Search Results: "miguel"

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

Danke
Thank you
(RTL or not?) / toda
Gracias
/ arigat
/ n ndi
Obrigado
Grazie
C m n
Kadin chey la
/ Efharisto
Dank je wel
Tak
D ngge
Merci
Kiitos
Tika hoki
/ dhanyavaadhamulu
Thank you and God save the Queen
Mul umesc
Tack
/ didi madloba
Gr cies
Dakujem
/ Aabhar
/ Dhanyavadagalu
Paldies
/ kop khun krap
Terima kasih
Hvala (hr)
/ Dhanyavad
/ Hvala (sr)
Hvala (sl)
/ Akun
/ Sukriya
Takk
/ Nandri
Maki biyen jianbakik
D kuji
/ Xiexie
/ Aabhari aahe
Faleminderit
/ Kam sah ham ni da
/ Blagodaram
/ Xiexie
Hvala (bs)

Danke
Thank you
(RTL or not?) / toda
Gracias
/ arigat
/ n ndi
Obrigado
Grazie
C m n
Kadin chey la
/ Efharisto
Dank je wel
Tak
D ngge
Merci
Kiitos
Tika hoki
/ dhanyavaadhamulu
Thank you and God save the Queen
Mul umesc
Tack
/ didi madloba
Gr cies
Dakujem
/ Aabhar li> / Dhanyavadagalu
Paldies
/ kop khun krap
Terima kasih
Hvala (hr)
/ Dhanyavad
/ Hvala (sr)
Hvala (sl)
/ Akun
/ Sukriya
Takk
/ Nandri
Maki biyen jianbakik
D kuji
/ Xiexie
/ Aabhari aahe
Faleminderit
/ Kam sah ham ni da
/ Blagodaram
/ Xiexie
Hvala (bs)

Finally presented that long-overdue exam!

What Yes, I have not used this kind of outfit for over 20 years. And I hope it will be 20 more years before I do it again. But today, I was seen like this in public. Why? Well, I won't explain the whole background yet again I did it a bit over a month ago in this same space. Much much in short, I never attended university, so after many years of working without any formal validation for my knowledge I followed the CENEVAL Acuerdo 286 procedure to get a "Software Engineering" title and the corresponding c dula profesional. Today I did the last portion of this procedure: Presenting an oral exam, defending the work I developed. Not precisely a thesis, but you can see it as an equivalent. One of the requisites was to go on formal attire Of course, I have some beautiful shirts I am very fond of, but I didn't want to risk it to such a detail, so I asked my friend and almost-neighbour Miguel Barajas to lend me the needed bits of clothing, and presented the exam. Was it easy? No, not by a long shot. Did I pass? Yes! Now, back to work!

A few days ago an article in the Norwegian Computerworld magazine about how version 2.0 of European Interoperability Framework has been successfully lobbied by the proprietary software industry to remove the focus on free software. Nothing very surprising there, given earlier reports on how Microsoft and others have stacked the committees in this work. But I find this very sad. The definition of an open standard from version 1 was very good, and something I believe should be used also in the future, alongside the definition from Digistan. Version 2 have removed the open standard definition from its content. Anyway, the news reminded me of the great reply sent by Dr. Edgar Villanueva, congressman in Peru at the time, to Microsoft as a reply to Microsofts attack on his proposal regarding the use of free software in the public sector in Peru. As the text was not available from a few of the URLs where it used to be available, I copy it here from my source to ensure it is available also in the future. Some background information about that story is available in an article from Linux Journal in 2002.

Lima, 8th of April, 2002
To: Se or JUAN ALBERTO GONZ LEZ
General Manager of Microsoft Per Dear Sir: First of all, I thank you for your letter of March 25, 2002 in which you state the official position of Microsoft relative to Bill Number 1609, Free Software in Public Administration, which is indubitably inspired by the desire for Peru to find a suitable place in the global technological context. In the same spirit, and convinced that we will find the best solutions through an exchange of clear and open ideas, I will take this opportunity to reply to the commentaries included in your letter. While acknowledging that opinions such as yours constitute a significant contribution, it would have been even more worthwhile for me if, rather than formulating objections of a general nature (which we will analyze in detail later) you had gathered solid arguments for the advantages that proprietary software could bring to the Peruvian State, and to its citizens in general, since this would have allowed a more enlightening exchange in respect of each of our positions. With the aim of creating an orderly debate, we will assume that what you call "open source software" is what the Bill defines as "free software", since there exists software for which the source code is distributed together with the program, but which does not fall within the definition established by the Bill; and that what you call "commercial software" is what the Bill defines as "proprietary" or "unfree", given that there exists free software which is sold in the market for a price like any other good or service. It is also necessary to make it clear that the aim of the Bill we are discussing is not directly related to the amount of direct savings that can by made by using free software in state institutions. That is in any case a marginal aggregate value, but in no way is it the chief focus of the Bill. The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:

Free access to public information by the citizen.

Permanence of public data.

Security of the State and citizens.

To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is indispensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single provider. The use of standard and open formats gives a guarantee of this free access, if necessary through the creation of compatible free software. To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code. To guarantee national security or the security of the State, it is indispensable to be able to rely on systems without elements which allow control from a distance or the undesired transmission of information to third parties. Systems with source code freely accessible to the public are required to allow their inspection by the State itself, by the citizens, and by a large number of independent experts throughout the world. Our proposal brings further security, since the knowledge of the source code will eliminate the growing number of programs with *spy code*. In the same way, our proposal strengthens the security of the citizens, both in their role as legitimate owners of information managed by the state, and in their role as consumers. In this second case, by allowing the growth of a widespread availability of free software not containing *spy code* able to put at risk privacy and individual freedoms. In this sense, the Bill is limited to establishing the conditions under which the state bodies will obtain software in the future, that is, in a way compatible with these basic principles. From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed:

