@IndiaJoze just dropped by a used full-kitchen wok stove, with two main burners and a stock burner in the back. We have some ideas to simply mount wheels and use propane burners until we can build out the outdoor kitchen.
Fresh and dirty used work stove
What to use this for? All part of our urban farm, Fairy-Tale Farm, for demonstrations, workshops, garden and food prep, and long, hot boiling of stuff during long, hot summer days … such as canning.
Back in the fall of 2009 I wrote a report that looked back on the Fedora Project’s five-years of involvement in Google Summer of Code (GSoC.) One glaring truth was that year-over-year we had not gotten any larger – eight students in 2005 to ten students in 2009. Similarly, our own Fedora Summer Coding had eleven funded students in 2010.
Is there a natural reason we have leveled off just shy of a dozen student projects? Is that all we really want done? All we are prepared to support?
The conclusion I’ve come to is that this is the level we get for the effort put in. Other projects that have more student slots simply have more people organizing as administrators, as well as mentors — more people making more smart decisions. They seem to be drawing from a common set of open roadmaps. Maybe the project-wide experience has made it so people actually watch out for opportunities to include students in the roadmap.
By contrast to what I’ve seen in Fedora, projects such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), GNOME, and KDE routinely have three to four times as many student slots. There are numerous reasons why, but I think a core part of it is this:
So we have fewer ideas out there on average, and they are jumbled on the page with no organization against project wide goals or a roadmap.
What part do idea pages play?
From what I’ve seen, Google assigns student slots based on the interest students show in a project. More ideas, more coordinated marketing across the teams, and more work to get students’ attention generates more applications. That seems to be an important factor in determining how big a project can scale for students.
To make that attention happen requires commitment from each mentor and sub-project team they are associated with. To get a winning application, an idea might get three or four or ten that don’t quite make it. Mentors have to work fairly with all the students, trying to improve applications (within reason), and making decisions in the end to pick three dozen from an original of perhaps two or five hundred applications. Not much problem though when you’ve got a hundred mentors reviewing.
I reckon that a well organized and large pool of ideas comes about best when there are enough people working on making that happen. Subsequently, that becomes enough people to actually manage the increased program size, the applications, the mentoring, and so forth. Thus, the ideas page becomes a fair representation of how ready a project is to scale to what size.
If some folks in Fedora would really like to see our GSoC program be two-times, three-times, or even four-times the size that it has been, I put all this out there in hopes that it helps.
(Numbers in this post that are not linked back to the source originated from queries to Melanage at http://code.google.com/soc for the year specified in the statistic.)
All year long people say to me, “This or that project will be perfect for Google Summer of Code.”
Where are all those projects? Not on the Fedora ideas page.
Folks, check this out – your idea doesn’t have to be complete, or even contain much more than a few sketchy use cases. Sometimes you just need to spark an idea in the student, something to become passionate about.
If you aren’t sure if you can mentor, put your idea up anyway. If a strong student or three shows up, mentors can be found.
You may wonder why this matters so much to me? Quite simply, we missed our chance at being in last year’s Summer of Code because we didn’t have an ideas page.
I look at the page now, there are great ideas there, but not very many of them. I know that the Fedora Project and JBoss.org folks have many more ideas in them. A strong ideas page is an essential part of the application.
If you are interested in helping Fedora/JBoss.org to get in to this year’s Summer of Code, or want to help run the program after that, join up to the cross-project mentor list and ask what you can do.
Similar to how things worked out for me and FUDCon this year, I have to cancel attending SCALE 9x this year.
I had a talk to give, “Decentralized Collaboration with Open Source Tools: Technical and Cultural Implementation“, which thankfully Robyn Bergeron is giving on Sunday, and I’m sure it will be at least three times more interesting than if I did it. (This was one I inherited from Mel and Sebastian when they couldn’t attend.)
This year I planned to give two workshops … and scrapping those is a big disappointment, but I will re-imagine them for next year.
The first workshop was a half-day mini-Professors Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) focused on Sugar and the XO laptop. Save that one for next year!
The second was a half-day workshop, “How to teach the open source way“. I have a new idea for all my talk proposals this year, and for SCALE I wanted to try it as a workshop. The goal is to turn a round-table discussion about the open source way (including an introduction to the handbook) in to something more. For a 3+ hour workshop, the first hour is sharing experiences, learning about different viewpoints in the room, and capturing information. The second and following hours are hands-on the wiki and mailing list, adding content from the session (video segments shot live, stories written, chapters edited), creating new threads on the mailing list, etc.
Anyway, that’s my rocking idea – I proposed something like that for OSCON, for the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and I’m going to propose something like that for everything this year. Even with 40 minutes or an hour, if I come in with an active plan I bet I can get people doing stuff in that timeframe that benefits everyone’s knowledge while benefiting the project.
*sigh* See you all next time.
One of the goals of writing a community how-to book was to write it by a community using the methods described in the book. This includes using 100% free and open source software to create and maintain the book, do the work of the community, and run the web presences. Of course, the source for the book itself needs to be 100% free and open, including the graphics such as the website banner. And I thought it was, but I made a mistake.
