Dear Project Members,

   "Now that I have your attention, I would like to make the following
delegations:"

... nah, scrap that. In my last day in office I first of all owe you a report of DPL activities for the last reporting period of this term, i.e. March 8th until today. Here it is! Highlights

• At LibrePlanet (see below) I've discussed at length with Karen Sandler as GNOME representative the possibility of Debian participation in the FOSS Outreach Program for Women. I've then proposed that we do participate and, as you might have read on d-d-a, we're now doing that. Many thanks to the volunteer co-organizers for Debian participation in the program: M nica Ram rez Arceda, Ana Guerrero L pez, and Patty Langasek.
• A couple of years of work with the auditors has come together. At elgar.debian.org:/srv/accounting.debian.org/ledger/ you can now find Debian monetary transactions for the 2010-2013 period. Note that: 1) They are not all of our transactions, most notably because we haven't yet managed to get access to all our bank transactions at SPI (while we do have access to other transactions there, e.g. donations). Given the relevance of the missing transactions for our budget, this is a blocker for producing meaningful public periodic reports of Debian finances. This is clearly annoying, but I'm confident that our feedback to SPI over the past years has helped them better understand our needs and improve. I hope this could be finally solved during the next DPL term. And, 2) Donor names have been anonymized in the ledger files, in wait of a donation system that allow to express privacy preferences. Complete donation information is available in the companion ledger.git repository, which is accessible to auditors only. I'd like to thank the Debian auditors, and in particular Martin Michlmayr, for their amazing work on this over the past 3 years.
• As you might have noticed, we now have an official Debian Project blog, finally entering the brave new Web 1.5 era I've only helped "politically" here and there with this over the years, and I'm happy to see it live. Your thanks for this should go to the blog editors---Francesca Ciceri and Ana Guerrero Lopez---and to DSA for making it real. A proper delegation for the editors is pending and I'm confident the next DPL will pick it up.

Talks Over the past month or so I've attended and spoken on behalf of Debian in the following occasions:

• "Debian: 20 years and counting" talk at the New York Linux User Group; slides are available. Many thanks to Brian Gupta and Tom Limoncelli for inviting me.
• "Debian and GNU" talk at LibrePlanet 2013; slides are available. Many thanks to John Sullivan and the Free Software Foundation for inviting me to talk at their main conference. My presence there has also been a chance to reassess the status of collaboration with FSF (see John's brief summary) and discuss further technical collaboration with the Trisquel maintainers.
• "Legal issues from a radical community angle" keynote at the yearly workshop of FSFE's European Legal Network; slides are available. The talk has also been covered by a LWN feature article last week (the link should become unembargoed for non-LWN subscribers starting tomorrow).

Assets I've approved the budget for the following forthcoming sprints:

• 6th Debian Groupware Meeting (~500 EUR)
• DSA sprint (~3'000 EUR)

Also, we've bought a 3-year warranty pack for the disk array that powers ftp-master.d.o (~900 USD). On the income side, Brian Gupta has started an interesting matching fund experiment, in order to raise funds for the forthcoming DebConf13. The matching fund will be open until April 30th, so your help in spreading news would be welcome. Many thanks to Brian for the idea and to his company, Brandorr Group, for funding it. DPL helpers Three more DPL helpers IRC meetings have been held; minutes are available at the usual place. Legal Spring Cleaning I've finally cleaned up the pile of pending legal matters (but I'm sure new ones will show up for the delight of the next DPL :-P)

• one is merely internal for trademark@d.o: our procedures for (n)acks on incoming requests has now been vetted by our legal advisors
• the second one is relevant for our mentors.debian.net service: one of the blockers to officialize it as mentors.debian.org have historically been DMCA-related concerns. We now have a DMCA policy for (wannabe) mentors.d.o, which I've shared with the service maintainers and DSA. This specific part should no longer be a concern.
• the last one concerns the possibilities of playing DVDs with Debian. We now have legal guidelines on how to include installer packages that allow to do so; that should allow us to have a decent solution for our users in the Jessie time frame.

Once again, I'd like to thank SFLC for the pro bono and very high quality legal advice they keep on offering to Debian. Miscellaneous

• I've mentioned last month that, as a Debian representative, I've joined a working group by the Italian public administration (PA) that should define procurement rules for software in the PA at large, together with representatives of other well-known FOSS initiatives (e.g. KDE, FSFE). The first meetings have now been held and I've participate in some, for the moment on my own budget. I'll check with the next DPL the feasibility of keep on doing so on in the future.

---

Now, before I get sentimental, let me thank Gergely, Lucas, and Moray for running in the recently concluded DPL election. Only thinking of running and then go through a campaign denote a very high commitment to the Project; we should all be thankful to them. Then I'd like to congratulate Lucas for his election. I've known him for a long time, and I can testify about his clear vision of the role Debian has to play in Free Software and on what Debian needs to improve to do so. Best wishes for the term ahead, Lucas! Finally, I'd like to thank you all for the support you've shown me over the past 3 years. Serving as DPL is a great honor, but also a very demanding job. Thank to you all, and to how cool Debian is, it has been for me an incredibly rewarding experience. I had no idea what I were doing when I embarked on this adventure, but in hindsight I don't regret any of it. See you around, as I don't plan to be anywhere far away from Debian anytime soon. Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity logs for March and April 2013 are available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.20130 3,4

Dear project members, here's another report of DPL activities, this time for a period longer than usual (February + 1st week of March), so that the next one will be at the very end of the current DPL term. Highlights

• As you know, we are now well within the DPL election process. And we have 3 valuable candidates running. I encourage all of you to participate in the discussions on -vote, and ask questions about project vision, goals, and improvements. It's something that is rarely as intense as during campaigning, so don't miss the chance!
• You might have noticed a sharp decrease in the count of RC bugs affecting Wheezy; that is largely due to the Release Team, who started the usual final sweep of RC triaging before release. Please thank them for their work, ... but don't give up on our collective work yet! You can still help up in the usual ways (NMUs, severity adjustments, unblock reviews, etc).
• The technical committee had to deal with a rather urgent issue during last month (#699808). I mention it here only to applaud their efficiency in doing so: 4 days to reach a decision. Resorting to tech-ctte shall always remain a last resort in Debian, but when it comes to that it's useful to know that we can count on a wise and speedy answer.

Appointments

• As the previous term was about to end, I've agreed with the Kurt Roeckx to re-appoint him as Project Secretary for another year.
• Following up to last month news, we've now assembled a team of admins for Debian participation into Google Summer of Code 2013 and delegated them for the task. Many thanks to David, Nicolas, Paul, and Sukhbir for volunteering, as well as to last year admins for their help in reaching out to interested volunteers. On a related note, we've until March 28th to propose projects and/or volunteer as (co-)mentor for GSoC 2013.

DPL helpers Two more DPL helpers IRC meetings have happened, minutes and logs of both are available. Assets

• I've worked with the press and publicity teams to announce the new trademark policy more widely and call for producing Wheezy merchandise. Apparently, we are now also being cited as a reference on how to strike a balance between free software and trademark (unfortunately the article is behind a paywall now).
• In related news, Brian Gupta has volunteered to help with answering trademark@d.o inquiries and has already helped a lot in streamlining the process and keeping track of past requests (thanks!)
• Following a -project inquiry by Thomas Koch, I've investigated with SPI the possibility of assigning to them the copyright for (code) contributions to Debian. The bottom line is that at present there is no safe way to do that with SPI; that might change in the future.
• As agreed at a DPL helpers meeting, we are trying to federate interests in Debian sponsoring and fund-raising. Part of the goal is avoid duplication of efforts DebConf- and sponsoring for other Debian activities; and part is establishing a more stable income flow for Debian (to ease long-term budget decisions). If you have experience and interest in this area, please join the debian-sponsors-discuss list on Alioth.
• Together with auditors, we have updated reimbursement procedures to better keep track of both outstanding and past requests. Main difference is that you'll now have to mail a RT queue instead of leader@d.o directly. Check the wiki page for details.