the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software

the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software

the law does not specify which concrete software to use

the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought

the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed.
What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements regarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning. We agree, Mr. Gonzalez, that information and communication technology have a significant impact on the quality of life of the citizens (whether it be positive or negative). We surely also agree that the basic values I have pointed out above are fundamental in a democratic state like Peru. So we are very interested to know of any other way of guaranteeing these principles, other than through the use of free software in the terms defined by the Bill. As for the observations you have made, we will now go on to analyze them in detail: Firstly, you point out that: "1. The bill makes it compulsory for all public bodies to use only free software, that is to say open source software, which breaches the principles of equality before the law, that of non-discrimination and the right of free private enterprise, freedom of industry and of contract, protected by the constitution." This understanding is in error. The Bill in no way affects the rights you list; it limits itself entirely to establishing conditions for the use of software on the part of state institutions, without in any way meddling in private sector transactions. It is a well established principle that the State does not enjoy the wide spectrum of contractual freedom of the private sector, as it is limited in its actions precisely by the requirement for transparency of public acts; and in this sense, the preservation of the greater common interest must prevail when legislating on the matter. The Bill protects equality under the law, since no natural or legal person is excluded from the right of offering these goods to the State under the conditions defined in the Bill and without more limitations than those established by the Law of State Contracts and Purchasing (T.U.O. by Supreme Decree No. 012-2001-PCM). The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them (which would effectively be discriminatory, if restrictions based on national origin, race religion, ideology, sexual preference etc. were imposed). On the contrary, the Bill is decidedly antidiscriminatory. This is so because by defining with no room for doubt the conditions for the provision of software, it prevents state bodies from using software which has a license including discriminatory conditions. It should be obvious from the preceding two paragraphs that the Bill does not harm free private enterprise, since the latter can always choose under what conditions it will produce software; some of these will be acceptable to the State, and others will not be since they contradict the guarantee of the basic principles listed above. This free initiative is of course compatible with the freedom of industry and freedom of contract (in the limited form in which the State can exercise the latter). Any private subject can produce software under the conditions which the State requires, or can refrain from doing so. Nobody is forced to adopt a model of production, but if they wish to provide software to the State, they must provide the mechanisms which guarantee the basic principles, and which are those described in the Bill. By way of an example: nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office "suite", under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved. To continue; you note that:" 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies..." This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding "non-competitive ... practices." Of course, in defining any kind of purchase, the buyer sets conditions which relate to the proposed use of the good or service. From the start, this excludes certain manufacturers from the possibility of competing, but does not exclude them "a priori", but rather based on a series of principles determined by the autonomous will of the purchaser, and so the process takes place in conformance with the law. And in the Bill it is established that *no one* is excluded from competing as far as he guarantees the fulfillment of the basic principles. Furthermore, the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement. On the other hand, the central aspect of competivity is the chance to provide better choices to the consumer. Now, it is impossible to ignore the fact that marketing does not play a neutral role when the product is offered on the market (since accepting the opposite would lead one to suppose that firms' expenses in marketing lack any sense), and that therefore a significant expense under this heading can influence the decisions of the purchaser. This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competitiveness is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations. It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: "update your software to the new version" (at the user's expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider's judgment alone, are "old"; and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays "trapped" in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary). You add: "3. So, by compelling the State to favor a business model based entirely on open source, the bill would only discourage the local and international manufacturing companies, which are the ones which really undertake important expenditures, create a significant number of direct and indirect jobs, as well as contributing to the GNP, as opposed to a model of open source software which tends to have an ever weaker economic impact, since it mainly creates jobs in the service sector." I do not agree with your statement. Partly because of what you yourself point out in paragraph 6 of your letter, regarding the relative weight of services in the context of software use. This contradiction alone would invalidate your position. The service model, adopted by a large number of companies in the software industry, is much larger in economic terms, and with a tendency to increase, than the licensing of programs. On the other hand, the private sector of the economy has the widest possible freedom to choose the economic model which best suits its interests, even if this freedom of choice is often obscured subliminally by the disproportionate expenditure on marketing by the producers of proprietary software. In addition, a reading of your opinion would lead to the conclusion that the State market is crucial and essential for the proprietary software industry, to such a point that the choice made by the State in this bill would completely eliminate the market for these firms. If that is true, we can deduce that the State must be subsidizing the proprietary software industry. In the unlikely event that this were true, the State would have the right to apply the subsidies in the area it considered of greatest social value; it is undeniable, in this improbable hypothesis, that if the State decided to subsidize software, it would have to do so choosing the free over the proprietary, considering its social effect and the rational use of taxpayers money. In respect of the jobs generated by proprietary software in countries like ours, these mainly concern technical tasks of little aggregate value; at the local level, the technicians who provide support for proprietary software produced by transnational companies do not have the possibility of fixing bugs, not necessarily for lack of technical capability or of talent, but because they do not have access to the source code to fix it. With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers. It is a common phenomenon in developing countries that local software industries obtain the majority of their takings in the service sector, or in the creation of "ad hoc" software. Therefore, any negative impact that the application of the Bill might have in this sector will be more than compensated by a growth in demand for services (as long as these are carried out to high quality standards). If the transnational software companies decide not to compete under these new rules of the game, it is likely that they will undergo some decrease in takings in terms of payment for licenses; however, considering that these firms continue to allege that much of the software used by the State has been illegally copied, one can see that the impact will not be very serious. Certainly, in any case their fortune will be determined by market laws, changes in which cannot be avoided; many firms traditionally associated with proprietary software have already set out on the road (supported by copious expense) of providing services associated with free software, which shows that the models are not mutually exclusive. With this bill the State is deciding that it needs to preserve certain fundamental values. And it is deciding this based on its sovereign power, without affecting any of the constitutional guarantees. If these values could be guaranteed without having to choose a particular economic model, the effects of the law would be even more beneficial. In any case, it should be clear that the State does not choose an economic model; if it happens that there only exists one economic model capable of providing software which provides the basic guarantee of these principles, this is because of historical circumstances, not because of an arbitrary choice of a given model. Your letter continues: "4. The bill imposes the use of open source software without considering the dangers that this can bring from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties." Alluding in an abstract way to "the dangers this can bring", without specifically mentioning a single one of these supposed dangers, shows at the least some lack of knowledge of the topic. So, allow me to enlighten you on these points. On security: National security has already been mentioned in general terms in the initial discussion of the basic principles of the bill. In more specific terms, relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains errors or "bugs" (in programmers' slang). But it is also well known that the bugs in free software are fewer, and are fixed much more quickly, than in proprietary software. It is not in vain that numerous public bodies responsible for the IT security of state systems in developed countries require the use of free software for the same conditions of security and efficiency. What is impossible to prove is that proprietary software is more secure than free, without the public and open inspection of the scientific community and users in general. This demonstration is impossible because the model of proprietary software itself prevents this analysis, so that any guarantee of security is based only on promises of good intentions (biased, by any reckoning) made by the producer itself, or its contractors. It should be remembered that in many cases, the licensing conditions include Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product. In respect of the guarantee: As you know perfectly well, or could find out by reading the "End User License Agreement" of the products you license, in the great majority of cases the guarantees are limited to replacement of the storage medium in case of defects, but in no case is compensation given for direct or indirect damages, loss of profits, etc... If as a result of a security bug in one of your products, not fixed in time by yourselves, an attacker managed to compromise crucial State systems, what guarantees, reparations and compensation would your company make in accordance with your licensing conditions? The guarantees of proprietary software, inasmuch as programs are delivered AS IS'', that is, in the state in which they are, with no additional responsibility of the provider in respect of function, in no way differ from those normal with free software. On Intellectual Property: Questions of intellectual property fall outside the scope of this bill, since they are covered by specific other laws. The model of free software in no way implies ignorance of these laws, and in fact the great majority of free software is covered by copyright. In reality, the inclusion of this question in your observations shows your confusion in respect of the legal framework in which free software is developed. The inclusion of the intellectual property of others in works claimed as one's own is not a practice that has been noted in the free software community; whereas, unfortunately, it has been in the area of proprietary software. As an example, the condemnation by the Commercial Court of Nanterre, France, on 27th September 2001 of Microsoft Corp. to a penalty of 3 million francs in damages and interest, for violation of intellectual property (piracy, to use the unfortunate term that your firm commonly uses in its publicity). You go on to say that: "The bill uses the concept of open source software incorrectly, since it does not necessarily imply that the software is free or of zero cost, and so arrives at mistaken conclusions regarding State savings, with no cost-benefit analysis to validate its position." This observation is wrong; in principle, freedom and lack of cost are orthogonal concepts: there is software which