The last two weeks have been quite event­ful. Each of these prob­ably deserves its own blog post, but since I don’t have the time to write them all I’ll just give a summary.

Doc­u­ment Free­dom Day, 26 March

The first annual Doc­u­ment Free­dom Day (inspired by Soft­ware Free­dom Day) was cel­eb­rated glob­ally. In Sydney, the cel­eb­ra­tions were hos­ted by Google at their offices, sup­por­ted by the Inter­net Soci­ety of Aus­tralia and the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG). As the SLUG rep­res­ent­at­ive, I was asked to say a few words about our organ­isa­tion and its rel­ev­ance to doc­u­ment free­dom. Not hav­ing time to pre­pare, I man­aged to ad-​​lib a speech, draw­ing on memor­ies of what I had writ­ten before on the Domes­day Book and Domes­day Pro­ject. I’m not an exper­i­enced speaker, so I’m very glad that it came out well.

Sen­ator Kate Lundy and David Vaile delivered great talks that made us think about open­ness of inform­a­tion and their import­ance to soci­ety. For the most part, we didn’t men­tion the war (which unfor­tu­nately has been lost), but there was no escap­ing acknow­ledge­ment of the Waughs. Any­one dis­il­lu­sioned at the state of polit­ics in Aus­tralia ought to speak with Kate. Even after 12 years in par­lia­ment, she is still inspiring.

All in all, it was a fant­astic night. Thanks to Alan Noble, Andrew McRae and the other folks at Google for mak­ing it hap­pen. Andrew and Sarah Mad­dox have writ­ten good sum­mar­ies of the evening.

I would have loved to have taken Kate up on her invit­a­tion to join her ‘Found­a­tions of Open: Tech­no­logy and Digital Know­ledge’ local 2020 Sum­mit, but alas a trip to Can­berra for one day was a bit much. I’m glad to see it all went well, though.

Sydney Linux Users Group Annual Gen­eral Meet­ing, 28 March

What can I say? Thanks to every­one in SLUG who sup­por­ted my can­did­acy for the role of Pres­id­ent. The new Com­mit­tee looks like a great mix of tal­ents, and we already have some good ideas in the pipeline. The next twelve months is look­ing to be excit­ing indeed.

We had the first gath­er­ing of the new Com­mit­tee on Sunday. It was a han­dover meet­ing, with the old Com­mit­tee mem­bers present to pass on their wis­dom and exper­i­ence to the new. My sin­cere grat­it­ude goes to the depart­ing Com­mit­tee mem­bers. I feel truly hon­oured to have worked with them over this past year.

Aus­tralian Open Source Industry & Com­munity Report 2008 launch event, 1 April

Free soft­ware and free beer! It appears that with FOSS, you can have your cake and eat it too

Note: there was no cake — but there were Iced Vo Vos! Sweet!

It’s great to finally have some author­it­at­ive stat­ist­ics to back our cause. Com­mon myths were dis­pelled, and we had con­firm­a­tion of things that seemed so obvi­ous to us but might have been less so for others.

Bar­Camp Sydney, 5–6 April

Bar­Camp 3 was not­able for expan­sion to two days of rev­elry. The venue migrated from UTS for the first two Bar­Camps to the UNSW Round­house for the third, which des­pite the longer com­mute I feel was a good move. Attend­ance did seem thin­ner than in pre­vi­ous years. This was prob­ably due to vis­it­ors spread over a lar­ger venue and across two days. One thing I like about Bar­Camp is that I get con­tact with people and ideas that I oth­er­wise wouldn’t notice from FOSS gath­er­ings like SLUG. Bar­Camp has con­sid­er­ably more pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware developers and entre­pren­eurs. Less Google, more Microsoft. As much as I love FOSS, I do like to see what’s hap­pen­ing in the rest of the ICT universe.

I made an effort this time to attend talks that were less tech­nical and more busi­ness or per­sonal devel­op­ment ori­ented. Stand-​​out speak­ers included Nick Hodge, Matt Moore and Richard Hayes.

Per­haps the high­light was the Sat­urday even­ing. Mike from Atlas­sian led us through a few rounds of Were­wolf, a vari­ation (and an improve­ment, IMHO) of the clas­sic Mafia game. I still can’t believe that we didn’t deplete the bar tab that Mike set up for us. We’ll have to have SLUG’s Deb­SIG present at Bar­Camp 4

LotD: Open​Of​fice​.org en masse in NSW schools!

