'Til All Are One

Update: my talk has been covered by OLPC News.

Here’s the video of the talk I said I’d be giv­ing at OSDC 2011, titled Australia’s Toughest Linux Deploy­ment:

In it, I out­line our edu­ca­tional pro­gramme and how the tech­no­logy fits into it. Some key points:

• we have a bet­ter ver­sion on You­Tube of the video I show in the talk
• we main­tain a Policy Doc­u­ment, which provides an over­view of our over­all programme
• OLPC Aus­tralia have two core prin­ciples in addi­tion to OLPC’s ori­ginal five
• we have some sup­port in gov­ern­ment at dif­fer­ent levels — for example, we were praised in fed­eral par­lia­ment and the print media (pay­wall) by a prom­in­ent fed­eral Mem­ber of Parliament
• we have deploy­ments across remote Aus­tralia — a feat that can only be man­aged through build­ing self-​​sufficiency
• our pro­gramme is show­ing bene­fi­cial res­ults, and we are engaged in lon­git­ud­inal and detailed evaluation
• we have a com­pre­hens­ive edu­ca­tional pro­gramme, with online train­ing and cer­ti­fic­a­tions (such as our XO-​​cert course)
• we are break­ing depend­ence on spe­cial expert­ise and infra­struc­ture — build­ing sus­tain­ab­il­ity and grass-​​roots sup­port is key
• deploy­ments are made at the classroom level, which is more man­age­able than sat­ur­at­ing a whole school at once
• we don’t provide XOs without train­ing — a teacher must earn a cer­ti­fic­a­tion before they can receive XOs for their class
• our sup­port is focused on enabling schools and com­munit­ies to help them­selves, and each other
• we have innov­ated in the tech­no­logy space, with offer­ings such as the XO-​​AU OS, XO-​​AU USB, XOP and XS-​​AU
• con­tex­tu­al­ising learn­ing, for example through loc­al­isa­tion, is a power­ful tool to improve engage­ment from the child, school and community
• we invite people to join our devel­op­ment efforts
• there’s a nice sur­prise men­tioned towards the end, which I shall elab­or­ate upon in the near future

For those of you who have seen me speak about OLPC Aus­tralia at SLUG, this is a much more pol­ished talk.

Two weeks ago, we had the Edu­ca­tion Expo.

Here’s my report, as co-​​ordinator of the Linux Aus­tralia stand:

Edu­ca­tion Expo
Sat 14 to Sun 15 June
Rose­hill Race­course, Sydney

The Edu­ca­tion Expo is an annual trades show tar­geted towards the K-​​12 edu­ca­tional space. Vis­it­ors con­sist of fam­il­ies and edu­cat­ors. Linux Aus­tralia once again had a stand, with volun­teers spread­ing the word about free and open source software.

As always, we were very suc­cess­ful. With each passing year, the level of aware­ness of FOSS notice­ably improves. Whereas at pre­vi­ous shows we would spend much energy expound­ing the basic con­cepts of FOSS/​Linux, this year most people had either heard of it or were already using FOSS products such as Fire­fox and Open​Of​fice​.org.

One thing we did dif­fer­ently this year was place more focus on FOSS run­ning on Win­dows. Our past efforts have been meet with some res­ist­ance, as installing a dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tem posed a bar­rier to entry that many would not sur­mount. We had plenty of cop­ies of the OpenE­duca­tionDisc to dis­trib­ute, in addi­tion to Fedora, Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Mandriva.

The fact that the NSW Dept of Edu­ca­tion is migrat­ing over 40,000 PCs across the state to Open​Of​fice​.org was a use­ful selling point as well.

Our mar­ket­ing efforts have been improv­ing with each event. Our mes­sage is becom­ing more refined, and our leaf­lets are becom­ing more rel­ev­ant. On the tech­nical side, FOSS is becom­ing easier and more access­ible, with pro­jects such the afore­men­tioned OpenE­duca­tionDisc and Wubi lead­ing the way.

Our Web pres­ence is improv­ing, too. It’s far easier to point a new­bie to just one easy-​​to-​​remember URL instead of con­fus­ing them with a list. In addi­tion, I built an edu­ca­tion portal for Linux Aus­tralia just in time for the expo.