is proprietary and charged for (for example, MS Office), software which is proprietary and free of charge (MS Internet Explorer), software which is free and charged for (Red Hat, SuSE etc GNU/Linux distributions), software which is free and not charged for (Apache, Open Office, Mozilla), and even software which can be licensed in a range of combinations (MySQL). Certainly free software is not necessarily free of charge. And the text of the bill does not state that it has to be so, as you will have noted after reading it. The definitions included in the Bill state clearly *what* should be considered free software, at no point referring to freedom from charges. Although the possibility of savings in payments for proprietary software licenses are mentioned, the foundations of the bill clearly refer to the fundamental guarantees to be preserved and to the stimulus to local technological development. Given that a democratic State must support these principles, it has no other choice than to use software with publicly available source code, and to exchange information only in standard formats. If the State does not use software with these characteristics, it will be weakening basic republican principles. Luckily, free software also implies lower total costs; however, even given the hypothesis (easily disproved) that it was more expensive than proprietary software, the simple existence of an effective free software tool for a particular IT function would oblige the State to use it; not by command of this Bill, but because of the basic principles we enumerated at the start, and which arise from the very essence of the lawful democratic State. You continue: "6. It is wrong to think that Open Source Software is free of charge. Research by the Gartner Group (an important investigator of the technological market recognized at world level) has shown that the cost of purchase of software (operating system and applications) is only 8% of the total cost which firms and institutions take on for a rational and truly beneficial use of the technology. The other 92% consists of: installation costs, enabling, support, maintenance, administration, and down-time." This argument repeats that already given in paragraph 5 and partly contradicts paragraph 3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs. However, allow me to point out that your conclusion is logically false: even if according to Gartner Group the cost of software is on average only 8% of the total cost of use, this does not in any way deny the existence of software which is free of charge, that is, with a licensing cost of zero. In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph 3. Now the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance. In the second place, due to the reproductive characteristics of the model, maintenance carried out for an application is easily replicable, without incurring large costs (that is, without paying more than once for the same thing) since modifications, if one wishes, can be incorporated in the common fund of knowledge. Thirdly, the huge costs caused by non-functioning software ("blue screens of death", malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability. You further state that: "7. One of the arguments behind the bill is the supposed freedom from costs of open-source software, compared with the costs of commercial software, without taking into account the fact that there exist types of volume licensing which can be highly advantageous for the State, as has happened in other countries." I have already pointed out that what is in question is not the cost of the software but the principles of freedom of information, accessibility, and security. These arguments have been covered extensively in the preceding paragraphs to which I would refer you. On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total. You continue: "8. In addition, the alternative adopted by the bill (I) is clearly more expensive, due to the high costs of software migration, and (II) puts at risk compatibility and interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector, given the hundreds of versions of open source software on the market." Let us analyze your statement in two parts. Your first argument, that migration implies high costs, is in reality an argument in favor of the Bill. Because the more time goes by, the more difficult migration to another technology will become; and at the same time, the security risks associated with proprietary software will continue to increase. In this way, the use of proprietary systems and formats will make the State ever more dependent on specific suppliers. Once a policy of using free software has been established (which certainly, does imply some cost) then on the contrary migration from one system to another becomes very simple, since all data is stored in open formats. On the other hand, migration to an open software context implies no more costs than migration between two different proprietary software contexts, which invalidates your argument completely. The second argument refers to "problems in interoperability of the IT platforms within the State, and between the State and the private sector" This statement implies a certain lack of knowledge of the way in which free software is built, which does not maximize the dependence of the user on a particular platform, as normally happens in the realm of proprietary software. Even when there are multiple free software distributions, and numerous programs which can be used for the same function, interoperability is guaranteed as much by the use of standard formats, as required by the bill, as by the possibility of creating interoperable software given the availability of the source code. You then say that: "9. The majority of open source code does not offer adequate levels of service nor the guarantee from recognized manufacturers of high productivity on the part of the users, which has led various public organizations to retract their decision to go with an open source software solution and to use commercial software in its place." This observation is without foundation. In respect of the guarantee, your argument was rebutted in the response to paragraph 4. In respect of support services, it is possible to use free software without them (just as also happens with proprietary software), but anyone who does need them can obtain support separately, whether from local firms or from international corporations, again just as in the case of proprietary software. On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place. You continue by observing that: "10. The bill discourages the creativity of the Peruvian software industry, which invoices 40 million US$/year, exports 4 million US$ (10th in ranking among non-traditional exports, more than handicrafts) and is a source of highly qualified employment. With a law that encourages the use of open source, software programmers lose their intellectual property rights and their main source of payment." It is clear enough that nobody is forced to commercialize their code as free software. The only thing to take into account is that if it is not free software, it cannot be sold to the public sector. This is not in any case the main market for the national software industry. We covered some questions referring to the influence of the Bill on the generation of employment which would be both highly technically qualified and in better conditions for competition above, so it seems unnecessary to insist on this point. What follows in your statement is incorrect. On the one hand, no author of free software loses his intellectual property rights, unless he expressly wishes to place his work in the public domain. The free software movement has always been very respectful of intellectual property, and has generated widespread public recognition of its authors. Names like those of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Andrea Arcangeli, Bruce Perens, Darren Reed, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, and many others, are recognized world-wide for their contributions to the development of software that is used today by millions of people throughout the world. On the other hand, to say that the rewards for authors rights make up the main source of payment of Peruvian programmers is in any case a guess, in particular since there is no proof to this effect, nor a demonstration of how the use of free software by the State would influence these payments. You go on to say that: "11. Open source software, since it can be distributed without charge, does not allow the generation of income for its developers through exports. In this way, the multiplier effect of the sale of software to other countries is weakened, and so in turn is the growth of the industry, while Government rules ought on the contrary to stimulate local industry." This statement shows once again complete ignorance of the mechanisms of and market for free software. It tries to claim that the market of sale of non- exclusive rights for use (sale of licenses) is the only possible one for the software industry, when you yourself pointed out several paragraphs above that it is not even the most important one. The incentives that the bill offers for the growth of a supply of better qualified professionals, together with the increase in experience that working on a large scale with free software within the State will bring for Peruvian technicians, will place them in a highly competitive position to offer their services abroad. You then state that: "12. In the Forum, the use of open source software in education was discussed, without mentioning the complete collapse of this initiative in a country like Mexico, where precisely the State employees who founded the project now state that open source software did not make it possible to offer a learning experience to pupils in the schools, did not take into account the capability at a national level to give adequate support to the platform, and that the software did not and does not allow for the levels of platform integration that now exist in schools." In fact Mexico has gone into reverse with the Red Escolar (Schools Network) project. This is due precisely to the fact that the driving forces behind the Mexican project used license costs as their main argument, instead of the other reasons specified in our project, which are far more essential. Because of this conceptual mistake, and as a result of the lack of effective support from the SEP (Secretary of State for Public Education), the assumption was made that to implant free software in schools it would be enough to drop their software budget and send them a CD ROM with Gnu/Linux instead. Of course this failed, and it couldn't have been otherwise, just as school laboratories fail when they use proprietary software and have no budget for implementation and maintenance. That's exactly why our bill is not limited to making the use of free software mandatory, but recognizes the need to create a viable migration plan, in which the State undertakes the technical transition in an orderly way in order to then enjoy the advantages of free software. You end with a rhetorical question: "13. If open source software satisfies all the requirements of State bodies, why do you need a law to adopt it? Shouldn't it be the market which decides freely which products give most benefits or value?" We agree that in the private sector of the economy, it must be the market that decides which products to use, and no state interference is permissible there. However, in the case of the public sector, the reasoning is not the same: as we have already established, the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector. The need for a law is based, firstly, on the realization of the fundamental principles listed above in the specific area of software; secondly, on the fact that the State is not an ideal homogeneous entity, but made up of multiple bodies with varying degrees of autonomy in decision making. Given that it is inappropriate to use proprietary software, the fact of establishing these rules in law will prevent the personal discretion of any state employee from putting at risk the information which belongs to citizens. And above all, because it constitutes an up-to-date reaffirmation in relation to the means of management and communication of information used today, it is based on the republican principle of openness to the public. In conformance with this universally accepted principle, the citizen has the right to know all information held by the State and not covered by well- founded declarations of secrecy based on law. Now, software deals with information and is itself information. Information in a special form, capable of being interpreted by a machine in order to execute actions, but crucial information all the same because the citizen has a legitimate right to know, for example, how his vote is computed or his taxes calculated. And for that he must have free access to the source code and be able to prove to his satisfaction the programs used for electoral computations or calculation of his taxes. I wish you the greatest respect, and would like to repeat that my office will always be open for you to expound your point of view to whatever level of detail you consider suitable. Cordially,
DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NU EZ
Congressman of the Republic of Per .