My last post made me revisit an internal debate that I’ve been hav­ing for a num­ber of years: what licence should I pub­lish my works under? There has been plenty of work done on this with regards to soft­ware, but what about doc­u­ment­a­tion and other works? What licence can I use for my guide to Linux and FLOSS, or just for my blog?

If I was a coder and not a writer, the answer in my mind would be much sim­pler. The GNU GPL allows me to give back to the com­munity from which I have gained so much, and it also allows me to lever­age a vast horde of pre-​​existing code.

The cul­ture in other cre­at­ive areas appears to be some­what dif­fer­ent. I often see licences such as the Cre­at­ive Com­mons, using com­bin­a­tions of the Share Alike, Attri­bu­tion, Non-​​Commercial, and No Deriv­at­ive Works clauses. I see sev­eral prob­lems with these. Share Alike is most in line with my prin­ciples, being in the same quid pro quo spirit of copyleft. Attri­bu­tion is remin­is­cent of the ‘obnox­ious’ advert­ising clause in the ori­ginal BSD licence, and as far as I can see car­ries the same poten­tial prob­lems. Non-​​Commercial restricts works to the ama­teur field. As long as changes are shared back in their entirety to help every­one, why shouldn’t any­one be allowed to com­mer­cially bene­fit? There is hardly a scarcity of pro­jects in the Free Soft­ware realm that are improv­ing in leaps and bounds thanks to com­mer­cial input. Because those improve­ments need to be shared back, every­one bene­fits. No Deriv­at­ive Works is a restric­tion that puts the work behind glass for people to look at but not touch. It’s no dif­fer­ent from free­ware. What’s the point?

Should works such as prose, doc­u­ment­a­tion, graph­ics, audio and video be treated any dif­fer­ently from code? All of the Cre­at­ive Com­mons licences have an Attri­bu­tion pro­vi­sion. Many of us in the Free Soft­ware com­munity would baulk at that, just as we did with XFree86. I under­stand that people like to be cred­ited for their work, but is it worth it if it comes at the expense of the com­munity as a whole? If I’m going to be basing my work upon that of oth­ers, must I spend time and effort ensur­ing that I’m leg­ally abid­ing by all the attri­bu­tion pro­vi­sions? Do I need to bookend it with a long list of cred­its? If I was writ­ing soft­ware, do I need an About menu item that includes every­one in the White Pages, along with their gene­a­logy stretch­ing back to Cre­ation?

It looks like a Cre­at­ive Com­mons licence with only a Share Alike pro­vi­sion would suit my needs, but such a beast doesn’t exist. Is there a reason why cre­at­ors of non-​​code works don’t feel the same sense of com­munity as coders? Why the strong need for recognition?

Let’s look at one example. All Wiki­pe­dia con­tent is pub­lished under the GNU Free Doc­u­ment­a­tion License (sic). Nobody seems to mind post­ing without attri­bu­tion within the art­icles. This encour­ages easy and unres­tric­ted edit­ing, ran­ging from simple spelling/​grammar cor­rec­tions to estab­lish­ing a new art­icle or rewrit­ing an exist­ing one. The attri­bu­tions are auto­mat­ic­ally kept sep­ar­ately, in the wiki his­tory. Sim­il­arly, estab­lished code pro­jects almost always have some sort of revi­sion con­trol sys­tem to man­age and track contributions.

Can this be done with other, non-​​code pro­jects? Wikis often work well for text. Doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tems like Alfresco and Plone exist for more com­plic­ated doc­u­ment arrange­ments, but the emphasis is still on text. I have seen efforts for other kinds of media, but I have no idea how mature or appro­pri­ate those are. Nev­er­the­less, it is often too com­plex and bur­den­some for the aver­age per­son to imple­ment such systems.

That brings us back to my legal nav­ig­a­tions through the sea of licens­ing. At first look, the GNU Free Doc­u­ment­a­tion License looks like the way to go. With the Free Soft­ware Found­a­tion and Wiki­pe­dia seal of approval, how could one go wrong? Not so fast there, mate. Exam­in­a­tion by the debian-​​legal team found it to not be in com­pli­ance with the Debian Free Soft­ware Guidelines. This is in dis­agree­ment with the Free Soft­ware Found­a­tion (who don’t believe there’s a prob­lem), but regard­less it means that if I choose this licence my work will never be com­pat­ible with Debian. That is not some­thing I can be com­fort­able with. Unfor­tu­nately, debian-​​legal don’t expli­citly seem to offer any altern­at­ive licence to use. Most of their doc­u­ment­a­tion I have examined, like the Debian New Main­tain­ers’ Guide, go with the GPL. Their own Web site has chosen the Open Pub­lic­a­tion License (sic). This is more likely than not to be an arte­fact of the past: Wiki­pe­dia calls the licence “largely defunct”.

