MIT student Patrick Lam picked up a GNOME
Foundation Desktop Integration award on his way to
Canada for school break.
Patrick Lam takes home Desktop bounty funded by Novell
(Left to Right: Tim Ney, Patrick Lam, Miguel de Icaza)
Solved: Use a mmap'able cache for fontconfig (Bug #169345)
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"JDS's GNOME based desktop is a pleasure to use."
Following Sun's vice president of operating systems Tom Goguen's announcement that
Sun will make a reference release of JDS on a Linux distribution available,
Fernando Cassia writes about the Java Desktop System in the Inquirer.
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Chief Information Officers and information technology staff from 17 states and Argentina convened today in Portland, Oregon at the first
Open Source Conference. The conference was opened by Congressman David Wu, a ranking member of the
House Committee on Science in the U.S. Congress. Representative Wu,
a former intellectual property lawyer, spoke of his Portland region as a hub of best minds
and businesses developing and benefiting from open source and free software - home of Linus Torvalds, Intel and the Eclipse Foundation.
Red Hat's Tom Rabon,Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs delivered the morning keynote highlighting the rapid adoption of open source by governments around the world. He also spoke about the current abuses of the
U.S. patent system and its "monopolistic hold which stifles innovation" citing
12 patents on the movement of a cursor as an example.
The two-day conference is organized by the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University.
At a pre-conference dinner for speakers on Wednesday evening, Linda Hammel of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, received a round of applause. The recent adoption of Open Document file formats in Massachusetts has attracted the attention of other governments as far away as Malaysia,
according to Tom Ranbon. Ms. Hammel, an attorney who did much of the due diligence
on the GPL and other licenses for Massachusetts, is at GOSCON presenting a background primer
on Proprietary and Open Source
licenses and public sector issues.
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Rising Stars Sign With GNOME Foundation
Today the GNOME Foundation welcomes three rising star companies to its Advisory Board - OpenedHand, Imendio and Fluendo.
Working on the Econ(o)system
Ecosystem is the latest buzz word used to describe open source interplay of code and commerce. Community and companies. Jobs.
The term ecosystem is a progression, of sorts, from
being labelled techie lunatic fringe or disruptive technology.
Roots
Today's announcement illustrates how the GNOME developers continue to develop technology that
benefits entrepreneurs and investors with open source business plans. In turn, these companies create jobs, return code and provide
resources to the community.
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With the growth in attendance and number of talks at GUADEC, the GNOME Summit was started as
a smaller, less structured gathering for
core developers and others who want to hack on or
talk about GNOME.
Statashootah
Except for a trip to a computer game center in Brooklyn, the Summit has been held at
MIT. This year, the Summit returns
to MIT's funky Stata Center from October 8 - 10th (Columbus Day weekend.)
Sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, there is no registration fee for participants. Those
planning to attend, however, are asked to sign up on the
Wiki.
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Like a TV movie of the week, the first bus of Katrina refugees reported to arrive at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, three hundred fifty miles from New Orleans, were those who took evacuation into their own hands.
For the refugees stranded outside, in cars or shelters along the Gulf Coast and in cities like
Hattisburg, the future is
unknown.
One fact is clear. Many who did not leave their homes before the hurricane hit stayed
because they lacked the means. They are America's poor.
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Serial Underground
He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, written music reviews and
composed an opera based on a John Waters film. We knew Jed
Distler was a talented guy when his wife, arts
administrator Celia Cooke, asked for some help in
founding Composers Collaborative, a non-profit
organization in New York formed to present new musical
work.
It took a lot of kitchen table meetings and telephone calls,
but Composers Collaborative produces vibrant, fresh
work.
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Eben Moglen, founder of the new Software Freedom Law
Center and Columbia law professor from New York, stopped by the
GNOME booth at LinuxWorld, San Francisco. He wanted to invite
GNOME Foundation's participation in the review of an upcoming
revised GNU General Public License.
With a GPL3 long awaited, Professor Moglen and Richard Stallman
are working on a language that will be posted early next year
for community review. The public comments period is expected to
take a year. We asked Professor Moglen what we might see on the
patent issue in the revised license. In answer to that
question, he described a large GPL community with a spectrum of
opinion from large global companies that want a carve out on
patents to free software developers who prefer the punitive
revoking of GPL rights in cases of patent conflicts.
