Where is Ploum?

Being selected as a Summer of Code student

Ploum — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:55:00 +0200

For several years now, I've been a Summer of Code mentor for Getting Things Gnome, under the GNOME umbrella.

This year again we received plenty of student proposals. GTG being a very small part of the GNOME project and having only few mentors available, we had to choose. That choice was sometimes really hard and it's a pity to see some students not being selected.

In order to help them for next year, I would like to point what we, potential mentors, expect from the students.

Programming knowledge

Summer of Code's primary purpose is programming. We expect candidates to have a somewhat good knowledge of the programming language used in our project. We have seen very bright students with very interesting ideas. But it quickly appeared that they were not comfortable enough with Python.

Accepting such a student could only lead to a failure. Every little problem which is trivial to an experienced programmer might become a blocker. More importantly: we are not programming mentors. Programming is obvious to us and is a pre-requisite.

Project ownership

Each year, GTG developers put some SoC ideas on the GNOME wiki. Retrospectively, I think it's a bad thing. Indeed, we receive plenty of proposals from students who simply copy/paste our ideas. Sometimes, they don't even understand it and have no clue of what GTG is.

We expect students to become owners of their project. The best way to achieve that is to have the student come with his own idea, to scratch his own itch. Of course, this could be discussed with the team and potential mentors but the initiative itself should come from the student.

Originality

Another reason why taking a SoC idea from the wiki is bad is because we end with ten identical proposals. We then try to find the most skilled student but we usually found that the best students came with their own, original project.

If you want to succeed as a student, be original and show that you understand what you want to achieve. Ask you the question: "Why was it not done before me and why can I succeed where nobody has been before?".

Early start

Next year, during the student proposal period, I plan to not answer emails from students with whom I had no prior contacts. As I'm listed as a possible mentor, each year I see my inbox filled with requests from students that particular week. All those mails are kind, polite but are basically asking "please tell me what to write on my proposal and support my candidacy".

Sorry but that week is not a good time to approach a mentor. A mentor is busy, have a work, a family and cannot handle twenty students requests in a few days. Remember that a mentor is not paid and that writing the proposal is your job.

But the secret here is very simple: start early. Be involved very early in the project you target. Get in touch with the team. Fix some easy bugs. Learn the project.

If you don't have the time or the motivation to do that in the months prior to the Summer of Code, there are chances you will not be a good student anyway.

But if you are known to the team, if we have seen you at work, we will probably want you as our student.

Initiative

Never send an email to a possible mentor vaguely asking what to do. We want to see initiatives. Try to find a mentor several weeks before the proposal period. Come with a well structured idea and ask for a critical review of your project. Seek critics, not advices.

When the submitting time start, immediately post your proposal. Don't wait. You will always be able to correct or edit your proposal. You will immediately get feedback from mentors so don't waste time trying to get private feedback before posting.

Also, in the first days, there's usually few proposals posted. Mentors take time to review them and post comments. After one week, there could be tenth of proposals and nobody review them all anymore.

Multiply your chances

You can post multiple proposals in different organisations, you have nothing to lose doing so. It's specially interesting if your project could be under different umbrellas. For example, a proposal about a video chat client could be adapted for GNOME, Gstreamer or even XMPP.

Conclusion

Being accepted as a GSoC student doesn't require you to be good enough. You need to convince us that you are the best.

Doing so is never, never, never done by writing an impressive list of skills or telling us that you were the leader of your football team. All we need to see is your code, your idea and your planning skills.

If you were not accepted this year and plan to try again next year, start to code now. Start to learn, start to contribute.

And don't send me an email asking me what to do. My answer is already written hereabove.

Picture by Seema K K, Mypouss and Fred Dhennin

What if Ubuntu were right?

Ploum — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:42:00 +0100

Last week, I had the chance to have a nice chat with Jonathan Riddell, Canonical employee and Kubuntu maintainer.

For years, Jonathan was paid to maintain Kubuntu. In a recent move, Canonical announced that Kubuntu will become a community-only project. As a way to start the conversation, I poked him about that:
— What happened? Is Canonical dropping KDE support?
— Well, we are doing with KDE exactly what we did with GNOME.
— Indeed. But what is the reason?
— Canonical seems to think that none of them managed to reach a non-geek audience.

And, sadly, I had to agree with that.

What is a desktop environment?

Since I'm involved in GNOME, I don't remember being able to explain what the GNOME project was to any non-geek. Ubuntu is something people understand. Linux is an harder concept but still manageable: it's the heart of the system, something invisible and magic that handle everything. But a desktop? People just cannot tell the difference between a desktop environment and an operating system. And, when you think about it, the whole definition is somewhat arbitrary.

Who cares about the desktop environment?

In fact, the only people I know who really care about what is GNOME are… GNOME developers and fans. What might illustrate this better is the astonishing lack of reaction which followed Ubuntu's move to Unity.

Yeah, sure, bloggers have discussed merits of Unity vs GNOME 2 vs GNOME 3. There was some buzz about Linux Mint. But, outside the geek microcosm, what have we seen? Nobody really cares. Ask any casual Ubuntu user: most didn't even noticed it was a big change. Some say it's better, some prefer the old way but don't make it a big deal. In fact, most of the blog posts even agree on this: Unity and GNOME 3 are, well, different. No winner.