There were at least two other stands that were FOSS-​​friendly. In fact, one of the largest stands were demon­strat­ing their Web-​​based soft­ware product on about ten com­puters, all of which were run­ning Ubuntu. Other stands expressed real interest when approached.

Other high­lights of our pres­ence included:

• OLPC XO laptops (from OLPC Aus­tralia)
• Intel Class­mate PCs (from Man­driva Australia)
• ASUS Eee PCs
• laptops show­ing Edubuntu

Rodger Dean has some pho­tos of the event.

A big thanks to every­one who helped at the stand:

• Ash­ley Lynn
• Ash­ley Maher
• Brendan Puck­eridge
• David Andresen
• Gloria Arnold
• Har­rison Conlin
• John Arnold
• Megha Kanth
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Vicki Burke

A spe­cial thank you goes to Melissa Draper, who was instru­mental in ensur­ing the suc­cess of the stand in more ways than one.

LotD: Insur­ance com­pany bets health on open source — I’m quite heav­ily involved in this pro­ject, so need­less to say I’m proud of what we’ve achieved

The Edu­ca­tion Expo is on this week­end. I’ve sent a couple of missives to our help­ers. The second one con­tains some advice that would work well in many situ­ations regard­ing FOSS (espe­cially where mar­ket­ing is con­cerned), so I’ll repro­duce it (slightly edited) here:

Sub­ject: Edu­ca­tion Expo, this week­end!
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:29
From: Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan <sridhar@​dhanapalan.​com>
To: SLUG Activ­it­ies <activities@​slug.​org.​au>

Thanks again to every­one who has volun­teered to help with the Linux Aus­tralia stand at the Edu­ca­tion Expo.

The expo itself runs from 9am to 4pm on Sat­urday and Sunday. Entry is free. It’s a fun day for fam­il­ies with chil­dren in the K-​​12 space, so feel free to bring along your kids and make a day (or two!) out of it.

This year, the expo will be held in Rose­hill Racecourse’s brand new Events Centre, and our stand is in a prime pos­i­tion right in front of the door. If you haven’t already, take a look at the ori­ginal announce­ment and the Edu­ca­tion Expo Web site.

I asked in my pre­vi­ous mes­sage if people could tell me when they would be avail­able to help out. If you haven’t already, please let me know. If you’re unsure, that’s fine too: just show up and grab me at the stand.

I’ll be there at 8am on Sat­urday (an hour before it starts) to set up the stand, and prob­ably at 8:30 on Sunday. I might need some assist­ance to set up, and also to pack up afterwards.

Some tips:

• Wear com­fort­able cas­ual cloth­ing. It might get hot in the exhib­i­tion hall.
• If you’ve got any Linux or FOSS themed cloth­ing, wear that
• Wear com­fort­able shoes. You’ll be stand­ing most of the time.
• Keep some water handy.
• Talk­ing to stand vis­it­ors can strain your throat. Some mints can help.

Make it clear to vis­it­ors that there is a vibrant FOSS com­munity in Aus­tralia, and espe­cially in Sydney. Invite them to SLUG, which meets in the city on the last Fri­day of every month (next meet­ing on 27 June). SLUG has a seg­ment known as ‘SLUG­lets’, which is inten­ded for newbies.

Famil­i­ar­ise your­self with the leaf­lets that we will distribute:

• http://​link​pot​.net/​r​a​v​i​n​es/
• http://​link​pot​.net/​d​e​t​h​r​o​ne/
• http://​link​pot​.net/​t​r​e​m​o​l​os/

Have a read of Linux Australia’s guides to Free and Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS) and FOSS in edu­ca­tion. Remem­ber to pro­mote these to stand vis­it­ors as the best place to start with Linux and FOSS:

• http://​linux​.org​.au/​l​i​nux
• http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion

One import­ant point to remem­ber is that Linux is not FOSS. We will be hand­ing out cop­ies of the OpenE­duca­tionDisc, which is a CD full of education-​​oriented FOSS for Win­dows. Not every­one is able to switch over to Linux cold-​​turkey, but we can get them star­ted with FOSS on Win­dows first.

Sim­il­arly, open stand­ards are not FOSS, but they are a good start. Inform people about the dangers of pro­pri­et­ary file formats, as seen with Microsoft Office, and pro­mote in their stead open altern­at­ives such as Open­Doc­u­ment and PDF.