The .org pavilion at LinuxWorld is always a hub of vibrant
activity and mutual aid among projects. Whether it's borrowing
a pair of scissors or the sharing of network connections,
hardware and information, the .org pavilion just works. It has
become a cornerstone of LWE since we first proposed to IDG that
they put all the community projects together after their first
show in 1999.
The LTSP.org team unpacks the thin clients
LinuxWorld was first held in San Jose before moving to San
Francisco. It is now located in this city's new Moscone West
(Moscone North and South now occupied by a large gift store
expo.) We haven't seen the new building's loading dock, but it
was sure nice to see the delivery of thin clients arrive, even
though the expo had already opened. The guys at LTSP had two of
them up and running at the GNOME booth in no time. Pity the
poor coordinator from Ricoh who was hunting down his two boxes
(one printer) while the set-up crew sat waiting over the
weekend. "Two boxes?"
"That's two sets of paper."
"We have the paperwork, we just don't have the boxes."
The .org pavilion remains the place to see the latest in open
source technology.
Stuart Anderson stopped by to demo the new USB powered
pocket server from Black Dog. The ipod size
Debian powered device comes with a biometric scanner and a
400Mhz PowerPC processor with flash memory.
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What malice lurks?
Malo Leche
With all the recent news
about identity theft, stolen credit card and
personal information, maybe the attempt at illegally taking money
from GNOME Foundation's bank account should not be such a surprise.
Yet malice
still comes as a shock.
What happened?
Forged bank drafts, with a counterfeit heading that included
"The Free Desktop Project" on the corner of the check, were presented
to the foundation's bank last week. Attempted deposits in two states
were quickly spotted by the bank and an investigation begun.
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Modernismo
Barcelona's waves of architectural expression include the 1992 Olympics and the modernism period at the end of the 19th Century into the beginning decade of the 20th. It was the monarchy that commissioned the grandeur around Ciutadella Park for the 1929 World's Fair. This is in this
area where the 2006 GNOME Users and Developers European Conference will take
place. Known for its artists and sense of design and innovation, it is only
fitting that a free desktop conference visit the capital of Catalunya.
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When statistician John Williams asked about
estimating the number of GNOME users, we turned to Dan Kusnetzky at
IDC to find out
their estimate of
Linux client operating environment
shipments. IDC projects in 2004 there were approximately 4.1 million revenue
producing copies of Linux delivered.
"If one considers the installed
base
(shipments minus retirements), then the paid Linux client operating
environment software population is 7.8 million copies" Mr. Kusnetsky
told us. Non-paid
copies, he said, are likely to add about 2.5 million to that total installed base.
While there is no available count
of those users running GNOME in the IDC figures, there are
known reference deployments - telecentros in Brazil, school and govenment offices in Spain, police and
animation houses in the U.S. Retail and financial companies (some on thin clients) are said to be using GNOME, but have asked their vendors not to publicize names.
With a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of
25% for Linux on the desktop and a differential for OpenSolaris, we'll leave it to the statisticians to verify which way the wind is blowing.
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"Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government."
- Morten Andreas Meyer, Norwegian Minister of Modernization
After her speech urging people to influence the information society at GUADEC last year in Kristiansand, Eva Hildrum, Director General at the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications, heard an earful about the government's use of proprietary standards from Norwegian members of the audience.
Ms. Hildrum's keynote was followed by a roundtable
called Defining Open Standards moderated by Bob Stack,
who was instrumental in implementing the
open standards policy in Massachusetts while
he was Chief Technology Officer for the state.
The session, arranged by Danish FLOSS advocate Anne Østergaard,
included Bruce Perens (USA), Brahim Souabi (NL), Egon Troles (DE), Vemund Riiser (NO) & Thomas Myrup Kristensen (DK) and contributed to the
discussion of open standards in Norway.
It is always encouraging to hear follow-up reports from countries that
have hosted a GNOME Users and Developers European Conference.
Norway's new digital government framework
calls for open standards and government agency
plans for open source software. The plan (Norwegian PDF) is called e-Norge 2009. Chalk another one up for free information access
and technology.
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People coming from all over the globe
and the introduction of a new device
is convergence in more ways than one.