Events Past At the beginning of February, I've attended FOSDEM 2013, together with many other Debian people. I didn't have any specific talk this year, but it's been a chance to talk F2F about several ongoing issues (see logs), and help mediating in some conflicts. I've also accepted the invitation to participate in the GNOME Advisory Board meeting, together with Laurent Bigonville of our GNOME team. No report of that has been prepared as of yet (sorry about that), but we have both reported "live" to the rest of the team on IRC. Future

• It looks like my last month as DPL will be quite busy. Next week I'll be first in New York City, delivering an invited Debian talk at NYLUG (thanks a lot to Brian Gupta and Tom Limoncelli for the invitation). Then I'll head to LibrePlanet 2013 to talk about the relationship between Debian and GNU (thanks to John Sullivan for the invitation). Finally, at the beginning of April, I'll be in Amsterdam to deliver a talk about Debian experience with various legal issues across the years, at the yearly FSFE Legal and Licensing Workshop (thanks to Karsten Gerloff for the invitation). Both trips (LibrePlanet and FSFE) will be on Debian budget. While I usually insist on having travel sponsorship from inviting entities, in this cases I've accepted to do otherwise given they are free software non profits like Debian.
• I've been invited to represent Debian at Distro Recipes. Due to a conflict with FSFE workshop I couldn't make, so I've looked for substitutes. Lucas Nussbaum and Jonas Smedegaard have kindly accepted to go in my stead and deliver two talks, one about QA and the other about Pure Blends; thanks folks!

Miscellaneous A couple of months ago I've mentioned that I had filed an application, as Debian representative, to participate in a working table to define software procurement rules for the Italian public administration. Good news: my application has been accepted, together with those of other well-known FOSS communities and organizations (e.g. KDE, FSFE). I'll keep you posted of how it goes. Let's go back to elect a new DPL and release Wheezy now,
Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity logs for February and March 2013 are available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.20130 2,3

Open question to enthusiasts, theoretical computing scientists and mathematicians of all sorts: is it possible to construct a valid QR-code that leads to interesting results when used as an initial configuration for the Game of Life? The rules:

• QR-code or DataMatrix or whatever, I'm not picky;
• valid code as in maybe not exactly what would be produced from the text, but which the error-correction can reconstruct;
• interesting results, as in not decaying to a stable state (or not too soon, at least);
• for bonus points, it would lead to at least one glider;
• for extra bonus points, a glider gun or a breeder of such;
• for awesomeness, the QR-code should encode an URL pointing at the demonstration of its own evolution in Life.

For Science! Update: The answer seems to be yes. Jurij Smakov assembled a QR-code generator and a Life engine and plugged them together for easy experimenting. And Stefano Zacchiroli noticed that using "free software" (no quotes) as the input leads to a couple of gliders endlessly traveling a field with a few still lifes. This is way beyond awesome.

(insert here: I've been to FOSDEM, I got a nasty flu, and other $lame_excuses for the delay in sending out this report) Dear Project Members, here's the monthly DPL activity report, this time for January 2013. About the next DPL This is the last DPL report before the start of the election process for the next term: around early March, about 20 days from now, the Secretary will send out the call for nominations. I'd like to respond (also) here to inquiries I'm receiving these days: I will not run again as DPL. So you have about 20 days to mob^Wconvince other DDs to run, or decide to run yourself. Do not to wait for the vary last minute, as that makes for lousy campaigns. I'm available to give feedback about my DPL experience to prospective candidates, ... and also to join mobbing^Wconvincing actions toward potential candidates. Just contact me. Call for helps

• Last year delegation for Google Summer of Code Admins 1 has expired and the program for 2013 will likely start soon. I'm looking for volunteer admins for this year, to organize Debian activities in the program. If you're interested, please contact me.
• In January we had a couple of related discussions on -project about DFSG 10 and maintaining an authoritative list of DFSG-free licenses. The latter would be an important contribution to the Free Software "political" ecosystem. An ikiwiki-based infrastructure to maintain such a list has been created by ftp-masters but needs to be populated. At this point we need volunteers willing to review licenses already present in main and fill them in. If you're interested, please review the discussion and manifest yourself on debian-dak@lists.d.o, where coordination about this work will happen.

Assets

• The long standing issue of writing a proper (outbound) trademark policy for Debian marks has been completed. I've reviewed on -project outstanding items from the last discussion, and documented how they've been implemented in a new policy draft. Later on, I've published the updated policy draft on our website.
• Complementary to the above, Ian Jackson has summarized the state of the discussion about our (inbound) trademark policy, i.e. what to do when accepting in the Debian archive software subject to trademark. It looks like we are close to conclusion on that front too.
• I've worked with representatives of Debian France, on the shared interest in having the association become a Debian Trusted Organization (per Constitution 9.3). We're not yet ready to start the 2 weeks discussion period to accept the orga as such (see Constitution 5.1.11), but I'd like to do that soon. So I encourage all of you to find out about the association, which is run by well-known project members.

Cloud Images Work has gone on also on the front of supporting Debian installation in public "clouds". Thanks to Arnaud Patard, Jose Miguel Parrella Romero, Pierre Couzy, and Gianugo Rabellino, we now have Debian testing images for Microsoft Azure. Together with Amazon EC2, this is the second large provider supporting Debian via images maintained by Debian Developers. More providers are welcome, exactly as more hardware/CD vendors shipping Debian are always welcome. If you want to contribute support for other providers just show up on the -cloud mailing list and say so. Some documentation effort in view of Wheezy are in need of help too, in order to let our users know about "cloud" options, see #695681. DPL helpers The DPL helpers experiment goes on. We have had 2 more IRC meetings in January (see the minutes). Documentation of the "team" communication channels (mailing list, IRC, Git, etc.) is now available from the DPL wiki page. Talks I've given an invited Debian talk at Polytech'Grenoble, as part of a free software event organized for students of local universities. Slides of the talk are available. I'd like to thank Vincent Danjean for the event organization. Let's release Wheezy now!
Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for January 2013 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201301

Happy new year, Debian! To celebrate, here are some freshly posted, bits from the DPL for December 2012.

---

Dear Project Members, happy new year! Here goes another report of DPL activities, this time for December 2012. This issue of the DPL-monthly is skinnier than usual: during the past month I've been struck by the catastrophe also known as "family holiday season", enjoying a solid 10 day break from computer-related activities. Talks

• I've been invited to talk about Debian and its opportunities in the field of education (for both students and teachers) at the fOSSa conference in Lille, France. Slides of the talk I delivered there are available.
• On related news, I've gladly accepted an invitation to talk at the next LibrePlanet conference in Boston, next March. It will be the occasion to discuss the status of collaboration with the FSF and the GNU Project. (FWIW, I'm trying to secure travel sponsorship with the conference organizers, but if that won't turn out to be possible I plan to go on Debian funds, as I consider this event important enough to do so.)

Assets

• The debian.eu saga is over! DNS is now under control of DSA, currently as a redirection to debian.org as for many other ccTLD, and we have now paid the corresponding transfer costs.
• The saga about the relicensing of www.d.o content, on the other hand, is still ongoing. But we made progress! Bradley Kuhn has kindly offered his experience to complete the relicensing part --- and most notably for dealing with contributions from people we haven't been able to contact. Due to busy-ness we will proceed further only in a few months, but in the meantime there is some work to do on our side, as documented in #388141.
• In conformance with the periodic hardware maintenance plan (the goal of which is, I remind you, having all Debian hardware under warranty) we have bought extended warranty for the storage array that serves project machines hosted at UBC ECE (~830 CAD). Thanks goes to Luca Filipozzi for taking care of the order part.
• As they did last year, Amazon kindly renewed their offer of AWS credit to be used for Debian related purposes, such as QA rebuilds. This year they offered us 8'000 USD of credit which, according to projections from last year usage, should be enough for QA rebuilds and buildd usage for events like BSP. Many thanks to Lucas Nussbaum and James Bromberger for reaching out to Amazon contacts and making this possible.

