GNOME.Asia and LinuxCon Japan

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/asia-2013.html

Two weeks ago I attended GNOME.Asia/Seoul and LinuxCon Japan/Tokyo, thanks
to sponsoring by the GNOME Foundation and the Linux Foundation. At GNOME.Asia I
spoke about Sandboxed
Applications for GNOME, and at LinuxCon Japan about the first
three years of systemd. (I think at least the latter one was videotaped,
and recordings might show up on the net eventually). I like to believe both
talks went pretty well, and helped getting the message across to community what
we are working on and what the roadmap for us is, and what we expect from the
various projects, and especially GNOME. However, for me personally the
hallway track was the most interesting part. The personal Q&A regarding
our work on kdbus, cgroups, systemd and related projects where highly
interesting. In fact, at both conferences we had something like impromptu
hackfests on the topics of kdbus and cgroups, with some conferences attendees.
I also enjoyed the opportunity to be on Karen’s upcoming GNOME podcast,
recorded in a session at Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul (what better place could
there be for a podcast recording?).

I’d like to thank the GNOME and Linux foundations for sponsoring my attendance to these conferences. I’d especially like to thank the organizers of GNOME.Asia for their perfectly organized conference!

Конкурсът

Post Syndicated from original https://alex.stanev.org/blog/?p=341

Та вече седмица е активна страницата и кодовото хранилище на конкурса за разработка на софтуер по методиката на ЦИК за парламентарните избори.

Идеята се роди в края на деня, в който представихме целия софтуер за компютърната обработка пред ЦИК, неправителствени организации и медиите. Тогава се разви една не особено ухоприятна дискусия, която във времето се разви и прехвърли в различни форуми. Изписаха се множествени простотии, тук-таме и ценни мнения. Някои пък използваха темата, за да отправят личните си нападки към където/който са си набелязали, с което разводниха допълнително и без това оцапаната дискусия.

Изводите за мен са няколко:

  • Хората не знаят какво се случва от момента, в който са пуснали бюлетината до обявяването на резултатите. Недоволни винаги ще има, а практиката да се култивират бъдещи аргументи не е от вчера;
  • Други хора, които не разбират от софтуер, още по-малко от свободен такъв, се изказват компетентно и дават ценни съвети. Дори и с най-доброто желание да помогнат, в сегашната ситуация това единствено пречи на нормалното протичане на изборите;
  • Досега мислех, че в България повече хора могат да делят и сравняват дробни числа, отколкото да програмират, но явно наистина сме нация техническа.

Самата методика си има и своето чисто програмистко предизвикателство. Задачи с близка сложност вървяха по ученическите олимпиади. Тъй като ЦИК така или иначе публикува числовите данни, та дори и по новия Изборен кодекс сканираните протоколи, нищо не пречи да си организираме hackatoon с награди, за по-интересно. По-глобалната цел е да има повече хора, които разбират от механиката на нещата и в бъдеще да могат да помогнат, като измислят нещо по-добро.

А и някои ще си припомним олимпиадните страсти 🙂

На финала, връзките отново:

Страница на конкурса: https://electionscontest.wordpress.com

Кодово хранилище: https://github.com/elections-contest/pe2013

 

MariaDB Foundation at the Percona conference

Post Syndicated from Monty original http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2013/04/mariadb-foundation-at-percona-conference.html

The MariaDB Foundation have just issued press release about the new Governance in the Foundation.  A lot of the new things that is happening in the MariaDB adoption comes thanks to the work we have done in the Foundation.

The Foundation is also happy to announce that is has now 2 senior MySQL (now MariaDB) developers on board, Alexander Barkov and Sergey Vojtovich and a documentation writer, Ian Gilfillan.

The foundation is also helping founding the new Connect engine, which allows you to use MariaDB with a lot of different formats (XML, CVS, DBF,…), and connections, including ODBC. (Documentation will appear shortly here).

If you want to know more about the MariaDB Foundation, you can find me and a lot of MariaDB developers in the MariaDB foundation boot at Percona conference in Santa Clara.

Monty Program Ab, SkySQL and Antony Curtis has also a lot of talks at Percona live about MariaDB and related things:

We have also a MariaDB BOF at 6:00 pm on the 23’th of April in Ballroom F. Anyone who ever been on one of the MySQL/MariaDB BOF’s with me knows what to expect. This time there will be even more surprises…

Hope to see a lot of you next week!

