El Mundo Libre

The Free Software Foundation is having its annual fundraising drive. I became a member myself last year and will be renewing my membership shortly. Let me elaborate on one of the many reasons for doing that.

I visited T-DOSE last weekend. This is a short overview of some of my impressions.

• Less people?: I'm certainly not a fan of crowds, but a bit more visitors couldn't hurt. Visitor count went up in the previous years, yet it seems to have diminished (or at least stagnated) this year.
• Where were the women? I saw just 4 women during the whole conference, only one of which stayed for longer than half a day. I'm not sure why that number was so low, but today's conferences should be able to do better.
• Much more focus on technical than on open source. In almost every presentation I saw non-free software was used or suggested. Why can't PDF documents just be opened in Evince? Why does OpenLaszlo generate Flash objects that can only be used with the non-free plugin? What's your credibility if you're talking about "open source" in government policy while running your presentation on Windows?
• Apparently some software from the Dutch government is not published as Free software because they fear that the code is in such a state that they would loose face if everyone could see it. That makes perfect sense: it's better to be a dictator than to have to explain why some code isn't properly modularized.
• NOiV, the organisation that promotes open source and open standards in government institutions, is very careful to avoid any mention of the philosophy of Free software. Yes, it's harder to convince people on the merits of ethics, but equating Free software to "freeware" doesn't build a healthy and durable environment for it and you'll have to keep convincing them on a case by case basis.
• If a Dutch school is telling you to use a non-free format, you can (and should) report it.
• VLC is still an awesome media player, and getting more awesome even
• OpenStreetMap is getting cooler by the minute. Hopefully coming soon: secure login (https) on the website. My first track (with my Freerunner) is itching to get on there, once that's implemented.
• If you want to use OpenStreetMap data for routing, then you need some special map instead of the regular one. But that doesn't explain why the map in Navit on my Freerunner was blank all the way. I probably just configured it wrong.
• There was some interest from a guy (sorry dude, I forgot your name, let me know if you're reading this) on the Debian project in gNewSense and my Lemote Yeeloong mini-laptop. He was the only person, apart from me, who seemed genuinly interested in software freedom.
• I should really look into unit testing, code inspection and all that stuff. If your development team is larger than 3 people and you're not doing any of it, then you're probably missing out.

In summary: it wasn't a bad conference, but I expected a bit more. Not all of the lesser points are in the hands of the organisers, but they could do a bit more steering, I think. We'll see if next year will bring some improvements.

The Blender Open Movie project's latest baby (in the making) is called Durian. It's going to be an action-packed animation with lots of cool effects and a female lead character. I'm a big fan of the Blender Open Movies because they show what free software can do in a cool way. A lot of their finances come from regular people. To get more funds for their movies, they provide two incentives (apart from the warm, fuzzy feeling of helping free software): a DVD and credits.

The DVD contains the movie in multiple formats, the source files for it, the script, tutorials and more. It is of course not copy-restricted with CSS. One disadvantage of it are the non-free formats: partly unavoidable to have an actual DVD, but apparently the HD version will also not be in a free format, even though it's just a file on the disk.

Anyway, for the second incentive, your name on the end credits, you have to pre-order the DVD early on. I missed the pre-order+credit window for Elephants Dream. Even though it was too late to get a credit, I pre-ordered the DVD anyway, to add to the funds for it or for the next project. I swore then that I wouldn't miss these opportunities again. So when Big Buck Bunny and Yo Frankie! were announced I made sure I was on time. Sadly, I let my attention drop a bit after that. It was only today, when someone mentioned Big Buck Bunny again, that I realized that pre-orders for the next project must have started by now. So I checked the Durian website and found out that the official pre-order period for credits ended a few days ago. I went ahead to the Blender shop anyway to pre-order and I could still choose to get my name in the credits. Maybe this is an oversight and my choice will be ignored. But there's also a chance that you can still get your name in the credits. I think it's a great way to end Software Freedom Day, don't you?

Your shipment of gNewSense has arrived. It was released last Monday and is already being enjoyed by many. Existing users have gotten it through regular updates, but we've also seen new users taking this important step towards freedom. If you would like to follow their example, just click the download button (which I've finally managed to fix) on this website. (Please use the torrent and seed if you can.)

This new release brings you some added freedom fixes in the packages (see also the software blacklist) and a more free Linux kernel. The other noticable major change in the new default install is the removal of Mono. This comes as a result of Richard Stallman's call to discourage C#. The two default applications that depended on Mono were F-Spot and Tomboy. They have been replaced by gThumb and Gnote respectively. A nice side effect of that is that the download has become smaller, so you can start using gNewSense sooner.

I would like to point out that Software Freedom Day is happening this Saturday. And what can be better than a fully Free operating system like gNewSense to tell people what Free software is all about and what it can do. Here's a selection of what you could do:

• Hand out live CDs.
• Show the live CD or an installed system on a demo machine.
• Show it on your Yeeloong mini-laptop. That would be a different version than the one we just released, but it gives a taste of things to come. And promoting the Yeeloong is a good thing.
• Organize an install party.
• Make (and hand out) bootable USB sticks by installing gNewSense on to one with the live CD or via FUSBi.
• Hand out flyers.

It's possible that you like the idea of a Free operating system, but your not entirely happy with gNewSense's implementation of it. Then there's a variety of other Free GNU/Linux distributions you can choose from. Our friends from Trisquel also just released a new version and Kongoni has just been added to the list. It looks like Software Freedom Day can't go wrong this year.

Two days ago, the newest version of gNewSense was released. gNewSense is a GNU/Linux based operating system that contains and suggests only free software. It's the distribution of choice for users who care about software freedom because it provides them with a system that is easy to use and very extendible, without having to worry about falling into a proprietary trap.