Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Spent some time discussing/arguing free software with RMS today. Was good, I think, all things considered- he’s clearly a bright guy, and though we have major disagreement about tactics and probably some minor disagreements about end goals, I think I understand him better now, and I hope he understands me (and maybe even GNOME) better.
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Outside of that, the summit/hackfest has been good. Not perfect- certainly we’ve learned lots of lessons for next time, which I’m writing down tonight and will send to the board and organizational list tonight. But all in all I feel like it’s been useful for me and I hope fun and/or useful for most of the people who came.

In the ‘small world’ category, a lawyer sat next to mibarra and behind me on the train to the GNOME Summit today. He asked why there were 15 people in front of him, all apparently madly hacking. Mibarra explained a bit about who we were, and eventually he mentioned that he was aware of the problems of compatibility with Microsoft, since his firm had just been forced to switch from wordperfect to Word. Oh, and then he casually mentioned that he’d cross examined ‘that jerk Johannsen’ for the DVDCSS case. On the side of the Industry, of course. Weird. On challenge, did seem to firmly believe that I had the right to watch DVDs I’d owned on any platform that the industry chose (had to try hard not to roll my eyes at him) and seemed surprised when I told him that, no, in fact, we don’t all have zillions of ripped movies on our hard drives.
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The summit should be very good. I look forward to beating some people over the head in person, and drinking with them later. ;)
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FWIW, I think people are over-interpreting the Joy quote; it seemed to me on reading it that his thrust was ‘open sourcing the code later does not impact the initial innovative moment.’ i.e., open source is not magic innovative pixie dust, it still takes some mixture of inspiration and perspiration to make good ideas happen whether they are open or closed.

jfleck: Very cool. libxml, the gnumeric and abi folks, moz/ephy, and (IMHO) above all the folks working on multimedia and multimedia codecs *cough*DeCSS*cough* are doing really important work.
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RandomThought: I’m currently watching some football, and just saw another Dell ad pushing Linux on the server. Hope to see those for Linux on the desktop at some point soon. :)

Saw Finding Nemo last night. Very, very cool to see Sawfish all over the ‘making of’ documentary and one shot that briefly contained a gnome panel. Those people badly need us to reinvent Expose :)

Sometimes I think bugworkers need their own website or something, so that we can swap bits like this. Hyatt is, as usual, right on the money.
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I also got a nice note from a former gnome/evo bug volunteer, who is now contracting with $BIGCO to QA some of their open source drivers. I thought that was pretty cool. I wish I could have hired him first :)

Spent last night answering board questions.Telsa picked some really good, hard questions. The toughest ones to answer, of course, were the ones that we knew were problems last year and have failed to resolve, like the one about transparency. Overall, I do think the board had a good year, but it took a lot of work to get there, probably more than it should have, and we did drop the ball on stuff like transparency, ad board relationships, and to a lesser degree marketing.
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Otherwise, spent the day poking at nautilus and gnome-vfs bugs for the first time in a while- felt good, despite the constant interruptions. Sort of surprised to see things in a reasonably sane state- nautilus bug work can be draining, but the bugsquad folks who look after nautilus have given it quite a bit of care. Kudos. :)

I finally posted my pictures of my trip to Bangalore at my website. The team itself is also slowly spinning up- they’ve filed a number of patches this week, slowly figuring out the ropes of nasty raw C and good old ‘diff’. The plan for now is pretty simple- they’re just working their way through ‘high’ priority bugs in core modules. Nothing glamorous or exciting, but a good way to get their feet wet just like we all did at some point.

For what it’s worth, I think this post by Nat is the best answer to the question everyone seems to be asking us these days- ‘has Novell changed Ximian?’

Finally… Chema and I had some disagreements, but it was always about business issues. Personally, he was a great, big-hearted, outgoing guy and he’ll be badly missed by all of us. Blue skies, dude.