Sunday, 20 July 2008
Lug Radio Live - Day 2
I woke this morning feeling *AWFUL*. Once again, my body clock woke me early, at about 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, 6:45, 6:50, 7:00, 7:10, 7:30, 7:45. I finally gave up trying to reject the world and had a shower and finished the blog post I was writing last night. I went down to breakfast and met up with the guy from breakfast yesterday. We talked about the party last night and the states that various people got themselves into during the evening. I bought a bottle of water from the bar, scrounged a couple of ibruprofen from another LRL'er, settled my bill and left some luggage with reception, and then made my way to the venue. There was already a queue outside, but as I arrived it started to rain. The hordes approached the entrance and were let in! I noticed that Fab and Dan (from Linux Outlaws) failed to arrive at anything even vaguely approaching the right time!, but figured that they were big grown up boys and would probably manage :)
After we were played some intro out-takes and more people arrived, the LRL team started the show back up. I went first to Barbie's [1] talk on Inbox Malware. I feel pretty awful about this, but it's a subject I'm pretty aware about - albeit about 2 years out of date, so I half dozed through this talk.
I went from there to the Mass Debate. The panel consisted of Mr Ben (LugRadio Community), Jeremy Allison (Samba/Google), Matthew Garrett (Kernel/X.Org) and Max Spevack (Fedora). Let's be honest... Again, I'd prefer a more technical talk, but it's not a realistic hope given it was a debate rather than a technical forum. Some of the subjects discussed while I was there were:
1) GPLv2 vs GPLv3 - good thing, bad thing or apathy rules? What circumstances would people be recommended not to use GPLv3 if starting a new project today?
Of the hands raised, a VERY small proportion said it was a bad thing, and then the rest of the hands were 50/50 good thing/apathy. Slightly worrying, but Jeremy did say that most people don't care about the license, until they have to enforce it. The only circumstances where people would be encouraged to not license something under GPLv3 was if they were writing a kernel patch (as this is currently GPLv2 Only) or for integration into a project which is GPLv2 only. Jeremy also said that if this is the case, make sure the license says "GPLv2 or greater", to ensure you have the ability to roll on to GPL3 without needing to contact all the contributors to ask for their permission to upgrade the license.
2) Is anyone surprised that Hans Reiser did it? [2] and what is the future of ReiserFS, to which one member of the audience yelled out "It's fucked" while another said "It's an open source project - it doesn't matter, someone else can carry it on". The Hans Reiser issue was not discussed at length, except for Jeremy saying it was a shock to him as he had met Hans in the past.
3) What did the panel think of OOXML?
A brief summary was that Jeremy followed (and wrote a lot of) the Company Line - OOXML was always redundant as ODF fulfilled everything that OOXML was supposed to fix. Mr Ben said that he thought the issue will only benefit the Open Source community, and someone (I can't remember if it was Mr Ben again) said that the additional information provided by Microsoft allowed the OOo [3] project to fix some bugs in the legacy DOC and XLS formats as they are, in theory, backwards compatible. Jeremy finished by saying that he can only applaud the Microsoft Office team for taking the decision to integrate ODF into ongoing versions of Office. There was more discussion about this issue, but most of it generally re-iterated these views.
4) Should the major distributions try and work towards the goal suggested by Mark Shuttleworth and try to release at the same time. The discussion did prompt the question from Max that why would the major enterprise distributions agree to something that would help a non-enterprise distribution gain market share from the market leader? The rest of the views basically revolved around the Application people saying that it would be good to have a stable platform to work from, but wouldn't it be really boring doing bug fixes for 3 months and feature development for 3 months? The distro people, both on stage and in the audience said that most enterprise distributions release based on features rather than time, as these tend to have long support periods. Jeremy finished off by saying that even if the distros did get "in step" for one release, they'd be completely out within two more releases!
5) How do we get more "New blood" into Open Source?
All the board seemed to think that desktop development is now fairly boring and the fun stuff is online. Matthew said that people are now likely to develop a facebook application, then migrate to a wordpress install, to PHP and then to "something better", which brought a murmur from the floor. Mr Ben finished off by saying that, contrary to popular belief, geeks did actually procreate. Jono wrapped up the mass debate at that point!
I went to Subway for lunch at this point and got talking to a couple from Aberdeen about the work they do and what, if any, other podcasts they listen to (none). We talked for about half an hour and then went back to LRL.
I went to the Telepathy talk in the afternoon (and plan on trying to figure out how to make it all work!) watched some of the talk on Second Life, and then made a point of attending the lightning talk on "Terminator". The project looks REALLY cool, and I'll be installing it on my laptop when I get back to a reliable and fast network service. He also talked about turning a weekend hack into a project. He said some stuff that I already do, but also mentioned that the main problem I tend to have (I'm a magpie when it comes to scratching itches) is fixed by getting users who adopt your project. He's right, I've just not got around to getting a project that's actually usable yet!
I went to the closing speech, and it was really great. I caught a penguin and the RedHat mini mouse :)
I said my goodbyes to Jono, Aq, Chris and Adam, to Dan and Fab and to the various other peoples that I'd spoken to over the weekend, then walked back to the hotel, retrieving my luggage and chatted with one of the Jaiku lot until about 10 minutes before my train was due to leave. I walked to the station and caught the train home.
I'm exhausted, very disappointed this was my first LRL, and desperate to find a replacement for my LugRadio loss.
I'm glad I got to meet all of the people I spoke to this weekend. I've had some really cool discussions with people, and made friends with people I'd never have experienced otherwise.