I have been wanting to post for several days already, at least since this last Sunday. I have repeatedly bragged about taking part in the Ciclot n: The last Sunday every month, the city's government closes to automotive transit a ~33Km circuit, for cyclists to enjoy. And by cyclists, I mean people from all expertise ranges Well, the very elite bikers will not take part of such a massive thing, but there are people pedalling a couple of blocks, people taking their small kids to drive a bit, and I recognized an amazingly large proportion of people doing the whole route. Well, this last Sunday one lap was not enough for me I did two laps, ~65Km.

(oh, and just for keeping the complaint current: After all, SportsTracker did release a version of thier software for the N95... But it requires Flash for using the webpage at all. I have several pointers at other applications... but am time-starved right now to start reviewing :-/ ) Anyway, I decided to do this double ciclot n in order to train for next week. If you are anywhere near Mexico City, you are invited - this is meant to be a large group ride, and looks very fun! Doble Marat n Ciclista Urbano del Bicentenario We are two weeks away from the 200 year conmemoration of the beginning of the Independence War in Mexico. A group of cyclists came up with the idea to organize a Double Marathon to celebrate! 84Km of biking in Mexico City:

For some reason, the distance numbers in that map were made... in miles :-P Anyway, the planned route will be:

Jardin de los periodistas ilustres (Delegaci n Venustiano Carranza)
Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de M xico
Circuito Bicentenario ( antes circuito interior )
Monumento a La Raza - Hospital La Raza
R o San Joaquin
Viaducto Bicentenario ( carril confinado sin interrumpir la circulacion )
Torres de Sat lite 50 aniversario
Presidencia municipal de Tlalnepantla
Presidencia municipal de Naucalpan
Anillo Periferico Sur
Secretar a de la Defensa
Bosque de Chapultepec 1 y 2 secci n
Segundo Piso del Distrito Federal
Ciudad Universitaria patrimonio cultural de la humanidad
Insurgentes Sur
Miguel ngel de Quevedo
Calzada de Tlapan
Z calo centro historico del distrito federal
Calle 16 de septiembre fin del recorrido

It looks very fun. Besides, although it is not that flat, it is one of the flattest long distance routes you will ever have. The toughest part will be IMO the Northern part of Circuito Bicentenario and possibly some bits of Perif rico towards Naucalpan. Then, a long flat stretch, with one long but not steep way up in Segundo Piso (near Las Flores), and a little stretch towards Ciudad Universitaria. Other than that, it looks very doable if you are in a moderately decent condition. And taking part in such a thing is very very worthy! As a final note... This same Sunday, it has been somewhat publicized the first D a Nacional de la Bicicleta (Bycicling National Day) will be held all over the country, kickstarting the National Cycling Crusade. Sounds nice, right? Even impressive? Yeah, but... If you look at the published information (in the page I just linked), you will see several cities are opening cyclist circuits. For one day only, which means, it does not build awareness among the population on how easy, how convenient and how fun it is to use the bicycle as means of transportation. And not only that The cyclist routes clearly make a point that cycling is a good way, at most, to have fun... But not a general habit we should all embrace. Lets see, as an example, the distances offered (only for the cities quoting route length):

Guerrero: Chilpancingo, 2Km; Chilapa de lvarez, 4.5Km
Sinaloa: Culiac n, 4.7Km
Nuevo Le n:Monterrey, 1.9Km
Quer taro: Quer taro, 3.2Km
Sonora: Nacozari, 1.5Km; Naco, 1.5Km; Huasbas, 1Km; Granados, 1Km; Imuris, 1.5Km; Huatabampo, 1.5Km; Yecora, 1.5Km; Sahuaripa, 1Km; Caborca, 2Km; Navojoa, 3Km; Santa Ana: 2Km; San Luis R o Colorado: 2Km; Cd. Obreg n: 3Km; Hermosillo: 3Km; Nogales: 4Km; Magdalena: 3Km; Guaymas: 4Km; Empalme: 2Km
Morelos: Cuernavaca: 2Km

...And so it goes. As you can see, several very important cities (i.e. Monterrey, Chilpancingo, Cuernavaca) put only a 2km route. 2Km by bike is... Nothing. 2Km is done at a leisurely pace in less than 15 minutes (I often sustain 20Km/h, which would mean 2Km in 6 minutes). And, in this short sample (the linked page has the information for several other states, but the pattern holds), most states are only making this in the largest city or two, completely forgetting the bulk of their territories. In my opinion, this "effort" was done backwardsly, and ends up delivering the exact opposite message to what should be done.

http://github.com/cjac/mcs I m also hosting it on my own not-as-l33t git repo: http://git.colliertech.org/?p=mcs.git;a=summary Does this mean that I get a cooler than Miguel tee shirt?