The Punditocracy of Unelected Technocrats

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2013/04/06/meme-hustler.html

All this past week, people have been emailing and/or pinging me on IRC to
tell me to read the
article, The Meme Hustler by Evgeny Morozov. The
article is quite long, and while my day-job duties left me TL;DR’ing it
for most of the week, I’ve now read it, and I understand why everyone
kept sending me the article. I encourage you not to TL;DR it any longer
yourself.

Morozov centers his criticisms on Tim O’Reilly, but that’s not all the
article is about. I spend my days walking the Free Software beat as a
(self-admitted) unelected politician, and I’ve encounter many spin doctors,
including O’Reilly — most of whom wear the trappings of advocates for
software freedom. As Morozov points out, O’Reilly isn’t the only one; he’s
just the best at it. Morozov’s analysis of O’Reilly can help us understand
these P.T. Barnum‘s
in our midst.

In 2001, I
co-wrote Freedom
or Power? with RMS in response to O’Reilly’s
very Randian arguments
(which Morozov discusses). I remember working on that essay for
(literally) days with RMS, in-person at the FSF offices (and at his office
at MIT), while he would (again, literally) dance around the room, deep in
thought, and then run back to the screen where I was writing to suggest a
new idea or phrase to add. We both found it was really difficult to craft
the right rhetoric to refute O’Reilly’s points. (BTW, most people don’t
know that there were two versions of my and RMS’ essay; the original one
was published as a
direct
response to O’Reilly on his own website. One of the reasons RMS and I
redrafted as a stand-alone piece was that we saw our original published
response actually served to increase uptake of O’Reilly’s
position. We decided the issue was important enough it needed a piece that
would stand on its own indefinitely to defend that key position.)

Meanwhile, I find it difficult to express more than a decade later how
turbulent that time was for hard-core Free Software advocates, and how
concerted the marketing campaign against us was. While we were in the
middle of the Microsoft’s attacks that GPL was an unAmerican cancer, we
also had O’Reilly’s the freedom that matters is the freedom to pick
one’s own license meme propagating fast. There were dirty politics
afoot at the time, too: this all occurred during the same three-month
period
when Eric
Raymond called me an inmate taking over the asylum. In other words,
the spin doctors were attacking software freedom advocates
from every side! Morozov’s article captures a bit of what
it feels like to be on the wrong side of a concerted, organized PR campaign
to manipulate public opinion.

However, I suppose what I like most about Morozov’s article is it’s the
first time I’ve seen discussed publicly and coherently a rhetorical trick
that spin doctors use. Notice when you listen to a pundit at their undue
sense of urgency; they invariably act as if what’s happening now is somehow
(to use a phrase the pundits love): “game changing”. What I
typically see is such folks use urgency as a reason to make compromises
quickly. Of course, the real goal is a get-rich-(or-famous)-quick scheme
for themselves — not a greater cause. The sense of urgency leaves
many people feeling that if they don’t follow the meme, they’ll be left in
the dust. A colleague of mine once described this entrancing effect as
dream-like, and that desire to stay asleep and keep dreaming is what
lets the hustlers keep us under their spell.

I’ve admittedly spent more time than I’d like refuting these spin doctors
(or, as Morozov also calls them, meme hustlers). Such work seems
unfortunately necessary because Free Software is in an important, multi-decade (but
admittedly not urgent 🙂 battle of cooption (which, BTW, every
social justice movement throughout history has faced). The tide of
cooption by spin doctors can be stemmed only with constant vigilance, so I
practice it.

Still, this all seems a cold, academic way to talk about the phenomenon.
For these calculating Frank Luntz types, winning is enough;
rhetoric, to them, is almost an end in itself (which I guess one might dub
“Cicero 2.0”). For those of us who believe in the cause, the
“game for the game’s sake” remains distasteful because there
are real principles at stake for us. Meanwhile, the most talented of these
meme hustlers know well that what’s a game to them
matters emotionally to us, so they use our genuine concern against
us at every turn. And, to make it worse, there’s more of them out there
than most people realize — usually carefully donning the trappings of
allies. Kudos to Morozov for reminding us how many of these emperors have
no clothes.

