Events - LinuxTag and HCC linux themadag

I'll be going to two VERY different events this month: Linux Tag with thousands of visitors and a big openSUSE team and the Dutch HCC Linux Themadag which I expect to be slightly smaller - by a factor of 10 or so.



I'm not really sure what kind of event I like most. At LinuxTag I'll probably be more busy to talk to people who know a fair bit about Free Software, get interviewed, discuss things with other FOSS people in many one-on-one or small meetings etcetera. At HCC, well, there will be few people I know and most visitors are probably quite new to Linux. I really look forward to meeting the dutch openSUSE people (most of whom I don't know yet) and yes, I always enjoy talking to newbies. But LinuxTag has lots of friends, both from within openSUSE and from other projects - that's also awesome.

I think I'm gonna decide that they're both equally cool.

And if you live close to either, be sure to be there & say hi to me!

If you want to pick me out of the crowd, a helpful tip: my hair (both on head & chin) got a bit longer since the pic above was taken!

GSoC - DOs and DON'Ts

Soon we'll all hear the news on the students accepted to Google Summer of Code. I'm excited and I'm sure so are a lot of students!

Once the news is in, it is time to start getting to know your mentor, getting your development environment up and starting to code. To help students, mentors and admins, let me echo a post by Lydia Pintscher to Planet openSUSE pointing to three blogs about DOs and DON'Ts she wrote with two other experienced GSoC mentors:

Donnie Berkholz from X.org and Gentoo, Kevin Smith from XMPP and I have written a series of blog posts for Google’s Open Source blog about the dos and don’ts of Google Summer of Code. Check them out. They have useful tips no matter your role in GSoC. There is a post for students, admins and mentors.

I think I can summarize many of the tips for students as: take a GSoC project serious, it is a real job! There is a serious commitment on the side of the organization (mentoring!) as well as the side of Google (payment!). And there is a lot in it for you, not just the money but also the learning opportunity. Last but not least, a successful GSoC looks good on your resume!

Resume?

Don't underestimate the value of GSoC and work in a FOSS community for an employer. As you know, all employers want 18 year old employees with 20 years experience. So having done some work in a FOSS community counts!

And as Boudewijn said in the first comment on the tips for students, taking your summer job for Google & your project serious also means you don't disappear at the end of the summer. It looks BAD to an employer as it signals little commitment to what you do. Especially if you have delivered "almost-ready code" which you never finish. You're basically saying that you are not very reliable!

Don't think potential employers won't see your GSoC work. Most, and especially the better employers, will do a search on your name and have a good look at the results. It is very likely that, once you've finished your GSoC, googling your name finds your project in the top-3 results. Moreover, if you hang around and keep doing some work, you'll learn more, build up an even more valuable resume and you'll more likely to be able to give your mentor up as a reference to a future employer.

fun

There's no guarantee, but maybe your GSoC one day leads to a job at a Free Software company. And a job in a Free Software company is more fun, really. You often get not only more pay (frankly not that important once you make enough to live OK) but also more responsibility and respect. Even if you get a job which isn't Free Software related, if you have the experience of working in a community, you will have a better position in your first job. You'll know better how to interact with people. How to write readable, maintainable code. When to ask questions. Who to ask. Such skills are useful so you're a more valuable employee - one who gets more choice, freedom and responsibility!

Taking your GSoC serious also means more fun on a personal level. At least I'd argue that having your code finished, shipped to a few million users and having your name on it as developer or maintainer is not just cool on your resume but pretty awesome in general!

Even without Google

Last but not least, as Boudewijn blogged, GSoC is not the only way to get most of the benefits of becoming part of a Free Software community! Even if your GSoC project was not accepted, you can ask if you can do it anyway. Mentors often have no problem mentoring you without a GSoC and while you don't get the money, meaning you'll probably have to find another summer job, you'll still get to code, learn & become part of the team.

so...

So. Take your GSoC project serious. It means more fun and better results. Both for yourself now as well as for your future!

Have fun!

Upcoming...

