pipka.org

Geez, so it has been decided after all this time that Microsoft is allowed to have the patent on the Fat file system. According to this article this means they’ll probably go after Linux vendors for patent infringement. I wonder if they go after USB key manufacturers, after all many of them use fat in order to make the keys easily accessible by Windows. Fat isn’t a great file system, but it has been an easy way for people to ensure compatibility with Microsoft whether they be devices or other operating systems. Microsoft seem to be cutting of their nose to spite their face by patenting and threatening competitors by “protecting” infrastructure that allows some interoperability with Windows. Groklaw looks at the the patent issue for more information.

Last year I gave a keynote and mentored at an event for twenty 14-17 yr-old girls to talk about IT and the opportunities therein. I compared IT to Charlie’s chocolate factory (distant, a little scary, full of weird people but so amazing and fun once inside!) which they really took to. Since then I’ve spoken to a few of the girls and am helping one of them secure work experience. Anyway, it was
a very interesting experience, particularly when only a few girls coming into the sessions were at all interested in working in IT, but by the end of 2 days, almost all of them were keen for it. The other interesting thing I found after talking to these girls was the high proportion of them who had told their careers advisors they wanted to work with computers who were told, “oh no dear, you should try social work or teaching”. WTF! Anyway, they came out with a report about the event, which also has some good stats and information about women in IT generally.

I think the exercise clearly demonstrated that girls at school are not getting any support or encouragement even if they demonstrate a specific interest in computers, so there is where we need to be focusing our efforts if we want to see equal access to ICT opportunities for both genders. Please note, I am not lobbying for equal numbers in ICT for women, I simply feel that at a young age women are being actively discouraged from ICT and I feel this is robbing both the industry from a huge demography and robbing many young women of the amazing opportunities ICT can bring to their lives and careers. I always use these opportunities to show the girls how working in ICT rocks, but also how being in the FOSS community I have had incredible and life-changing experiences due to the doors opened to me and the wonderful things I can achieve there. They have generally been very enthusiastic about the idea of socially responsible software, and achieving their personal dreams using technology to get there.

Oh, and Linux Australia is listed there as one of the sponsors 🙂 Hooray for Linux Australia!

So I’m in this months Linux Format magazine amongst some of the best known women in Open Source today talking about women in FOSS. Hooray! Unfortunately the article isn’t online, so check it out at the newstore. There is a silly photo of me in it too 🙂

The LA election process is happening right now and we are currently in nominations phase. Nominations close the 11th January, and voting starts on the 18th and closes before the AGM which will be at linux.conf.au on Wednesday the 25th January. All LA members should have received their AGM notice, and if you aren’t yet a member, then join up at the membership page.

Good luck to everyone!

It has been a huge week. We went down to Yass for the break on the 22nd and on the 23rd I had some excellent meetings in Canberra. Firstly I met with Michael from the National Archives of Australia. The stuff they are doing with Open Source is incredible. Firstly they have one of the nicest server rooms I’ve ever seen, complete with a robot sweeper that knows when to recharge itself. They get all the fun toys! They also had some amazing SAN technologies and were running several operating systems including of course a couple of versions of Linux 🙂 The most interesting part of what they are doing there is a digital preservation application they have written and GPLed called Xena which is of course on sourceforge. Xena is a world first application for proper digital preservation and management and is very smart. The NAA say in their documentation about Xena that proprietary data formats are the greatest risk to the ongoing preservation and accessibility of electronic data, and thus Xena is built completely on open standards, including of course the OOo document standards. The Xena data preservation process is roughly as follows. First they quarantine the data, to ensure it doesn’t have viruses in it, ensuring it is safe and such for about a month updating the anti-virus app daily. Then they transform it to open formats, and finally they store it in multiple repositories to ensure redundancy that is cross hardware and cross platform. Anyway, it was great to see the project and what they are up to. I’m looking forward to seeing their case study to be presented at Linuxworld in March at Government Day, which isn’t yet announced but will be in a couple of weeks. Hurrah!

