8 Feb 2010

Post FOSDEM 2010

So last week-end I was at FOSDEM. First, it's quite huge. Several thousand geeks in one location (if somebody hates open source, it's the place to drop a bomb, lots of projects might also die afterward (I'm just saying that it's not so cool on a risk management point of view, I'm not encouraging anybody to do such a bad thing 😉)). A lot of smart people, good ideas, interesting stuff to see, to hear and free Wi-Fi everywhere (such thing would be illegal in France nowadays 😕).

As usual with conferences, goodies review. What do we get:

conference program (on paper)
a bag (made from biodegradable material)

That's all good to me. Quite eco-friendy and nothing is unnecessary.

Here is the list of sessions I attended:

Welcome (FOSDEM Staff)

Quick history of the FOSDEM and of course the FOSDEM dance.

Promoting Open Source Methods at a Large Company (Brooks Davis)

Brooks Davis told us how they managed to bring some of the open source way of working in a big aerospace company. I find incredible that in a company working for aerospace (and even any company doing software) some developers are still not using any version control system.

Evil on the Internet (Richard Clayton)

Quick presentation of what "bad people" are doing on the internet and how it works, with live examples of phishing/fake banks/fake escrow websites.

Visit the AA419 website for more information.

Mozilla Europe/Mozilla Foundation (Tristan Nitot/Gervase Markham)

Some info on current status and future stuff at Mozilla. Some discussion about the ballot screen.

Personal note: the ballot screen will appear for every Windows XP/Vista/7 users how do not have installed any other web browser. This is a decision of the European Commission imposed to Microsoft. But what about people working at the European Commission? Are they going to see the ballot screen on their computers? Obviously, like in any company managing their computers, this is going to be blocked in order to keep the "homogeneity" and ease of system administration. Guess what? I am working at the EC (as external contractor). Since I'm a developer, I can install whatever I ~~want~~ need on my work computer so I don't have the problem (and in fact since I'm doing a bit of web development I've all major web browsers installed). Anyway, I will see if my colleagues get some choice for their web browser.

FLOSS: a key to self-determination in Internet life (Mitchell Baker)

OK, I can't really summarize but it was interesting. Free and open source software have values, freedom related ones (at least). To some extent we can see those values in how the internet has been built and we need to be sure that those values are still going to drive the future of the internet and even take a more predominant place.

Hackability (Tristan Nitot/Paul Rouget)

Do you want the internet to be a place only for for-profit companies to sell you their products? I hope not (if you do, what the hell are you doing here?). An important thing that will prevent that is to be sure that the internet is hackable. That mean we can do what we want with it, event if it was not designed for.

I would like to give an example of a hackable product by design: a Lego box. When you buy a Lego box, it's shipped with a manual with one or two (sometimes more) patterns to build what Lego thinks you might want to build with. But obviously, it's for fun, and Lego does not forbid you to do anything else with it, on the contrary, they encourage you to do stuff they didn't think you could do with it… and it's quite normal since Lego bricks are done to build whatever you want.

On the internet it's quite the same. You have bricks. Different kind of bricks, versatile ones (bits and bytes) on top of which people have created more complex bricks (HTML, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, XMPP, XML, CSS, JavaScript…) allowing you to do any kind of things. But there are some stuff that are not following that concept. Take Flash for instance, here you have the Logo box already mounted and you can't unmount it, you can play a bit with it but not that much.

Paul did a demo showing that the web is hackable (changing the UI of a website and with the help of Firefox/Greasemonkey change how to interact with the website), that Firefox is hackable (switching from a tab to an other by shaking his wiimote!).

HTML 5 (Paul Rouget)

The "theorical" part of the presentation was done by someone else but I don't have his name (sorry). Anyway, since most of the stuff I developed so far were web applications, I was quite interested in this presentation (and of course because I have been too lazy to check by myself what's new in HTML 5).

HTML 5 syntax, very pragmatic. HTML has been slaughtered on so many web pages that web browsers are now very good at understanding the understandable. So of course, instead of imposing a drastic syntax (like XML based stuff requires usually) that nobody is going to apply, HTML 5 is quite "user friendly" (in the way that you can type whatever you want, it's going to work (uppercase, lowercase, it doesn't care, you don't close your tags? not a problem…)). I think web browsers (except IE of course 😉) are the perfect example of "be strict in what you send, but generous in what you receive".

Anyway, lots of new tags like header, footer, aside, of course video, canvas…

Paul did an amazing demo with a "simple webpage" turning out to be an interactive presentation with CSS transitions, video playing, 2D transformations, 3D ones… impressive.