I've been quite busy over the last few months - after Michael Loeffler left and AJ went on parental leave for 2 months life got crazy. Luckily openSUSE doesn't exactly depend on me and while some things slipped, I don't think big things broke down. Ok, my boss wasn't happy with me as especially internal budget things suffered. I've given those sending me interviews and other writing stuff (like my column for LinuxUser) a very hard time too. And personally, I'm unhappy with it because I tried to do to many things which resulted in many of them unfinished.

back on track

But AJ is back, we're getting some processes on track and the 11.4 release worked out great. So it is time to focus again and get things finished. First is the strategy stuff. The openSUSE Board had a few comments we'll look through, then it should go up for voting. Really. I know, it already needs some updating - we'll try to do that first. Once that is done, it's time to vote on it and get it out however. We need to get the DVD's out which we created for GNOME 3 and KDE. For both I spend a lot of time collecting materials to include on the disk and imho the end result is pretty ok. But there's also room for improvement, something for the future... And we have marketing materials to create for the US. There have been only a few suggestions on the marketing ML so it looks like I'm gonna have to lock myself in my room for a day or two to write some stuff... Finally, I have to catch up with mail. With over 2300 unread mails that'll be quite a job but in some folders I'll probably just mark all read... And then it's on to new stuff!

Like...

Last Saturday I gave a talk at a FLISOL meeting - and in the preparations for that I updated a number of presentations I have. Will share them with the marketing team and hopefully put them in Git & the wiki with the marketing materials.

wiki stuff

The openSUSE ambassador talking points have been improving and I'm working on an upcoming features. I've also went through the wiki pages for new contributors, making small changes and adding links there, improving the Junior Jobs pages. Now the openSUSE Boosters are planning to work on that as well, smoothing out the process of getting involved in openSUSE.

openhatch

Once we have that up, I'd like to investigate openSUSE joining openHatch. For that we'd need junior jobs in a variety of areas as well as mentors - but I think I can just start small. We have a convention in Bugzilla which is followed by practically nobody: mark simple bugs with "JJ" so they can be easily found. I'll try and get a few of those on openhatch, see if we can get a contributor or two to chip in. If that works we have a good reason to expand upon that!

and a promise

Finally I promise to work harder on being available & in meetings - I know I missed a few ;-)

LibreOffice

I just stumbled upon mmeeks blog where he mentions some of his favorite projects from the LibreOffice GSoC ideas. And it made me happy.

OpenOffice = blegh

Now I've never been a big fan of OpenOffice. I saw it as a huge pile of legacy code with little future. Part of that was due to the "WE OWN OPENOFFICE" Governance from Sun/Oracle, part due the the slowness and UI horror. And part due to developers saying things like

"developing OpenOffice is like brushing your teeth with a chainsaw"

Such quotes don't inspire a lot of confidence

LibreOffice an improvement

The LibreOffice fork solves the governance issue and focusses strongly on cleaning up the code. Still I felt they still had the Millstone of the old codebase around the neck. I've always seen a lot more future for Calligra suite which has a modern code base and innovative features, especially since the inception of KO GmbH. For me, LibreOffice did not seem relevant for anything other than bridging the gap until Calligra was end user ready..

Which in itself is bad - competition is good, OO has a huge user base (slowly moving to LibreOffice now) and the LibreOffice project is a big showcase of Free Software in many ways.

Light at the end of the tunnel

So the post by Meeks lighted up a little spark in me when he mentioned moving over the Canvas to Cairo. Yes, I'm no developer, but I do know that Cairo is a modern technology, good enough to be adopted as the new canvas by the upcoming Qt4 port of Scribus (part of openSUSE 11.4). And it is what GNOME Shell is build upon, not exactly irrelevant either. Meeks also mentions an Android port which would force work on improving performance like it did for Calligra office.

So why is this so special? It's not like OO.o didn't have any plans... Well, frankly, the only improvements I've seen from OO.o over the last years was an addition like Java. Sorry but why oh why add Java to an office suite which is already slow as crap and big as a mountain? Oh, and the discussions about the "awesome UI redesign" ("let's copy the ribbon, badly"). I didn't hear about taking advantage of modern technologies like Cairo. Frankly, the improvements were mostly putting lipstick on a pig, if you ask me.

LibreOffice REALLY brings change!