DPL helpers

• The experiment of sharing the load of DPL responsibilities within a larger team still ongoing. We held one more IRC meeting in December (and skipped one due to holiday season ). Logs are available at the usual place.
• Also, I've now started moving the DPL-related part of my own TODO list to the dpl-helpers.git repository. The idea is to further reduce SPOF and ease the transition to the next DPL. BTW: this is my last-3 report as DPL. If you haven't yet started encouraging project members you think could do a good job as DPL to apply, you should better hurry up!

Collaboration with the outer world

• I've signed the OSI affiliate membership agreement on behalf of Debian. This is just a long overdue formalization of the decision to join of a few months ago. The signed version is available in the DPL document archive on master.d.o, and it has been publicly discussed with other projects on the OSI affiliates mailing list.
• As requested, I've provided a quote for FSF's restricted boot campaign, that we have subscribed as a project a while ago.
• Thanks to the prod of various people (hi, Sune!), I've noticed an interesting call by the Italian government to representatives of FOSS communities, to form a group of experts that will have to decide the criteria to adopt in the public administration. The call is in Italian, but an article in English on the matter has been posted on the Joinup website of the European Commission. I've therefore submitted an application as Debian representative and, if accepted, I'll be happy to push for criteria that too often leaves high quality and well reputed community-based distributions out of the door for futile reasons (e.g. corporate "certifications").

That's all for last year, enjoy the new one, which will soon see a new Debian release out of the door. And to make it happen sooner, let's go back fix RC bugs! Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for December 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201212

A bit more than two weeks after the Mini Debconf in Paris, I am glad to say that the videos of the event are finally published (the sound is not very good for the 4 first presentations, sorry about that).
They will be also available on the new IRILL website with a video player when ready.
All slides are also available on the page of the event. I believe that there is a consensus about the quality of the event. We had around 150 people attending to the event, many interesting and various talks.
As usual, it was nice to meet some old and new friends from Debian.
Group picture by Frederic Lehobey
For those who wonder, I am confident there will be a 2013 Parisian Mini Debconf. Various feedbacks about the event:
Lucas Nussbaum
Stefano Zacchiroli
Vincent Untz
Raphael Hertzog
Pietro Abate
Logilab (Julien Cristau)
The 'official' Debian news And, once more, many thanks to the sponsors!

Just posted, bits from the DPL for November 2012.

---

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/ Pop-up advertisement. Breaking news. Help the Release Team [0] by reviewing     \
  pending unblock requests. Oh, and by fixing RC bugs too.                         
                                                                                   
  [0]: http://nthykier.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/wheezy-release-progress-december/  
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------/

Dear Project Members, here is another (delayed) monthly report of DPL activities, this time for November 2012. Highlights

• In November, I've kept on helping the work of the debian-cloud initiative that I've announced last month. Some work went into setting up the usual infrastructure pieces (mailing list, pseudo-package in the BTS), some other into paperwork: on behalf of Debian, James Bromberger has opened an account on the Amazon Marketplace. That enabled us to deliver the first milestone: official Debian Squeeze images for Amazon EC2 (I keep it short here, but you can find more info in various places). More work is needed, and ongoing, to support other public clouds, better document Debian availability there, etc. You can help! Just show up on -cloud.
• I've then spent quite some time in November getting up to speed with the status of DebConf13 organization. For the first time, this year we have implemented the "budget approval" process that I've introduced a couple of years ago. The budget I've reviewed looked good and it's balanced (meaning that the event should be self-sustained, at least that's the theory); so I've been happy to approve it. I'm looking forward, once again, to meet many of you in Switzerland this summer!
• Together with Enrico Zini (with his DAM hat on) I've also helped Kevin Carrillo, a PhD student from New Zealand, to finalize and advertise a survey of newcomer experiences in Debian. The hope is to learn more about what works and what can be improved in our NM process, possibly learning from other FOSS projects that are also participating in the survey.
• As a last highlight, the "dpl-helpers" initiative I've spam-ed you with several times is keep on going. We held 2 more IRC meetings during November and we have also worked on the infrastructure: we now have a mailing list and a Git repo associated to the "dpl" project on Alioth. To ease handing over pending tasks to the next DPL, I'm also working with DSA to set up some DPL related request tracker queues. BTW, this is my last-4 report as DPL, if you haven't yet thought at who you want as next DPL and started bothered him/her, you better hurry up!

Events

• I've participated in the mini-DebConf Paris and held a couple of lightning talks there: one about RC Bugs squashing for Wheezy, and another about debian-cloud.
• I've given an invited talk about Debian and our relationships with companies at the yearly FOSS seminar of France Telecom / Orange
• on related news, the minutes of the Debian/Ubuntu relationship session at the last UDS have now been posted to -derviatives; some addendum has been discussed in the resulting thread

Assets

• We have finally got the certificate from the Japan Patent Office, confirming that ownership of Debian trademark there has been transferred to SPI. Many thanks to Kenshi Muto for his help on this matter over the past several months.
• We have also finally been transferred ownership of the debian.eu domain, from its previous owner (formally: the domain is now owned by FFIS, the Trusted Organization we rely upon the most in Europe).
• We got our first "donation" from DuckDuckGo for revenue sharing over the past 3 months. It's about 150 USD, which answers the worries that excessive profit from this kind of deals might influence our judgement. The precondition is far from being satisfied.
• I've been happy to approve the tentative budget for the forthcoming DebianMed sprint, for ~1400 EUR. Reminder: you can haz your sprint too, just read the fine manual.

That's all for now,
let's go back releasing Wheezy,
Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for November 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201211

Please Note: this article is written from my personal perspective as a Debian Developer, and is not the opinion or expression of my employer.

Amazon Web Service s EC2 offers customers a number of Operating Systems to run. There are many Linux Distributions available, however for all this time, there has never been an Official Debian Image or Amazon Machine Image (AMI), created by Debian. For some Debian users this has not been an issue as there are several solutions of creating your own personal AMI. However for the AWS Users who wanted to run a recognised image, it has been a little confusing at times; several Debian AIMs have been made available by other customers, but the source of those images has not been Debian . In October 2012 the AWS Marketplace engaged in discussions with the Debian Project Leader, Stefano Zacchiroli. A group of Debian Developers and the wider community formed to generated a set of AMIs using Anders Ingemann s ec2debian-build-ami script. These AMIs are published in the AWS Marketplace, and you can find the listing here:

• https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/ref=csl_clsc_prd?sku=8fvdn95s5ev33cprr62nq3q7t

No fees are collected for Debian for the use of these images via the AWS Marketplace; they are listed here for your convenience. This is the same AMI that you may generate yourself, but this one has been put together by Debian Developers. If you plan to use this AMI, I suggest you read http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image, and more explicity, SSH as the user admin and then sudo -i to root. Additional details Anders Ingemann and others maintain a GitHub project called ec2debian-build-ami which generates a Debian AMI. This script supports several desired features, an was also updated to add in some new requirements. This means the generated image supports:

• non-root SSH (use the user admin )
• secure deletion of files in the generation of the image
• using the Eucalyptus toolchain for generation of th eimage
• ensuring that this script and all its dependencies are DFSG compliant
• using the http.debian.net redirector service in APT s sources.list to select a reasonably close mirror site
• and the generated image contains only packages from main
• plus minimal additional scripts (nuder the Apache 2.0 license as in ec2debian-build-ami) to support:
  • fetching the SSH Public Key for the admin user (sudo -i to gain root)
  • executing UserData shell scripts (example here)

