Software Free

Right now I am working with the members of the Ubuntu Chicago LoCo team on creating a solid proposal for developing “Ubuntu Development Courses” that members of the Chicago community will lead. Right now we are looking for those that are in the Chicago land are that may be interested in such events. As it stands, I have come up with a basic, college-like, course layout.

Ubuntu Development 101 - Familiarization of Ubuntu development tools
This session will provide the attendees with a breakdown and brief run-through of the tools involved with Ubuntu development. These tools would include: Launchpad, mailing lists, IRC, development applications and scripts, and more.

Ubuntu Development 102 - Bug Triage
This session will provide the attendees with the knowledge necessary to help triage Ubuntu bugs. Attendees will learn the basics as well as some of the advanced topics with triaging bugs on Launchpad.

Much after the fact, here are a few notes about my trip to Boston last month for the Free Software Foundation’s 2008 annual associate member meeting. This is part one. Maybe I’ll get part two up before another 6 weeks go by.

I like to travel, but I guess mainly with my wife. I didn’t like leaving her and our little baby girl behind. So while the outbound trip was pleasantly uneventful and I made it there with plenty of time to see the city, I felt a bit lonely walking around Boston Friday afternoon. I took some pictures which I’ll be posting here in the days/weeks/months ahead.

Wow, what a day! Jorge Castro did a smashing job getting the OpenWeek setup this time around. I was totally impressed and intrigued with today’s talks and watched everyone of them. The participants were amazing! I saw some of the most thought out questions, comments, and ideas today that totally blew me away.

I gave the Kubuntu Development talk today that had the greatest participation I have ever had in my previous OpenWeek talks. Great questions and interaction by everyone present! Thanks for making today such a success and I hope you all continue checking the talks out this entire week. On Wednesday, April 30 at 20:00 UTC, I will give an introduction to KDE 4 and its future and on Friday, May 2 at 21:00 UTC, I will give a talk about the Ubuntu Documentation Project. If you are interested in either talk, I sure hope you show up! For those of you who have been wondering how to contribute, I urge you to really check out the Documentation talk, as it is one of the easier ways for you to get involved.

—the new online social learning network—decided to go Creative Commons earlier this week. On Wednesday, they integrated CC licensing into their platform as an option for users to share their work, with the additional option of contributing work into the public domain. One of their inspirations was Flickr, the online photo management system that has integrated CC licensing and search.

LearnHub is the result of a collaboration between India’s largest online educator–Educomp–and Savvica Inc., an educational technology company that John and Malgosia Green founded back in 2004.

Both communities are overly defensive in which term to use to describe software that gives you the freedom to change and share it. If both communities could unite and both movements converge imagine how much more we could accomplish.

"...when I used Windows I was in a cocoon plugging away day after day I sure never cared about a Bill Gates blog like I do a Mark Shuttleworth blog, [...] Ubuntu has brought me into a community, a community of people that really do want to make computing free and open."

Tap into the wisdom of the crowd for your health with community web site PatientsLikeMe. Using the site, you can read all about the experiences of other real people who are afflicted with certain...

"If you jump to the last page of the submitted posts, you'll see that
this site [OpenSourceCommunity.org] was officially launched on March 21 in 2007. If I counted
well, 260 members have been registered so far, and 1076 blog entries
have been posted, what means ca. average 3 posts a day."

Complete Story

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“Travellin’ and livin’ off the web…”

I have a GPG key, freshly created a couple of days ago. GPG is the GNU Privacy Guard, also known as GnuPG, used for encryption and digital signatures.

Many people include helpful comments about GPG encryption on a page with their public key and fingerprint. Instead of making similar remarks (which I don’t feel qualified to make), I’ll point to some examples: Karl Fogel, Peter S. May, and Henrik Lund Kramshoej.

Newsweek reports that the same entrepreneurs who funded the "user-generated revolution" are now looking to professionals to edit and produce online content.

Are we at a turning-point with the "wisdom of the crowds" and moving to a more trusted and refined Web?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/119091/page/1

Hey, everyone, Arc is out! As if you didn’t know. I mean, I think the internet backbone has been saturated with refreshing news.ycombinator.com to be able to post the next reply.

But seriously, as one of my last blog posts, I thought I might shed a meager light on the issue. There are a lot of statements, many true, many untrue, many other, that have been made about Arc. I’d like to address some of them, one at a time.

First, though, if you don’t know, Arc is a recently-released Lisp programming language by Lisp pundit Paul Graham. He is also the guy who started the Y Combinator venture capital firm. And he wrote news.ycombinator.com in Arc before he released the language to the public. Now it’s out, and look at the raucous.

After working on some bugs, testing Alpha 5, and playing around with the new Alpha 5 CDs in Windows Vista, I ran across quite a few things that could be listed as “The good, the bad, and the ugly.” So lets start off with the good.

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Everyone knows that the obvious difference between proprietary software and free software is the licensing model. What few people know is that free software’s biggest strength is the people that are drawn together to make up a community that is incredibly powerful. I saw this power first-hand in Mountain, CA, USA at the KDE 4.0 release event. If you use Gnome, XFCE, or even Microsoft Windows, put your bias aside. This is about the community of free software, and to a lesser extent, some of the individuals that make free software what it is - not just KDE.

Everyone knows that the obvious difference between proprietary software and free software is the licensing model. What few people know is that free software’s biggest strength is the people that are drawn together to make up a community that is incredibly powerful. I saw this power first-hand in Mountain, CA, USA at the KDE 4.0 release event. If you use Gnome, XFCE, or even Microsoft Windows, put your bias aside. This is about the community of free software, and to a lesser extent, some of the individuals that make free software what it is - not just KDE.