Silicon Island

RE: On the Meme (WAS: Gran Canaria wrap-up 1)

Dave, regarding the meme, it isn't particularly aimed at RMS himself, but to the whole anyone trying to stop third parties on writing code on whatever platform they like, specially trying to stop them writing free software, with a free software platform! Technically speaking, some of us might not like Mono (I don't like the idea of a desktop running 2 or more interpreters/vms as it is right now) but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't stand up and support those who like it and deserve the freedom to use it. Some people might not like mono, but they shouldn't be afraid of people writing code with it!

RMS stood in front of us, and said we were wrong, and he didn't even bother giving us a plausible reason, he just referenced the software freedom law center as a source, no explanation at all, that is just not right, do you imagine Steve Ballmer. In the meantime, none gives Miguel the credit of what he is achieving, quite the contrary, everything he and other people in the Mono community got so far is loads of negative input and no credit.

Miguel is pushing Microsoft to play within our rules, and to be honest, I rather see a world where Microsoft plays nicely with open source (or free software), than a world where beating Microsoft is more important than free software itself. The more we treat them as our enemies, the later they'll commit to our game rules.

We wanted to stand up and support those who believe in software freedom and that look for pragmatic and effective ways to bring everyone into the game. We are not afraid of anyone excercising his/her freedom to write free software! We support them all! That was what the meme was all about.

As fot the sexism issue, Richard is been parodying the Bible for quite some years, if anyone has a problem with Richard's parody, I think they should complain to every christian church around instead. To me the whole issue is like claiming that Monty Python's Life of Brian is sexist or antisemitic as well. But that's just my opinion.

By the way, I, for one, am not afraid of people porting applications to C++ either!

GCDS is over

It's been a hell of a crazy month for me, first I get moved to Manchester, a few weeks ago, I get my new flat keys, and a week after that I get a plane back to my home town, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, in the meantime, I've been catching up with my new job at codethink. This is the first conference I attend as a codethinker, and it's been quite fun to feel part of the small but mighty team. This is one of the very few times a year that the whole gang meets together (except for muks, who couldn't attend this year).

All in all, a very productive week and half, but a very tiring one, specially for me, it is actually quite hard to be at GUADEC, to take care of work stuff and to be at home all at the same time. I don't even have enough energies to post any of the technical outcomes of the conference at this point. But I'm generally happy, specially after so many positive input from people after enjoying their time at Gran Canaria. It is a weird feeling to have two completely different worlds kind of melting, seeing people like Michael Meeks or Federico Mena walking over the streets where I used to walk when I was dreaming on becoming a GNOME hacker is quite of a mind twist, but still a nice feeling.

Anyway, I'm now off to refuel my batteries and rock hard on the stuff codethink want me to come up with! Expect some updates on techy stuff soon.

I'm not afraid either...

RE: Finite resources, infinite growth

Philip proposes that we should modify the entire human race for them to have fewer possibilities to reproduce as a measure of birth control. As a prerequisite you will need to modify every single newborn, if we had the resources to influence how every single new person is born, we would actually be at the point where we could stop thos non desired borns in a much simpler way...

Anyway, there's an easier way that actually has many other upsides. Philip, let's solve poverty instead of proposing sci-fi :-)

Shame on us all!

Check out this 1991's video, starting minute 23. We are in 2009 now. After you've watched it, repeat with me:

To everyone building open source desktop development tools:
SHAME ON US ALL!

Evince outreach the Windows platform

In february, I made a post about how nice a proper Windows port of evince could be. Well, seems like some lads have been actually working on it in the meantime and finally all the patches to make it work are in place. Special mentions goes to Alan Horkan for starting the ball rolling, Hib Ebris for doing all the work and Carlos Garcia Campos for reviewing and committing all the patches.

The only reamaining task is to create an easy to use installer and make it part of the standar release process, Hib and Jody Goldberg are already working on it. Once that's done we'll be ready to add Evince to the FSF PDF readers page.

First day at Codethink!