Debian Stable (Squeeze; 6.0.6 at this point in time) does not contain the cloud-init package, and neither does Debian Testing (Wheezy). A fresh AWS account (ID 379101102735) was used for the initial generation of this image. Any Debian Developer who would like access is welcome to contact me. Minimal charges for the resource utilisation of this account (storage, some EC2 instances for testing) are being absorbed by Amazon for this. Co-ordination of this effort is held on the debian-cloud mailing list. The current Debian stable is 6.0.6 Squeeze , and we re in deep freeze for the Wheezy release. Squeeze has a Xen kernel that works on the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) EC2 instance, and hence this is what we support on EC2. (HVM images are a next phase, being headed up by Yasuhiro Akarki <ar@d.o>). Marketplace Listing The process of listing in the AWS Marketplace was conducted as follows:

• A 32 bit and 64 bit image was generated in US-East 1, which was AMI IDs:
  • ami-1977f070: 379101102735/debian-squeeze-i386-20121119
  • ami-8568efec: 379101102735/debian-squeeze-amd64-20121119
• The image was shared public with all other AWS users (as was the underlying EBS snapshot, for completeness)
• The AWS Marketplace team duplicated these two AMIs into their AWS account
• The AWS Marketplace team further duplicated these into other AWS Marketplace-supported Regions

This image went out on the 19th of November 2012. Additional documentation was put into the Wiki at: http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image/Squeeze A CloudFormation template may help you launch a Debian instance by containing a mapping to the relevent AMI in the region you re using: see the wiki link above. What s Next The goal is to continue stable releases as they come out. Further work is happening to support generation of Wheezy images, and HVM (which may all collapse into one effort with a Linux 3.x kernel in Wheezy). If you re a Debian Developer and would like a login to the AWS account we ve been using, then please drop me a line. Further work to improve this process has come from Marcin Kulisz, who is starting to package ec2debian-build-ami into a Debian: this will complete the circle of the entire stack being in main (one day)! Thanks goes to Stefano, Anders, Charles, and everyone who contributed to this effort. Resources

• https://github.com/andsens/ec2debian-build-ami
• https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/ref=csl_clsc_prd?sku=8fvdn95s5ev33cprr62nq3q7t
• http://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image
• http://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/

rc bugs, cloud, and getting involved This past week-end has been rather intense. In addition to another, non free software related event I was volunteering for, I had the pleasure to participate in the 2nd Paris mini DebConf. Once again, the organization has been great and the average quality of the talks have been very high. I'd say talk quality is now totally up to par with the yearly full blown DebConf (and yes, talks have been in English ). If I had to single the talk that intrigued me the most, I'd name Joss' talk on large GNOME deployments: it's full of insights on the GNOME architecture and of tips useful to all power users, no matter the size of your GNOME "deployment". For more info on the talks have a look at the program. To catch up with the talks you missed you can peruse the slides there and/or keep an eye on http://video.debian.net, where we usually post conference videos "when they are ready". At the conference I've also witnessed the usual healthy mix of country origins that I remember from the previous Paris mini DebConf. Once again I've been happy to meet (and host!) Debian friends from many countries including Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Finland, you name it. Kudos to the organizers (hi Sylvestre and Mehdi!) and to all the volunteers who made this possible. On my part, I didn't have any full blown talk scheduled (ETOOMANYTALKS struck me this month ) but I did book two lightning talks slots that I've used for:

• rambling on RC bugs and the effects of long freezes on Debian
• presenting the debian-cloud initiative, which is rather new but incredibly active and effective despite its infancy

On the subject of lightning talks, I also recommend to promote Lucas' talk on how to get involved in Debian. It's dense and straight to the point, able to both convey useful tips and point wannabe contributors to the most useful contributions they can make to Debian.

In recent times we have worked quite a bit to improve the NM process, i.e. the process newcomers go through to become members of the Debian Project. As it happens, I've just read Nathan's recent post on his NM experience and I think it is a perfect example of the joining experience we are trying to offer to all newcomers. But examples, be them positive or negative, are only anecdotal. To evaluate a process one needs actual data and someone analyzing them, ideally with a scientific approach. This is why I'm happy to host below a guest blog post by Kevin Carillo, who is doing a pretty thorough scientific study about how newcomers join a wide range of Free Software projects, including KDE, OpenSUSE, GNOME, and Debian, of course! TL;DR: if you started contributing to Debian after January 2010, there's a survey for you; participating will help us improving the NM process even further. Kevin's guest blog post follows.

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Newcomer experience in Debian and other FOSS communities - Survey My name is Kevin Carillo. I am a PhD student currently living in Wellington (New Zealand) and I am doing some research on Free/Open Source Software communities. If you have started contributing to the Debian project after January 2010 (within approximately the last 3 years), I would like to kindly request your help. I am interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences. The purpose of the research is to work out how newcomers to a FOSS community become valued sustainable contributors. The survey is online and will be available until Tuesday, 27 November, 2012. Inspiration from Debian New Member Debian is a successful community that keeps attracting new contributors and that relies on a very unique way to handle the integration of new contributors: the New Member process. The idea behind the NM process is that it is some sort of filtering procedure allowing to only retain the individuals who have the potential to become valued sustainable contributors in Debian. Within Debian, there is a lot of enthusiasm and pride around the NM process as it seems to be functioning pretty well but the question is: Is this really enough to ensure that Debian remains a healthy and growing community? How does it compare to the way newcomers are integrated in other large projects such as KDE, GNOME, or in other non-Linux related communities such as Mozilla? I have to admit that the Debian NM process has been among the main sources of inspiration that made me embark in this research project. I have kept being quite impressed when talking to people who had gone through the process as all of them came out of it with a real passion for the project and love for its community. When reflecting on the reasons why the NM process succeeds, I have a feeling it is some instance of ritualized socialization. In other words, barriers and initiation rituals that require some effort from newcomers, generate members with higher commitment and sense of identification towards the Debian community. What do newcomers really experience? The main assumption that motivated this project is that attracting new members has become crucial for a large majority of FOSS communities but this is not a sufficient condition to ensure the success and prosperity of a project. A proportion of a community's newcomers must contribute to the well-being and growth of the community. Keeping all that in mind, FOSS projects have thus to do a good job at "socializing" their newcomers and turning them into 'good' contributors. Doing a good job here means that FOSS projects shall ensure that they help generate citizenship-like behaviors from newcomers by designing appropriate newcomer programs and procedures. FOSS communities rely on a wide array of initiatives to facilitate the integration of newcomers but it seems like the other side of the coin is less understood: What do newcomers really experience? And how does this influence their contributions and actions within a project? How is this study going to help Debian? The data will help gain insights about the experience of newcomers within the Debian community. In addition, it will allow to understand how to design effective newcomer initiatives to ensure that Debian will remain a successful and healthy community. The dataset will be released under a share-alike ODbL license so that Debian contributors can extract as much value as possible from the data. Since this survey also involves other large FOSS projects such as Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, and NetBSD, it will also be possible to compare practices across projects in order to identify what works from what does not work when facilitating the integration of newcomers. About the survey This survey is anonymous. The raw dataset of everything one fills in the survey will be released under the ODbL. Since all the questions but one are optional, one is free to control the amount of information they are giving away about themselves. I expect the survey to take around 20 minutes of your time. If you know members of the Debian community who you think would be interested in completing it, please do not hesitate to let them know about this research. I will post news about my progress with this research, and the results on my blog. Don't hesitate to contact me. --- Kevin Carillo