If you’ve redistributed that website banner in any way, you must read on.
When we got the final banner for the website from the creative team at Red Hat, I wrote back asking for assurance that the components of the banner were freely reusable and redistributable so we could put the work under the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported license with the rest of the content. This idea naturally covers the fonts used – they must be free fonts or the whole image is not redistributable and remixable.
Today I was clearing out some old email and discovered a reply from the creative team to my request from March of 2010, with a new banner SVG file attached. The original banner, which was in use until just a short bit ago on theopensourceway.org, was using the non-free Interstate font. This new banner, now in use, uses the free and open Liberation font.
So I’ve updated the source files in the project’s git repository and I’ve updated the website itself.
Now the only concern is if anyone else has actually redistributed this banner under the expectation that it was OK to do so.
I made an honest mistake in that I am not very good at distinguishing between fonts, so I didn’t recognize that this was a non-free font. I also made the sloppy mistake of not seeing the follow-up from the designers, who did the right thing by all of us. While I’m sure I had the rights to use Interstate under Red Hat’s license, I probably didn’t have the rights to redistribute the image for remixing and further redistribution. It’s not that the file contains the actual font itself, just sixteen English letters of it in a scalable-vector graphic (SVG) file. I’m sorry and hope it causes no further troubles.
If you think you might have redistributed that banner or remixed then redistributed any images based on that banner, please contact me (directly via email or in the comments below.) I want to make sure you get the updated source files and that we follow-up with anyone else who might have the incorrect images in use.
Fedora Students Contributing is about to get ignored to death.
And maybe it should be, or at least put in to suspended animation. Let me explain why I think this might be the right option, if the program doesn’t get what it needs.
So what does the program need?
More sponsors who provide budget and people.
People to collaborate openly with the community to make a professional event occur. Students get reimbursed for what amounts to three months of hackfest during their time-off-school, so it’s potentially more complicated than an ordinary open project and benefits from staff time of the sponsors.
Without these additional sponsors, I’m not sure it is worth our continued investment. In this case, the us is both the Fedora Project and Red Hat. Here’s my thinking about the whole picture. More…
While it’s great to see all the enthusiasm and noise from FUDCon, I am sadly observing it all from a far distance … along with 99.9% of the rest of the Fedora Project. I had to cancel my plans to be there in Tempe, AZ this weekend, as well as an earlier this week in-person planning retreat with the rest of Red Hat’s community leadership team.
Unfortunately, the wonderful woman I’m lucky enough to be married to got hit with the effects of a bout with Crohn’s disease. Over all my years travelling for Red Hat, I have worked really hard to not let that travel overly affect my family, nor let problems here overly affect my showing up for where the work is.
Sometimes, though, that balance doesn’t hold together, as with this week. If you’d like to read more about the other side of that balance, you can catch up on Debbie’s blog, Waiting for the Cure. She’s doing OK, me and the girls are hanging in there, we’re hoping she’s out of the hospital on Monday.
Meanwhile, I’ve done some work to setup BigBlueButton so I can run a remote session at FUDCon about ‘The Open Source Way‘. So, there’s a fair chance that I’ll have a chance to participate after all!
Today is the Community Leadership Summit West (CLS West) in Daly City. I had to cancel attending today, which meant I was able to put the mantle of talking about The Open Source Way (book and methodology) to my main-man Mark Terranova. I met Mark at the first CLS in 2009, we’ve become fast friends, and it’s awesome to kick him out of the nest to fly in front of people. He’s very passionate about these topics and lead a great session. It not only addressed and referenced the handbook, so it was useful to attendees beyond the session, but some great stories came out of the session that we can write up for the book itself.
Mark did some magic to stream a video of the proceedings, so I was able to watch and lightly participate from remote. Lightly because, as I predicted, the experience of being in the room was more magnetic to everyone than the video feed out/chat coming in. I expected this, since telepresence is often an audience situation unless it is a centerpiece of the meeting.
Since I was mostly just listening, I took what notes I could around the occasional stream drop, then posted them back to the CLS West wiki:
(I’m not going to embed any of the video because Ustream’s advertising spots are aggressive, so I wanted to give a warning before you get to the video.)
A few years back I switched away from a GUI email client for work and back to ‘mutt’. While ‘mutt’ can handle doing an IMAP connection directly, I wanted to gain from the speed and portability of having fully local folders. (This is more feasible, I think, since encrypting hard drives became so much easier; now I can carry around my work email safely.) The tool my people have been using for synchronizing IMAP folders is ‘offlineimap’.
After using this combination for a while (running ‘offlineimap’ in ‘screen’, with ‘mutt’ running in one or more ‘screen’ windows), I ran in to some problems with ‘offlineimap’ when it was run continuously. I could set the sync interval in the configuration just fine, but inevitably a few things happened. It would be syncing, using CPU, memory, and bandwidth when I had other ideas for how to use those resources. It would be in between a scheduled sync when I wanted to check for an email just sent, causing me to quit and restart it. It would occasionally suck up all my memory, requiring a kill and restart (that was probably an older, buggier version?) It also didn’t like it if I suspended the laptop or lost network during a sync, which seemed to be the main trigger for the memory-sucking-error.