So now I have the impression that LibreOffice really represents a change. Sure, it's all perception, I know. I'm sure the OO team did some replacing-of-legacy-stuff. And LibreOffice still has a HUGE amount of work to do. They still have the old code base. But the project is revitalized! With all the new developers and LibreOffice in GSoC, there is change in the air. With Calligra going incredibly strong as well (just see the number of ppl here) the Free Software office space looks to be gearing up to good stuff. I for one welcome our new Office overlords, evil or not ;-)

The Collaboration Imperative

As you might have noticed, there is a little bit of a brush-up between GNOME and Canonical with KDE involved from the sidelines (just read Planet GNOME). Dave wrote a reasonable summary of this and so did Jeff Waugh in his series on the relationship between Canonical and GNOME. In three sentences:

Let's have a fight

Canonical gets a lot of criticism for creating a fork of the GNOME experience with Unity, instead of contributing upstream to GNOME Shell. Canonical responds that Unity was meant to be a GNOME project and their contributions are being blocked (giving libindicators as example). Suddenly Aaron Seigo from KDE weighted in, saying GNOME is indeed hard to work with.

I've been reading up on it and to some extend participating in the discussion on identi.ca. As you know, I'm interested in the subject of collaboration and this is a case where it clearly didn't work out for a variety of reasons. In this blog I won't try to weight in on the topic itself but rather argue that the psychological construct of "the fundamental attribution error" can explain much of the conflict and how to avoid it.

But let's start with a sample of the discussion.

forming an opinion

I'm not exactly the type of person who makes up his mind easily. And the stories that came out of this debate were highly conflicting and confusing. According to this, Canonical discourages its employees from contributing upstream. However, Aaron claims GNOME does not WANT to collaborate. And Mark blogs:

Jeff also goes on to talk about Ted and Aurelien, who were proposing the app indicators work in GNOME and KDE respectively. KDE apps worked smoothly, Gnome rejected Ted’s proposal.

I say opinions are cool!

So GNOME is uncooperative? Or does Canonical not get it, as Dave claimed? Is KDE just pushing things without listening? Depends on your point of view - the facts are vague. Read for example this thread on freedesktop.org about the StatusNotifier (systray) spec - there is about a 50% chance you'll decide KDE is the uncooperative one... This thread was referenced several times as proof Party X was inflexible and rude - where X was sometimes GNOME and sometimes KDE!

Makes you wonder what is going on...

So what is real?

A few days ago I had a call with Jeff Waugh. He offered to talk in a dent and I'm glad he did. Of course, as usual the whole situation is more complicated than what you can discuss in 140 characters on twitter. The talk was very enlightening and made me think of a psychological concept.

Call it a family trait...

The fundamental attribution error

People tend to attribute what happens around us in the world to intentions. We believe things happen for a reason. This is quite a strong human tendency already present in very young children. Put a 3 year old in front of a room where stones are moved around by some invisible means like magnets. Ask the kid what is going on and he or she will describe the events in the room in terms of "the blue stone wants to talk to the red one". We know stones usually don't really want a lot - so why does the child perceive such intentions? This phenomenon not only forms the base of early religions (attributing 'intentions' to weather, trees or growth of crops) but also results in making conflicts worse. Psychologists call it "the fundamental attribution error" and it is fundamental (hence the name) to our perception of the world.

So the reality is, besides that stones and trees don't have 'goals' and 'intentions', that often things happen for other reasons than someone having the intent to do that specific thing. Or in English, if a specification gets critical comments - maybe the respondent might have had other reasons than just wanting to be a jerk. Like being busy, tired or having misunderstood/missed a part of the discussion.

Reality?

Reality applied

The talk with Jeff made clear that the major reason for GNOME not supporting the systemtray spec was timing, not lack of interest The focus of the GNOME project right now is understandably narrow: get GNOME 3 out the door. Something like interoperability, no matter how important, is not on top of the agenda. Jeff said he expects the FD.o systray spec to be supported hopefully in GNOME 3.2! The lesson: sometimes things interfere with cooperation. And the 'other camp', blissfully unaware of the real reasons behind lack of response or rude behavior, attributes it to a lack of willingness and support.

As another example, take the adoption of the Galago (notification) specification and what went wrong according to this message by John Palmieri. And about GNOME and Canonical having misunderstandings: Stuart Jarvis blogged how hard understanding a Free Software community can be.

Now I'm not going to attempt to unravel all the events that led to this blog as that would simply be impossible. Nor will I attempt to figure out 'who is to blame' as that's pointless (and wrong anyway, as I argued above). What I can do is ask those involved to think about the fundamental attribution error: if someone looks funny at you, it doesn't mean they hate you. They might have something stuck in their eye!

*snap*

Actions

Ok, so maybe the others don't hate you. That doesn't solve the problem - yet. We all need to step up and do something. What?