Today, I officially got approved by the Debian Account Managers as a Debian Developer (still waiting on keyring-maint and DSA). Over the years, I have seen many people complain about the New Member Process. The most common complaint was with regards to the (usually) long amount of time the process can take to complete. I am writing this blog post to provide one more perspective on this process. Hopefully, it will prove useful to people considering starting the New Member Process. The most difficult part about the New Member Process for me had to do with getting my GPG key signed by Debian Developers. I have not been able to attend any large conferences, which are great places to get your key signed. I also have not been able to meet up with the few Debian Developers living in/around Chicago. As a result, I was forced to patiently wait to start the NM process. This waiting period lasted a couple of years. It wasn't until this October, at the [Association for Computing Machinery at Urbana-Champaign's Reflections Projections Conference], that this changed. Stefano Zacchiroli was present to give a talk about Debian. Asheesh Laroia was also present to lead an OpenHatch Workshop about contributing to open source projects. Both of these Developers were more than willing to sign my key when I asked. If you look at my key, you will see that these signatures were made on October 7 and October 9, 2012. With the signatures out of the way, the next step in the process was to actually apply. Since I did not already have an account in the system, I had to send an email to the Front Desk and have them enter my information into the system. Details on this step, along with a sample email are available here. Once I was in the system, the next step was to get some Debian Developers to serve as my advocates. Advocates should be Debian Developers you have worked closely with, and usually include your sponsor(s). If these people believe you are ready to become a Debian Developer, they write a message describing the work you have been doing with them and why they feel you are ready. Paul Tagliamonte had helped review and sponsor a number of my uploads. I had been working with him for a number of years, and he really helped encourage and help me to reach this milestone. He served as my first advocate. Gregor Herrmann is responsible for getting me started in contributing to Debian. When I first tried to get involved, I had a hard time finding sponsors for my uploads and bugs to work on. Eventually, I discovered the Debian Perl Group. This team collectively maintains most of the Perl modules that are included in the Debian repositories. Gregor and the other Debian Developers on the team were really good about reviewing and sponsoring uploads in a very timely manner. This allowed me to learn quickly and make a number of contributions to Debian. He served as my second advocate. With my advocations taken care of, the next step in the process was for the Front Desk to assign me an Application Manager and for the Application Manager to accept the appointment. Thijs Kinkhorst was appointed as my Application Manager. He also agreed to take on this task. For those of you who might not know, the Application Manager is in charge of asking the applicant questions, collecting information, and ultimately making a recommendation to the Debian Account Managers about whether or not they should accept the applicant as a Developer. They can go about this in a variety of ways, but most choose to utilize a set of template questions that are adjusted slightly on a per-applicant basis. Remember that period of waiting to get my GPG key signed? I had used that time to go through and prepare answers to most of the template questions. This served two purposes. First, it allowed me to prove to myself that I had the knowledge to become a Debian Developer. Second, it helped to greatly speed up the New Member process once I actually applied. There were some questions that were added/removed/modified, but by answering the template questions befrehoand, I had become quite familiar with documents such as the Debian Policy and the Debian Developer's Rerference. These documents are the basis for almost all questions that are asked. After several rounds of questions, testing my knowledge of Debian's philosophy and procedures as well as my technical knowledge and skills, some of my uploads were reviewed. This is a pretty standard step. Be prepared to explain any changes you made (or chose not to make) in your uploads. If you have any outstanding bugs or issues with your packages, you might also be asked to resolve them. Eventually, once your Application Manager has collected enough information to ensure you are capable of becoming a Debian Developer, they will send their recommendation and a brief biography about you to the debian-newmaint mailing list and forward all information and emails from you to the Debian Account Managers (after the Front Desk checks and confirms that all of the important information is present). The Debian Account Managers have the actual authority to approve new Debian Developers. They will review all information sent to them and reach their own decision. If they approve your application, they will submit requests for your GPG key to be added to the Debian Keyring and for an account to be created for you in the Debian systems. At this point, the New Member process is complete. For me, it took exactly 1 month from the time I officially applied to become a Debian Developer until the time of my application being approved by the Debian Account Managers. Hopefully, it will not be long until my GPG key is added to the keyring and my account is created. I feel the entire process went by very quickly and was pain-free. Hopefully, this blog post will help to encourage more people to apply to become Debian Developers.

Freshly baked, bits from the DPL for October 2012.

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Dear Project Members,
another month, another periodic report of DPL-ish activities, this time for October 2012. Highlights Debian on public clouds I've spent quite some time to improve Debian presence on the so called "public clouds". Following up to an inquiry of a fellow developer, I've reached out to Microsoft to investigate the possibility of having Debian as an option on Windows Azure. Around the same time, I've been approached by Amazon to have Debian as an option on the AWS marketplace. In both cases, we will need to overcome challenges of various kinds, at the technical (e.g. image preparation), bureaucratic (e.g. terms of the agreements we'll need to accept to be present), and political (e.g. chain of trust, platform freedom) levels. Up to now, discussions have been going on mostly in private, simply because they started as 1-to-1 inquiries and continued from there, but there is no good reason they should remain so. Hence, thanks to the listmasters and in particular Alexander Wirt, we have setup the new debian-cloud mailing list. If you are interested in these topics please join the list. For both Azure and AWS there is good progress on the technical part already; summaries will soon be posted on the list so that we are all on the same page. Similarly, I'll post there status reports about the bureaucratic requirements. And of course there is no reason to focus on specific clouds, if you'd like to support others and are willing to put some work to that end, please join the list and let us know. DPL helpers meeting I've already bothered you at least in my last platform and DebConf13 talk with observations about how non-scalable the DPL job is. After having collected applications of DPL helpers for a while, I've finally sat down and tried to put those applications into good use. The idea is simple: to the extend of possible, we should shift from a one-man-band job to a more "board-like" job, with people sharing an agenda, a list of outstanding tasks, and public communication. We have started slowly, setting up the #debian-dpl IRC channel and running periodic bi-weekly meetings there. You can find the meeting minutes and full logs at the usual place. We are still ramping up, so we don't have yet "fancy" stuff like a mailing list or an issue tracker entry, but they're in the working. Some of the outcome are starting to show, too (e.g. as part of recent discussions on 3rd party orphaning, or on our inbound trademark policy, or even in the forthcoming DMCA policy to make mentors.d.n an official project service). It's an experiment and a big challenge. I'm, for one thing, not yet convinced there are enough people interested in sharing the load of DPL duties (that look boring, for many tech geeks) in the long run. But I'm also convinced that the sustainability of the Debian organization model depends on this, so it's worth trying. If you're interested in the challenge and willing to volunteer some of your time, please join us on #debian-dpl . I'll take care of keeping the project informed of further evolution, in particular about the communication channels we will pick for day to day activities and accountability. Events / public communication I've spent most of my remaining Debian time in October attending events on behalf of the Project, in particular:

• I've attended and delivered a Debian speech at ACM Reflections Projections conference in Urbana-Champaign, USA. Slides and even a video of my talk there are available.
• I've attended and delivered a Debian speech at the yearly LinuxDay event in Turin, Italy. Slides of my talk are available
• I've then attended the by-yearly Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Copenhagen, representing Debian there. I've met a bunch of people there, generally vouching for more (and more (and more )) collaborating at the Debian-Ubuntu border. I've also attended the traditional Debian-Ubuntu "health check" session, presenting there the topics I've collected on the -derivatives list. A report of the session is pending, but I should have successfully talked Stefano Rivera into posting it to -derivatives soon g.

On the topic of public communication, I've also coordinated with the press team an answer to a press inquiry about Secure Boot (which has become part of this article), and happily vouched for the Ubuntu charity marathon, adding some Debian challenges to it. Delegations As largely overdue matters, I've finalized the delegations mentioned last month, namely: FTP masters, New Members Front Desk, and Policy editors. Assets and legal stuff

• on the logo relicensing, one pending matter from last month was the non-free-ness of the so called "official" logo. Discussion continued, but we had no consensus in ditching it completely. Rather, I've proposed to bless as "official" Debian logo the free one, and rename the other for what it is, a "restricted" Debian logo. The change was consensual and has been implemented
• our account creation request to softchoice.com has been approved, meaning that we can now more easily buy hardware in North America, reducing a bit the bureaucratic burden associated to individual purchases. Thanks to DSA, and Luca Filipozzi in particular, for his help with this matter
• there are a couple of legal matters on which there have been progress, but still inconclusive. Just to mention that they haven't been forgotten, they are the DMCA policy for mentors.d.o and the appropriate presentation for a forthcoming libdvdcss installer package in the archive

Miscellanea

• sadly, we have found no volunteer admin for the Google Code-In initiative, so we won't participate this year
• the end of 2012 is approaching, sprint-wise, we have had roughly the same number of sprints than the previous year (8 vs 9). Please start planning your sprints for 2013, so that we can minimize travel costs and bring more people at the event!

