Posted
3 days
ago
Terrible night, E. complaining the whole time: teeth,
cold, temperature ? who knows. Dosing with every known substance
ineffective - exhausting.
Off to NCC; DT spoke on - mission; pottered about afterwards,
and got
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the babes home for a quick lunch: DIY wraps. Held the
fort with a very tired and sad baby (sleeping on me), while J.
took the older three to an 'Angels parade' suitably attired.
Took N. to a children's party - lots of bouncing and pizza.
Back, bed early tired. [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Lefty)
Recently, Richard Stallman has suggested on the foundation-list that Planet GNOME is not effectively representing the free software movement, and that rules should be developed to bar "favorable mention" of proprietary software.
I've put
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together a small survey on SurveyMonkey in which I hope to get as many people to participate as possible. Mr. Stallman has raised "supporting free software" as being a critical obligation of the Planet, since GNOME is part of the GNU Project; Philip van Hoof, among others, has suggested that perhaps we need to re-examine that relationship.
The thread on the foundation-list can be found archived here., in the thread, "Code of Conduct and Foundation membership". Mr. Stallman's contributions begin here.
The survey can be found here. [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
My boss Monty has issued a call to action. It looks like the European Commission is set to rule on the Sun/Oracle merger, and Oracle has used its clout with its customers to generate a mass-mail campaign. So now it’s time for the Free Software
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community to do the same.
First, let me again say that I am employed by Monty Program, and so this request is not coming from a wholly disinterested party.
Second, the idea that Oracle should not acquire MySQL without limitations or conditions has been championed by such luminaries as Richard Stallman. While Eben Moglen wrote a missive on behalf of Oracle, his idea that any fork using GPL code has the exact same business opportunities Oracle has is, plainly, absurd. It shows a deep misunderstanding of how MySQL’s dual licensing has worked to build a viable business from Free Software. In short, Stallman “gets it,” Moglen does not.
Third, if Oracle believes the “anyone can fork it” argument, why did they not drop this whole matter months ago, saving themselves millions in revenue, and just fork it themselves? ZDnet published an article a month ago saying, “The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose,” Ellison said at the time, insisting he wouldn’t spin off MySQL. Do I believe Larry Ellison is an astute businessman? You bet I do. So the fact he isn’t prepared to believe his own company’s “anyone can fork it!” mantra tells me something. It should tell you something, too.
Forking code saves the code. It does not save the business. Full stop.
Finally, read Monty’s post and act! Thanks! [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
Being not subscribed to GNOME’s foundation-list mailing list (and having no intention to subscribe to it), I tried to catch up a bit with the controversy of the last days. I might have missed stuff of course.
Trying to
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summarize:
Initially, Lucas brought up complaints received about content posted on Planet GNOME which triggered a discussion whether there should be rules on appropriate content, whether an annual reminder should be sent to blog authors aggregated to Planet GNOME (telling them that they can remove themselves if they don’t feel fine with it anymore), and whether GNOME has “lost” people because of reasons that could have been avoided.
RMS joined the discussion and Philip disagreed with him. RMS then wrote that people should not post about closed source on Planet GNOME and defined his “most minimal support for the free software movement” . Because of the obvious disagreement, Philip consequently proposed “to have a vote on GNOME’s membership to the GNU project”. Dave warned that such a vote “could cause a lot of harm & discord for the GNOME community” which was answered by Philip.
So far my summary.
Other folks may find other postings more important than the ones I’ve picked – feel free to read the entire thread yourself to get your own opinion.
Now some questions come up here:
How is “membership to the GNU project” defined? Was “FSF membership” meant here maybe? Is there a public document?
Is KDE nowadays such a “member to the GNU project” too? If not, why not? Did KDE try or consider applying for it? Links to potential past KDE discussions appreciated.
Wikipedia states that “the Linux kernel is not part of the GNU project” which leads to the question: How important is it for the GNOME community to have GNOME being a member to the GNU project? (As a sidenote, the term “GNOME” being an acronym is obsolete, just to avoid a useless discussion about potential project name changes).
I wonder if members of the FSF’s board of directors agree with Richard Stallman’s opinion that Planet GNOME “should not invite people to talk about their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME contributors”. As clearly written, “Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors” which also covers activities outside of GNOME, may it be philosophy, hunting, music, non-free software or anything else, as long as blog authors have some relation to GNOME. For technical news there is always GNOME News.
