Colin Charles Agenda

Fedora Core 2 test1 has been released. Standard disclaimers apply; its only a test release, don’t let it ruin your life and so on. Its x86 based only, though I hear an unofficial 64-bit one will be coming real soon.

Been Gimp’ing up some hacker heads for Fedora People. I think by the time this makes it to Fedora People there will be hacker heads. Well, Jeff told me I could use some of the p.g.o Hackergotchi Heads, which makes life much easier!

Today was the day for the 3 parallel tracks to run – FOSS in Government, Localisation, and Building FOSS Capacities. Torn between the three, I participated at the FOSS in Government working group.

Mention of making sure open standards is in use (ala Australia’s national archives using an open XML standard), as well as using C/C++ which are ISO standards, while C# is a Microsoft standard – which would you trust if you were a government?

Code reuse will save IT budgets in the long run – each and every government department doesn’t have to re-write code. Heck, businesses (that pay tax) don’t have to rewrite code that needs to deal with government process. I also mentioned that in procurement costs, make sure that the entire life cycle cost analysis is performed – end-of-life migration costs are hardly ever thought about during procuring the new system.

More useful things came out, and the usual bits on increasing awareness to the officials (government, NGOs, businesses, etc…). Awareness among the techies exist, but we need better marketing tactics. We need more central information that “just works” for governments; making them find old HOWTOs that don’t work anymore just turn them away from FLOSS. Education needs to happen at some stage – there have to be more FOSS professionals rather than just trained MCSE’s.

The general idea of a support network was proposed from all working groups, and I presume we’re going to be making use of the International Open Source Network (IOSN) site a lot more. The day ended with food, and a door gift – a pewter card holder, and some iosn.net posters.

Day 2 got more technical, I’d say; fun for me, but not most of the others I reckon. They’re policy makers from the UN and respective governments!

FOSS in Education was interesting, touching on the Creative Commons license, MIT’s Open Courseware, and things like that. Tools like Moodle were covered. It just made me want to start what I finished – my open source training materials. Interesting points include the fact that FOSS allows one to transfer skills (so if we teach you FOSS-based stuff, it can be transferred to closed source based apps too); another is to not breathe FOSS down students’ necks, rather than show it to them as an alternative. I mentioned that tools like gcompris, tuxtype and tuxpaint come in handy for young children (along with Debian Jr. or the kdeedu meta package).

Licensing & Legal issues from Dinesh was a good introduction to the GPL, LGPL and the BSD Licenses. It’s a key importance, and we’ve found that we lack IP lawyers that understand copyright, patents, intellectual property as well as open source licenses. Not to name names, but apparently there are about 2 skillful ones in Malaysia, one in Singapore, and I know of one in Australia. Remember, give away everything, but never your intellectual property rights. Dr. Molly Cheah said, it’ll be over her dead body!

Localisation of FOSS is something that always gets interesting. In Malaysia, we use Bahasa Malaysia, but the script is similar – its Roman. We don’t have weird requirements for new fonts, and Unicode support; but this is where other countries shine and require it. Bhutan has their Dzongkha language, which they love dearly, and feel they need to promote it for sovereignity; MS promised them support, but with Longhorn delayed, they want a FOSS alternative. Bhutan is an awaiting open source project, with 800,000 people to support (out of which 70% live in rural areas).

Which brings us to an interesting point. Computers today are largely based on metaphors that the average urban bloke understands. Like we have a desktop, to represent our workspace. How do we transpose such an idea to someone in a rural area? What about a blinking cursor, in a language like Urdu that has no translation? They’ve resulted in calling it a “firefly”! The Khmer language (Cambodian) has got the translate fast and quick idea and pango and Mozilla has been translated. The language is Indic-script based, and well, they need OOo support.

Some suggested that it would be great if these localisation layers were removed. They have Linux itself as a layer (the OS layer), then they’ve got X to worry about (the windowing layer), then there’s a desktop environment (like GNOME) to worry about, and finally, there are applications to also translate. All this involves (wo)man-hours and most would find it easier if these layers were removed. Something about a new, X server. /me shudders.

Dinesh continued on about security and mentioned some useful open source tools, as well as what Worldcare has used. And that brought Day 2 to a close. Lunch was excellent, beautiful seafood, with Molly, Soo Hoe, Dinesh and I talking about open source in healthcare. Dang, thats something I’m taking an interest in. Fixed Molly’s Mozilla (so it reads/writes to both Windows/Linux). Dinner later with Ruben, Aaron, Serhan and Johnathan – rocking.

With the CAL’s that Windows server users have to pay (per client), and all the added costs, how can the TCO be lower? IT Managers Journal has a cool Migration from Windows to Linux saves thousands write-up.

And, Getting to know GNOME is rather useful. In some aspects, we’re really better than Windows/OS X. We still have plenty more work to do, but we’re getting there. All we need to do is reach there before Longhorn is released. Longhorn has promises – it has pre-announcements of features and products; features that will be around in 2 years. So don’t be fooled.

FOSSAP Consultations Day One. Quite cool and beneficial. Arrived about ten minutes late, kind of surprised a few folk since I was back, but yeah, good stuff.

NSH did his usual intro to FOSS, which was cool, and then Harish Pillay (from Singapore) gave a talk about FOSS Policies in the Asia Pacific. Interesting outcome from that, got to post notes soon; he skipped covering Singapore & Malaysia though. Ken Wong talked about FOSS in Government, and this was akin to me going to the OCG mini-conf at linux.conf.au. More interesting outcomes, and I’ve got a new idea. Now its time to research and work myself off to get it done.

Apparently, the MNCC is in deficit, and guess where funds are being funnelled out from? The OSSIG OSS-101 funds. Rocking. (this is bad).

Oh, caught this cool Christina Ricci movie, Pumpkin before sleeping last night. And on the plane, a true story, The Other Side of Heaven. I can recommend both, but I guess I was tired :P

FedoraNews has been Slashdotted. That looks like a word in the making; it’ll be a while before the dictionaries officialy recoginse it I bet.

Modem on the iBook 2.2 doesn’t work using a 2.6.2 kernel. Grr. WARNING: missing file /lib/modules/2.6.2-ben1-hermione/build/include/linux/modversions.h Time to get it fixed (and still try not to pay USD$20 to linuxant).