Now let's all go back to RC Bug squashing to make Wheezy a reality. SPAM-my link of the month is http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi and its various "views" at the bottom of the page. Cheers.

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PS the day-to-day activity log for October 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201210

Just posted to d-d-a, bits from the DPL for Septemer 2012.

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Heya,
here is the periodic report of DPL activities, this time related to September 2012 (posted here with some delay, as I've been traveling oversea on behalf of Debian for the past few days). Help needed: Google Code-In The Google Code-In (GCI) initiative is about to start again. We don't have a great track record of participating into it, and that's a pity. The initiative revolves around small tasks that other Free Software projects have come to call "easy hacks", showing how effective they're in attracting new volunteers. To participate, we need both mentors and admins. If you're interested see Ana's call for help and please volunteer on the soc-coordination list. Related to this, you've probably seen the report of our participation in GSoC 2012. I'd like to thank all students, mentors, and admins for a very well organized edition. Logo relicensing & other assets The DFSG-relicensing of the Debian logo, which I've mentioned in recent updates, has now happened. The so called Debian "Open Use" logo, in both variants (with and without "Debian") is now dually licensed under LGPL3+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0. The change has been made effective with a resolution of the SPI Board of Directors. Note that the so called "official" logo, which we seem to use very little, is still released under the terms of a non-free license. Discussion is ongoing on -project to stop promoting it. If you're using it or if you've arguments in favor of against that, please participate in the discussion. I've got from SFLC an updated draft of the new proposed trademark policy, implementing most of the changes requested during related August discussions on -project. I'll post it for review there shortly. The Japanese Trademark Office (JPO) has sent us the final confirmation that trademark transfer request (from individuals Debian contributors in the area to SPI) has happened. We've paid the needed fee of 457 CHF to conclude the transaction. We finally settled a domain transfer agreement with the current owner of the debian.eu. Technically, the domain will be transferred to FFIS in the coming weeks. Core teams (non-)news Quite some core teams are in the process of changing their formations these weeks, but most are still pending proper delegation (or equivalent). So here are just a few "teasers":

• as you might have read in the ftp-master sprint report, we have a new ftp-master: congrats Ansgar! (delegation update pending, but no suspense here)
• we have a new front-desk member (delegation pending + suspense)
• we have a new debian policy team (delegation pending + suspense)
• the tech-ctte is in the process of selecting a new candidate to fill the vacant seat. I've nominated a couple of candidates myself, and I'm now waiting for tech-ctte recommendations as per Constitution 6.2. On related news, the tech-ctte has now dealt with the conflict on Python interpreter maintenership, which was also the longest standing issue brought before them. Having invested quite some energy in that issue myself, I'm delighted to see it finally addressed.

I hope to finalize all the pending tasks above this month. Future events I've spent quite some time to plan my participation in events I'll be attending during October on behalf of Debian, such as the ACM Reflections conference in Urbana-Champaign (at the time of writing, this has already happened), the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen, and the LinuxDay event in Turin. Cheers.

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PS the day-to-day activity log for September 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201209

Fellow geeks of the Canonical community team will be doing something pretty weird this week. They're fund-raising for charity, for causes ranging from environment to autism, from homeless support to kids education, from poverty fight to water supplies. But that's not weird. What's weird is that the fund-raising will culminate in a 24-hour work marathon stream live, which will kick off tomorrow (Thursday) at 10:00 UTC. As I like charity, and as I like contributing to Free Software, I gladly accepted to rely here a challenge to the Debian community by one of the marathon "horsemen", Michael Hall:

• if Michael receives at least 5 Debian-tagged donations for the cause he has chosen to support (Autism Research Trust - donate), he'll do his marathon day wearing a Debian t-shirt (which apparently is also the first Free Software t-shirt he has ever owned). I've already donated, so that makes only 4 donations to go to add some Debian promotion salt to an Ubuntu marathon . To "tag" your donation as originating from the Debian community, just leave a message containing the word "debian" at the end of the donation process. The work Michael will be doing tomorrow is not entirely Debian-specific, but Michael is Canonical's responsible for relationship with upstream. I've worked with him in the past on a range of topics, and I can testify that part of his work is generally useful to Debian.

Raising the stakes, Nick Skaggs has decided to propose a similar challenge:

• for every 5 Debian-tagged donations to Nick's cause (WaterAid - donate), Nick will write a manpage for a Debian package that is in dire need of one. As above, just mention "debian" in your post-donation message to tag your donation as originating from the Debian community.

Wanna take the challenge? And how about the other 4 horsemen? No challenges to the Debian community? Feel free to leave a comment and I'll raise the stakes even more, updating the list above. Update 4/10/2012, 13:35 +0200: Daniel Holbach added his own challenge to the Debian community:

• for every Debian-tagged donation to Daniel's cause (Oxfam - donate), Daniel will (triage and) forward a patch from Ubuntu to the Debian BTS.

DPL August report, posted on d-d-a a while ago (yep, I forgot to blog it up to now!, sorry for the oldies).

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Dear project members, August has been a month with a good deal of vacations for many of us, including yours truly. Therefore the monthly report of DPL activities will be briefer than usual. Which is good, as it'll leave all my readers more time to do NMUs and fix RC bugs! Ongoing discussions

• Discussion about the new trademark policy has continued on -project. I've collected quite some feedback and summarized it in a request for change that I've passed on to SFLC. I'm waiting for a second draft from them, before reviving the thread.
• on the long-running issue of de-duplicating DebConf infrastructure wrt Debian's, I've been happy to support the proposal of moving DebConf's list to Debian's software and infrastructure. There seems to be interest and consensus, but the DebConf team could probably use a couple more helping hands to make it real
• starting from the practical need of dealing with minified JavaScript files, an interesting discussion sparkled on -devel. It quickly turned in both musing on the notion of archive-wide DFSG-freeness and some new devscript tooling by Andreas Tille. AFAIU some extra testing would be welcome

Assets

• The DFGS-free logo relicensing I've mentioned last month is now on its way. Following advice from SFLC, I've slightly patched the current trademark policy (mainly to clarify scope), just enough to decouple logo relicensing under LGPLv3/CC-BY-SA 3.0 from the finalization of a new trademark policy (see above). I've also verified that the license choice is fine with teams that regularly deal with the logos. Ball is now in SPI camp (as copyright holder). They should finalize the relicensing during the forthcoming board meeting, on September 13th.
• We heard back from the trademark office in Japan, who accepted our request to transfer it from local Debian contributors to SPI. That being mainly a bureaucratic acknowledgement, we'll now need to way for a while until they confirm the transfer has been finalized. My eternal thanks for help with this matter goes to Kenshi Muto.

Core teams

• Manoj Srivastava has stepped down as tech-ctte member. I hereby thank him for his long and valuable service in that capacity. The tech-ctte has now one vacant seat, and I've encouraged present tech-ctte members to propose to me a suitable candidate. In an attempt to promote diversity of views within the tech-ctte, they are now considering various ways to solicit candidatures. You'll hear from them about this soon, I suspect.
• In the meantime, monthly IRC meetings of the tech-ctte are continuing, as you might have noticed from tech-ctte decision reports posted on this list. As it seemed to be lingering, at the last meeting I've solicited progress on the Python maintenance issue.
• The auditors have noticed the unclear situation of the Policy Editor delegation, which seems to rely on a "base" delegation dating back to Antony Towns' office and various subsequent delegation "patches". After discussion with Russ Allbery I've then proceeded to a public "ping" to assess the interest of current editors in continuing their work in such capacity, and encourage new volunteers to apply as editors. Based on the feedback I've got, I'm now preparing a new Policy Editor delegation.