Which influence do FSF members have on FSF decisions? For example the Windows7 campaign got some bad feedback within parts of free software communities. How transparently are decisions made in the FSF, e.g. deciding about such campaigns? Who is involved? Are there public archives (URLs)?
Sorry if answers exist out there and I have been too lazy to search or have not found them yet.
With regard to my current personal opinion (which may of course change as I’m willing to learn), having read Richard M. Stallman’s recent posts on the foundation mailinglist, he remains a fascistic extremist to me, painting black & white, ignoring reality (with a bad impact on free software user experience if you cannot interact properly with closed source products that obviously do exist out there) and trying to exclude folks from the GNOME community (because they also work on VMWare stuff) because he knows better what’s good for the GNOME community.
RMS has done great work in the 80es and 90es that I really appreciate, but I prefer to forget about his last years (a bit similar to Michael Jackson actually), especially his GCDS keynote in 2009 (yes, I have to come up with this again, because it’s part of the picture). RMS was a non-funny comedian with jokes that can easily be interpreted as sexistic (to me they definitely were, though that most probably was not his intention), trying desperately to auction a GNU puppet by behaving like on a children’s birthday. Okay, one can probably discuss humor here. At least it was not my type of humor. If GNOME ever invites RMS again to a conference, I prefer to stay away and not go there. It’s simply not the community that I want to be part of and proud of.
I always tell myself that RMS does not speak on behalf of the entire FSF, as the FSF has good intentions. But good intentions don’t count if the actual acting and outcome is bad. Plus organizations normally are reflected quite well by the leaders that were elected to represent them.
So yes, the discussion might be definitely less heated if the request to not post about closed source on Planet GNOME had been posted by a different person than RMS, as he himself is controversial enough already. Plus for many people, FSF = RMS.
A general note at the end: “Freedom” to me is also the personal freedom to tolerate and even to use non-free software from time to time, without having a big issue if it fits my needs way better. (For potential “Then help the free software to become better!” comments: I talk about the present here, not about the future.)
And I have enough friends working on closed software. They are awesome people. They just have a different concept that I totally accept because I’m not in a position to say “My concept is the only right one and superior to any other concept”. I prefer to let history decide on that instead. [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
Been doing a pretty poor job of blogging my life lately. Mostly it's been photos and no text.
Took a week off from work (the week before last) because a number of our Perth friends came to visit. I've never dropped someone off and picked
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someone up from the airport in the same run before.
It was a fun, but exhausting week that culminated with my 25th birthday. Not as traumatic as I might have anticipated 6 months ago. Ended up eating every meal out that day, breakfast at Grigons + Orr, lunch at Friends of the Earth, and dinner at the East Brunswick Club.
Went to Prahran on Monday for Jo's birthday (who is actually 2 days older than me). Turned out everyone there was vegan (I think?) but there weren't really that many vegan (veganisable) things on the menu. There somewhat of a dearth of vegan food south of the Yarra. Felt bad for the people who still ended up paying full-price for a seafood noodles minus the seafood.
Also went to Fitzroy twice on Monday, once to have lunch with Steph between her meetings and then later that day with Furry (before heading on to Prahran). Thankfully I still managed a couple of early starts this week, and a few late evenings, so somehow I still managed to finish all my work by Friday (even with all the distractions). Worked on the telepathy-gabble codebase for the first time this week.
We became just that little bit more Victorian this week. The registration and insurance on our car was running out, so we had to transfer the car to Victorian registration. This meant new license plates.
I've personally been very slack with doing any Christmas shopping. Although we have been to a lot of markets, at which I've seen a lot of great stuff, for the same couple of people, there are people who remain notoriously hard to find something useful and meaningful for (I hate just buying crap).
I think I'll propose family-based secret-Santa for next year. Steph's cousins do this. The way it works is everyone writes down a list of stuff they want, and it all gets put into an (electronic) hat, and then you buy a bunch of stuff for just one person. Plus instead of buying 10 books or DVDs or whatever you buy the person a larger present to the same cumulative value, allowing them to ask for something they want but may be unable to afford (without the hassle of asking everyone if they want to go shares in a gift).