Amarok 2.2 Rocking (Sven Krohlas)

I was an Amarok user for a long time but since I switched to the Mac it's not the case anymore (even though Amarok runs on Mac). Anyway, the moodbar is back!

I haven't played a lot with Amarok 2.x, but I don't feel very comfortable with the UI. In 2.2 it's a bit better. Maybe a part of the problem is that I don't like KDE's default theme.

It was a conference on free (as in free speech) softwares, but there are not only softwares that are free, there is also music. Go to Jamendo and listen/download a bit of music, you might discover good music under Creative Commons licenses (I recommend: Diablo Swing Orchestra and David TMX).

NoSQL for Fun & Profit (Tim Anglade)

A quick overview of what is NoSQL, no technical details, more a presentation for managers. Anyway, like lots of people I have suffered of SQL. For several reasons, first, it's hard to find a project where a relational database is not badly used, a RDBMS can be very good at what it does (like PostgreSQL), it still needs to be used correctly, and secondly, because it was almost the only way "managers" did know about storing data. Who have never seen that kind of situation:

The manager: "On our new software we are going to use this programming language and that relational database."
The developer: "I can understand that we need a programming language since we are going to write a software, but we don't need a relational database for it."
The manager: "Of course we need a relational database, every software use a relational database."
The developer: "Well… no."
The manager: "I'm the one deciding, you are only the mindless developer coding the stuff I ask so shut up." (OK, maybe not that part)

Well anyway, NoSQL is a good idea to make sure that people know that we have choices on how we store data and that there are some ways better for some kind of tasks and others ways better for other kind of tasks.

Mozmill (Henrik Skupin)

A quick presentation of Mozmill, a tool used to do automated functional tests on Mozilla products (Firefox, Thunderbird…). Each version of Firefox in fact 225 versions of Firefox (75 languages on 3 platforms) and all of them should/need to be tested. It looks like at Mozilla they are not really in the test driven mindset (yet), and they are lacking of tests. Wait… sorry, when I say tests, I always think "automated tests", it's inhuman to make a person run a test suite manually, unfortunately to many people are paid for that. From what I understood they have some manual test suites for Firefox and fortunately they are trying to automate them.

You can see the mozmill generated reports for Firefox here: http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/couchdb/mozmill/_design/reports/_list/summary/summary

Towards GNUstep GUI 1.0 (Fred Kiefer)

GNUstep has been in development for ages and there is still no 1.0 version. So the question was "do we need to do one and if yes, what needs to be in". Obviously, the answer for the first part is "yes" (so it will attract more developers, *BSD and Linux distributions will update their packages…). The second part of the question was not really solved. One proposition was to name the version 10.2 and has complete support of Cocoa 10.2.

L20n (Axel Hecht)

I'm not a specialist of internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n), I know some issues regarding that but quite frankly, I didn't really understood the presentation. It's a bit more clear after a look on the l20n wiki. Sounds interesting to me since I think that the current way of doing (key/value) sucks a lot as soon as you have some non ultra-trivial stuff to do.

Étoilé: Where it is, where it's going, why it isn't there yet (Quentin Mathé/David Chisnall)

What have they done since the beginning in 2004? This is a project with few people but lots of ideas. One thing I find interesting is the CoreObject framework. Well in fact not the framework, but the ideas behind. From a user point of view, having to save your documents sucks. Why the default state is "in case of problem you are going to lose all your unsaved work" and not "in case of problem all your work is saved"? So here the idea is everything you change on your document is recorded, so you can do/undo/redo modification, close your document, open it again, ask to undo stuff you have done before… the history of your changes on the document have been saved all along.

Such ideas are not new, we have been talking about that for decades (well, not me, I'm talking about it only for years, I'm not that old 😉), but mainstream operating systems are still not implementing it.

Women and Mozilla (Delphine Lebédel)

Quick presentation of WoMoz.

Nepomuk (Sebastian Trüg)

Recent operating systems are now indexing datas so it's fast and easy to search for stuff on your computer. Nepomuk is a "semantic" way of doing so (using RDF and so on).

Several functionalities are similar between Nepomuk and what I think Étoilé's CoreObject do. But Nepomuk is based on "standards" like RDF and SPARQL.

Mozilla Panel Discussion (Mitchell Baker/Tristan Nitot/Mark Surman)

A discussion on Mozilla's mission. Lots of questions about privacy. I confirm, Mozilla's people have the right mindset (at least the mindset I like) and I'm glad that they are caring about the Internet.