Free Software Linux

I am pissed. So pissed that my language will probably stronger than usual. I have work to do but I can't.

I was asked by a colleague in Holland to explain Becta's Home Access scheme and give an update on how it was going. He was concerned that 'it had all gone a bit quiet' and he could not find out much about it.

As an (sorry, the only) accredited supplier of Free Open Source software to schools we had looked into tendering to become an accredited supplier of the Home Access Package so this presumably is why he thought we might know something.

My current interest in the topic was quite low but was given a fillip by two things:

 March 8 turned out to be Simon Phipps’ last day at Sun (news, site) / Oracle (news, site). What does that mean for his pet projects, and Oracle’s plans for Sun’s open source properties?

It seems that, having lost its position as monarch of the world of computing, Microsoft has decided to become the industry jester. Last week I wrote about its amusing suggestion that we should all be taxed to clean up the mess its software has caused. Now we have this witty post on Microsoft's Port 25 site, which involves writing about open source software applications and the platforms they run on without mentioning “Linux” once.
On Open Enterprise blog.

Many places I go I meet people telling how much they liked graphic tutorials and how much they learned about using GIMP and Inkscape following theb, and this makes me feel bad, as I am quite busy lately with a lot of things (video and photography ate a lot of my time) and rarely manage to write something new. But here is a perfect opportunity, Fedora 13 entered Alpha and had a code name (Goddard) and so far a visual theme based on rocketry, so it seems a tutorial titled "Drawing a rocket with Inkscape is not rocket science" would be just fit.

It must be true; the Enterprise's computers never blue-screened even under attack (did you know Vista still reports a BSOD message when it crashes?...who said MS did not do irony?) and its chief engineer was always telling Jim that what he asked was not possible in the time...hah proof!

And so it goes, but the truth is that great science fiction is not prophetic, the reality is that those that experience it merely 'make it so'. Huxley's Brave New World (my all time favourite), Rodenberry's Star Trek and Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide simply told us what to do...and we obliged.

Very few followed my riddle and to my knowledge nobody guessed the answer, but the time has come for the first part of the trilogy, today the day for the Fedora 13 Alpha release.

It was not hard at all, the riddle was "the first one is titled just like a name" and its answer "Goddard", as in the rocket scientist and the F13 codename. The next one, "is about trekish cannon-fodder" is slightly harder, but still trivial for any respectable geek.

Now gotta run, I have a localised announcement to write...

There’s obviously been a lot of talk and speculation since the Elliott Associates announcement. I had started drafting a post looking at the key scenarios and add my own take on how this could play out when I ran into Andy Updegrove’s take over here. Andy nails it. The only part that I’m not “in the boat” on is his take on the Microsoft importance. I actually wonder if this isn’t exactly what a certain person in Redmond wanted though I’ll keep my reasons to myself. ;-)

Many were sceptical when Google announced that it was launching another mobile platform. After all, some said, there are already multiple offerings out there, and Google had precisely no track record in this sector: surely it was heading for a fall? The launch of the first Android phone, the G1, seemed to confirm these doubts. Although capable enough, it was clearly not going to carry Android through into the mainstream.
On The H.

It looks like everybody is rocking the planet except me, wonderer with pink ponies and disco balls and mchua with happy people, ponies and disco balls again. Is time for me to join the fray, rocking as hard as I can (with a bit of help from my little cartoonish friends):

As Fedora lacks a warm an fuzzy mascot (and every time something like that was tried it was received with a very strong and vocal opposition), I had to use for this photo session the same old Tux penguin. So there is no way I can turn this photo series into some distro-related wallpapers or posters.

It is worth noting the model is a CS student who understand and likes the principles of Free software and Free culture but still uses Windows on her laptop, so the message is almost true :D

Only one topic in town this week and that's bullying …

This post however was originally inspired by Glynn Moody's unrelated latest blog (in Computer World) which broadly was a treatise on the simile between organising Open Source folk on any large scale and herding cats...

...this activity is, as we all imagine, a futile pastime ... and moreover transposed into an office context, represents for a manager of 'cats' a role of terrifying proportions.

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.

Now finished with the last few bugs and some dialog changes, we need your help for some final build testing and translations.

Miro 3.0-rc3 is available from the nightly builds page for:

I, for one, feel an itching seeing Inkscape 0.48 in "chill" - this means just before "freeze" and on the way to "release" and start thinking about a jump to Rawhide as soon as it's version will be upgraded but on the other hand I see people in a different situation: big company with "RHEL4 on thousands of workstations" crying about being stuck with (self built) 0.46 and preparing a migration to RHEL5 now, in the spring of 2010, and crying their old building script won't work with 0.47 (EPEL has 0.44 for RHEL4 and 0.46 for RHEL5).