Went to the Walk Against Warming yesterday. Estimates place the attendance at 40,000 people. Looking down Swanston St was kinda amazing. I didn't take any pictures, but given the number of cameras, I'm sure lots exist. We walked from the State Library down Swanston St, past Federation Square, to the Princes Bridge (which spans the Yarra), where we formed a human sign photographed by blimp (safe climate - do it: looks like this).
by takver, CC BY-SA
The sign took a while to make, so I was amazing sore and hungry by the end. Caught the tram back to Friends of the Earth for lunch and to see Steph (who had to miss the walk because of her FotE shift). Ended up wiping down the tables and packing things up so they could close for the afternoon before coming home to have a nap. SJ dropped by later that evening to drop around some Christmas noms, and have a cup of tea and a catch-up.
Spent all of today so far in my PJs. Taken some photos. Have made an attempt at fruit bread, but I think our yeast is stale. I had to put it in a warmed oven to get it to rise. It's just cooling now, so we'll see how it went in a bit. My brother is meant to be showing up tomorrow, having been in Melbourne for a University motorsport event (they built a car!). [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
When we focus on what we want the world to look like, and make products that reflect that, we excel.
Posted
3 days
ago
I was surprised to read Monty Widenius’s plea to help save MySQL.
On the one hand clearly I sympathize and want to keep MySQL free. I am not entirely sure how that’s not already possible given that there’s always the option of
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forking, but I’ll leave that aside.
However, I don’t really get what Oracle is doing wrong here. In my opinion, Monty should have made sure when MySQL was sold to Sun to get all the things he’s now asking Oracle to commit to in writing. Sure, Sun didn’t have a competing product. But Sun is a company, and to not even consider that the company you’re selling to can be taken over by any other company, or can sell off your product to some other company, seems pretty dumb to me. Who were the other rumoured potential buyers of Sun ? IBM was one of them, no ? They have a database, no ? That database gets hurt by MySQL in the market as well, no ?
So, since I’m just an armchair commentator, I don’t really know what to do here. What do you guys think ? Surely I’m missing something obvious about what Oracle is doing. [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
Some lovely guy sent me this email:
From: ****@gmx.de
Subject: Freedom!
Take your closed source crap out of this planet, nobody cares about it.
--
Freedom Lover
--
Jetzt kostenlos herunterladen: Internet
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Explorer 8 und Mozilla Firefox 3.5 -
sicherer, schneller und einfacher! http://portal.gmx.net/de/go/chbrowser
Note the irony of using an email service that adds to your email an advertisement for Internet Explorer… [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
There are few things I really hate. One of them is regressions. Regressions are bad because they usually take away things we are used to rely on, and leave us with the idea that perhaps the technical improvements didn’t really improve our lifes as
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a user, despite putting less burden on the developers. Software is made for users, after all.
As part of my work on WebKitGTK+, I always keep an eye on regressions, both from previous WebKitGTK+ releases, and those imposed on embedding applications on their migration away from Gecko, and try to focus some of my efforts into lowering their numbers, whenever I can.
In recent times I have worked on removing a few very user-visible regressions in Epiphany, which I see as the most demanding WebKitGTK+ user in GNOME, such as save page not working, missing
favicon support, failing to
perform server-pushed downloads (such as GMail attachments), and not being able to view source. An example of a regression from a previous version of WebKit also exists: in 1.1.17 we started advertising more than we should as supported by the HTML5 media player, causing download to be almost completely broken.
All of these are working if you are using WebKit and Epiphany from trunk/master, so should be on the next development versions of WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany. Other people have also fixed many other regressions; a few examples: Xan has reimplemented the Epiphany customization of the context menu, Frederic Peters provided a work-around for mailto: links while we don’t have SoupURILoader yet, and Joanmarie Diggs keeps rocking on the accessibility front!
If you find regressions, keep them coming! If you have a patch, even better! =)
Next week WebKitGTK+ team gets together to work furiously on improving WebKitGTK+ in a hackfest sponsored by Collabora, and Igalia, and hosted/organized by Igalia. While there I should also get my hands on one of these. Can’t wait! =) [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (thiblahute)
Just a short entry about my Gsoc project "Nautilus: add Google documents support". So as I am now in summer vacation (studying in chile for one year), I found some time last week to carry on my work on my GVFS backend. It is still missing a few
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things and robustness, but it hopefully should be mergeable in this cycle. Actually the reading/writing isn't fully functionnal so it's not yet open to public test.
I am now going to Brazil for vacation for one month, but I promise, afterward I will fix this issues, and then would like to find people to test it and report bugs, if it's possible ;).
Just a little reminder if anyone wants to help me developing/reviewing the backend (we never now ;) ) http://github.com/thiblahute/gvfs/tree/googledocuments
Hopping I can send you interesting news quite quickly! [Less]