Show people that Linux isn’t strange and new. Many don’t real­ise it, but they are already using FOSS. For example:

• Fire­fox and Open­Of­fice are becom­ing increas­ingly pop­u­lar. The NSW Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion is in the pro­cess of switch­ing over >40,000 school com­puters to OpenOffice.
• Wiki­pe­dia is built around the idea of open know­ledge, inspired dir­ectly from the FOSS move­ment (and it’s built on FOSS too!).
• Even Mac OS X has many import­ant com­pon­ents based on FOSS, such as the ker­nel, file shar­ing, print­ing and the Web browser.
• About two-​​thirds of Web sites are served by the FOSS Web server, Apache.
• Most of the large Web com­pan­ies (like Google, Face­book and Yahoo) are built with FOSS.
• It is nor­mal for Hol­ly­wood films to be cre­ated using Linux.
• Linux is pre­val­ent in a range of con­sumer devices.
• The pop­u­lar ASUS Eee PC, and many of its com­pet­it­ors, come with Linux pre-​​installed.

Show people that Linux is easy to install and use. Ubuntu has an installer called Wubi, which is a Win­dows applic­a­tion that installs Ubuntu as a file without par­ti­tion­ing the hard drive. It behaves like a nor­mal dual-​​boot sys­tem, but it can be unin­stalled from ‘Add/​Remove Pro­grams’ just like any Win­dows applic­a­tion. We’ll also have cop­ies of Edubuntu. Remem­ber that this is an add-​​on com­pan­ion, not a stand-​​alone liveCD as in the past. Give a copy of Ubuntu with every Edubuntu disc you distribute.

Linux is more secure. While noth­ing can claim to be 100% secure and virus proof, Linux has an excel­lent track record. It doesn’t need ‘band-​​aid’ solu­tions like anti-​​virus and anti-​​spyware soft­ware because the soft­ware was built sanely to begin with. The Inter­net was built for UNIX, not for Windows.

Linux and FOSS is great for fam­il­ies. It’s afford­able and reli­able. It won’t get infec­ted and show unso­li­cited porn adverts to your chil­dren. There are heaps of great edu­ca­tional soft­ware install­able with just a few mouse clicks.

Some caveats:

• As a com­munity stand, we are not selling anything.
• Avoid unne­ces­sary Microsoft-​​bashing. We’re run­ning the stand because we love FOSS, not because we hate Microsoft.

The second Open CeBIT in Sydney ended last week. Form­ing a sec­tion of the much lar­ger CeBIT expo, Open CeBIT focused on open source tech­no­lo­gies and solu­tions. I was involved in three stands: BizCubed (my employer), Linux Aus­tralia and Open Source Industry Aus­tralia.

In the mar­ket, FOSS is clearly matur­ing and becom­ing more main­stream. At a CeBIT a couple of years ago, I’d be answer­ing basic ques­tions like, “what is open source?”, “what is Linux?” and “how do you make money?” This year, I didn’t get any ques­tions like that at all. Most people knew some­thing about Linux and FOSS, and just needed some dir­ec­tion to get started.

We had much interest in com­munity and gen­eral usage at the Linux Aus­tralia stand. Our Fedora, Ubuntu and Edubuntu discs were pop­u­lar. Of immense pop­ular­ity were our OLPC XOs, thanks to OLPC Aus­tralia. Vis­it­ors were genu­inely inter­ested in the units, and I didn’t hear any neg­at­ive feed­back at all. I do believe that a lot of people did under­stand that this is an edu­ca­tion pro­ject for chil­dren in the devel­op­ing world and not just a laptop project.

At the Open Source Industry Aus­tralia stand, I spoke to many people who were inter­ested in deploy­ing FOSS solu­tions to solve spe­cific prob­lems. Many of these people would not have con­sidered FOSS in the past, so clearly our mes­sage is resonating.

Com­ing up in a couple of weeks (June 14–15) is the Edu­ca­tion Expo. We’ve always been suc­cess­ful there, and all signs point to us repeat­ing that.

LotD: MacGyver is favour­ite dis­aster hero

I prom­ised way back in Janu­ary that we’d release a video of that month’s SLUG meet­ing — our up-​​close-​​and-​​personal with Microsoft. We did just that a month ago, but I totally for­got to men­tion it here.

I know, I suck.