Obvi­ously, Debian isn’t the only game in town. Let’s see what some of the other major FLOSS pro­jects are up to. Both GNOME and KDE have stand­ard­ised their doc­u­ment­a­tion around the GNU FDL. Ubuntu and Gentoo use the Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attri­bu­tion ShareAlike licence, with the not­able excep­tion of the Ubuntu Pack­aging Guide, which is GPL to main­tain com­pat­ib­il­ity with Debian devel­op­ment doc­u­ment­a­tion. Fedora make the effort to list and explain ‘good’ and ‘bad’ licences, for soft­ware, doc­u­ment­a­tion, typefaces and other forms of con­tent. They don’t men­tion the GPL for doc­u­ment­a­tion or other non-​​code content.

That doesn’t mean that the GPL is not usable for non-​​code works. The Free Soft­ware Found­a­tion don’t expli­citly recom­mend the GPL for doc­u­ment­a­tion, but they do have it lis­ted as a licence “for works besides soft­ware and doc­u­ment­a­tion”. They go on to explain: “The GNU GPL can be used for gen­eral data which is not soft­ware, as long as one can determ­ine what the defin­i­tion of “source code” refers to in the par­tic­u­lar case.” I am not a law­yer — what exactly does this mean? I think it’s clear enough for documentation/​prose, but for other con­tent types this can get con­sid­er­ably more hairy. Is there a guide out there for using the GPL for non-​​code works? Some­thing along the lines of the Soft­ware Free­dom Law Center’s (sic) recently-​​released Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Soft­ware Pro­jects would be brilliant.

With these things con­sidered, I’m cur­rently lean­ing towards using the GPL for my work, per­haps with a little mes­sage request­ing (but not requir­ing) attri­bu­tion. As much as I can determ­ine, this would not break com­pat­ib­il­ity with an unmod­i­fied GPL. Altern­at­ively, I could just go with the GNU FDL, des­pite its short­com­ings. I’d be inter­ested to hear people’s wis­dom, know­ledge and exper­i­ences with this.

LotD: Best. Talk. Ever!

Last night, SLUG’s monthly meet­ing played host to four rep­res­ent­at­ives from Microsoft:

• Sarah Bond, Plat­form Strategy Man­ager. Sarah was present to talk about Microsoft’s cur­rent pos­i­tion with OOXML, espe­cially with regards to the inter­op­er­ab­il­ity with Linux.

• Amit Pawer, National Tech­no­logy Spe­cial­ist. He spe­cial­ises in Win­dows Server technologies.

• Alistair Speirs, Tech­no­logy Spe­cial­ist — Office. His back­ground is in Java and .NET development.

• Rose­mary Stark, Product Man­ager, Win­dows Server and Infra­struc­ture Products.

This unsur­pris­ingly caused much con­sterna­tion and con­tro­versy within the Aus­tralian FOSS com­munity in the weeks lead­ing up to the event, and I (being its organ­iser, and hence the tar­get of much vit­riol) ended up spend­ing much time gauging and respond­ing to the opin­ions and ideas raised.

We wanted this to be an open community-​​led Q&A ses­sion, and to their credit Microsoft were obli­ging. Admit­tedly, I would have saved much san­ity and hours of work if people had pos­ted to the wiki as asked, but hav­ing to tran­scribe from the mail­ing lists to the wiki allowed me to think more about the ques­tions and how they should be worded and ordered. I need no reminder of Microsoft’s trans­gres­sions, but I made sure to keep IBM in mind (as a com­pany that was once con­sidered an ana­thema to soft­ware free­dom but has now largely reformed) and take an optim­istic approach.

Pia was of great help here (as always!). With so many ques­tions and only an hour and a half in which to ask them, we decided to cull the non-​​constructive, accus­at­ive and just plain trolling ques­tions. By the end, Pia had com­piled a list that was fairly encom­passing of the major issues con­cern­ing sup­port­ers of com­pet­i­tion, tech­no­logy and freedom.

