Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/05/18/germany.html
I just returned a few days ago to the USA after one week in Germany. I
visited Göttingen for my keynote at Samba XP (which
I already
blogged about).
Attending Samba XP was
an excellent experience, and I
thank SerNet for sponsoring my
trip there. Since going full-time at Conservancy last year, I have been
trying to visit the conferences of each of Conservancy’s member
projects. It will probably take me years to do this, but given that
Samba is one of Conservancy’s
charter members,
it’s good that I have finally visited Samba’s annual conference. It was
even better that they asked me to give
a keynote talk
at Samba XP.
I must admit that I didn’t follow the details many of the talks other
than Tridge’s Samba 4 Status Report talk and
Jeremy’s The Death of File Protocols. This time I really mean
it! talk. The rest, unsurprisingly, were highly specific and
detailed about Samba, and since I haven’t been a regular Samba user
myself since 1996, I didn’t have the background information required to
grok the talks fully. But I did see a lot of excited developers, and it
was absolutely wonderful to meet the entire Samba Team for the first
time after exchanging email with them for so many years.
It’s funny to see how different communities tend to standardize around
the same kinds of practices with minor tweaks. Having visited a lot of
project-specific conferences for Conservancy’s members, I’m seeing how
each community does their conference, and one key thing all projects
have in common is the same final conference session: a panel discussion
with all the core developers.
The Samba Team has their own little tweak on this.
First, John Terpstra asks all
speakers at the conference (which included me this year) to join the
Samba Team and stand up in front of the audience. Then, the audience
can ask any final questions of all speakers (this year, the attendees
had none). Then, the Samba Team stands up in front of the crowd and
takes questions.
The Samba tweak on this model is that the Samba Team is not permitted
to sit down during the Q&A. This year, it didn’t last that long,
but it was still rather amusing. I’ve never seen a developers’ panel
before where the developers couldn’t sit down!
After Samba XP, I headed “back” to Berlin (my
flight had landed there on Saturday and I’d taken the Deutsche Bahn ICE
train to Göttingen for Samba XP), and arrived just in
time to
attend LinuxNacht,
the LinuxTag annual party. (WARNING: name dropping follows!) It was excellent to
see Vincent
Untz, Lennart Poettering,
Michael Meeks and
Stefano Zacchiroli at the party
(listed in order I saw them at the party).
The next day I
attended Vincent’s
talk, which was about cross-distribution collaboration. It was a
good talk, although, I think Vincent glossed over too much the fact that
many distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE, specifically) are
controlled by companies and that cross-distribution collaboration has
certain complications because of this corporate influence. I talked
with Vincent in more detail about this later, and he argued that the
developers at the companies in question have a lot of freedom to
operate, but I maintain there are subtle (and sometimes, not so subtle)
influences that cause problems for cross-distribution collaboration. I
also encouraged Vincent to listen
to Richard Fontana‘s talk, Open
Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement, that Karen and I
released as an episode
of the
FaiF oggcast.
I also attended Martin
Michlmayr‘s talk
on SPDX. I kibitzed more than I should have from the audience,
pointing out that while SPDX is a good “first start”, it’s a
bit of a “too little, too late” attempt to address and
prevent the flood of GPL violations that are now all too common. I
believe SPDX is a great tool for those who already are generally in
compliance, but it isn’t very likely to impact the more common
violations, wherein the companies just ignore their GPL obligations. A
lively debate ensued on this topic. I frankly hope to be proved wrong
on this; if SPDX actually ends or reduces GPL violations, I’ll be happy
to work on something else instead.
On Friday afternoon, I gave
my second
keynote of the week, which was an updated version of my talk, 12
Years of GPL Compliance: A Historical Perspective. It went
well, although I misunderstood and thought I had a full hour slot, but
only actually had a 50 minute slot, so I had to rush a bit at the end. I
really do hate rushing at the end when speaking primarily to a
non-native-English-speaking audience, as I know I’m capable of speaking
English way too fast (a problem that I am constantly vigilant
about under normal public speaking circumstances).
The talk was nevertheless pretty well received, and afterward, I was
surrounded by a gaggle of interested copyleft enthusiasts, who, as
always, were asking what more can be done to enforce the GPL. My talks
on enforcement always tend to elicit this reaction, since my final
slides are a
bit depressing with regard to the volume of GPL enforcement that’s
currently occurring.
Meanwhile, I also decided I should also start putting up my slides from
talks in a more accessible fashion. Since I
use S5 (although I hope
to switch to jQuery
S5 RSN), my slides are trivially web-publishable anyway. While
I’ve generally
published the source code to my slides, it makes sense to also make
compiled, quickly viewable
versions of my slides on my website too. Finally, I realized I
should also put my upcoming public
speaking events on my frontpage and have done so.
After a late lunch on Friday, I saw only the very end
of Lennart’s
talk on systemd, and then I visited for a while
with Claudia
Rauch, Business
Manager of KDE, e.V. in the KDE booth. Claudia kindly helped me
practice my German a bit by speaking slowly enough that I could actually
parse the words.
I must admit I was pretty frustrated all week that my German is now so
poor. I studied German for two years in High School and one semester in
college. I even participated in a three-week student exchange trip to a
Gymnasium (the German term for college-prep high school) in Munich in
1990. Yet, German speaking skills are just a degraded version of what
they once were.
Meanwhile, I did rather like Berlin’s Tegel airport (TXL). It’s a
pretty small airport, but I really like its layout. Because of its
small size, each check-in area is attached to a security checkpoint,
which is then directly connected to the gate. While this might seem a
bit tight, it makes it very easy to check-in, go through security, and
then be right at your gate. I can understand why an airport this small
would have to be closed (it’s slated for closure in 2012), but I am glad
that I got a chance to travel to it (and probably again, for the Desktop
Summit) before it closes.
