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

Ashwanth: Dance practice? for a Novell anniversary? There must be pictures taken. And hopefully some explanation :)

• Read a lot more ximian bugs yesterday.
• Started a suse 9.1 install on my new Dell. Didn’t detect the monitor’s refresh rate/resolution correctly, and I didn’t have time to screw with it, so it is still uninstalled. Box is slightly louder than I would have wanted but still pretty nice.
• Went to the pops last night with Krissa, my dad, and my brother. They had a 14 year old kid who studies in Provo (of all places) who was brilliant. Second half of the show an Art Garfunkel concert broke out. Was pretty fun, but I was forced to go home and rip Metallica’s S&M; to remind myself of what really great orchestration of non-classical music can be like.
• Have to third the ‘I like jfleck’ posts. Though I wish he had more time to be involved in GNOME these days. C’est la vie, I guess.
• Apparently there are a hundred or so people signed up for GNOME Bangalore’s conf. That’s wild. Hopefully today we can get the ball rolling for next Summit- we’ve found an awesome site if we can get it wired. And I’m going to lean on Tim to see what the status is of funding people for GUADEC. Conferences galore! :)

Whiprush of ars fame has a great rebuttal to Nicholas Petreley‘s trash. I added my own comment on his blog about something I think he missed, and which is probably Petreley’s single biggest screwup- the misconception that Free Software must have lots of options because Free Software is about choice. Sure, Free Software is about choice- but that’s why we have xfce and kde and openbox and so on and so far. But in our design, GNOME has instead chosen to honor the notion that Free Software is a moral right for everyone and as such we work hard on i18n, a11y, and above all usability. As Havoc says, if we limit ourselves to the geeky 2% of the population, we’re losing- Free Software must vigorously work towards something the other 98% of the world can use if we want to win. And Petreley wants to be content with that 2%, it seems.

I am
Luis Novell.

• Read about 175 open b.x.c bugs. Was able to clear a lot of them out. More tomorrow when I actually start using/abusing the ‘should go upstream’ keyword.
• Got a new dell, after rebate should be a tad under $400. No MS tax, for the first time in a long time. Very nice. Still haven’t booted it, though, no OS disc ATM.
• Had a 7:30am meeting with Neeti, Parag, and Krishnan from Novell’s Bangalore office. Good folks; getting regularly into the blogging thing and much more usefully will hopefully be throwing a number of folks at core hacking and bugwork. Really neat that they are getting a lot of non-Novell people involved.
• Didn’t actually eat anything all day. Should do that.

James: yeah, plus == supplementary. It is my boldest hope that 2.7.x will show up there as well. We’ll see :)

Good weekend.

• Spent most of the weekend at my grandparent’s new place. They had lived in the same house for about 40 years, but they are in their late 80s with all that entails. So they recently moved into a large ‘aging’ complex near their old house. I was sort of worried about it, frankly a little guilty that I didn’t go down more often and help them stretch out their independence. But the new place is nice- it is a much larger apartment than I have, and part of a really nice facility- they have a great pool, gym, theater, lakes, gardening areas, everything you could want, except for a terrible, terrible cafeteria. It is like dorm life, really- lots of people in the same period of life living together, sharing the same experiences, having fun together. Pretty neat, really. Made me feel a lot better about the tradeoffs they’ve made.
• Finished Lessig’s new book on the flight down to DC. Nothing terribly new, really, for those following it, but some nice, concrete, doable-in-the-real-world improvements, and of course detailed, persuasive argument for anyone who wants to read the whole thing. Yes, that link is to perfectly legal remixes of the book. Heck, you can BitTorrent the thing.
• Big shortcoming in Lessig’s book (that he admits was the reason he lost Eldred) is the lack of a persuasive but simple and coherent explanation of the harm done by the current trends in IP regimes. He sort of touches in the book on two posssible such themes/memes- James Boyle’s IP Environmentalism- that copyright actually is a lot like DDT, useful and also dangerours- and the notion of IP Feudalism- that we’re entering a period where all content is owned by a select few who use the law to enforce that ownership. But he never really develops either of them very extensively. It seems to me that until someone does this, and the EFF, Public Knowledge, and other such groups work together to push it as a meme (like the content industry has overloaded ‘piracy’), the IP situation will continue to deteriorate.
• John Rawls mentioned in the same speech as wireless. I’m excited.
• Dad and brother in town for a few days this week, should be nice to see them. OTOH, we’re supposed to go to opening night at the pops- which I just found out is supposed to be formal dress. Oops. I don’t think Dan has anything more formal than a guayabera with him right now. And I’m not much better off.
• J5: Mono does something like this, I’m pretty sure.

• Rich Burridge had a brief piece on the importance of extensibility today. It brought to mind this paper, titled ‘Toolkits for User Innovation’ by some folks at MIT’s Business School who believe that the best way to serve your customers in virtually any field is to make things extensible. Interesting paper for those who have too much spare time. There is also some followup work where game companies were studied with some analsysis of the costs and benefits of extensibility through toolkits. Interesting stuff. Needless to say, the authors of both of these papers are now utterly fascinated with free software and its lessons for business.
• Speaking of Rich, was amused to see that SuSE ships not just gcalctool but also calctool. Still waiting for qalculate packages. :)
• For those on Planet SuSE, I noticed James blogged a bit about ULB and suse 9.1. We don’t want to tromp on James’s toes- it sounds like he’s done awesome work in the past, and I hope we can work with him to help him any way we can. But it looks like we will be getting GNOME 2.6 plus many ximian patches into PLUS at some point- just a matter of when. So when James rides off into the sunset, there will be definitely still be something for cutting-edge GNOME folks on SuSE to use. Hope he sticks around, though. I want to see that g-s-t work ;)
• jirb points out we’ll have a new bugzilla box soon, apparently donated by a mysterious benefactor. I’m excited, if for no other reason than maybe I’ll finally have the guts to ask for root and be able to fix the thing. Didn’t want root on the main web box- too much responsibility.
• Going to visit the grandparents for Mother’s Day. This trip used to be more fun, but my grandfather is slipping away into Alzheimers and that is really hard to deal with.
• I wish I could say the prison news from Iraq surprised me, but it should not be surprising to anyone who has taken introductory psych. For those who are curious, this article provides some very nice background in the (now mostly banned) research into what very normal people do to each other when authority roles are created. You can find more at the Prison Experiment website. There is nothing quite so comprehensive on the Milgram experiments that I could find, unfortunately.
• Epiphany crashed on me for the first time in ages today when I’d nearly finished this post. I thank the heavens, again, for crash recovery.

dwmw2: I’d hope if you have deep understanding, and you’re frustrated, you say it and say it loudly. Of course, I’m currently in the process of chickening out when faced with the same problem, so perhaps my bold advice should be taken with a grain of salt. ;)

dwmw2: I grossly oversimplified my post for the purposes of getting it up and going to sleep. I should have said ‘something the size and scope of Debian’ instead of just Debian- my intent was to emphasize that ‘the fedora problem’ is capital-H Hard, and no one should say ‘RH is doing it badly’ without an understanding of the difficulty it entails. I’ll probably post more on this tonight, if I get a chance to get my ideas straight.