Last week I left Dublin and moved to Manchester and last Monday I found a flat already! However, the paperwork involved is still keeping me to move in. In the meantime I'm staying at Rob's place, who's kindly hosting me. I still have to get a National Insurance number and a bank account, then gas, electricity, broadband... the boring side of moving abroad.

Manchester City

Anyway, I'm already getting up to speed on Codethink stuff, the work environment looks great and the workmates are awesome! Cannot talk much about the project I'm going to be working on, you know, SecretStuff(TM), but it's gonna be really cool! Stay tuned :-)

On competition (Was RE: Back Home)

Just come across on this post from Rodrigo Moya, beloved GNOME hacker and friend. He is sort of upset by the amount of duplicated work and he is sort of sad about the feeling of competition between free software projects and the duplicity of work that it implies.

Somwhat Rodrigo thinks that we would be better off if we worked together instead of competing among each other. Up to some extend I agree that a level too high of fragmentation is not any good as long as you pursue the success of the freedesktop.

However, I do think that competition is essential, and instead of discouraging it, we should try to understand why peolpe have to start so many different projects to get something right. I would like to share some thoughts about this:

• Building a team of developers is hard, for a team to work well there should be some sort of complicity, vision and easy going atmosphere in a community. And that means that the group of people creating a project have to share the bulk of a common vision. This involves having good leaders, good software architects and perform a good promotion of the project among the open source community.
• Competition and fragmentation are two different things. Ideally competitors have to follow a certain set of common rules, and more importantly, they should participate in the process to set the rules (standards), this is, if competitors pursue the best for their users. Fragmentation only spreads confusion ammong users and makes downstream projects' life harder (there is where the duplicity of work comes from).
  
• Competition is our key differentiator against the closed source model. Is the one thing that makes us appealing. Of course it has its downsides, but our efforts shouldn't go towards constraining that competition, instead, enforcing a set of rules that we all agree about, and commit ourselves to those rules.

I think that companies like Canonical, RedHat or Novell have a lot to say about this, if we have 16 different libraries for a single purpose, don't you think developers would stop using most of them if these 3 key players decided not to distribute them anymore at some point? As long as these libraries get distributed, developers won't make the effort needed to keep a sane dependency tree, and if they don't even then, we are better off without software that is poorly maintained.

Farewell Sun

It's been two years since I moved to Dublin to work as an intern in the desktop virtualization group, and they have been by far the most exciting years of my life. Lots of stuff have happened since then, I've got promoted to full time engineer, my team has grown to more than double since I got in and we've been building an incredible product right from scratch that is actually quite successful, Jan Schmidt moved to Dublin to work in my team, Carlos, Luis and Adrian all of them college mates, best friends of mine and three brilliant engineers, came to work at Sun as interns last year and we moved together, I've lost 26 kilos... I cannot think of a better way to start my professional and personal life after college.

When I look back, I can only see positive things about the decision to leave my home land and work in such a great company, among such a talented group of people and with two great managers Dirk and Geoff that have always trusted me and from whom I've learned a lot. Actually it's been feeling too good for a while, I would like to try risky things before I get too old to be able to do them and also there's a whole skill set of mine that I can't apply to my current day job and that's sort of frustrating. And therefore after loads of thoughts I have made the move:

In three weeks I will be moving to Manchester, UK, to work with Rob Taylor and the rest of the codethink team! How cool is that? Exciting times ahead!

Tip when booking your flights to the Desktop Summit

If you can't find the Gran Canaria airport in the autocompletion field for your tour operator, airline or flight search site of choice, try with Las Palmas or LPA.

On a side note that I don't know whether if helps or makes things even more confusing:

• Gran Canaria: name of the island
  
• Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: name of the city
• Las Palmas: name of the province, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura are the islands that belongs to tha province.

To make it a little more confusing, people usually refer to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, as just "Las Palmas" which has ended up to be the most common way to refer to the city as most times people don't talk about the province.

Yes, we like to mess things up with names, that's what you get when you are a fragmented piece of land :-)