As I arrived at the venue, I found that our guests had beaten me and were act­ively help­ing to get the fur­niture into place. This allowed us to get bet­ter acquain­ted before the meet­ing. It was clear (and they openly admit­ted) that they had been fol­low­ing our open dis­cus­sion pro­cess on mail­ing lists and the SLUG wiki. Really, they would have been daft not to do so

I handled the intro­duc­tion, then turn­ing the micro­phone over to our guests to intro­duce them­selves. Sarah Bond launched into a present­a­tion on OOXML, in the pro­cess answer­ing sev­eral of the ques­tions we had on the wiki. I left Pia to offi­ci­ate most of the meet­ing, but I chimed in on occa­sion with both poin­ted and irrev­er­ent ques­tions and com­ments that were not on the list.

We will be releas­ing the video of the meet­ing as soon as we are able, so I shan’t explain its con­tents too much. Some inter­est­ing points though:

• In the list of rules for the meet­ing, I put ‘Ask­ing “Why do you eat babies?” doesn’t help any­one.’ I ini­tially felt bad when I met Sarah and real­ised that she is preg­nant! She was a good sport about it though, and we all had a good laugh
• In her present­a­tion, Sarah men­tioned that Microsoft will be releas­ing the specs to their bin­ary Office file formats in mid-​​February (UPDATE: it’s con­firmed!). I’m still not sure if I heard this one right (it’s a lot to swal­low!), so if someone can con­firm this I’d appre­ci­ate it. They made no bones about this being part of their drive to pro­mote OOXML acceptance.
• Not new, but news to us, is the fact that Win­dows 2003 has a DRM infra­struc­ture which they call RMS, short for Rights Man­age­ment Ser­vices. I did cheekily ask them if the name was delib­er­ate, and their attempts to ser­i­ously and politely address the ques­tion was price­less

Like with any other SLUG meet­ing, we went out for Chinese food after­wards. Three of our guests joined us (it’s a shame that Sarah couldn’t come, but being preg­nant isn’t easy). Did we have din­ner with the Devil? It cer­tainly didn’t feel that way. Once we put our dif­fer­ences aside, we real­ised that we have an awful lot in com­mon. We are all geeks at heart, and some of the MS people have and con­tinue to dabble in Unix and FOSS tech­no­lo­gies such as Python.

Were we suc­cess­ful? It depends on how you look at it. From my per­spect­ive of try­ing to build trust and under­stand­ing, without dwell­ing too much on (but cer­tainly not ignor­ing) the past, I think so. Ask­ing loaded ques­tions and mak­ing our guests feel uncom­fort­able might have brought some short-​​term sat­is­fac­tion to some of us, but would it have achieved any­thing? There were some inap­pro­pri­ate com­ments from the audi­ence going in both dir­ec­tions (one of the loudest people actu­ally seemed to be pro-​​Microsoft), but those people were eas­ily out­numbered by the more sens­ible major­ity. My ori­ginal fears of the crowd devolving into a sense­less rabble dis­sip­ated rap­idly, and I am very pleased and proud of our com­munity for that.

I was ini­tially dis­ap­poin­ted by our turn out, but that feel­ing changed as the meet­ing pro­gressed. Due to it being Janu­ary, linux​.conf​.au being just around the corner (which siphoned a lot of our best and bright­est) and the sens­it­ive nature of the sub­ject mat­ter, we had a crowd that was smal­ler than expec­ted, but felt more con­ver­sa­tional and manageable.

If you were at the meet­ing, please let me know what you thought of it by post­ing a com­ment.

Sarah will be speak­ing again at LUV on Feb­ru­ary 5. If you’re in Mel­bourne for linux​.conf​.au, it might be worth extend­ing your trip by a few days to see it. I would also sug­gest that you take inspir­a­tion from the list of ques­tions that we have com­piled. If our video is out by then, watch it to avoid repeat­ing the ques­tions that we’ve already asked (or pose follow-​​up questions).

My warmest thanks go to:

• the rest of the SLUG Com­mit­tee (Lind­say Holm­wood, Silvia Pfeif­fer, Matt Moor, Ken Wilson, John Ferlito and James Dumay), for their sup­port throughout
• Pia Waugh
• Anna, Matt and every­one who helped with set­ting up, pack­ing up, record­ing and so on
• our guests from Microsoft, for being such good sports
• and of course, our community

P.S. Happy Inva­sion Day to Aus­trali­ans, and happy Anti-​​Invasion Day to Indi­ans

It’s been indic­ated to me that I never put out a report on Soft­ware Free­dom Day in Sydney. Well, bet­ter late than never

Advoc­ates of free soft­ware cel­eb­rated at the Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales on 16 Septem­ber for the fourth annual Soft­ware Free­dom Day. Mem­bers of SLUG, Ubuntu-​​AU and the gen­eral FOSS com­munity col­lab­or­ated to spread the mes­sage of free soft­ware to the gen­eral public.