Earlier this month, I applied to the Mono Project (and the University of Washington, and Ubuntu, and Debian, and The Perl Foundation) requesting a mentor to get Perl6 hosted on the DLR. Last Tuesday, Miguel contacted me and asked that I chat with Michael Hutchinson about possibly taking up a different project. It seems that the group did not have any mentors who felt comfortable mentoring the Perl6 project. After a bit of consideration, I agreed to modify my application and take up a project to revive the regular expression compiler from 2.2. Today, the project was officially accepted, and I met with my mentor for the first time (hi Rodrigo!). I will also be working with Matthew Wilson (aka @diakopter), since he has purportedly implemented a number of regex-to-IL compilers ;) He also offered to mentor me if The Perl Foundation had accepted my application, and since he has already implemented a perl6 compiler in javascript, I have been looking forward to poking some code with him. Although the GSoC doesn t officially get started until 5/24, I m making a git-svn checkout now. I ve always committed the code directly to svn, but I ve enjoyed working with git, and it seems about time to start contributing via git-svn. It will be easier to have local branches this way, too. Anyway, I m looking forward to it ;)

Update March 1st, 24 UTC: Reynaldo Verdejo is ok, the list is complete! Update March 1st, 16 UTC: Alejandro Vald s, Fabi n Arias, Carlos R os Vera and Germ n P o-Caama o have been in contact with others in Chile.

Probably by now some of you know or are worried about the situation in Chile. I m not chilean nor in Chile but I ve been following closely due to the considerable number of good friends I have there, most of them related to GNOME.

From The Big Picture (AP Photo/Roberto Candia) Juan Carlos Inostroza (blog down) suggested I publish the list of GNOME/Free Software people in Chile that has reported since the earthquake and are fine, here it goes: Known, found and good:

Andrea Orellana Palma
lvaro Olivares
Alejandro Vald s (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via Felipe Besoa n)
Adrien Bustany (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via pvanhoof)
Cristian Barahona G.
Carlos R os Vera (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via his sister on fb)
Fernando Ruiz Altamirano
Joo Anfossi Mardones
Jorge Bustos
Juan Carlos Inostroza
Fabio Dur n
Fabi n Arias (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via Andrea Orellana)
Felipe Andres Besoa n Pino
Fernando San Mart n Woerner
Germ n P o-Caama o (updated 20100301 @16 UTC, via Pablo Estef )
Mario Gonz les
Miguel Angel Ruiz Manzano
Pablo Estef
Pedro Villavicencio Garrido
Ricardo Fuentes
Reynaldo Verdejo (updated 20100301 @24 UTC, via Claudio Saavedra, Juan Carlos Inostroza)
Sven von Brand
Sebasti n Lara

Not know, nor found, we presume good but without cellphones:

None

If you have been in contact with any of them, leave a comment, send a DM in twitter (@diegoe) and etc. List is not complete, I probably forgot someone, please remind me. Will update if I get news from anyone.

It's not that often that I start something from scratch. It's an amazing feeling to start a new project, to start writing something new. I like that. It's creation, it's an artistic part of our computing stuff. I feel like a code artist. And what I like even more is that little feeling that you are going in an unknown land. Some area in this tech world where nobody ever came before you, or only a few pioneers. That the sensation I got starting to using Cython, Python 3 and various other tools. I just spent half of my time trying to fix problems, rather than working on *my* code. Problems in autoconf macro not knowing Python 2.6 or Python 3.1. Problems and limitations in Cython. And problem in Python. That last one was a hard one. I'm still a beginner in the Python world: I barely know anything. And I was trying to use something nobody never did: building an embedded Python with a set of built-in modules. I spent hours trying to find why one type of module importing was badly failing. I finally found the answer thanks to a guy. who has the same problem A guy ? No. A pioneer. What do I say? A hero. He's been my week-hero! Thank you Miguel Lobo because you found the bug I chased for hours and because you even reported it as issue 1644818, including a patch! How not damn wonderful is that? I will not bore you with the technical details of that bug, since nobody cares. Nobody cares, even the Python guys, since that bug has been opened for 3 years, and nobody even reviewed in that time. I found an old thread about that bug where some guys were wanking about how they should do the review, because Miguel pushed for several weeks to have a review, back in 2007. But that bug was in my way. I had to do something. So I prepared my mail reader, mounted my web browser and here I was for a uniq quest: getting a Python bug fixed. At that point, if you did not stop reading earlier, you might get very excited. Don't be, spoiler, it's still not fixed. You'll have to wait the end of the season and see all the episodes I'll have to write to get the end of the story! Let's continue. I had to create an account on the Python bug tracking system. That was a trivial task for a man like me (you bet). Then, I launched a verbal attack, something you rarely see in a bug tracking system. Something I knew would awake any developer caring about their software.

Julien Danjou: Is there any chance to see this *bug* fixed someday?

I had the deep feeling that my quest was starting here. How many days would I have to wait until I get an answer? Time was passing. Minutes were ticking while I was waiting, sat in a comfortable sofa in a softly lighted room. It seemed like all my life was shorter than the delay I had to wait to get an answer. After waiting for hours, suddenly, and only 15 minutes later, I got an answer:

Martin v. L wis: Please ask on python-dev. I may be willing to revive my five-for-one offer.

Martin? Don't know that guy. Who is he? Who is he like? Will he fix that bug? What is this offer? So many question without an answer. But he asked to ask on python-dev, and I said: challenged accepted! I will write a mail to python-dev to get that bug fixed. Which I did. I sent a short (but well written you know, I made efforts) "WTF?" to pyhon-dev. And then the guy asked me to review 5 bugs so he will review and fix this one. And this is how I said that he was pissing me off for blackmailing me to fix a bug that was its "duty". Therefore, this is the end of the story so far. Will that bug be fixed some day? There's a hope, because another guy jumped in and took the bug assignment. To be continued. My conclusion about all that story: that is a little rude to start something new, with new tools, and get quickly into teething troubles. It's even more harsh to enter a community because you just found bugs, and be not very well received when you ask to apply a 10 lines long fix somebody wrote 3 years ago to fix it. I'll probably still use Python :-), but I get a darker image of its community now.

