Daniel Pocock: Is giving money to Conservancy the best course of action?
There has been a lot of discussion lately about Software Freedom Conservancy's fundraiser.
Various questions come to my mind:
Is this the only way to achieve goals such as defending copyright? (There are other options, like corporate legal insurance policies)
When all the options are compared, is Conservancy the best one? Maybe it is, but it would be great to confirm why we reached that conclusion.
Could it be necessary to choose two or more options that complement each other? Conservancy may just be one part of the solution and we may get a far better outcome if money is divided between Conservancy and insurance and something else.
What about all the other expenses that developers incur while producing free software? Many other professionals, like doctors, do work that is just as valuable for society but they are not made to feel guilty about asking for payment and reimbursement. (In fact, for doctors, there is no shortage of it from the drug companies).
There seems to be an awkwardness about dealing with money in the free software world and it means many projects continue to go from one crisis to the next. Just yesterday on another mailing list there was discussion about speakers regularly asking for reimbursement to attend conferences and at least one strongly worded email appeared questioning whether people asking about money are sufficiently enthusiastic about free software or if they are only offering to speak in the hope their trip will be paid.
The DebConf team experienced one of the more disappointing examples of a budget communication issue when developers who had already volunteered long hours to prepare for the event then had to give up valuable time during the conference to wash the dishes for 300 people. Had the team simply insisted that the high cost of local labor was known when the country was selected then the task could have been easily outsourced to local staff. This came about because some members of the community felt nervous about asking for budget and other people couldn't commit to spend.
Rather than stomping on developers who ask about money or anticipate the need for it in advance, I believe we need to ask people if money was not taboo, what is the effort they could contribute to the free software world and how much would they need to spend in a year for all the expenses that involved. After all, isn't that similar to the appeal from Conservancy's directors? If all developers and contributors were suitably funded, then many people would budget for contributions to Conservancy, other insurances, attending more events and a range of other expenses that would make the free software world operate more smoothly.
In contrast, the situation we have now (for event-related expenses) is that developers funding themselves or with tightly constrained budgets or grants often have to spend hours picking through AirBNB and airline web sites trying to get the best deal while those few developers who do have more flexible corporate charge cards just pick a convenient hotel and don't lose any time reading through the fine print to see if there are charges for wifi, breakfast, parking, hidden taxes and all the other gotchas because all of that will be covered for them.
With developer budgets/wishlists documented, where will the money come from? Maybe it won't appear, maybe it will. But if we don't ask for it at all, we are much less likely to get anything. Mozilla has recently suggested that developers need more cash and offered to put $1 million on the table to fix the problem, is it possible other companies may see the benefit of this and put up some cash too?
The time it takes to promote one large budget and gather donations is probably far more efficient than the energy lost firefighting lots of little crisis situations.
Being more confident about money can also do a lot more to help engage people and make their participation sustainable in the long term. For example, if a younger developer is trying to save the equivalent of two years of their salary to pay a deposit on a house purchase, how will they feel about giving money to Conservancy or paying their own travel expenses to a free software event? Are their families and other people they respect telling them to spend or to save and if our message is not compatible with that, is it harder for us to connect with these people?
One other thing to keep in mind is that budgeting needs to include the costs of those who may help the fund-raising and administration of money. If existing members of our projects are not excited about doing such work we have to be willing to break from the "wait for a volunteer or do-it-yourself" attitude. There are so many chores that we are far more capable of doing as developers that we still don't have time for, we are only fooling ourselves if we anticipate that effective fund-raising will take place without some incentives going back to those who do the work.
Recently, Eric Raymond, famous for is 
The arguments are quite easy to summarize: The meritocracy party proposes that One s contribution should only be evaluated based on the content and the quality , while the SJW party asserts that in case the submitter as from a minority group, in particular everyone outside the white straight group, the contribution has to be accepted with higher probability (or without discussion) to ensure equality.
(Added here for clarification: A SJW is someone who puts the agenda of anti-genderization and anti-biasization (nice word) above all other objectives, often by quoting scientific results on existing and not deniable bias)
Well, I am a scientist, and I can tell you just one thing: I simply don t give a shit for whether someone is white, black, red, green, red, straight, gay, a Rastafari or 
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for 
In case you are going to
What happened in the 
Just in case someone else finds these useful, some bash functions I ve got into the habit of having in 
s vezes voc s quer um pouco mais de velocidade nos downloads do APT e n o tem muito como modificar muito a instala o do cliente. Duas dicas simples podem ganhar minutos preciosos:
Coloque em algum dos /etc/apt.conf.d (sugiro criar o /etc/apt.conf.d/71parallel) a seguinte linha:
This post is intended to document some elements of workflow that I ve setup to manage videos produced for a MOOC, where different colleagues work collaboratively on a set of video sequences, in a remote way.
We are a team of several schools working on the same course, and we have an incremental process, so we need some collaboration over a quite long period of many remote authors, over a set of video sequences.
We re probably going to review some of the videos and make changes, so we need to monitor changes, and submit versions to colleagues on remote sites so they can criticize and get later edits. We may have more that one site doing video production. Thus we need to share videos along the flow of production, editing and revision of the course contents, in a way that is manageable by power users (we re all computer scientists, used to SVN or Git).
I ve decided to start an experiment with Git and 
The drawback is that we need manual intervention for starting the rsync, and also that we must make sure that the rsync target is ready to get a backup.
The target of the rsync on Linux is a git-annex clone using the default indirect mode, which handles the files as symlinks to the actual copies managed by git-annex inside the .git/ directory. But that ain t suitable to be compared to the origin of the rsync mirror which are plain files on the Windows computer.
We must then do a git-annex edit on the whole target of the rsync mirror before the rsync, so that the files are there as regular video files. This is costly, in terms of storage, and also copying time (our repo contains around 50 Gb, and the Linux host is a rather tiny laptop).
After the rsync, all the files need to be compared to the SHA256 known to git-annex so that only modified files are taken into account in the commit. We perform a git-annex add on the whole files (for new files having appeared at rsync time), and then a git-annex sync . That takes a lot of time, since all SHA256 computations are quite long for such a set of big files (the video rushes and edited videos are in HD).
So the process needs to be the following, on the target Linux host:
I would have preferred to have a working git-annex on windows, but that is a much more manageable process for me for now, and until we have more videos to handle in our repo that our Linux laptop can hold, we re quite safe.
Next steps will probably involve gardening the contents of the repo on the Linux host so we re only keeping copies of current files, and older copies are only kept on the 2 servers, in case of later need.
I hope this can be useful to others, and I d welcome suggestions on how to improve our process.
Finally, bzed.de is back online and I m planning to start blogging again! Part
of the reason why I became inactive was the usage of 
Is your table a mess of wires? Do you have multiple devices connected via serial and can't remember which is /dev/ttyUSBX is connected to what board? Unless you are a embedded developer, you are unlikely to deal with serial much anymore - In that case you can just jump to the next post in your news feed. Introducting ser2netUsually people start with minicom for serial access. There are better tools - picocom, screen, etc. But to easily map multiple serial ports, use 
Even though I spend more time staring at the screen than typing, there are times when I - after lots and lots of prior brain work - sit down and start typing, a lot. A couple of years ago, I started to feel pain in my wrists, and there were multiple occasions when I had to completely stop writing for longer periods of time. These were situations I obviously did not want repeated, so I started to look for remedies. First, I bought a new keyboard, a 
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