All in all. Bloody good fun.
Oh, and those looking for a new podcast to listen to; I can strongly recommend LinuxOutlaws if you like LugRadio. It mixes the irreverence of LugRadio, with actual content. Who would have thought it eh? :)
[1] Barbie is a guy. It threw me. There you go.
[2] He killed his wife, in case you didn't already know.
[3] OpenOffice.org
After we were played some intro out-takes and more people arrived, the LRL team started the show back up. I went first to Barbie's [1] talk on Inbox Malware. I feel pretty awful about this, but it's a subject I'm pretty aware about - albeit about 2 years out of date, so I half dozed through this talk.
I went from there to the Mass Debate. The panel consisted of Mr Ben (LugRadio Community), Jeremy Allison (Samba/Google), Matthew Garrett (Kernel/X.Org) and Max Spevack (Fedora). Let's be honest... Again, I'd prefer a more technical talk, but it's not a realistic hope given it was a debate rather than a technical forum. Some of the subjects discussed while I was there were:
1) GPLv2 vs GPLv3 - good thing, bad thing or apathy rules? What circumstances would people be recommended not to use GPLv3 if starting a new project today?
Of the hands raised, a VERY small proportion said it was a bad thing, and then the rest of the hands were 50/50 good thing/apathy. Slightly worrying, but Jeremy did say that most people don't care about the license, until they have to enforce it. The only circumstances where people would be encouraged to not license something under GPLv3 was if they were writing a kernel patch (as this is currently GPLv2 Only) or for integration into a project which is GPLv2 only. Jeremy also said that if this is the case, make sure the license says "GPLv2 or greater", to ensure you have the ability to roll on to GPL3 without needing to contact all the contributors to ask for their permission to upgrade the license.
2) Is anyone surprised that Hans Reiser did it? [2] and what is the future of ReiserFS, to which one member of the audience yelled out "It's fucked" while another said "It's an open source project - it doesn't matter, someone else can carry it on". The Hans Reiser issue was not discussed at length, except for Jeremy saying it was a shock to him as he had met Hans in the past.
3) What did the panel think of OOXML?
A brief summary was that Jeremy followed (and wrote a lot of) the Company Line - OOXML was always redundant as ODF fulfilled everything that OOXML was supposed to fix. Mr Ben said that he thought the issue will only benefit the Open Source community, and someone (I can't remember if it was Mr Ben again) said that the additional information provided by Microsoft allowed the OOo [3] project to fix some bugs in the legacy DOC and XLS formats as they are, in theory, backwards compatible. Jeremy finished by saying that he can only applaud the Microsoft Office team for taking the decision to integrate ODF into ongoing versions of Office. There was more discussion about this issue, but most of it generally re-iterated these views.
4) Should the major distributions try and work towards the goal suggested by Mark Shuttleworth and try to release at the same time. The discussion did prompt the question from Max that why would the major enterprise distributions agree to something that would help a non-enterprise distribution gain market share from the market leader? The rest of the views basically revolved around the Application people saying that it would be good to have a stable platform to work from, but wouldn't it be really boring doing bug fixes for 3 months and feature development for 3 months? The distro people, both on stage and in the audience said that most enterprise distributions release based on features rather than time, as these tend to have long support periods. Jeremy finished off by saying that even if the distros did get "in step" for one release, they'd be completely out within two more releases!
5) How do we get more "New blood" into Open Source?
All the board seemed to think that desktop development is now fairly boring and the fun stuff is online. Matthew said that people are now likely to develop a facebook application, then migrate to a wordpress install, to PHP and then to "something better", which brought a murmur from the floor. Mr Ben finished off by saying that, contrary to popular belief, geeks did actually procreate. Jono wrapped up the mass debate at that point!
I went to Subway for lunch at this point and got talking to a couple from Aberdeen about the work they do and what, if any, other podcasts they listen to (none). We talked for about half an hour and then went back to LRL.
I went to the Telepathy talk in the afternoon (and plan on trying to figure out how to make it all work!) watched some of the talk on Second Life, and then made a point of attending the lightning talk on "Terminator". The project looks REALLY cool, and I'll be installing it on my laptop when I get back to a reliable and fast network service. He also talked about turning a weekend hack into a project. He said some stuff that I already do, but also mentioned that the main problem I tend to have (I'm a magpie when it comes to scratching itches) is fixed by getting users who adopt your project. He's right, I've just not got around to getting a project that's actually usable yet!
I went to the closing speech, and it was really great. I caught a penguin and the RedHat mini mouse :)
I said my goodbyes to Jono, Aq, Chris and Adam, to Dan and Fab and to the various other peoples that I'd spoken to over the weekend, then walked back to the hotel, retrieving my luggage and chatted with one of the Jaiku lot until about 10 minutes before my train was due to leave. I walked to the station and caught the train home.
I'm exhausted, very disappointed this was my first LRL, and desperate to find a replacement for my LugRadio loss.
I'm glad I got to meet all of the people I spoke to this weekend. I've had some really cool discussions with people, and made friends with people I'd never have experienced otherwise.
All in all. Bloody good fun.
Oh, and those looking for a new podcast to listen to; I can strongly recommend LinuxOutlaws if you like LugRadio. It mixes the irreverence of LugRadio, with actual content. Who would have thought it eh? :)
[1] Barbie is a guy. It threw me. There you go.
[2] He killed his wife, in case you didn't already know.
[3] OpenOffice.org
Labels: LRL08, LugRadio, LugRadioLive, LugRadioLive08
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