Distro Recipes 2013: Nice first !

As indicated, I had the opportunity to talk during the first Distro Recipes event organized in Paris last week, at the invitation of Hupstream. As Yoann Sculo posted, this was a very interesting day for me, and I really regret I was busy to also attend the first day and the opening.

After a nice welcome breakfast, Aurélien Bompard started by presenting the Fedora distribution.

He did a great job especially expalining how easy it was to become a Fedora maintainer, even if a comparison to Debian revealed that it’s much less different that what people may think (it also takes time to become a packager able to modify most distro packages) and I know by experience that the Fedora packagers are really picky (sometimes for not so good reasons) with new contributions.

After that I talked about HP and Linux distributions. I used in fact the standard HP marketing presentation of the company as a starter (modified of course to suit my needs and include more penguins !) in order to explain the span of our activities, our relationship with communities including distributions, announced that HP will even soon provide firmware for ProLiant servers under a package format (rpm and deb), the fact that HP doesn’t see Linux demand for desktop/laptop on the consumer market (no, it’s not just a price issue that would make Linux more appealing in that case as I justified) but that we do support Linux on some enterprise desktops/laptops. Hopefully this was useful and/or new to some of the audience.

Then Dodji Seketeli made the type of talk making you believe that you could contribute to gcc ! Of course, when he details how much time it took him to add some of the features of the next stable version, you know you can’t ! Well I at least Anyway lots of good news and features that make that future version 4.8 expected soon.

That conclude our morning sessions, and it was then time to eat !! Especially as we had a great buffet waiting for us as you can see:

In order to avoid a sleepy afternoon, we started right after by a round table with 7 people (!), that I had the pleasure to chair. With a representative of each distribution (Mageia, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Embedded) and a Microsoft representative, you could expect blood and swords fight ! Not at all, I was surprisingly happy that the elements were clearly exposed, each representative defending their own work rather than criticizing, and finding ways to propose more future joint work. Of course, some subjects such as LSB/FHS lead to more debate, but very constructive and I really enjoyed this time slot as a way to show that differences are an added value ! It was also the opportunity for me to meet with Colin Guthrie and Frédérc Crozat, which I had never met before. These distros should be happy to have such representatives defending them (and the others too of course ) Finally if you have ideas to share to improve cross-distribution work , consider joining the mailing listdedicated to his topic and start sharing your ideas.

Then it was time again for the remaining presentations. The first was Lucas Nussbaum. Long time Debian Developer, (he is even running for the Debian Project Leader now, vote for him !) he made a convincing picture of the Debian ecosystem, the numerous Web sites that contributors can create to enhance the distribution with stats, infos, Ubuntu correlations, … As usual, Debian appears as a very mature distribution, with a strong Governance, being perl friendly… If I had to change I may well become a debianers. But isn’t it because of the pres, as the morning I was a fedorian

The next speaker was a long time Linux enthousiast Pierre Ficheux. In fact back when it was Minitel time (not 2.0) I used his xtel program !! Pierre made a presentation (in english but with the accent ) around embedded Linux distributions, presenting various way to tailor one for your device (he was using a Raspberry Pi) depending whether you use an Ubuntu, a Yocto generated one or a pure OpenEmbedded linux one. Definitely a good idea to explore for my Pi !

And then we had the lightnings talks. Aurélien Bompard was there again for HyperKitty. Too bad it’s devoted to mailan, as I think Sympa would also benefit from such a work, as their archive management (at least on the latest versions I used) could be improved.

I came then again on stage for a project-builder.org presentation (building cross-distro packages for upstream projects) and made a short demo which I think is explaining much more than my slides, so I plan on using it more in the future !

After me, Eric Leblond explained how his upstream project (ulogd2) wasn’t picked up correclty by most distributions and asked for help to improce that.

And final speaker was Nicolas Vérité who made a panel on all mobile Linux distributions, recommending to follow closely Tizen for the future as the main force in this area.

Too bad it was already over. Anne closed the session and I’d like to thank her for the invitation and the perfect organization of this first cross-distributions vent as a real success. Well done and see you next year hopefully !

Bdale Garbee has been HP’s best Open Source Ambassador

As announced by Kirk Bresniker during its keynote at LinuxCon this week, Bdale Garbee has left HP yesterday.

When he warned me in July of his willingness to leave, in order to have more time for his family, his own FLOSS projects (FreedomBox, Debian, …), I really was shocked and had a very bad night. It’s difficult for me to imagine Open Source at HP without him to represent it.

Bdale was IMHO our best Ambassador in the FLOSS community. He has a large ring of relationships in a large set of projects, and knows personality lots of key FLOSS personalities, some of them being even friends. He was giving a lot of credibility to HP around our FLOSS activities, and was listen internaly from both our internal community members, as well as our management, allowing our community to pass supportive FLOSS messages to it.