Drivel 2.0.4 ("Alive again")
============================

* Improvements:
- Add current patches from Debian and Ubuntu
- Add patches from bugzilla that have accumulated since 2.0.3
- New member of upstream team: Neil Williams
- Add tag support for LiveJournal. Closes #307967

* Translation updates:
- Added Italian translation (Vincenzo Campanella)
- Updated Germann translation (Mario Bl ttermann)
- Updated Portuguese translation. (Am rico Monteiro)
- Updated Canadian English translation. (Adam Weinberger)
- Updated Nepali translation. (Basanta shrestha)
- Updated Portuguese translation. (Miguel Figueiredo)
- Updated Russian translation. (Yuri Kozlov)

Drivel 2.0.4-1 has also arrived in Debian unstable - Ubuntu will update in due course but there's an Ubuntu release to get out before then (I assume).

http://incoming.debian.org/drivel_2.0.4-1_amd64.changes

Description:
drivel - Blogging client for the GNOME desktop
Closes: 465805 521452 521903 522335 522661 523425
Changes:
drivel (2.0.4-1) unstable; urgency=low
.
* New upstream release.
* [INTL:ru] Russian program translation update (Closes: #521452)
* [INTL:pt] Updated Portuguese translation (Closes: #521903)
* Update Standards Version (no changes)
* Drop previous patches and dpatch support, patches implemented
upstream.
* Switch to libcurl4-gnutls-dev instead of libcurl4-openssl-dev
to avoid linked against OpenSSL (Closes: #522335)
* Add LiveJournal tags support (Closes: #465805)
* [INTL:ru] Russian program translation update - added string
(Closes: #522661)
* [INTL:it] New Italian translation (Closes: #523425)
* Add gnome-doc-utils to build-depends

I've prepared a private autobuilder. As I've setup the incoming using scp, I don't need to gpg sign each package. But dupload complained saying that the package is not gpg signed. Lurking in dupload code, I found It's possible overriding the default preupload for my default host:

package config;

$default_host = "eragon";
$cfg 'eragon' =
fqdn => "eragon",
method => "scp",
incoming => "/data/autobuilder/incoming/unstable",
# files pass on to dinstall on ftp-master which sends emails itself
dinstall_runs => 1,
;

$cfg 'eragon' preupload 'changes' = '/bin/true';
1;

Ted T'so wonders about the LUGs over the world, seeking to answer a conversation he recently had at the Linux Foundation. He quotes a blog posting in Lenovo, Local User Groups - gone the way of the dinosaur? . I think this is an interesting point to gather input from others. In Mexico City, we did have a strong LUG several years ago, holding not-very-regular-but-good-quality-wise meetings, roughly monthly, at Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares. I was active there ~1996-2001.
By 2001, however, the group stopped acting as one - Maybe one of the main factors is that we had a very strong, unquestionable group leader and cohesion factor (Miguel), who worked at Nucleares and regularly got said auditorium. Once Miguel left to form Ximian, the group slowly disgregated. In one of the last LUG meetings, we started working towards the National Free Software Conference (CONSOL)... Nowadays, in Mexico (as a country) we have several conferences around the year, although I'd be hard-pressed to say whether any of them really fills the needs of a LUG (and my answer would probably be negative). Now, there are several smaller groups that have popped up in the void left by the Mexico City LUG - Mainly LUGs local to universities or faculties... And yes, a 25-million-people city is too large to have a single, functional LUG - Just the geographical size of the thing is too daunting. Besides, we are too many people, even though few of us are contributing any real work. But I also recognize that a local *users* group should care about making the users better, before focusing on making the world a better place ;-) Anyway... My intention with this post, besides writing what I see, is to ask to other people that read me (I know this blog is syndicated at Planeta Linux Mexico, maybe even people reading in other Latin American countries through Planeta EDUSOL) to write what they see at their local communities. To make this a bit more useful, please leave a comment (in English, if possible) at this blog, so this can be used as a summary for Ted's request as well.

After a summer during which I didn’t get to watch many movies, I’m back on track now. Here we go:

A Raisin in the Sun: this is a magnificent film, almost a masterpiece. Story of a family when a large sum of money comes to disrupt their lives. You should watch it.
Happiness: this one is definitely a masterpiece, but it’s quite likely you should not watch it: many people find it very disturbing. If you think you could take it, though, I say go for it.
There Will Be Blood: it is a good film, and it wasn’t a waste of my time, but I do believe it’s hyped. If you ask me, I think it’s so high in the IMDB list because of its last scene.
Ataque verbal: if you’re into Spanish cinema, and are fond of conversations, you may enjoy it quite much: a film consisting of 7 conversations. It isn’t perfect, but it’s different and cool (I’ve watched it twice, actually). The director, Miguel Albaladejo, has some other fine films as well.
The Remains of the Day: England, 1930; Anthony Hopkins is a butler, and Emma Thompson the housekeeper of the house. Ivory at his best. I had watched this film a couple years ago; having enjoyed it quite a lot, I went and read the book recently. Reading the book was a wonderful experience, so I decided to watch the film again. It is a very good and faithful script, but I think I enjoyed it this second time better. Regarding the book, I wrote some bits about it here; from now on I hope to write something about books I read in this space. By the way, the cover of the book has some amusement in it, see if you can spot it.

I spent much of this week in Alicante. It was wonderful to have a few days away from the beginnings of Winter in Cambridge - Alicante's in South West Spain, right on the Mediterranean. It's a lovely city, although it was very quiet due to the time of year. I was invited down to Alicante by organisers of the Congr s de Programari Lliure, Comunitat Valenciana, to present a talk about Debian. That I did, and as always my slides and photos are available in case people are interested. I wasn't too sure about what level to aim the talk, so I deliberately went for a general introduction to Debian. That seems to have been the correct level - nobody threw anything at me, and nobody was visibly falling asleep. *grin* It's also the first time I've ever given a talk with official translators, which is a weird experience! The main topic for the conference was the new release of Lliurex, Valencia's own GNU/Linux distribution targeted primarily at use in schools. The conference was massive; I was told there were about 1500 attendees in all, most of whom were teachers who wanted to come and learn more about Free Software. There was a good spread of talks and workshops, covering topics from development through to deployment in the classroom. The level of enthusiasm for Free Software here was immense - lots of people were keen to learn more about it and get involved. I was told that out of the 15 regions/states of Spain, 11 of them have now started their own distributions to use in schools! Extremadura were the first region to experiment with Free Software like this, and their success with LinEx was a clear inspiration to their neighbours elsewhere in Spain. As well as the obvious cost advantages of moving from proprietary to Free Software, the local governments also love the freedom to use and modify their software however they like - including the ability to provide their own translations.