Legal and RC fun

• Solicited by Jonathan Nieder and Helge Kreutzmann, I've looked into #555168 and sought legal advice to answer various questions related to the non-copyrightability of locale data. Aaron Williamson of SFLC has been blazing fast in answering them (thanks!), and Jonathan and Helge has now all the needed information to help addressing that (RC) issue. Keep an eye on the bug log for more details.

Hardware

• I've approved buying 6 console servers to improve DSA ability to act on remote machines, without having to bother^Wrely on local admins when not strictly needed. ~550 USD well spent.

See? It's been quick(er)! Talk to you here next month, with a much lower count of Wheezy RC Bugs on the horizon, hopefully.
Cheers.

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PS the boring day-to-day activity log for August 2012 is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201208

In late July, the Awesome Foundations invited me to participate in an interesting conversation about open brands at their conference. Awesome is a young collection of organizations struggling with the idea of if, and how, they want to try to control who gets call themselves Awesome. I was asked to talk about how the free software community approaches the issue. Guidance from free software is surprisingly unclear. I have watched and participated in struggles over issues of branding in every successful free software project I've worked in. Many years ago, Greg Pomerantz and I wrote a draft trademark policy for the Debian distribution over a couple beers. Over the last year, I've been working with Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli and lawyers at the Software Freedom Law Center to help draft a trademark policy for the Debian project. Through that process, I've come up with three principles which I think lead to more clear discussion about whether a free culture or free software should register a trademark and, if they do, how they should think about licensing it. I've listed those principles below in order of importance. 1. We want people to use our brands. Conversation about trademarks seem to turn into an exercise in imagining all the horrible ways in which a brand might be misused. This is silly and wrong. It is worth being extremely clear on this point: Our problem is not that people will misuse our brands. Our problem is that not enough people will use them at all. The most important goal of a trademark policy should be to make legitimate use possible and easy. We want people to make t-shirts with our logos. We want people to write books about our products. We want people to create user groups and hold conferences. We want people to use, talk about, and promote our projects both commercially and non-commercially. Trademarks will limit the diffusion of our brand and, in that way, will hurt our projects. Sometimes, after carefully considering these drawbacks, we think the trade-off is worth making. And sometimes it is. However, projects are generally overly risk averse and, as a result, almost always err on the side of too much control. I am confident that free software and free culture projects' desire to control their brands has done more damage than all brand misuse put together. 2. We want our projects to be able to evolve. The creation of a trademark puts legal power to control a brand in the hands of an individual, firm, or a non-profit. Although it might not seem like such a big deal, this power is, fundamentally, the ability to determine what a project is and is not. By doing this, it creates a single point of failure and a new position of authority and, in that process, limits projects' ability to shift and grow organically over time. I've heard that in US politics, there is no trademark for the terms Republican or Democrat and that you do not need permission to create an organization that claims to be part of either party. And that does not mean that everybody is confused. Through social and organizational structures, it is clear who is in, who is out, and who is on the fringes. More importantly, this structure allows for new branches and groups outside of the orthodoxy to grow and develop on the margins. Both parties have been around since the nineteenth century, have swapped places on the political spectrum on a large number of issues, and have played host to major internal ideological disagreements. Almost any organization should aspire to such longevity, internal debate, and flexibility. 3. We should not confuse our communities. Although they are often abused, trademarks are fundamentally pro-consumer. The point of legally protected brands is to help consumers from being confused as the source of a product or service. Users might love software from the Debian project, or might hate it, but it's nice for them to be able to know that they're getting "Debian Quality" when they download a distribution. Of course, legally protected trademarks aren't the only way to ensure this. Domains names, internal policies, and laws against fraud and misrepresentation all serve this purpose as well. The Open Source Initiative applied for a trademark on the term open source and had their application rejected. The lack of a registered trademark has not kept folks from policing use of the term. Folks try to call their stuff "open source" when it is not and are kept in line by a community of folks who know better. And since lawyers are rarely involved, it is hardly clear that a registered trademark would help in the vast majority of these these situations. It is also the case that most free software/culture organizations lack the money, lawyers, or time, to enforce trademarks in any case. Keeping your communities of users and developers clear on what is, and what isn't, your product and your project is deeply important. But how we choose to do this is something we should never take for granted.

Monthly DPL bits, fresh from the oven.

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Tip to feel good about the release #476: before reading this, grab and fix one of the RC bugs affecting Wheezy. Done? Now you're ready for a slightly less exciting report of DPL activities. Highlights

• I've wrapped up a couple of years of discussions with FSF representatives, proposing a joint working group on FSF' assessment of Debian Free-ness. Some news coverage ensued. The discussion list that has been set up welcomes participants and, in particular, could use some more DDs, fond of Debian principles but also interested in external review of our free/non-free separation.
• DebConf12 has happened!, and many of us attended it. Due to family reasons I've been able to attend only DebCamp and DebConf day-0, just in time to deliver the traditional "bits from the DPL" speech. Among other topics, in the speech I've discussed governance scaling issues in our governance, and in particular about the role of the DPL --- issue which I'm partly trying to address with the "DPL helpers" initiatives. Slides and videos of the talk are available. As many others DebConf people, I took part in Nicaraguan TV shows about DebConf, showing a good deal of interest by the local media in our presence. I don't have links to the recordings yet, but I suspect DebConf orga people will provide them as soon as they're available.
• Many others DebConf12 events are relevant for future Project directions. I went through many of the events I've missed thanks to the work of the video team and of the gobby note takers. I recommend doing the same. Some events are particularly relevant to recent project-wide discussions, such as EFI, hijacking, and the release process and I'm sure you'll find more If you're a DebConf12 speaker and produced slides, please upload them to penta, so that they could be used as future reference.

Assets

• On the hardware front, we bought another server according to DSA's "5-year plan". It will be used as a ganeti node at the man-da hosting location. We bought it thanks to donated money, for a total of ~6'600 EUR.
• (After ~8 months of pestering,) we got from SPI a data dump of Debian financial transactions there. Thanks for this result goes to the SPI Board and in particular to Robert Brockway and Joerg Jaspert. This was the last blocker to produce detailed financial reports for the past couple of years of Debian activities. Unfortunately, it still is a blocker: Debian auditors found out that the data dump is not complete. SPI will send us remaining data soon , but I don't have an ETA, unfortunately.
• An ftpmasters sprint is being organized and I've been happy to approve its budget. Help is still needed on the -sprints list to keep up with the organization part of sprints, including activities like documenting sprints to show donors what we do with their help.

Logo & trademark

• to stop the absurdity of not using the official logo ("with Debian") as part of our official theme, I advanced a bit on the topic of relicensing the logo under a DFSG-free license. I sought a second legal advice to SFLC (as requested by the SPI board). They confirm we can safely do the relicensing (without undermining our rights on contained marks) under a license like dual LGPLv3+ / CC-BY-SA, provided that a suitable trademark policy is in place
• which is why I've posted to -project a trademark policy draft, based on legal advice from SFLC. I've gather useful feedback already, but more is welcome. Note that, as Russ very eloquently put it, we do not particularly enjoy thinking about which restrictions we put on the usage of our marks. But given we do have (and use) those marks, we should better empower the legal owners (SPI in this case) to properly defend them. Our specification for the policy to SFLC has been "as free as possible", and that is what we're trying to achieve.