The Punditocracy of Unelected Technocrats

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2013/04/06/meme-hustler.html

All this past week, people have been emailing and/or pinging me on IRC to
tell me to read the
article, The Meme Hustler by Evgeny Morozov. The
article is quite long, and while my day-job duties left me TL;DR’ing it
for most of the week, I’ve now read it, and I understand why everyone
kept sending me the article. I encourage you not to TL;DR it any longer
yourself.

Morozov centers his criticisms on Tim O’Reilly, but that’s not all the
article is about. I spend my days walking the Free Software beat as a
(self-admitted) unelected politician, and I’ve encounter many spin doctors,
including O’Reilly — most of whom wear the trappings of advocates for
software freedom. As Morozov points out, O’Reilly isn’t the only one; he’s
just the best at it. Morozov’s analysis of O’Reilly can help us understand
these P.T. Barnum‘s
in our midst.

In 2001, I
co-wrote Freedom
or Power? with RMS in response to O’Reilly’s
very Randian arguments
(which Morozov discusses). I remember working on that essay for
(literally) days with RMS, in-person at the FSF offices (and at his office
at MIT), while he would (again, literally) dance around the room, deep in
thought, and then run back to the screen where I was writing to suggest a
new idea or phrase to add. We both found it was really difficult to craft
the right rhetoric to refute O’Reilly’s points. (BTW, most people don’t
know that there were two versions of my and RMS’ essay; the original one
was published as a
direct
response to O’Reilly on his own website. One of the reasons RMS and I
redrafted as a stand-alone piece was that we saw our original published
response actually served to increase uptake of O’Reilly’s
position. We decided the issue was important enough it needed a piece that
would stand on its own indefinitely to defend that key position.)

Meanwhile, I find it difficult to express more than a decade later how
turbulent that time was for hard-core Free Software advocates, and how
concerted the marketing campaign against us was. While we were in the
middle of the Microsoft’s attacks that GPL was an unAmerican cancer, we
also had O’Reilly’s the freedom that matters is the freedom to pick
one’s own license meme propagating fast. There were dirty politics
afoot at the time, too: this all occurred during the same three-month
period
when Eric
Raymond called me an inmate taking over the asylum. In other words,
the spin doctors were attacking software freedom advocates
from every side! Morozov’s article captures a bit of what
it feels like to be on the wrong side of a concerted, organized PR campaign
to manipulate public opinion.

However, I suppose what I like most about Morozov’s article is it’s the
first time I’ve seen discussed publicly and coherently a rhetorical trick
that spin doctors use. Notice when you listen to a pundit at their undue
sense of urgency; they invariably act as if what’s happening now is somehow
(to use a phrase the pundits love): “game changing”. What I
typically see is such folks use urgency as a reason to make compromises
quickly. Of course, the real goal is a get-rich-(or-famous)-quick scheme
for themselves — not a greater cause. The sense of urgency leaves
many people feeling that if they don’t follow the meme, they’ll be left in
the dust. A colleague of mine once described this entrancing effect as
dream-like, and that desire to stay asleep and keep dreaming is what
lets the hustlers keep us under their spell.

I’ve admittedly spent more time than I’d like refuting these spin doctors
(or, as Morozov also calls them, meme hustlers). Such work seems
unfortunately necessary because Free Software is in an important, multi-decade (but
admittedly not urgent 🙂 battle of cooption (which, BTW, every
social justice movement throughout history has faced). The tide of
cooption by spin doctors can be stemmed only with constant vigilance, so I
practice it.

Still, this all seems a cold, academic way to talk about the phenomenon.
For these calculating Frank Luntz types, winning is enough;
rhetoric, to them, is almost an end in itself (which I guess one might dub
“Cicero 2.0”). For those of us who believe in the cause, the
“game for the game’s sake” remains distasteful because there
are real principles at stake for us. Meanwhile, the most talented of these
meme hustlers know well that what’s a game to them
matters emotionally to us, so they use our genuine concern against
us at every turn. And, to make it worse, there’s more of them out there
than most people realize — usually carefully donning the trappings of
allies. Kudos to Morozov for reminding us how many of these emperors have
no clothes.

The collective thoughts of the interwebz

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.

Close