I had forgotten to mention a very cool story from the Open Source World Conference in Spain late last year. Some of my Brazilian friends Fabs Balvedi and Marcelo Branco, who are wonderful people working on FOSS in Brazil showed me a fantastic video called “Cultura Digital” about the creation of FOSS music labs in Brazil created for the youth to express themselves. Also on the site is a music video with Stallman performing alongside Brazilian music god Gilberto Gil, who has also been a political activist in his time and is now the Minister for Arts in Brazil. Anyway, pretty awesome stuff. Check out the computer case graffiti being done in the Cultura Digital video. Thankyou Marcelo and Fabs for showing me, I look forward to returning to Brazil, which is certainly one of my favourite places in the world 🙂

Last but not least, the planning for Linuxworld Conference and Expo is going well. We have a finalised main conference outline, some great exhibitors at the trade show, and Government Day about to be announced. I’m personally pretty excited about this event, which will be the first Open Source business and Government focused event in Australia. Getting the word out has been hard as people automatically assume Linuxworld is the same as linux.conf.au, which shows how strong the LCA branding has become, but nevertheless, they have very different audiences. If you know managers, C level people, policy makers and generally anyone in the business or Government community looking to understand the Open Source opportunity, send them to Linuxworld. It’ll certainly help them understand the market, understand the opportunity and understand that they are missing out, if they are not already using FOSS and building concise FOSS strategies. The aim of the conference is to grow the industry and help educate our business/Gov community about FOSS.

I have been amazed over the last few days as what has started as tension between gangs and locals in a suburb in Sydney has been blown out by the media to be “Race Riots”. The media seems intent on blatant embellishment of the story into a raging inferno, just in order to get the story, and sell the newspapers. Anyway, there is obviously some tension there towards these gangs, but I find it interesting how that has translated for a few (I hope only a few) into full blown racism, the gangs are very rarely representative of an entire culture. It is a sad progression.

For what it is worth, I’m a little sick of hearing about the contrast between the “local youths” and “Middle Eastern criminal gangs” involved, when both sides have been as violent and disgusting in their behaviour as each other. I found an interesting thread where people were discussing the topic in a forum. Be warned, it is pretty disturbing in parts, and certainly speaks volumes about the issues we face in Australia today, and how names-calling and putting people in boxes is not the way forward. It also however made me feel a bit better as there were a lot of people on the thread completely disgusted with the state of affairs, and seemingly bound by a value of multiculturalism and understanding. I personally love the multi-culturalism in Australia. It works very well and you only have to live in a true mono-culture for a while to really appreciate it.

To all the idiots not engaging their brains when they speak, being Middle Eastern is not synonymous with being Muslim, and neither are synonymous with being a thug. Learn to think a little, try to understand a world slightly larger than your tiny little brain and we will all get along better.

I’ve been working on the conference coordination for Linuxworld Australia, which is a business and government focused conference and not to be confused with linux.conf.au which is a community event 🙂 Anyway, Linuxworld is shaping up nicely. We have announced the two business days of the conference, and will be announcing a surprise 3rd day in January! Check out the conference details at the conference page. As well as all the exhibitors that will be at the trade show part of the conference. Linux Australia and OSIA will have booths to show off what our community is doing and some of the successes we’ve had. I think Linuxworld Australia will be a real turning point for FLOSS in Australia, and look forward to having hundreds of businesses and government agencies learning more about why they should be looking at FLOSS 🙂

As the LCA registrations opened offering the free LA membership, the membership has gone up a lot, and after Jon’s post there has been heaps of subscriptions to the linux-aus mailing list and to announce. Hooray! So memberships are now up to ~900 (we could almost be a political party two times over ;), linux-aus has only ~370 of that (subscribe now people!) and announce has almost 1200 subscribers! Rock! Now we just need to fence sitters to join 🙂

Remember, nominations for the election at LCA (Jan 25th-ish) will be opening in the next few weeks, so consider where you want to see LA go, and either run for committee or ensure you choose someone who has the same vision you do 🙂

Rock on Linux Australia!