I met up with a lot of cool people at the conference too. The local education minister (Alejandro Font de Mora) was keen to talk with all the speakers and very enthusiastic about the future of Free Software in his schools. As is increasingly common at FS events around the world, there were of course quite a few Debian people around too. Luciano and Miriam were also giving talks, and I bumped into Rene and Miguel and a whole bunch of others whose names I'm too crap to remember - sorry! I also spoke a lot with Kurt Gramlich, the mega-enthusiastic Skolelinux developer who was also happy to push Debian to everybody he spoke to *grin*. Jon "Maddog" Hall had some excellent ideas that I'm sure we'll all hear more about soon, and his talk was excellent. He did a very good job of explaining how Free Software makes such a difference, including how it helps people to make money. He also explained that due to travel he had missed Halloween at home and he wanted to share the experience of scary masks with the people at the conference:

I had a great time in Alicante, and I'm very grateful for the invitation to go there. I wish that the UK was as far as advanced as Spain in the use of Free Software in education - they've done a huge amount of good work in this area and I'm glad we can help them.

Juan Miguel Rodr guez and Luk Claes
DebConf 8, Mar del Plata, Argentina.

In an hour the online part of this combined embedded+fai meeting in Badajoz in Extremadura, Spain, will sadly be over, but the sadness will hopefully be compensated by good food (yes, the food at the last dinner was great) and more fun! To me it were three intensive days (plus some two half days of intense travelling) which were really productive. This post is a summary of what I did here, to document how useful these meetings are. I'm only one person out of 18, who did some Debian work here, much more stuff was done, most of it I probably didnt even notice, as 14 people where working on embedded stuff, which I mostly ignored... ;-) That said, I think it was still very nice to have this meeting together, a.) because I'm quite interested in embedded stuff and b.) because the embedded crowd is a fun one to hang around with!

Right now I'm quite tired so that I dont fully remember what I have done on the first day :) It included uploading the DebConf7 mpeg videos which will now be used by Miguel Gea to create DVDs from those, so that he gets familar with the toolchain, so that he then can do the DebConf8 DVDs once those videos are (fully) ready. That will still take some time though, but hopefully not too long.

Unlike DebConf8 I also brought my fancy new fonera2 with me, in the hope to give it to someone to work on emdebian support for it. This is quite a longer road, as currently uclibc is not part of Debian, but thats only one step in this puzzle. Much to my joy Per Andersson took the opportunity to play with it and now took it home with him to document how to run Debian on it. I'm looking forward to see progress on this in the future ;-) Update: uclibc support is only needed for running Debian from the 4mb flash it has. But since it also has an usbport one can attach some storage there and run a full Debian system, just like on the nslug, which also has 32mb of RAM.

Unfortunatly I basically forgot about the FSG-3 I also took with me (which was for good reasons, one the second and third day I mostly did FAI work), but then I remembered 90min before the end, which was really too late. Narf. But Riku had a short look at it and told me one thing I didn't knew before: (at least) arm(el) kernels need to have the cpu id set in the kernel and the debian kernels don't have that, as they are build for more than one cpu type, so one has to prepend an arm assembler code instruction before running the kernel... I'm curious to do this soon :-)

But I have more hardware news to tell: C sar G mez Mart n (thanks for organizing this meeting, too!!!1) gave me back my OLPC laptop which I borrowed to him quite some time ago, so he could use it for a talk he gave at a university in Extremadura, so now I finally could give Andres Salomon new debian image for the XO a try. It was really nice to finally see a nice Debian gnome desktop on the device :-)

Today the FAI group, that was Sebastian, Michael, Thomas and me, also took a break to visit the Alcazaba de Badajoz (built around 1100, so roughly 900 years ago) which is an amazing building (thats why I linked to the spanish wikipedia entry as it has nicer pictures), from where you can see most of the city. I've been to Badajoz at least three times now and I'm really glad I finally did that, it's only 5min away from the office where the meeting was held and I highly recommend it to anyone going here.

Oh, and last and definitly not least I did a lot of work on FAI too. Besides discussing stuff which will hit planet after I posted this (hah! Michael already posted it, though without proper credit, so I will do a repost) I mostly reviewed changes and patches and discussed bugs, I didn't develop many patches myself (well, except one for the changelog..) but I've read every change at least twice, once as a commit msg and once in a full review. Plus many patches I read more often... all in all I think FAI is now in an great shape for lenny (which was the only thing we worked on during the weekend, we discussed some future plans, but work was only done for lenny), except that we want to another upload (with only documentation changes) after the upcoming one (which has quite some documentation changes already, but also some RC+important and some trivial bugfixes).

As you might have guessed, I started this entry on saturday and am finishing it now. According to the topic of the #extremadura2008 channel, which we created to coordinate between the groups, we also fixed 7 RC bugs (or 8? one should really document the bug numbers and not the number of bugs..) affecting lenny and 3 more which are only relevant to sid. Which is not as many as I would have liked to be fixed, but then, it wasn't a ("traditional") bug squashing party either. Which makes me wonder, are there any planned in the coming weeks?

So all in all I think this meeting was really very productive. Plus, I also enjoyed a special half an hour of real holidays: on saturday we had to leave lunch without having a chance to have a coffee afterwards, so I stumbled into a random cafe on the way to the venue. Turned out it was a very nice one, where due to its nice interiour I managed to reflect on life, 42 and all the rest almost immediatly. A totally unexpected but needed break. I wont say more here, because the thoughts and memories are really mostly relevant for me, but I'm really happy I found that space. DebConf8 and this meeting both were really fun, but I really didnt have a minute to reflect things. 30 minutes to do that is definitly not enough, but it was a good start. Now I just need to find another opportunity to continue with it. I hope this will happen before the next Extremadura meeting ;-)

I recently announced that German and French reached 100% completion in unstable for po-debconf translations (by the way, both are now 100% in lenny as well). However, l10n efforts also happen for many languages in that area, so it's time to highlight them as well:

Third is Portuguese at 98.3%. Nearly all complete. It would need some overview by the team, lead by Miguel Figueiredo, to complete the currently incomplete files.
Czech if 97.85%. The effort is a very longstanding one by Miroslav Kure, nearly alone. Miroslav has small difficulties to cope with changes in eth->lenny release cycle which explains why, despite they once were virtually 100%, cs could never reach it. This will happen for squeeze
Vietnamese is 84.97%. Clytie Siddall fights with changes and her real life conditions and still succeeds in keeping the l10n effort up. I'm admirative
Dutch is 80.72%. The Dutch team is an "old" team in Debian with a thorough, but sometimes slow, QA process. I have no doubt about the quality of their work. The manpower seems fairly short, though, with people involved in many other areas in Debian and outside.
Swedish was slowly vanishing until Martin Bagge recently resurrected it. They even passed over Russian again at 78.76%. Congratulations.
Russian is constantly progressing. Kudos are due to Yuri Kozlov who efficiently leads the team. They'll make it at 100%, I don't doubt it. 78.71% for now.
Galician is the longstanding one-man effort by Jacobo. He already described in details his work process and took great advantage of my NMU campaigns to progress constantly. 76.80%: will he pass over Swedish and Russian before lenny?
Spanish is an "old" team. I expected to see a good progress, which doesn't really happen. The NMU campaigns do not benefit them and I don't see that many bug reports. What's happening there? Tis team is one I'm most worried about.
Finnish took great advantage of the NMU campaing with Esko Ar j rvi following it very closely. He bumped the stats from less than 40% to 66.5%
Japanese slowly goes its own way. The effort is less constant than others, but they successfully manage to stay around 60%
Basque is also constantly progressing. Under the lead of Piarres Beobide, the team reached 60% after starting below 40%
Brazilian Portuguese is more focused on DDTP these days (they have impressive stats, thanks to Felipe can de Wiel's work) so they just manage to stay around 55%

Other translation efforts are more hectic. I'd like to point the slow decrease of the work on Catalan, probably due to low manpower and other areas of interest for the old timers. I'll try to soon make such report for other areas of translation effort in Debian.

Here some news from the Smuxi front. As you might already know Smuxi 0.6.2 was released. With the 0.6.2 release we have now German translation and Smuxi packages in Debian (Unstable) (as promised), Ubuntu (intrepid) and ArchLinux (AUR)! Now just OpenSUSE, Foresight Linux, Gentoo and Fedora are missing for world domination^W^Wconvering the major Linux distributions. The upcoming 0.6.3 release will contain Spanish (thanks to Juan Miguel Carrero), French (thanks to Clement BOURGEOIS) and British English (thanks to Ryan Smith-Evans) translations. Besides bugfixes this release will contain the famous tray icon support and some other goodies!

The release should be ready by this weekend... stay tuned.

The 500000th bug day is coming. Some of you may remember the contest I launched last year for people to bet on the day bug #500000 would be reported. The bug rate in Debian is about 1000 bugs in 6 days from my survey. So, as we're now at about #497300, bug #500000 should happen in 14 days. It seems that Kartik Mistry is about to win the contest. Indeed, he will if the bug is reported between Sept. 11th and Sept. 17th which probability is very high. Folks, prepare to send cheers to India! Unless the bug rate increases a lot and Miguel "xerakko" Gea wins. Miguel, I watch you: no MBF for you! I definitely lost when Aug. 22nd came. I was betting on a small rate increase which indeed did not happen. You can start now computing the #600000 bug day. There *will* be a contest for it...unless I launch one for bug #1000000...:-)

I've been rather disconnected lately, trying to finish my PhD, find a job, etc. I got permission from my committee to start writing my thesis a few weeks ago, so I've been trying to get that in gear, as well as finishing up data for publication. This should all be done by November, if all goes well, so I can get back to spending more time on the things that I love.

I've tried to stay somewhat current with what's going on, and there's been a noticeable change over the past couple weeks in the tone of discussion around the community. I've personally been fascinated by the appearance of two things: the Linux Hater's Blog and the debate about Gtk 3.0. What's striking about both of these things is that they focus very much on the more consumer-oriented side of Linux. It's all about pleasing the independent vendors and grandma, and not about doing cool things. This is a huge shift from a few years ago. When I (and I assume many of us) got started with Free Software it wasn't really about these things, but more about getting your own work done and less about pleasing other people. Pleasing others was good of course, but it wasn't really expected. Just getting the system up and running was cool at the time, but using it exclusively for all your work? Only if you were in the right line of work!

We've come to a point where we expect a hell of a lot more though. We've got very vocal community members who want to spread Linux far and wide, and they want to do it today. And arguably, Linux is ready for it. We have good software that works rather well, can be easily installed and set up, and will run most of what people need. Yay us. On the other hand, after spending the better part of the decade using Linux on the desktop I'm finding that I agree with almost everything that the Linux Hater's Blog says. It's hard to argue with the truth, and the truth is that things are still difficult for people. I've spent the last few years trying to make X in Debian easier for people to deal with, and I've barely made a dent in just this one problem. And there's plenty more to pick and choose from. Sure, you can talk about how Windows and OSX have problems too, but we can't just be as good as them. We have to be better if we want to spread Linux and Free Software far and wide.

But do we really want to do that? Well, to be honest, I don't think it matters. No matter whether or not you care about grandma using Linux, we all want to have systems that work well and are easy to manage. Currently we have a lot of things in modern distros that could be a hell of a lot better. And many of them are directly related to fundamental assumptions we've made that don't really hold up as well as they should. They lead to lots of extra work leading to a sub-par product. We can do better and we should do better. If we have the absolute best system, world domination would be a natural side effect.

That's why I think that things like this need to stop and that we need more things like this. Sure, one is a hell of a lot harder, but no one cares if you solve an easy problem. It's the hard ones that matter, and provide the real payoff in the end. We need a better system to stop the hemorrhage of developers to OSX. When Miguel talks about how the people pushing for gtk 3.0 are all using OSX, I get very worried. If we want to be in control of our own destiny then we need to face our problems head on, and solve them.

Search Results: "miguel"

15 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

23 February 2011

Gunnar Wolf: Finally presented that long-overdue exam!

25 December 2010

Petter Reinholdtsen: The reply from Edgar Villanueva to Microsoft in Peru

1 September 2010

Gunnar Wolf: Cycling, cycling everywhere!

28 June 2010

C.J. Adams-Collier: Hey, look. I got mcs to github before Miguel

27 April 2010

C.J. Adams-Collier: GSoC 2010

1 March 2010

Diego Escalante Urrelo: GNOMEs in Chile

20 December 2009

Julien Danjou: Teething troubles

17 April 2009

Neil Williams: drivel 2.0.4 released.

3 March 2009

Miguel Gea: My .dupload.conf file

4 February 2009

Gunnar Wolf: How active are your local Linux,Free Software User Groups?

9 November 2008

Adeodato Sim : Five films (#3)

8 November 2008

Steve McIntyre: 3rd Free Software Congress in Valencia

8 September 2008

loldebian - Can I has a RC bug?: funny pictures

Holger Levsen: We had joy we had fun we had changelogs in the sun

4 September 2008

Christian Perrier: What about translations other than German and French?

Mirco Bauer: Smuxi 0.6.2 + Translations + Distribution

31 August 2008

Christian Perrier: Will Kartik win?

16 July 2008

David Nusinow: Goings On