Any­way, you can get the video and slides here (the links in the ori­ginal announce­ment are no longer func­tional). It’s been poin­ted out to me that the slides in the video vary slightly from the PDF, but the dif­fer­ence is min­imal. It’s three months old now — so don’t expect any rev­el­a­tions — but it’s still an inter­est­ing watch.

LotD: Save money by buy­ing dir­ectly from the USA (for Aus­trali­ans only)

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!

As prom­ised, Microsoft have released doc­u­ment­a­tion on their old bin­ary formats by Feb­ru­ary 15. I haven’t taken a look yet, but the com­ments on the art­icle don’t look too encour­aging: some people con­tend that ele­ments are miss­ing and incom­plete. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how Microsoft respond to this feed­back. Hope­fully the kinks will be smoothed out with little fuss. As far as I am con­cerned, a com­plete spec needs to cover full format­ting, embed­ding, scripts, mac­ros, for­mu­lae, schemas, images, bin­ary blobs, pass­word pro­tec­tion and DRM (and I’m sure I’ve missed some other import­ant stuff too). It should also list exactly which pat­ents are covered, in a man­ner sim­ilar to the Samba/​PFIF deal.

Addi­tion­ally, Microsoft have announced a binary-​​to–OOXML trans­lator pro­ject. How well this will pan out is anyone’s guess. They say that the “pro­ject is developed and released under a very lib­eral BSD-​​like license (sic)”. IANAL — is this licence GPL–com­pat­ible? Could it be used to cre­ate a GPL binary-​​to–ODF con­verter (using OOXML as an inter­me­di­ary), that we can embed into applic­a­tions like Open​Of​fice​.org or Xena?

Obvi­ously these moves are focused on get­ting OOXML approved by ISO, but I’m also hope­ful (though not optim­istic) that it is a sign that Microsoft are will­ing to play more fair with the pub­lic and industry. We need to take advant­age of this pre­dic­a­ment they’ve put them­selves in, and pres­sure them into open­ing their formats as much as pos­sible. If OOXML is ever going to be approved, it should be so open that it’s no longer an issue. I don’t ser­i­ously expect this to hap­pen, so I still hope it fails .

But stand­ard or not, we’re still going to have to deal with it. Office 2007 has its own vari­ant, lov­ingly dubbed MS-​​OOXML by some. The more they open up the format, the more inde­pend­ent and com­plete imple­ment­a­tions there will be, hence there will be more iner­tia for MS to go with the flow and not devi­ate any fur­ther. Then at least it’ll be a de facto open stand­ard. Maybe I’m dream­ing, but it’s at least an inter­est­ing the­ory

In semi-​​related news, Microsoft engin­eer Alistair Speirs has blogged about his visit to SLUG. Some prize quotes:

“The Linux com­munity has matured from my uni­ver­sity days. … It seems like the linux com­munity has a much more sens­ible, prag­matic approach now”

“Geeks are geeks, no mat­ter what OS they use. I think this often gets lost in the reli­gious divides and flame­wars. All that geek-​​anger would be much more use­ful tar­get­ing law­yers and invest­ment bankers.”

“The crowd was pretty friendly and they took us out to a Chinese res­taur­ant after­wards. In an inter­est­ing act of irony, the FLOSS com­munity paid for our din­ner.”

For those won­der­ing about the video, we just have to wait on a few things before we can release it. I’m sure we’ll get this sor­ted soon, so no con­spir­acy the­or­ies please .

I men­tioned in my write-​​up of the Microsoft visit to SLUG that Microsoft are going to release the spe­cific­a­tions to their bin­ary file formats. I wasn’t aware at the time that this had already been announced: the specs will be released on Feb­ru­ary 15. Grok­law has decided to look a little closer at the pledge.

Is this a win for inform­a­tion and soft­ware free­dom world­wide, or just the next step towards a new stage of vendor lock-​​in? It remains to be seen, but it does show that our keep­ing Microsoft’s nose to the grind­stone is gen­er­at­ing some effect. Don’t stop now, we’ve only just begun!

A note about the video: it will be released as soon as we are able. We’re at linux​.conf​.au at the moment, so it’ll more likely be out next week. I’ve cur­rently got 20GB of glor­i­ous HD video sit­ting on my hard drive, which we need to edit and con­vert to some­thing more Internet-​​friendly. The transcod­ing alone will take a while!

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