Interest and buzz was gen­er­ated in the days leading-​​up to the event through a poster cam­paign across the cam­pus. At the UNSW Com­puter Fair, we piqued the curi­os­ity of many com­puter users with our dis­plays, screen­casts and spiels. Those who were enthu­si­astic migrated to our room in the nearby Law Build­ing, where we could explain and demon­strate in greater detail. Not only did we have many expres­sions of interest from new­comers in free soft­ware and the free soft­ware com­munity, we also suc­ceeded in bring­ing those who already use FOSS into par­ti­cip­a­tion in the local community.

Regret­tably, I was not able to take any decent pho­to­graphs of the event. If any­one has pic­tures, I’d be grate­ful if they could be sent to me.

I would like to give a big word of thanks to every­one who helped on the day:

• Andreas Fisc­her
• Brendan Puck­eridge
• David McQuire
• James Dumay
• Jim Tsao
• John Ferlito
• Ken Wilson
• Lind­say Holmwood
• Matt Moor
• Peter Baker
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Silvia Pfeif­fer
• Any­one else who I may have for­got­ten (if I have, sorry!)

In addi­tion, I would like to thank those who provided resources in sup­port of our efforts:

• Com­puter Fairs Aus­tralia (tables at the com­puter fair)
• David Vaile, Abi Para­maguru and Alana Maur­ushat at the UNSW Cyber­space Law and Policy Centre (room in the Law Building)
• John Schilit (IBM and Rob­ocode materials)
• Solu­tions First (Unwired modem)
• Ubuntu Screen­casts Team (screen­casts and subtitles)
• Canon­ical (Ubuntu CDs)
• The world­wide free soft­ware com­munity

LotD: Sign the peti­tion for a Free Soci­ety and against Digital Restric­tions Man­age­ment and Treach­er­ous Computing

Whilst codi­fy­ing the plans for Soft­ware Free­dom Day in Sydney, I decided to put together a mock press release. A little of the con­tent is lif­ted from the SFD Web site. Feel free to modify it for your needs (loc­al­ised to your city, etc.) and redistribute.

SYDNEY CELEBRATES SOFTWARE FREEDOM, THIS SUNDAY

For the second time run­ning, The Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales (UNSW) has been selec­ted to form the centrepiece of Soft­ware Free­dom Day in Sydney.

Soft­ware Free­dom Day (SFD) is a world­wide cel­eb­ra­tion of Free and Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS). Our goal in this annual cel­eb­ra­tion is to edu­cate the world­wide pub­lic about of the bene­fits of using high qual­ity Free and Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS) in edu­ca­tion, in gov­ern­ment, at home, and in busi­ness — in short, everywhere!

Have you ever had your com­puter soft­ware crash, lose data or get a virus? Ima­gine if after only a few years that the thesis that you worked on for ages was no longer read­able, or that your pre­cious home movies were no longer watch­able. If you com­plain to the soft­ware com­pany, they try to talk you into spend­ing yet more money on an ‘upgrade’, which only turns out to be slower and bug­gier than the pre­vi­ous ver­sion. Ever bought a new music player, only to find that it refuses to play the music that worked just fine on your old player?

Unfor­tu­nately, most people are liv­ing in this world today.

Soft­ware Free­dom Day exists to show the gen­eral pub­lic that there is a way out of this vicious cycle. Through the use of free soft­ware, you regain con­trol over your com­puter and your data. Every per­son has the free­dom to par­ti­cip­ate in and use free soft­ware, whether it be on a totally free oper­at­ing sys­tem like Linux or on a non-​​free plat­form like Win­dows or Mac OS.

This Sunday, the Sydney FOSS com­munity will demon­strate how easy it is to install and use free soft­ware to achieve a vari­ety of tasks. Our activ­it­ies shall grav­it­ate around two ven­ues in UNSW:

• At the com­puter fair in the Round­house (10am-​​3pm), we will be demon­strat­ing FOSS tech­no­lo­gies to vendors and visitors.
• In Law Room 203 (8am-​​5pm), we will be host­ing a series of talks and tutorials.