GUADEC's new Cornerstone Sponsor
will bring some of their new devices - the Nokia 770 to demo in Germany. Participants at GUADEC6 will have an opportunity to hear Yannick Pellet and Carlos Guerreiro talk
about Nokia participation with open source
during the conference.
Nokia is sending a
25-person team to Stuttgart and promises to
raffle a few new devices away.
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"Six years. It's hard to believe," wrote Greg Corrin,
the marketing chief at Eazel, now working in publishing after
an MBA stint in Japan.
Greg remembers the decision to adopt
nautilus at the first GUADEC in Paris.
It may be hard to believe, but it's true. With a little bit of magic and a LOT of help
from the planning committee and sponsors, the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference launches again this weekend.
Keynotes and More
With a successful GUADEC-ES finishing in Spain, all heads now turn to
Germany.
There are fine speakers and a multimedia track that is a first.
Sleepless in Stuttgart
If you are hesitating to travel to Stuttgart for want of
a place to sleep, there are still some GUADEC beds available at the
Youth Hostel which can reserved on-line. You may also request gratis conference registration, hostel and
breakfast.
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The Good Ol' Days
Some years ago, technology journalist Amy Harmon traveled from Manhattan to MIT to attend the first Free Software Award ceremony at the Media Lab. While in Cambridge, she took the opportunity to interview
Bob Young.
The resulting N.Y. Times article, with a headline For Sale: Free Operating System helped stimulate Wall Street's interest in the then pre-IPO Red Hat.
Higher up the Stack
Recently,
publicists working with venture capitalists (VC) and
their portfolio companies are issuing press releases
announcing funding for companies
based on the Open Source business model which has picked up steam again along Sand Hill Road.
This week, Gary Rivlin writes that the good ole
days may be returning for a new generation of
start-up companies with products
and services that reside further up the software "stack."
On the track
SpikeSource received its start-up financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
GroundWork Open Source Solutions landed cash from Canaan Partners
and Mayfield Fund.
MySQL AB, based in Sweden, is backed by Index Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Benchmark Capital, which once held a 5 percent stake in Red Hat.
MySQL has a VC-friendly business strategy utilizing the dual licensing business model, releasing software under the GPL and a closed license.
In Atlanta, JBoss is financed by Matrix Partners, Accel Partners and Intel Capital.
VC, who once walked the aisles of a .org pavilion in search of engineering talent, now
have a growing organizational infrastructure and open source network to use.
Last year, Seattle's Voyager Capital, joined the Open Source Development Labs in an
effort to keep its finger on the pulse of the new shared
technology and business plans.
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Miguel de Icaza today received the Software Tools User Group (STUG) award from USENIX, sharing the honor with Mattias Ettrich of KDE. The award was announced by Mike Jones, the USENIX president.
Ellie Young and her friendly staff at USENIX have organized an impressive conference
that has brought 600 participants to southern California. Anaheim, home of Disneyland, has an area
around Convention Way which is meticulously clean and features neatly trimmed bushes in
the shape of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. USENIX regulars such as Peter Salus
and Jon “Maddog” Hall could be seen holding court in the lobby of the conference hotel. Outside the hum of power lawnmowers fill the air.
In making the award to GNOME and KDE, USENIX said:
Recipients of the annual STUG award conspicuously exhibit a contribution to
the reusable code-base available to all and/or the provision a significant,
enabling technology directly to users in a widely-available form.
The UNIX Command-Line User Interface (CLI), while widely recognized as being
efficient was often attacked by non-UNIX users as not being user friendly.
While many GUIs have been added to UNIX over the years in trying to make it
easier to use, these were often considered inferior to many non-UNIX GUIs.
In October of 1996 and August of 1997 two projects were started to produce
desktops that were easy to use, mapped to traditional UNIX philosophies and
gave access to all of the underlying features that the CLI contained.
While these desktops competed with each other, they also lent strength to each
other and have now produced a range of applications that we collectively
call KDE and GNOME. These applications have allowed different implementations
of the Unix operating system into the non-technical marketplace. Most
importantly, by embracing the concepts of Free and Open Source Software, these
two desktop projects allowed for freely distributed code that allowed any
distribution or software developer to utilize these graphical features.
