Free Software Linux

If you've ever watched a road bike race like the Tour de France, you know the peloton is the big group of riders that cluster together during the race to reduce drag. It's a great example of collaboration in action. But let's face it: the people in the middle of the peloton may go faster than they would otherwise, but they don't win the race.

When it comes to creating and innovating, most companies (and employees) are in the peloton. They are doing enough to survive, but they are stuck in the pack. And if they stay in the pack too long, they lose.

• Business

Cory Doctorow says "information wants to be free" slogan is "lazy, stupid shorthand."

(See discussions at Shareable.net and Utne Reader)

When celebrated science fiction writer, blogger, and copyright activist Cory Doctorow tweets, 40,000 followers glance at their phones.

• Life

I am in a hurry, working on some cool (for myself!) stuff which I will probably write about in a couple of days, so I will reproduce the announcement verbatim:

The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is the annual working conference for free software graphics application users and developers. The fifth edition takes place 27-30 May 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. Teams from GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, Open Font Library and many other graphics projects gather to improve their software and discuss new ideas for interoperability and shared standards.

If you know me, you know I am a junkie for three things: interacting with young people, the many aspects of sustainability, and my job. From my work in the

I learned about the Public Domain Manifesto from Bogdan's blog and as soon as I read it I found it awesome and signed.

Like him or not, you've got to be impressed by the quality of discourse that Jon Stewart adds to the national dialogue.  Maybe this conversation with Bill Gates about the U.S. education system could have taken place on Charlie Rose -- but how many people would have seen it?

• Education

I oppose censorship as strong as I can, I consider it to be evil and I enjoy a lot post on various Planets about the personal live of the people behind the code, however seeing something like this is embarrassing... making you think maybe RMS was not entirely wrong.

note: the button above links to microsoft.com

This past year, CivicActions has undergone a transformation in the way that we organize project teams.  We've moved from a "matrix" model (people contributing to several projects) to what we call "Pods" (dedicated teams focused on one or two projects at a time). This transformation has yielded incredible results for clients and project team members. This model also means that we can more easily scale, which we are preparing to do in 2010.

Paris public transport has always been stellar, with an tight network of subway (métro) stations, commuter rail (RER/SNCF), and buses that can can get you within spitting distance of anywhere in the city, quickly and economically.  But the implementation of the Velib bike-sharing program two years ago put Paris public transport a whole other level, by any measure--ecological, economic, public health, noise pollution, etc.

I have blogged in the past about my dislike for Yahoo, a dislike which from time to time grow to real hate, like right now about the inability to log intro Y!M with Pidgin.

In Romania Instant Messenger (or shortly "mess") is practically all Yahoo, no no matter how geek you are, you have to be on Yahoo Messenger to be able to communicate with the people around you. Which is doable, as Pidgin, while far from perfect, is acceptable as a client. Well... until now, when Yahoo is performing an upgrade to their servers and enforcing a new authentication method, with the direct result of locking-out everything else beside Y!M 9, so no Pidgin and not even Y!M 8.

Each year, Amnesty International releases a comprehensive report on the state of the world's human rights. Amnesty International decided on Drupal as their website platform for the 2009 report based on the successful redesign of their main site with Drupal in 2007.

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There are already a lot of links to one of my groups photos with all the communities together, but thanks to Alex, this one has notes, labelling all the participants:

The second day of the eLiberatica conference was quieter, with a lot less visitors, probably because it was a Saturday and the students preferred to stay away from the university, but it still was a fun day, we talked with people and gave CDs and business cards. We had also more time to interact with the other communities present at the event.

early in the morning, warming-up the booth

The image quality is poor and the sound even worse as we used ajoian's compact photo camera, but we at least have a Romanian version of the "I am Fedora" video, featuring Nicu, Adrian, Alexandru and Ionut.

...and if you are using a lame browser without support for the video tag, you can watch a a Flash version on YouTube.

On-location report, directly from eLiberatica: those conferences have a less known part about which people not talk that much, so I'll break the silence. The night before the guest have to get a contact with the city:

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And this contact is fun when it begins with a couple of palinca shots, continue with an unknown number of tequilas (I believe not even the waiter counted them...), everything washed with beers.