So this week has all been about international disabled day, and I went to an amazing panel session wednesday night, where I heard the stories of 6 amazing young people. I heard stories about tragic accidents, genetic disorders and misdiagnosed mental health issues, all inspirational and humbling. Anyway, it has risen again the interest from me to introduce Vision Australia to Open Source. I started a discussion about a year and a half ago, but then got distracted. I spoke to a woman called Ebru after the conference who was visually impaired and working for Vision Australia about the opportunity to break down the economic barrier for the visually impaired to participate fully online through the use of FOSS and the collaborative approach. She was quite keen, and I’m hoping to get the conversation happening again 🙂 How cool would it be to break down all the barriers to entry online, from accessibility challenges, education issues, etc etc. Anyway, then tonight I went to a dance party which was specifically for the disability community of Sydney as a helper, which was awesome. I met an awesome chick named Jodi who was in a chair, sharp as a tack and a wicked sense of humor 🙂 Loads of fun!

Now for the research bit! I’ve started working part-time for Macquarie University on a project called ASK-OSS (Australian Special Knowledge on Open Source Software). The project is being funded by DEST under an umbrella of projects called the MERRI projects, and is about creating a reference site for FOSS in research and education. It is AWESOME! We will be showing off the website for the project in a couple of weeks, but needless to say I am stoked to be doing formal research in this way, and seeing that part of the ASK-OSS proposal was to ensure _all_ data be completely openly available, I really feel this will have a broad beneficial impact on the Australian FOSS industry. We’ll be publishing case studies (mainly focusing on research and higher education to start, then hopefully expanding out a bit later), legal information, about FOSS and most importantly, a proper matrix of software and vendors where anyone can add stuff through a web interface, and finally it will be easy to find FOSS applications and who can support them. It is amazingly hard to find appropriate FOSS unless you know what you are looking for or how to judge a successful project, and I’ve been wanting to build such a repository for a couple of years now. Finally! Yay!! Anyway, I’ve posted the scope below, if anyone has feedback or suggestions, please email me at pia (at) waugh dot id dot au 🙂

Tool: Application/company register

Purpose: To make finding FOSS applications and companies that service
them easier. Also to make entries able to be updated by a range of people.

Required information:

Applications – Project name, Short description, Categories (*), Platforms,
Competing Products, Target Market, Rating, Support

Companies – Company Name, Size (ppl) Location, Contact Details,
Products/Services, Online Ordering, Categories, Applications supported (this
could be a link to a particular view of the database showing all
applications the company flagged when they added themself to the database)

(*) Categories – Networking, File Management, Workstation software, System
Management Software, Multimedia – Audio, Multimedia – Video, Multimedia –
Graphics, Office/business Applications, Games, Programming and development,
Server software, Scientific and special programs, Emulators, Other/Humour 🙂
plus ability to add more categories

Description: So the aim is to have a database that anyone can add
applications, but you have to log on to add your company (so that
expirations can be sent after 2 years to the company contact to maintain
freshness) and so that only the logger of the company can change their
company details. I’d love if we can get a rating, so that the person adding
applications can rate them, as well as people viewing the page. In this way
we’d hopefully be able to see popular products easily. Also it’d be great to
be able to display information by category, and by most popular (by rating),
and any of the headings. It’d be great to have a search functionality so
that search queries return results based on any data. This will need to be
to be inputed has to be done through the web interface, similar to the LA
memberDB stuff we did for our membership.

I want to populate it with existing data from the Linux Australia vendor page,
as well as applications from the
Skolelinux site and this site and
any other app we comparison charts we can find. I want the application to be
100% Open Source as I think it’ll be useful to many people, also in other
countries. There are probably existing products that do some of the work.

Suggestions welcome! The other 50% of my working time is being spent working on industry and government contracts. I’ll be announcing my new business in January along with what I’ll be doing, but the short of it is a) FOSS strategic services for corporates and government, b) services for Australian FOSS companies to help them be more efficient and grab the opportunities open to them, c) community work such as the community centre rollout stuff I’ve been getting into, this will hopefully be mainly Government funded, and d) research and consulting work.

Hooray for James and Karin who are on an O’Reilly list of Linux podcasts 🙂 Here’s to more downloads and more strain on the LA Mirror 🙂