Make collaboration an explicit focus

I wrote about collaboration before and at FOSDEM there was a cross-distro-collaboration discussion. As I said there, a big blocker for more openness is that we simply don't think about collaboration. We need to be aware of the opportunities for and benefits of collaboration. The whole discussion that I started this blog with might be negative and things are all a bit tense right now, but it shines the spotlight on something that needs attention! And positive initiatives like Appstream are happening. As Seif Lotfy wrote on his blog:

And if you haven’t noticed we are working with GNOME Shell, Unity and KDE. So a sense of collaboration is possible ;)

It just needs us to take notice! So, Mark, maybe blog about Appstream? It's using Ubuntu Software Center for the GNOME side, after all... Let's also focus on the positive projects!

Talk together face to face!

It is important to talk about concerns and frustrations. Considering the distance Brazil-Australia the best Jeff and I could do was a phone call but it was certainly enlightening. And I bet that you'll notice the same when you finally get to talk to those you've been fighting with on IRC and mailing lists for so long... Even then, realize that one single person does not define his or her whole project. Not everyone in KDE is as jumpy as Aaron; not everyone in GNOME is as French as Vincent Untz. It is important to share the results of a chat as well - blog about it (if your blog is aggregated on your projects' planet), or add results to a wiki or commit logs etcetera. Make sure the positive results persist!

Allison wrote he also wants to start a bit of a discussion in the cross-desktop area which I welcome and support. Sounds like something which could make an impact and Allison, if you want my help, let me know what I can do.

Time for a group hug?

Take advantage of events to meet

Don't overlook the opportunity to meet at events. For example, there is the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit in San Fransisco in a few weeks. It is co-located with Camp KDE which seems to me an excellent opportunity for stakeholders to get together. Go a few days before the Collaboration Summit starts so you can get some face to face time with desktop folks.

Then of course in August, there is the Desktop Summit. I'm one of the organizers and while collaboration isn't always perfect, the team has a common goal: organize a great event! Like the previous Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria I hope we can make some steps forward. This Desktop Summit will have collaboration even higher on its agenda than the last one and I hope this will have positive effects.

Doing more, moving forward

There certainly is more we can do to solve the conflicts. With apologies for the irony here, more blogs trying to analyze the whole thing may simply be fueling the flames more than extinguish them. Talking to people works better. I don't claim there was no talk, there was. However, much communication we do happens over the web. And as we are all aware, that can easily lead to misunderstandings. So the face to face meetings I suggest, as well as an awareness of biases like the fundamental attribution error, can contribute to solving these conflicts in a more effective manner. As long as the results get documented in a few (public!) places and as such don't get forgotten the results of such meetings can be good and long lasting!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

Personally, I'll stay away from the subject now - I've dented, tweeted and now blogged enough about it. I'll focus on the positive - including the Desktop Summit. And making sure the next openSUSE conference will have as much of a collaborative atmosphere as the last one!

HCC linux Day and the NL release party

HCC Linux Day in May

Yes, as I blogged before, Saturday May 21 there will be a HCC Linux day (news updates here). And openSUSE will be there. Soon you'll find the HCC Linux day page on the openSUSE Ambassador events page! If you're interested in helping out, just let me know. No, you don't need any special skills or a lot of knowledge - you'd be surprised how little the average visitor knows of linux and openSUSE. And if they have harder questions, you can ask one of the other team members - so you'll learn something too ;-)

openSUSE release party in NL

18 March 2011, from 17:00 onwards in the Novell office in Utrecht an openSUSE release party will be held! Of course, everyone is welcome. What do you need: be there. What do you get: fun, pizza, some beers, an openSUSE presentation/demo, some big surprise and of course party.

So if you are in NL at either of these dates, you know what to do!

makeovers

Today I did a makeover of my blog. Thought - hey, I can fix the bad looks in 10 minutes, right? Guess again ;-)

But it is done. I am an absolutely horrible artist but I could draw on the awesome work of Marcos "SUSEspain" B.R. (isn't CC licensing wonderful?) and of course the blogger team. Next up: a proper domain name...

Oh, I butchered Marcos' wallpaper as the original didn't fit my blog & was too sharp. So - what you see is a horrible version of his original work which you can find (together with his other stuff) if you click on it below!

Marcos, if you read this, awesome wallpapers dude!

edit: and I forgot to add these but didn't want to let you all miss out on it: on the right pics of an LA airport makeover. They have a sense of humor over there...