J5’s Blog

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.

Well it has happened.  Bryan left yesterday and Chris is out on the cape doing his national guard duties.  I think he gets back here for a couple of days and then hitches up his trailer and heads down to Charlotte. It was only about seven months ago when I was in Italy for a friend’s wedding and got a call from Bryan asking if my lease was coming up and if I would like to move in. I might not have picked up but as chance had it I had just gotten back from an fun yet exhausting day of touring and was itching to hear from someone back home. To make a long story short I moved in in February and haven’t looked back since.

It has only been four or so months since I moved in but in many ways it has been life changing. When the new roommates move in, Nate in July and Aaron in August, hopefully we will keep up the social atmosphere. Sometime this summer a fourth roommate will also join the fray as I search for a dog to adopt. I really do miss having Moose around blocking my view of the TV, farting for attention or giving the I’m sorry eyes when knocking down tables, hitting the eject button on the PS3 while we are playing or generally being mischievous. He did leave me something to remember him by though - a pulled back muscle from carrying his fifty pound body up the stairs when I had to go to work but he wanted to stay outside. You so crazy Moose.

Me: So I’m thinking about going back to school.

Bryan: Don’t do that, you are throwing your money away.  I think you learn so much more by reading books, talking to others and actually doing.  Why do you really want to go back to school?

Me: You know I think you may be right.  I learned programming mostly on my own.  I’ll have to think about it more and get back to you.

… a couple of days pass …

Me: I know why I want to  go back to school, so I am surrounded by like minded people who come from different backgrounds so they approach problems from different angles.  I want to have this constant debate so I am challenged to find the underlying reasons for my own decisions and actions.

Bryan: Hmmm, that is a good answer.  You should do it.

As many may already know, Bryan Clark is leaving for Vancouver to join the Thunderbird Team while learning how to properly say “ay” to piss off the locals. Chris Hartz our other roommate also got an awesome job down in Charlotte protecting our freedoms from behind a desk using an occasional paper clip. Hey those paper clips can be dangerous. They will be vacating this Thursday.

I’m going to miss the constant friendly debates we had which allowed the ability to flesh out my own arguments and understand and examine my beliefs more fully. I hope they took something similar from the experience.

Disclaimer: While yes, I am looking at going back to school, most likely for some buisness/operational type of degree with an engineering background (is it weird to get excited about process efficiency?), that is a year away and will most likely be part time. I don’t intend to leave Red Hat or the work I do for the larger FOSS community if I can help it.