The USENIX Association would like to recognize both of these groups in creating
a set of libraries, tools and applications which are portable and run across
several different operating system platforms and hardware architectures.
Thanks to USENIX for providing this recognition to Miguel, Matthias and all the free desktop developers around the world.
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Inclusão Digital
A photograph
of children at a Sao Paolo telecentro (like the girl below)
appears in today's New York Times on the front page of its Business section. Todd Benson's article reports on the Brazilian
government's initiative to bring computers to its citizens. The effort is similar
to one launched by the Ministry of Information and Communication in South Korea
four years ago. It may be
unusual for a major U.S. newspaper to run a image
of children in a developing country using computers on a business page, but Brasil is probably the only
country where global companies selling hardware and software to the government have in-country managers with job titles that include "digital inclusion."
A Happy GNOME User in a Telecentro
Wake up and smell the chimarrao
Brasil has no Grand Canyon to give relevance to the term
digital divide, yet it does have enormous barriers to including
its population in the information society.
Digital inclusion is a term popularized by the PT (Worker's
Party) in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, the country's first oasis for free software. Since the election of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2002, many of the IT leaders who deployed Software Livre in Rio Grande
do Sul are supporting the digital inclusion efforts of other Brazilian states. Marcos Mazoni went to oversee IT in Paraná. Rogério Santanna dos Santos and Patricia Pessi are in Brasilia working on Governo Eletrônico (Electronic Government) at the Ministry of Planning.
 Sao Paolo Developers
GNOME has been a cornerstone in the telecentros deployment, as illustrated in this testimonial
from Frederico Camara, who recently left
the Sao Paolo city hall to join Coletivo Digital, a non-government organization.
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Passion for Fashion
If
Barbie has Linux, can the Bratz be far behind?
Sleeping in Baden-Württemberg
There is a range of GUADEC accommodation available
in Stuttgart. GUADEC discounts are available at selected hotels. A number of beds in the local hostel will also be available (27 - 31 May) for booking when the registration opens in a week's time.
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Your Favorite Menu
Stuttgart-bound GUADEC, the sixth annual GNOME Users and Developers European Conference, joins its Spanish language sibling GUADEC-ES in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain to make May a
true EuroGNOME desktop celebration and hackfest.
Two menus, same API.
Flying with the Cosmonauts
Today's announcement
illustrates how GUADEC has grown from 100 hackers in Paris (2000) to this year's event
featuring Canonical founder/outer space
traveller Mark Shuttleworth and top analyst Dan Kusnetzky (he speaks, business leaders listen.)
The Pinata Factor
Technical talks are not scheduled to be announced until Monday. However, reliable sources have it that Mr. Robert Love, author and pinata companion, is among speakers from 16 countries, including his native Florida.
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With the strong government support for Software Livre, a growing Linux market in Brasil and modest acquisition price, one
wonders why Conectiva has only been
acquired now. In buying
this South American distributor, Mandrakesoft
co-founder Gael Duval reaffirms a
presence in a country where the Mandrake brand is already known and Debian has more Linux market share than Red Hat or Novell.
Mandrakesoft and Conectiva have downsized considerably since their start-up days. What the combined company will offer by way of
development and services remains to be seen. Brazilian media have not rushed to cover this announcement, although a press call was scheduled for today.
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GUADEC Blotter is back for another season.
Getting GUADEC 6 connected this year is strong support by public agencies in Germany. Wirtschaftsförderung Region Stuttgart, the Stuttgart Region Economic Development agency that is hosting this year's GNOME User and Developers European Conference (29-31 May) with GNOME Deutschland, e.V. has an open source initiative that is gaining traction. An area primarily
known around the globe for its automobiles is quietly working to transform a challenged old economy with the same free software that is removing the digital barrier in developing countries. GUADEC is locating to the regal building called
Haus der Wirschaft with the strong support of lead Cornerstone Sponsor
Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economic Affairs.
As Haus der Wirtschaft has no network available for the hundreds of developers meeting over three days, a team of local volunteers are
working on delivering the required bandwidth in May. Hanno Wagner, Joerg Hoh and Murray Cumming surveyed the building for electrical outlets and potential access points on Wednesday
afternoon.
Assisting GNOME Foundation in the outreach to German businesses for User
Day will be MFG Baden-Württemberg, the federal agency working for IT and media.