We will also have people roam­ing around cam­pus spread­ing the news. We will be happy to answer any ques­tions that you may have per­tain­ing to FOSS. We will have CDs and other items to hand out, to get you star­ted. If you bring (or buy at the fair) a USB drive, we can trans­fer free soft­ware onto it for you.

If you’re buy­ing hard­ware at the fair, we can help you to get it run­ning with FOSS. If you’re a stu­dent, or just plain curi­ous, we can show you how you can max­im­ise the poten­tial of your com­puter, all at no cost to you.

Unlike with non-​​free soft­ware, FOSS is typ­i­fied by extens­ive com­munity net­works that are able to provide detailed sup­port should you need help. Examples include the Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG), which hosts e-​​mail lists, monthly meet­ings, and other events for people of all skill levels.

With the fin­an­cial sup­port of IT mar­ket lead­ers like IBM, HP, Dell, Intel and Google, as well as count­less gov­ern­mental bod­ies and com­pan­ies in other indus­tries, FOSS is grow­ing from strength to strength at a phe­nom­enal rate.

If you have any fur­ther ques­tions, please see our list of resources below. Oth­er­wise, come and see us on Sunday, and we’ll show you in person!

If you’d like to get involved as a volun­teer, read our plans for the day (linked below).

 

RESOURCES

• To view our plans for the day, see http://​www​.soft​ware​freedom​day​.org/​t​e​a​m​s​/​o​c​e​a​n​i​a​/​a​u​/​S​y​d​ney
• For more inform­a­tion on the mean­ing of Soft­ware Free­dom Day, see http://​www​.soft​ware​freedom​day​.org/​a​b​out
• For more inform­a­tion on FOSS, see http://​www​.linux​.org​.au/​l​i​nux

LotD:  I never got around to writ­ing about the Edu­ca­tion Expo, so I’ll point to Pia’s writeup. 

Tighten your belts and buckle your shoes, for Soft­ware Free­dom Day is just around the corner! This year, the Sydney team is host­ing their event one day late (on Sunday instead of Sat­urday), to take advant­age of the com­puter fair at The Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales. We’ll have a couple of tables, which we shall be using to show off the won­ders of FOSS to con­sumers, stu­dents and other vendors.

I have chron­icled our plan at the Soft­ware Free­dom Day wiki. If you’d like to get involved, please get in touch with me.

LotD:  Get­ting in Bed With the Cus­tomer (an oldie but a goodie)

Things have cer­tainly been crazy as of late. Being elec­ted onto the SLUG Com­mit­tee (at the March AGM) has given me a greater appre­ci­ation of local com­munity issues and of what it takes to co-​​ordinate a group. At the same time, man­aging the Linux Aus­tralia stand at Open CeBIT has also been a tre­mend­ous learn­ing exper­i­ence. My offi­cial report is here.

I’ve had a few requests to elab­or­ate upon the ‘brush with death’ men­tioned in that mes­sage. Driv­ing home after the second day of CeBIT, I exper­i­enced a car acci­dent. While trav­el­ling at at least 60km/​h, I some­how lost con­scious­ness, and woke up phoughed into the side of another car. For­tu­nately, the car was parked and unoc­cu­pied. Nobody was involved aside from myself. The car was a write-​​off, but the pas­sen­ger cabin was fully intact and I exper­i­enced no injur­ies. The other car was part of a com­pany fleet, and its cus­todian wasn’t bothered much at all. Insur­ance took care of the costs on both sides.

I was quite shaken after the crash, and I very nearly didn’t go to CeBIT the next day. After being cleared by a para­medic and two doc­tors (one on the night of the crash and another the fol­low­ing morn­ing), I decided that I wasn’t going to let this get in my way. It was prob­ably the best decision that I made, since it forced me to get back on my feet doing some­thing that I love, rather than sit­ting at home in misery. I was unable to mod­er­ate the Linux Aus­tralia panel dis­cus­sion that I had helped to organ­ise, but I was there at the stand just like on the pre­vi­ous two days.

Oth­er­wise, CeBIT was a resound­ing suc­cess. It proved to be a fant­astic spring­board for us to launch the inaug­ural SLUG Boot­camp. More on this later.

I can’t fully explain why I blacked out in the first place. When I was younger, I would occa­sion­ally black out under cer­tain cir­cum­stances. Neur­o­lo­gists at the time couldn’t identify what it was, but told me not to worry about it. I was prob­ably just exhausted, from the exhib­it­ing all day, the plan­ning in the lead-​​up to the event, my new job, TAFE, and vari­ous other things. The doc­tors that I spoke with agreed with me that it was prob­ably just a microsleep.