I had my first interaction with Bdale at HP in 2001. At that time Bruce Perens was the HP FLOSS representative (even he also was a big FLOSS personality, I preferred when Bdale took over the role), and as he couldn’t make the NordU 2002 Keynote, he was proposing that either Bdale or me did it !! As Bdale wasn’t available, I was the one replacing both him and Bruce !! Believe me, speaking of Open Source, Linux and freedom in Finland during a keynote session after a couple of months at HP was a bit stressing ! I still remember it. But that was great. Side note, if any event is willing to host me as a keynote speaker, I think I could do a much better job today

In 2002, Bdale was elected Debian Project Leader. He was the first HP employee leading this project. I then had the pleasure to meet with him face to face (well with my size, I can not really look at Bdale easily !) and I really was looking forward each time for this type of non-virtual meeting, as it was for me an opportunity to learn more on Open Source at HP and at large. Which was the case during various Fosdem, LinuxCon or our own internal TES. As I’ve always been impressed by his profound knowledge of this ecosystem, and the deep thoughts he’s able to have on various areas making this IT sector.

That’s why I built his application form so he could become Lutèce d’Or (personality of the year) during the event Paris, Capitale du Libre. That was my contribution back to his incredible work for FLOSS. But not the only one, as he told me once that MondoRescue saved once a critical Debian server he was hosting. Hopefully, you’ll continue to use

Bdale is one of the people I admire in the IT industry with Linus Torvalds and Larry Wall (In the music, I also have my heroes such as Gustav Leonhardt, Jordi Savall and her wife Montserrat Figueras, Jean Belliard or Frans Brüggen). I’m sure our paths will cross again very soon, and I hope our frienship will be reinforced by regular chats, mails and face to face meetings during FLOSS events. And in the mean time, I wish to him all the best for his new activities, that will benefit to all of us, and for his new life 2.0 !

Hopefully HP will find other FLOSS representatives. Corporations always say that anybody is replaceable. I disagree. Everybody brings a unique touch. And here, for sure, it will never be the same. You’ll be missed.

All the best Bdale for your future, and hope rockets flied this week-end

Proposition of Cross-Distro Mini-Conf for Linux.conf.au 2012

Time has come again to think to our friends down under ! Since I was there in 2007 for a MondoRescue conference I think this is really a place to be in the FLOSS ecosystem when possible; Too bad it’s so far away from France Travel costs are not light either.

But I thought I should propose the follwoing mini-conf, as the one I attended in Fosdem 2010 on the same topic worked very interesting, and allowed to start some joint collaboration that I think is fruitful and avoid/reduce fragmentation.

I hope it will be accepted to give me an opportunity to fly there and meet with the great community which gathers there each year.

So here it is (Thanks to the great example provided by Martin Michlmayr last year)

The “Cross-Distribution” mini-conf at LCA 2012 (Ballarat, Australia; January 16-20 2012) is for people interested in cooperation between Open Source distributions. Topics include contributors agreements, licensing policies, packaging best practices and tools, sharing patches to upstream projects, communications, working with upstream Open Source developers, translations, governance, workflow in place, version control systems, bug reporting management and sharing, vcs-pkg.org, funding, marketing, lessons from your experience, and whatever related topics people would like to bring up. Whether you are a single contributor working on a single package, or leading a full distribution, managing a full distribution infrastructure, or representing it in the press, whether it’s famous as Debian or less as AbulEdu this mini-conf hopes to bring different people together to exchange thoughts and facilitate discussion about these topics.

Presentation submitters should feel free to suggest their own topics. Here is a list of potentially interesting subjects (in no particular order):

* Building software packages on a large scale
* Choosing valid licenses and copyright policies
* Patch management
* Working with upstream
* Forking a distribution
* Experiences in distributed development
* Managing bug report and enhancement request
* Tools to support making a distribution
* Translation of a distribution
* Reuse between distributions
* Collaborationbetween distributions
* Distribution structures
* FHS
* Distribution Development Management and Governance
* Distribution Corporate Governance
* Lessons learned in building up your distribution
* Marketing
* Communication
* Copyrights
* Applying your copyright and license choices

We hope to receive proposals for:

* 50 minute expert panel discussions
* 50 minute full presentations
* 25 minute half presentations
* 5-10 minute lightning talks (e.g. success stories, …)

To submit a proposal, please contact Bruno Cornec at bruno.cornec@hp.com and include the following information:

* Your name
* Brief bio noting any previous speaking experience
* Talk title
* Brief outline of your proposed talk
* Notes of any special equipment / facilities you may require