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Don't live to geek; geek to live.
- lifehacker
Umm. Ok.
For the early adopter who has everything, Gawker Media brings you lifehacker.
Sponsored by Sony, the site explains blog, quotes Richard Stallman and is under a Creative Commons license.
The Good Fight
Eric Raymond has stepped down as President of the Open Source Initiative and a new team is in place. OSI established the Open Source Definition and has set the metric on licenses.
There is no shortage of intelligence at the newly established Software Freedom Law Center. Headed by
Eben Moglen in New York, the center
stands to protect software freedom. The GNU General Public License and its license siblings, have created a multi-billion dollar revenue stream for the members of Open Source Development Lab, which is bankrolling the effort.
Welcome SFLC and good speed!
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INT. EDIE'S APARTMENT
Verbal walks in and sits down on the couch, watching Keaton cautiously. He looks around the large apartment, beautifully furnished and decorated.
VERBAL
Don't tell me you don't need this. Is this your place?
Keaton is unable to answer.
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We might have taken it as an omen last year, when the reception they hosted at Harvard B School's 20th Annual Entrepreneurship Conference featured a cash bar. Things were changing at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault .
Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, the Boston law firm that advised Red Hat on its 1999 initial public offering and represented
Ximian prior to its acquisition by Novell, has announced it will close its doors at 125 High Street. With the deep pockets of venture capital firms such as Greylock, Charles River Ventures, Battery Ventures and universities like MIT feeding Boston area start-ups, the firm found no shortage of of deals, particularly in the boom days of the stock market. As in the tech sector, however, law firms of late have been going through their own mergers. Bigger firms mean fiercer competition.
Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault was unable to survive the loss of its founder Richard Testa, who passed away suddenly in 2002.
Testa was known for deals that created companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Teradyne. He had worked
with his mentor General Georges Doriot, the man who started the first venture capital firm, American Research and Development (ARD.)
Apparently, no one at THT could fill Testa's shoes and provide the inspiration and leadership essential to retaining the human capital that made the firm what it was. Lawyers started to leave for other firms. Tom Beaudoin jumped ship to become Chair of the Fund Formation Group at
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr. William Schnoor Jr. left and is expected to join Goodwin Procter LLP in Boston; litigation chair Roger Lane is moving to Greenberg Traurig LLP. Other THT partners have left for Bingham McCutchen and Proskauer Rose.
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Carol Bellamy has served as Executive Director of
the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) for the past ten years. Long a champion to the underdog, she was the first woman
elected City Council President in New York where she took
up many community causes, including saving an abandoned school on the lower eastside
of Manhattan for use as an arts
center that is now internationally known.
For the last week, Ms. Bellamy has patiently provided TV journalists with
caring and experienced insight into a more grim reality than an arts center. On Sunday, from Sri Lanka, she described seeing parents "standing at the edge of the ocean waiting for their children's bodies to come back."
Sunday morning television in the States is time for the weekly news
and political commentary shows. While the broadcast networks often
cover the same topics and events, they typically book a different
assortment of guests to discuss them.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appeared on ABC television's
This Week
show with host George Stephanopoulos, former Clinton staffer who figures
prominently in the documentary War Room. Mr. Stephanopoulos commented, during his interview with Secretary-General Annan, that Colin Powell was headed for the disaster region. Secretary
Powell did not appear on the ABC weekly show before leaving for Asia, but on CBS and NBC.
Speaking on Face The Nation[transcript pdf] (CBS News), after Carol Bellamy's brief interview,
Secretary Powell described the problem of "retail distribution" in the affected area.
On NBC's Meet the Press, Powell reiterated the huge logistical challenge of getting supplies to those who need them.
"It's a matter of getting supplies to the region and then, once you get these
supplies to airports and ports, how do you make retail distribution out to the
people in need?"
Commenting on the criticism he and the U.S. administration had received following its
initial response to the disaster, Secretary Powell said,
"There is always some former official around, some Rolodex ranger that always
shows up to criticize what we are doing."
In his book Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward describes Powell's own tension behind the scenes with other members of the administration.
Since announcing his resignation, however, Colin Powell has not slowed down on the job,
nor has he said what he will do after he leaves.
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