I’m still recov­er­ing from the after-​​effects of the acci­dent. I get stressed more eas­ily when driv­ing, but I can feel that slowly reced­ing with time. Most of all, I feel excep­tion­ally lucky that I didn’t hurt myself or any­one else.

LotD:  IBM PC Real Time Clock should run in UT

Is it already Feb­ru­ary? Janu­ary must have been the busiest month of all time for me. My birth­day was on the 6^th, and I still haven’t been able to do any­thing about it. My fam­ily and friends have been bug­ging me about it since Decem­ber. If any of them are read­ing this, I’m sorry.

The chaos of Janu­ary has car­ried into Feb­ru­ary, I’m afraid. This write-​​up of my Janu­ary escapades would be best split into sev­eral parts, so view this post as one of a few.

linux​.conf​.au (LCA) was extraordin­ar­ily enjoy­able. I had volun­teered to help with a few activ­it­ies, and most of my time was spent as part of the Audio/​Visual Team. My job con­sisted of sit­ting in lec­ture theatres and encod­ing video (passed to me in the form of DVDs) to Ogg The­ora on my laptop. The exer­cise was a tre­mend­ous stress test of some of the hard­ware, and I’m glad that it passed with fly­ing col­ours. ffmpeg2theora doesn’t take advant­age of SMP, so I engaged my Core 2 Duo CPU with two video streams in parallel.

Unfor­tu­nately, I was so focused on transcod­ing that I was not able to appre­ci­ate the present­a­tions occur­ring dir­ectly in front of me. I’ll have to go back and watch the videos of those talks, which were likely transcoded by myself. On a pos­it­ive note, our transcod­ing efforts meant that we were able to make video avail­able online even before the con­fer­ence was over. There was plenty more to transcode after the event, so my duties didn’t sud­denly end on the 19^th of Janu­ary. It’s amaz­ing to see that only two weeks after the clos­ing of LCA we are on the cusp of final­isa­tion. All that’s left are a few ‘prob­lem’ videos and some doc­u­ment­a­tion writing.

Silvia expertly man­aged our rag-​​tag team of volun­teers to deliver some first-​​class res­ults. I hon­estly feel that we set a bench­mark for future free soft­ware events, not just in Aus­tralia but also around the world, and I am very proud to have been a part of it. Through Linux Aus­tralia, we have pur­chased equip­ment and for­mu­lated meth­ods that will be car­ried on into the future. We have proven that qual­ity video pro­duc­tions can be achieved on a mod­est budget, using entirely free software.

Aside from other mis­cel­laneous volun­teer duties at LCA, I took part in the Open Day, spend­ing most of my time at the Ubuntu-​​Au stand. I also briefly covered for Chris Smart at the Make the Move stand. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Pia and com­pany, Open Day was a resound­ing suc­cess. I believe that it has firmly estab­lished itself as a per­man­ent fix­ture at future LCAs. It was truly encour­aging to see luminar­ies like Keith Pack­ard and Jim Gettys as exhib­it­ors, inter­act­ing with the gen­eral populace.

Events like LCA are always spe­cial because of the people you meet. I had the priv­ilege of inter­act­ing with many people for whom I hold a great deal of respect. Pla­cing faces to IRC nicks is always fun, as is catch­ing up with friends whom I don’t see often.

No write-​​up of LCA would be com­plete without an expres­sion of grat­it­ude and con­grat­u­la­tions to the Seven Team for a job well done. So thank you Jeff, Pia, Sara, Jamie, Ben, Lind­say and John!

My one regret is that I opted to not reside on cam­pus for the dur­a­tion of the con­fer­ence. You can­not fully enjoy your­self on a night out while wor­ry­ing about how you will get home. It meant that I had to wake up earlier to catch the bus-​​train-​​bus com­bin­a­tion to get to UNSW, and even then I missed some of the morn­ing A/​V Team meet­ings. The buses to Cent­ral from Anzac Parade end at around 22:45, and woe betide you if you miss them. On one night, it took me close to two hours to get home. Reli­ance upon pub­lic trans­port is a major hindrance upon after-​​hours activ­it­ies, and cur­tails the time that would be bet­ter spent catch­ing up on some sorely-​​needed sleep.

