J5’s Blog

In an effort to recreate “The Hangover” I am heading to Vegas tomorrow morning for one of my closest friend’s bachelor party.

I’ll be back Monday with some pretty cool announcement involving JavaScript and native messaging support. Let’s put it this way – if this works out implementing D-Bus in pure JavaScript might be a fun side project.

Until then I’m going to be incommunicado except for my cell phone. Get in touch with me only if there is an emergency, otherwise I’m pretty much stepping into the alternate dimension that is Vegas.

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

For only cents a day, less than a cup of coffee, or Brondo(it’s got what plants crave) , you can make sure a GNOME hacker has all the resources they need to hack late into the night and into the early morning.  So become a friend of GNOME and donate $10 a month.  Doing so will make you elegeable to receive a signed  postcard from your favourite hacker (only valid for participating hackers) .  You can even watch their progress through their personal blog and see what a difference you have made.  Remember, as of today I am not just the GNOME Board’s Treasurer, I’m also a Friend because everyone needs friends.

Disclaimer: Donations do not go to individual hackers you specify (though feel free to thank them directly via a gift or even better, a thank you and pat on the back – just not when they are sleeping, that is kind of creepy).  The money you donate to the Foundation goes into the general Foundation budget and helps ensure that GNOME continues to be a free (as in libre) and open source desktop by providing resources to developers, software and education for end users and promotion for GNOME worldwide.

Thanks to Joe Shaw’s recommendations five months ago I joined the Chestnut Farm’s meat CSA.   Today, fighting Cambridge/Arlington rush hour traffic I picked up my first monthly 10lbs. share.  It was kind of funny finding a mail in my inbox stating that I had signed up some time ago and oh ya you need to go pick up your share this Wednesday.  I almost skipped the mail but after looking at the quality of the meat I’m glad I read it.

It looks really tasty, unfortunately I spent last night cooking up 3lbs. of chuck beef stew which means I can’t justify cooking anything up just this minute.  I will however be taking some of it to my parents house for the holidays and cooking some for them.

At $8 a pound it is pretty expensive but I am treating it like a learning expense.  Since I don’t know what type of meat I will get each month I have to learn to cook almost any type thrown at me.  I figure during the colder months I will stick with soups, stews and brazing while during the warmer months I will switch to grilling and slow roasting.  If I like what they are sending me I may even get adventurous and see if they can send me the more exotic bits like sweetbreads though I suspect they sell those at a premium to restaurants.

Once I figure out my budget I may just start one of the vegetable CSA’s too.

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.

For my Fedora friends who don’t read Planet GNOME (you should):

• Federico’s screencast of rpm2git tool – we should be using this or something similar

It seems that Moblin will be switching from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux as their base operating system.  I’m interested in finding out the underlying reasoning for such a move.  The stated reason is because they wanted to use RPM instead of DEB.  I can’t quite buy that but perhaps that is because having come from both camps I think that packaging is an implementation detail that too many people put way too much stock in.  This has the effect of causing unnecessary emotional splits within the community resulting in animosity which often overshadows real threats.

The second reason given, which has to do with building a community is pretty broad but more believable.  Fedora has made huge strides while also sticking to its guns in the freedom department and being valuable upstream contributors. It may be that we sacrificed short term gains which can be gotten via a bit more differentiation, or out of the box “just works” on closed hardware but as companies are being convinced to open up their specs and open drivers are being written, a large portion of which is being done by Fedora developers working upstream, little of the short term gains matter much.

I suspect the real reason is somewhere in the community vein, staring with the Kernel and X team developers who work tirelessly making sure their work is fit for upstream consumption and can be supported in the long term. Following their lead the rest falls naturally out of that single notion of moving Linux forward as a whole. Kudo’s to all my Fedora friends – keep moving forward.

I thought I was going to be on vacation for my birthday this year but it turns out I’m leaving the day after so I decided to do something this Friday to celebrate with people in Boston.  I’m going to have a small dinner with close friends at Good Life Bar around 8:00 and then perhaps some drinks at Jacob Wirth.  In any case I’ll be microblogging my whereabouts on identi.ca so use it as an excuse to come down, drink a few beers and have a good time.

