J5’s Blog

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

Fedora Community Screencast - Background music edited from the song Conversion by Kourosh Dini off his Live At Bliss Gardens album (CC Some Rights Reserved)

Fedora Community, codename MyFedora, integrates the Fedora infrastructure into one interface focused on usability and streamlining user workflows.  This is a beta release with a production version to be released alongside Fedora 10.  While the first revisions are focused on Fedora Developers, the underlying Moksha framework, based on top of the Python WSGI TurboGears 2 platform, provides a base for writing self contained applications which can integrate to create one large application.  The applications seen on Fedora Community interact with the Fedora infrastructure to produce a single, unified view.  In the future applications can be written to interact with Transifex for translations, listen to upstream for project releases and even federate between infrastructures such as OLPC being able to have a view into their services along side the services they use in Fedora.

We are calling on Fedora members to test out the site and file bugs.  We plan to roll this out alongside Fedora 10 so pitch in and help us make a great release.

The Beer Summit was a smashing success last night and I even managed to still wake up at 6:00am today.  It was even better than last year which I partially attribute to being closer to the venue.  What really made it better though was people were interacting a lot more this year both with shop talk and community building small talk (no not Smalltalk).  I thrive on community and every time I get to hang out with people in the community that I love, it reminds me why I do this whole Open Source thing and motivates me to try to do more. I hope that others feel the same and find our conferences and the surrounding events bring some measure of value to the work they do.

Novell came in and is sponsoring the 2008 GNOME Beer Summit at Flat Top Johnny’s tomorrow night starting at 7pm.  You will need to be at the Summit to receive your GNOME foot stamp in order to partake in the open bar.  Beer, wine and soft drinks will be covered.  We also have the four pool tables in the back next to the couches.  So come on down and discuss the future of GNOME with good friends over a couple of pints and a game of pool.

Havoc Pennington is well known in the GNOME and Open Source communities. He was one of the driving forces behind GNOME’s shift in focus to usability and simplicity during the GNOME 1.0 to 2.0 switch. Recently he had moved on from Red Hat to a small company named Litl. Other well known GNOME hackers followed suit after Havoc had announced in his well read blog that Litl was hiring.

Not much has been revealed about what Litl is working on. Up until this point their employees have been fairly silent and only rumours based upon job openings and the projects that their employees had formerly been working on before getting hired. Litl contacted me recently to ask about sponsoring something during the summit.

At around three o’clock on Saturday the 11th, in between sessions, Litl will have an informal catered snack break at the Summit where their CEO, John Chuang, will speak a bit about the company. Also, employees will be around to answer any questions the community might have. They will also be having a release announcement for some GNOME related technologies which they hope will be valuable to the continued development of GNOME. If it is like anything these GNOME contributors have worked on in the past, it should be some pretty cool stuff.

A big thank you goes out from the Foundation for Litl sponsoring snacks to satiate hungry hackers. It will be great to see what our friends at Litl have been working on.

It’s happening all over again!!! Let us know you are coming. There may be some exciting announcements, good fun and who knows…another beer summit, tack on conference may present itself again. So, come on up (or down or sideways depending on your latitude and longitude) to Boston for some good friends, good hacking and good times.

Since I know not many people read the board meeting notes even though Luis slaves tirelessly over them after each meeting I though I would write up a short, what’s happening to get people in the loop.

•  First and foremost, the Foundation is changing in very good ways.  We hired Stormy Peters as our Executive Director and she has gotten off to a flying start, posting on the board list faster than the board can respond and generally keeping us part timers on our toes.  This brings up a good point that members should start participating more in Foundation activities and teams such as with GNOME Marketing, or helping organize hackfests.  With Stormy on board there are more opportunities the Foundation can pursue but we will need people to oversee these initiatives and make sure they are a success.
• As people should know the next Boston GNOME Summit is happening at the MIT Slone building (map):
  DATES:             October 11, 12 & 13, 2008
  TIME:                7:00 AM – 11:59 PM
  ROOMS:            E51-315, E51-325, E51-335, E51-34
• We are also holding the GLib Introspection and User Experience hackfests around the same time frame in Boston.  Hackfests are small invite only gathering (around 5-20 people) focused on moving specific parts of the GNOME stack forward.  I encourage people running these hackfests to blog about them and the work that was accomplished once the hackfest is over.
• The GNOME Asia summit is also set to kick off in Beijing on the 18 and 19th of October.  That is only 25 days left until our first Foundation sponsored Asian event.  It looks like it is going ot be a hit already and something we want to continue to sponsor annually.
• Budgeting changes - as treasurer I have had my head filled with budgets for the last few months.  With the hire of Stormy and the feedback she has been getting from members of our Advisory Board we have started to move budget planning for the whole year instead of adding budget items and asking for money as we need it (like we did for the hackfests this past year).  We want to grow GNOME and the Foundation and in order to do that in a responsible way we need to plan further ahead than we have traditionally done.  A draft budget for 2009 went out to the Advisory Board yesterday to make sure we hit companies budgeting schedule.  In the future I hope to start budgeting talks at GUADEC and get all foundation members involved in figuring out how to best utilize the resources we are given every year.  This also means I will expect more participation in board activities from members as we move forward.
• As many have noticed while we get a healthy amount of donations from individuals from the Friends of GNOME program it pales in comparison to the corporate sponsorships.  While it may always lag behind since a large part of our community may not have the money to donate, whether they are in school or times are getting a bit tougher we still think we can do much better.  Because of this Friends of GNOME is going through some changes to make it easier for individuals to donate throughout the year.  While I don’t want to spill the beans before we launch, sufficed to say,it tears down a lot of the barriers that can make donating to GNOME a bit of a pain.

