled by the specific hackfest organizers.

If you are a company or organization which wants to organize and sponsor a second or even third hackfest please get in-touch with myself (J5 on irc) or the GNOME Foundation Board.

Event Sponsorship

We will be looking for companies to sponsor events such as a lunch, a snack hour and the ever present Boston Beer Summit. These events help people unwind and socialize between the intense hack sessions and BOFs. They have also been used by the sponsoring organizations as a thank you to developers and to make significant announcements of work being done by the sponsor.

Last year saw Litl throw a snack hour catered by Sel de la Terre where they announced their work on JavaScript bindings, now being extensively used to build the shell for GNOME 3.0. They also answered questions and reveled small bits of the project they have been working on.

Novell had budget left over from their hackfest and cosponsored with the Foundation an open bar at our annual Boston Beer Fest. Over pool, drinks and food GNOME hackers got to discuss numerous subjects and make new friends in a relaxed atmosphere.

On the last day of the Summit the GNOME Accessibility team through Sun sponsored a pizza lunch as a thank you for the support the Foundation members and hackers have given the Accessibility team (though I really think we should be thanking them for the work that they do).

Again if your are interested in sponsoring one of these events please get in-touch with myself (J5 on irc) or the GNOME Foundation Board.

Travel Sponsorship

Traditionally the Foundation has not sponsored travel to the Summit, relegating that to our flagship conference, GUADEC, and several regional conferences where we felt GNOME needed a presence. Unlike GUADEC which is a meet and greet for users and developers of the GNOME platform and related technologies, the Summit is a more intimate working event with specific goals in mind.

This year however, we do want to start sponsoring specific people to attend the conference who would otherwise not be able to attend. The difference is, anyone applying for sponsorship must have a specific reason for coming and detail concrete goals which they aim to accomplish at the Summit. The Board and Travel Committee are still working out the details so look for more announcements in the future.

Make your travel plans now and start getting psyched up to have another successful Boston Summit come this Fall. If last year’s Summit successes continue their momentum, look to see even greater things to come out of Boston come October!!!

Notes

It is unfortunate that the dates, October 10th-12th, conflict with the Maemo Summit but should be noted that we have for the most part always had the Summit on the second weekend of October (Columbus Day Weekend). Those plans were set in motion well before we were able to get a definite confirmation on the venue and make a formal announcement. We should perhaps use the Foundation as a way to coordinate all GNOME related gatherings in the future.

–
John (J5) Palmieri

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.