Note that the actual logo relicensing should be done by SPI, via their board, upon request of mine (as Debian Project liaison). We won't make it for the next SPI board meeting, as it is on 4 days away. But we can aim for the subsequent meeting, on September 13th. If all goes well (big "if"), we will enjoy a DFSG-free logo after that date. Internal organization Recent flurry of re-organization in the tech-ctte --- which I somewhat triggered pushing for periodic meetings --- seems to be proceeding well. I'm very happy about it, as we all need to trust that tech-ctte decisions will be not only sound, but also prompt. If you're interested into this topic, some recent evidence of the ongoing reorganization and its result can be found in their DebConf12 BoF, minutes of the last meeting, a set of forthcoming GRs, and the recent great decision of posting decisions results to d-d-a (as it happened for node/nodejs). Kudos to tech-ctte members for the recent activism! I haven't worked on it myself directly, but I highlight Enrico's work on server side archival of NM conversations. It has the potential of enabling automatic detection of stuck NM processes. I'm a bit rusty as AM now, but I think missing that ability is one of the main remaining causes of frustration when joining Debian. So, if you are an AM, please opt-in and use this feature with your appicants. If you are not an AM why not? Miscellanea Some misc legal stuff:

• I got the legal advice we asked about the possibility of turning mentors.debian.net into an official service. The worry there was about the potential copyright infringements by mentees. In the end, we don't need to worry about that, provided we've clear contact points (and "reasonable" timing ) for removing infringing material once it's been reported, and that we declare our public policy about that. I've a draft policy document to start with. I'll soon contact mentors.d.n to adapt it where needed and have it vetted by SPI before going live.
• I've worked with GNOME maintainers (thanks in particular to Jordi Mallach) to rework the mixed Debian/GNOME logo on their alioth project page, to stay on the safe side and avoid any ambiguity wrt GNOME trademark policy.

and some misc "political" stuff:

• we've been happy to accept an invitation to attend the GNOME Advisory Board meeting at GUADEC: Jord (thanks, again!) kindly accepted to represent Debian there. An early report has been posted on his blog, a more detailed one is forthcoming to -project.
• OSI has discussed with their affiliates the possibility of signing the Declaration of Internet Freedom. On behalf of Debian, I've vouched for it. By the way, I'm serving pro tempore as Debian liaison at OSI, but if there are people interested in doing that, I'll be happy to consider handing over the responsibility to other (it's a quite lightweight one, at present).

Happy RC bug squashing,
Cheers.

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PS the boring day-to-day activity log for July 2012 is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201207

If you're organizing a DebConf12, and especially if you're new to it, please have a look at the DebConf BoF HOWTO. One of its main take away messages is: don't be exclusive, think of the kittens. Since last year, and to the might powers of DSA (and their kittens), we now have a more stable place for the gobby server: gobby.debian.org. I've just amended the howto to point to that, and updated the info about which gobby package to use (nowadays clarified, thanks to Phil). Enjoy your BoF-s!

Monthly DPL bits, fresh from the oven^W^W^W hot from DebConf12, and just posted to d-d-a.

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Howdy from DebConf12. It's hot, but it's also time to bother you again with a (not so) brief DPL activity report, this time for June 2012. Time-based freeze: DONE, short freeze: TODO Two highlights for this month. First, you've probably noticed Wheezy is now frozen, YAY. This is huge achievement for the release, but also for the project. It's the first time we do a time-based freeze, and it took some quite heated discussion at the beginning of the release cycle to decide to do this. And we did it properly: respecting the planned month and narrowing down the period later. This exercise has hopefully helped both DDs in their package planning and our upstreams in targeting Wheezy with stable releases of their software. Kudos to the release team for their coordination work! Now we've the second part still TODO: releasing Wheezy, without RC bugs, with a freeze period as short as possible. See the beginning of my last "bits from the DPL" mail for my usual song and dance on how to deliver that, together. DebConf12 A lot of us will attend DebConf12. Enjoy it! ... and take the chance to both have fun and make great plans for Debian's future. But remember that "if it didn't happen on a mailing list, it didn't happen". Not all of us will be lucky enough to attend DebConf (in person or remotely). Make sure that those who don't can take part in your team decisions and get informed of what is going to happen here. Politics

• After discussion (and consensus) on debian-boot, I've asked to join FSF campaign on secure boot.
• Since OIN was seeking comments on their Linux System definition (not really openly though: I learned about it last minute from people directly in touch with OIN representatives), I've contacted them proposing to include all "Debian main" packages in their definition. I haven't yet hear back from them, but I doubt they'll accept the idea. It'd be nice to have an official answer about why, though.

Zack's spring tour I spent a significant part of June doing Debian talks ins some sort of "spring tour" between Italy and France. In particular:

• I've taught a lenghty class about the Debian Project at the Insubria International Open Source Summer School in Como, Italy (see slides)
• I've delivered the opening keynote at the yearly Free Software conference in Ancona, Italy, ConfSL'12 (see slides)
• I've delivered the opening talk at the Debian for Scientific Facilities Days event organized by the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France (see slides)

Many thanks to the organizers of these events for inviting and sponsoring me (as well as other Debian people, in the ESRF case) and for their interest in Debian. Sprints

• I approved (for a budget of ~2'000 EUR) and helped hosting the i18n sprint in Paris. As a (great!) result of it, the i18n infrastructure has now been moved on DSA administered machines. A more detailed report is available. Thanks to all attendees and in particular to Christian Perrier for the organization work.
• as part of the "Debian for Scientific Facilities" event, a Debian Science sprint also took place at ESRF. Report is pending
• a BSP took place in Salzburg in June, see the report posted by Bernd Zeimetz. I've approved using some Debian money (~350 EUR) to pay for lodgement of some of the attendees

Assets

• DSA have been working on seting up the first machines we bought as part of the yearly revamping plan of Debian hardware. As one of the first user visible changes, UDD has been moved to a new, faster, machine. I single this out because, if you're doing RC bug squashing (as you should! :-)), you'll notice that the bugs search interface is now much faster, hopefully making your release work less frustrating. Similar improvements are forthcoming for other machines, while DSA (thanks!) migrate other services to newer hardware.
• Last April I mentioned that we're aiming at publishing comprehensive Debian budget reports for the past couple of years and that one of the blocker is access to our transaction information at SPI. This is still a blocker, unfortunately. And we still don't have an ETA on when it'll be fixed.
• The current owner of debian.eu has let us know that he is willing to hand over the domain to us. Finally.
• The European part of our Madrid protocol application for the Debian trademark has been vetted by the European trademark office. Meaning: Debian trademark is now officially protected in Europe.
• DuckDuckGo sent me a first report of the "donation" they're ready to make, based on our agreement with them. The aument is still unclaimed, as we're aiming at invoicing twice per year (to keep the papwerwork low). It isn't a stellar amount: 32.55 USD for the month of May.

Discussions Some relevant discussions for project evolution has been going on in June and I took part into them. You might want to have a look at them:

• proposal to change the way DM permissions are handled
• proposal to change the policy ruling the debian.net domain
• we've been discussing debconf12 budget at length, including how to deal with travel sponsorship requests in the future:
• in the "debian account on github" thread, I've proposed a general policy for presence of accounts named "debian" on non-free services
• the long quest on how to choose Wheezy artwork has come to an end, and we have a very nice theme now, thanks to contributions by many artist and integration work by Paul Tagliamonte. Not all went well in the process, but there are useful lessons for the future.

Misc

• I got quite some feedback about the debate with debian-multimedia.org I mentioned last month. My take away message from that feedback is that many users have no idea about the multimedia capabilities (and in particular of codecs availability) of recent Debian releases. We should probably invest some communication energies into that.
• as planned, another tech-ctte IRC meeting has happened. I took part into it, mostly asking to prioritize long standing issues, such as the Python maintenance one. Minutes of the meeting are available.

Cheers.

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PS the boring day-to-day activity log for June is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201206

It's that time of the year again. No, not only the Debian biyearly freeze that has just happened, again (YAY!). It's DebConf time again. Yesterday night I arrived in Managua, Nicaragua, for DebConf12. I'm still jetlagged a bit, but the first impression is great. And that impression is also very green, shockingly green. The city is gorgeous: full of trees and plants (well, at least compared to my metropolitan European standards), and the campus of Universidad Centroamericana where the conference is hosted is even more so. Also, it's a great pleasure to have DebConf in an university campus where students are still swarming. My only reason for sadness thus far. While I did bring my traditional Debian kilt at DebConf, I discovered this morning that I forgot my sporran at home
So if you don't see me wearing my kilt at this DebConf often, that's why