Reading the comments in Zeeshan Ali’s blog make me a bit sad that the issue of giving credit was somehow brushed aside instead of fomenting a good debate on the nature of credit within our communities.  I would have to agree that Zeeshan’s post was a bit polarizing and in any polarized situation people tend to retreat to their corners and bend their arguments around the space they feel they need to defend.  For the sake of academics let’s take it from a different angle and examine the nature of credit in GNOME.

Being that no license that is used by GNOME has an attribution clause (besides having to keep copyright notices intact) is it legal not to give attribution in a document which references a licensed work?

Perfectly legal.  It has been noted that there are attribution licenses but only one is accepted by the OSI and none are compatible with the GPL or its derivatives.

What about ethical, especially if the author has requested it?

This one is up for debate.  If the author has not legally bound you to do so it is correct that it could be needlessly burdensome to list out every contributor in every press release.  This is the number one reason why attribution licenses are frowned upon.  However it behooves an entity to point out and acknowledge the contributions of others, a topic I will go into later.  It is utterly unethical to claim credit for others work or use language that implies such.

Why is credit important then if things can be taken and used legally without attribution?

Like it or not, everyone has their own reasons for contributing to the Open Source ecosystem (shockingly we are a diverse bunch).  Far from being the vestige of communism that many people tried to paint the Free Software and Open Source movements in the early days, the ecosystem is a true free market.  Remember the free in Free Software is about freedom not price.  The price paid for people releasing their code into the wild increasingly these days has been money but is still overwhelmingly supported by code being contributed back, recognition from peers and credit for the time spent not doing something else.  To push aside giving people credit for that work that they have done runs the risk that they will not contribute in the future.  Credit is the grease that allow our cogs to spin freely.  Karl’s contribution to some may seem small but if it wasn’t him would anyone else step up to the to do the same things?

So if putting every author of every package on a press release is prohibitively expensive what should we be doing?

Language and attitude are key here, especially in public.  If an author feels they aren’t getting enough credit it is something to look into.  Words should spell out what has come from the hard work of external contributors, because if after all we are willing to praise ourselves for our own contributions then acknowledging that we stand on the shoulders of giants shouldn’t be a burden.  Blogs and talks are excellent places to give credit.  The kernel talks often do this very well even though they can’t list out every contributor, and I recently saw an animation of the development of python that excellently visualized all of the contributors over a period of time.

Credit where, credit is due.  It is an important part of our culture.  Without it the ecosystem breaks down and that is a large price to pay for not saying thank you. Viva La Upstream!!!

I feel I owe this blog post to Chris being that I’ve been cited as one of the catalysts for some in the GNOME community aligning themselves with WebKit.  Not that I think that is bad that there is competition in the browser market (competition is one thing but a line in the sand is just counterproductive here) but my original intent was merely to ask what are our priorities and what projects would align closer to those priorities.

In any case it was reported on Slashdot that according to an article at Dot Net Perls, Firefox is now one of the most efficient browsers when it comes to memory usage.  This meshes with the internal tests Mozilla was doing and Chris blogged about.  It was one of my main gripes with Firefox when using the XULRunner and Gecko engine as the basis for an embedded browser.  At the time I was a bit nonplussed as the work that was being done to make Firefox better revolved around blaming and removing important libraries instead of fixing the root causes.

If the data is to be believed (and be transferable to Linux as the tests were run on Windows) then it does point to significant improvements in Firefox and I thank the Mozilla community for listening and dealing with the issues head on.  Software is hard and we shouldn’t turn our backs on a friend of the Linux community even when they might not be walking lock step with us.  The flip side is Mozilla does need to be concious of the needs of downstream developers and not use its market position as bludgeon to get its way. To that end there are still the issues of a stable embedded API and better platform integration. I hear those are being worked on so hopefully it won’t be an issue going forward.

Again I would like to thank the Mozilla community for putting out a great browser that is a serious competitor with Internet Explorer. I would also like to thank the Mozilla Foundation for helping fund accessibility work in GNOME. By working with each other instead of butting heads, as happens every once in awhile, the ecosystem grows and benefits both communities.