Well, that is all the exciting bits, to some degree of exciting.  I’m going to try and post regularly but most of the time the week to week running of the Foundation isn’t all that exciting (if it were more people would read the meeting notes).  The exciting bits happen around the stuff that the Board enables through its work.  While we make sure resources are procured and allocated for the various projects and conferences it is the people on the ground, hacking, organizing and making these things happen which make the Foundation run smoothly and GNOME get better from year to year.  This is something seven board members and two staff members can not do on their own.  Consider getting more involved in our different teams, offering to help with a local event or donating your expertise in various areas that the board deals with (e.g. read the meeting notes on foundation-announce to see what we are working on and see if there is an action item you may be able to help out with).

You can post whatever you want within the guidelines of the Gnome Code of Conduct (and I don’t think I have seen anything in your posts to say you have overstepped those rules).  I would fight for your right to post whatever to your blog and be aggregated even though I often find your posts illinformed.  You however should understand that others also have the right to disagree with you, and disagree with you strongly.  Throwing a temper tantrum doesn’t really help your cause, whatever that is.

Havoc,

I totally agree that embeddable languages is the way to go.  I’ve been using JavaScript heavily lately, along with the excellent Firebug for debugging (decent debuggers are something some very big languages are missing btw).  The biggest issue I have with JavaScript  is it’s lack of structure and horrendous scoping rules (this certainly doesn’t mean you are calling the containing object, especially when running a “method” from a callback).

What would really make JavaScript even more useful is the proposal for JavaScript 2. Unfortunately that presentation was made in 2006 but some, if not all of those features are part of the ECMA Script 4 proposal.  They even have a reference implementation up which is under a liberal license (I haven’t looked into it much but it links to a GPLv3 library).  As anything in committee, it is slow moving.  Hopefully we will see a finished spec sometime soon but I couldn’t find a timeline.

In the meantime there is an ECMAScript 4.0 to JavaScript converter call Mascara.  Unfortunately it is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license which means the code can not be distributed on many distributions because of the Noncommercial clause.  It isn’t always clear what constitutes commercial and most distributions I know of want to allow the possibility of for pay distribution or use in a commercial product by 3rd parties.  It also isn’t clear if that license extends to the generated code.  Does anyone want to write a GPL version?

Truthfully, I have a dirty little secret - I like JavaScript with all of its warts and hackish workarounds.  I like it because I know non-programmers who can grok JavaScript but can’t wrap their heads around Python or C.  I attribute that more to the environment than the language itself because it allows for the instant gratification of hitting the reload button and seeing something happen.  But what I like even more is the idea of embeddable languages bringing that sort of development process to GNOME.  There are a few apps that already do this and though it isn’t as easy as it is with the web whenever I have jumped into one of those apps, such as experimenting with writing a quick Vi mode for gEdit, it is amazingly simple.

What would keep me working in those environments would be an embeddable debugger, object viewer and UI/extension point tree.  Whoever writes those components and makes it simple to add scripting to any GObject app will be a hero in the community.  Anyone willing to sign up?

You know on my blog I see a lot of spam which gets caught by my filters but the funniest I ever see are the inept ones.  Here is one:

Your site regarding %TITLE% looks very interesting to me. I found it doing a search for %KEYWORD%….

If you can’t even get the template right … try harder not smarter, because I know you are as dumb as a rock.

In other news look for some Fedora announcements from me pretty soon.  I’ve been pretty under the radar recently in terms of what I have been working on.  It has all been public, just not publicised.  Revolutionary, probably not.  Those who know me know I like calculated improvements.  A step forward…let’s just say I am proud of what I am doing and have to praise Red Hat for having faith in me and my plans to let me work on things I felt were important.  There is a reason they are not just a pay check to me, and part of that is their belief in the power of free and open source softaware and the confidence in developers who work on the betterment of not just the company but the community and the ecosystem as a whole.