Finally, Paul suggested to me that I try just running it manually when I wanted to get my email. This was part of a larger discussion on how to not let email run your life. If you know the email is constantly being refreshed, it’s easy to “just go see if there is something new”, thereby procrastinating on what you are really supposed to be doing. By making mail poll/sync a manual task, I could eliminate most of the first problems, and fresh messages were always just moments away. (If I’m anxious to get an email NOW, I’m usually interested in the main inbox, since my email is filtered server-side.)
All that leads me to this very simple ‘bash’ script that runs ‘offlineimap’ one time, and before exiting puts a nice visible timestamp on the console for me. I find this really helpful to let me know when I last ran ‘offlineimap’. Sometimes it shows me it’s only been twenty minutes, and my checking email is a sign to me that I am procrastinating. Other times it shows me that I haven’t checked since last night!
#!/bin/bash /usr/bin/offlineimap -o; echo "****************************" echo "vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv" /bin/date echo "^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^" echo "****************************"
That is such a simple script that I don’t think it warrants copyright, but just in case I am wrong, consider it under the GPL v3+ (yes, I trust the FSF with improvements to the GPL more than I trust that GPL v3 is so perfect that it never needs improving.)
For ‘mutt’ goodness, check out Paul’s configuration directory for his ‘mutt’ wrapper script (which I use), as well as his ‘mutt’ and ‘offlineimap’ configuration files (which I also modified to use.)Â You might notice that Paul has contributed a ton more to my ‘offlineimap’/’mutt’ experience than the reverse, but I try. 🙂
Finally got myself to listen to a “Free as in Freedom” oggcast (aka “faifcast”), specifically the newest episode 0x06. (I’m not a big audiocast listener normally, to really make it worthwhile I have to be actually listening, and I don’t have a lot of deadtime in my day where my brain is unoccupied such as during a drive commute. When exercising, I generally prefer thumping hip-hop.)
Of the two hosts, I know Bradley Kuhn from around the way and more recently as part of the larger group of voices discussing software freedom all over identi.ca. As a latecomer to this new oggcast and not having heard their previous show, this was my first time listening to Karen Sandler (@kaz on identi.ca). The two hosts have a good repartee, it’s clear why they enjoy doing this together, and they bring excellent information and insight to their topics, which mainly cover policy, legal, and related issues in the FLOSS (free/libre and open source software) world. Sandler is the general counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center, and Kuhn is the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. So, it is literally listening to two experts in the field on FLOSS and its legal aspects discuss interesting and relevant topics.
Another reason I was inspired to write this post is in reaction to the latest show, where they discuss the issues and reasons around copyright assignment to appropriate non-profit organizations. In their discussion around copyright assignment, Sandler had some strong points to make about how useful it can be in cases where code needs to be relicensed. (To be clear, I understand their preference is, if copyright is assigned it should be to a non-profit organization, such as the Software Freedom Conservancy, that in turn makes contractual promises not to license the software non-free in the future.)
This topic sparked interest in me because of my own experiences relicensing the Fedora Project’s documentation from the deprecated OPL to the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported license in 2009. In the post I wrote on the subject, “Why relicense Fedora documentation and wiki content“, I discuss clause 2(a) in the Fedora Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which I started referring to as “the nuclear option“, that allowed the project to sub-license contributions to the project under an equivalent or freer license. Since the content we wanted to relicense (sub-license) was all new contributions (as opposed to content from an upstream), it was clearly something that could be sub-licensed under the CLA.
Without repeating all of the reasoning involved, it boiled down to this:
This situation was necessary because the OPL we were using effectively put the Fedora Project on a content island, unable to interact with the growing body of freed content under the Creative Commons licenses. The work coincided with the start of a review by Fedora Legal of the CLA overall, which has resulted in work to replace it with a simpler agreement that relies upon the acceptable FLOSS licenses and doesn’t assign these sort of additional legal rights to the Fedora Project.
So, the FaiFcast put me in mind of this situation where copyright assignment wasn’t involved, a different provision in the CLA was able to save us countless hours of work, and yet we were reluctant to use that provision and subsequently removed it from the next generation agreement.
Yet there is still a clause that seems to provide some protection against having to track down thousands of contributors in a future relicensing scenario:
The Fedora Project Board may, by public announcement, subsequently designate an additional or alternative default license for a given category of Contribution (a “Later Default License”). A Later Default License shall be chosen from the appropriate categorical sublist of Acceptable Licenses For Fedora.
Once a Later Default License has been designated, Your Unlicensed Contribution shall also be licensed to the Fedora Community under that Later Default License. Such designation shall not affect the continuing applicability of the Current Default License to Your Contribution.
Read the entire proposed agreement to understand all of the special terms, especially the very narrow definition of “Contribution”. The goal, as I understand it, is to ensure continued freedom for contributed code or content by relying upon a simple agreement between the project and the contributor to use a permissive license now and forever.