LotD:  Get a First Life

Jonathan Oxer, Pres­id­ent of Linux Aus­tralia, is mak­ing a vali­ant effort to bet­ter organ­ise the often chaotic passtime known as a key sign­ing party. If you are attend­ing LCA2007, head over to the page for instruc­tions on what to do with your key. So far, there have only been nine­teen keys sub­mit­ted. That’s more of a minor gath­er­ing than a party, and I def­in­itely know that we can do bet­ter than this con­sid­er­ing that we are expect­ing 500+ people at the con­fer­ence. Sub­mit your key and we’ll build a web of trust that even Spider-​​Man can’t match. Entries end on 2007-​​01-​​10 18:00:00 AEDST.

I wrote this back in Octo­ber, and for some silly reason I for­got to post it. Bet­ter late than never, I say.

It seems that every couple of weeks I’m at some kind of FLOSS-​​related event. You just can’t keep me away from them! They may require a lot of work, but it cer­tainly feels reward­ing to get the word out. This is espe­cially so in regards to the edu­ca­tional sec­tor. Chil­dren are our future, and they are gen­er­ally more will­ing than your aver­age adult to learn new and dif­fer­ent things. It is an educator’s job to impart know­ledge, and it is the duty of any respect­able edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion to facil­it­ate a free and open flow of know­ledge. What bet­ter way to achieve this than with free software?

This concept was not lost on the eduact­ors, par­ents and stu­dents at the Sydney Edu­ca­tion Expo in June, and I’m proud to say that we man­aged to rep­lic­ate that suc­cess at the Sydney Moodle Con­fer­ence on Octo­ber 14–15 (Sat­urday and Sunday). Once again, I manned the Linux Australia/​SLUG stand, join­ing Pia Waugh, Lind­say Holm­wood and Andreas Fisc­her. The SLUG Com­mit­tee stopped by for a while, too.

Whereas most people at the Edu­ca­tion Expo were unfa­mil­iar with FLOSS, many of the attendees of the Moodle Con­fer­ence had some idea about it. Moodle itself is avail­able under the terms of the GPL, and many com­pan­ies and schools have become part of its user/​development/​support com­munity. All we had to do was to remind them that we rep­res­ent the under­ly­ing FLOSS con­cepts that have made Moodle so great, and that Moodle func­tions in con­cert with other FLOSS pro­jects such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The response was over­whelm­ing. We were pre­pared to hand out a truck­load of Ubuntu CDs, only to dis­cover that most attendees had already been sup­plied with one as part of their offi­cial con­fer­ence kit. That didn’t stop us from dis­trib­ut­ing many more, though. We had one fel­low so excited about FLOSS on Sat­urday that he brought along his laptop the next day for an impromptu Ubuntu install­fest. We demon­strated a range of tech­no­lo­gies, includ­ing Compiz and Ink­s­cape. Vis­it­ors were impressed with the ease of the Ubuntu LiveCD installer, and with how Moodle can be installed (com­plete with depend­en­cies) in only a few clicks via Synaptic.

Most inter­est­ing for me was the Live Online Event, which was a panel dis­cus­sion on-​​stage in front of about 150 people. Pia was slated to rep­res­ent the LA/​OSIA point of view, but was forced to bow out due to other com­mit­ments. Much to my sur­prise, she asked me to fill in for her. So there I was, on-​​stage, in front of well over 100 people, field­ing ques­tions while being recor­ded and streamed live over the Inter­net. I had never done any­thing like that before, but I think I went reas­on­ably well. Pub­lic speak­ing and gen­eral spoken com­mu­nic­a­tion are cer­tainly skills that I would like to fur­ther exer­cise in the future. Thanks for your sup­port, Pia!

The topic which dom­in­ated the panel dis­cus­sion, and one which I had been pre­vi­ously unaware of, con­cerned how far soft­ware pat­ents had intruded into the realm of edu­ca­tional soft­ware. Moodle-​​competitor Black­board has been issued an appalling pat­ent “for tech­no­logy used for internet-​​based edu­ca­tion sup­port sys­tems and meth­ods.” I was some­what relieved to see that Mar­tin Dou­gia­mas, Moodle’s founder and pro­ject leader, was not con­cerned at all by this event, at least as far as Moodle was con­cerned. Nev­er­the­less, the spectre of soft­ware pat­ents has been loom­ing over FLOSS for some time now, and it is still very unclear if/​how the situ­ation will ever be resolved.