People want an application launcher, that's all.

Shifting out of the desktop paradigm.

The world is increasingly shifting away from the standard desktop: iOS, Android, Metro. There's currently a quest going on to make the computing experience very similar on small devices or on bigger television, including tablets, netbooks, laptops, desktops.

That experience will be the main selling point of OS vendors and it only makes sense for an OS vendor to reclaim control about its own destiny without depending on any external project. Which is exactly what Ubuntu did.

What should a desktop environment be?

When KDE and GNOME appeared, Linux was mostly seen as technical environment. Developing a desktop was logical and highly needed. Lof of what we take for granted today should be credited to those who pioneered KDE and GNOME.

But we reached the point where there's no clear separation anymore between what is part of the OS and what is part of the desktop. Should the configuration tools be part of the desktop or the OS? Even the package management is now offered as an OS independent layer in the desktop.

This explains why I've never successfully explained what GNOME was: what it is and what it has to offer is arbitrary and not clear.

In fact, I see two possible futures for the GNOME project:

1) Being a software catalog. Offering software which have similar design goals and let the OS pick what they want. Sometimes, multiple alternatives for the same need can be offered. This makes the shell mostly irrelevant or anecdotal in the whole GNOME project and it is exactly the way Ubuntu uses GNOME.

2) Offering a complete operating system and controlling everything from the kernel level. This idea is sometimes referred as GNOME OS.

As we said in French, we currently have our ass between two chairs, not really able to take a decision, which is the worst situation.

And what about Unity?

The main criticism about Unity is that it is "yet another desktop", fragmenting the community. But, in fact, Unity is a pure Canonical project like Android is a pure Google project. There's no involvement from the community. Canonical wants to be able to control the appearance of its core product and who will blame them for that?

To their credits, it can be added that they tried to play it fair first with the "netbook remix edition", which failed to gain any attention from upstream.

And is GNOME really better? GNOME-shell design decisions are taken by a handful of designers, most of them employed by Red Hat, which has no interest in smartphone/television. Has the wide community anything to say in the design process? Not much. And that's a good thing if you want to avoid the bicycle-shed/UserLinux syndrom.

So, all technical qualities set apart, what is our problem with Ubuntu?

Maybe, what we hate with Unity is that it proved us that we were a small circle of geeks, that most users don't care and didn't even noticed that they were switching their desktop. The desktop war looks like the window managers war of ten years ago: all the geeks tried to find the best one while, in the end, it appeared that what user wanted was just to move windows. And none really won. WM, those day, are just anecdotal projects that only geeks care about.

The future?

Unity seems to have quite a clear future: it will stay and evolve as the Ubuntu default interface, from Ubuntu TV to any Ubuntu device, offering quite a consistent experience while you stay in the Ubuntu world.

But what is the future of GNOME and KDE? How do you see it? What will they offer? Do you think it's a good idea to leave Ubuntu in order to keep GNOME at all costs? Should GNOME work on GNOME-OS?

What if, all irrational feelings set apart, we realized that Unity was the right move?

Picture by Carsten Knoch

My experience working with patents

Ploum — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:36:00 +0100

A few years ago, I worked at a very big international company. I was doing R&D in the user interaction field and I had very friendly colleagues: the dream job.

At some point, I had what looked like a good idea: make our user's life easier by predicting his input thanks to multi-modal sensors and a learning algorithm. I know it sounds crazy but it was not a lot more than customizing the Bayes algorithm.

After building a very basic prototype, it turned out that it was a very good idea. My prototype was able to predict more than 90% of our test situations. And the remaining 10% was not worse than before.

For the young and naive innocent I was, the next step was to get more funding in order to build a real life prototype before putting that feature into our product. But, as every big corporation, my employer had rules. One of them being "patent it first".

If you are reading this blog, chances are that you think patents are evil, that they are impending innovation, that they are a very bad thing for our economy and are killing kitties.

After working with patents, I can ensure you it's not. It's even worse than that. It is worse than everything you can possibly think of. Let me share my experience with you.

I don't pretend to hold the truth. I'm not a lawyer. The following is only how I was told and taught to work with patents.

Every patent is a software patent

Not being a patent expert, I nevertheless knew that software patent were not allowed in Europe. I wondered how I could possibly patent something that was nothing more than a customized Bayes algorithm. It looked trivial and purely software. Also, as a Free Software geek, I was against software patents. Not sure why but I trusted those who were against it.

I was asked to reconsider my "invention" under another light: I was using captors to the external world. My prediction had an impact on a hardware product. In fact, every software patent you can think of can be reconsidered as an hardware patent. In the extreme case, isn't moving electron something physical?

Also, everything actually running as hardware can become software. Think about modelization. Even a plane or a train can exist only as a software model. It doesn't make sense to make a distinction between software and hardware patent.

Some patent attorney are specialized into re-writing a software patent into something that would be accepted by the European patent office. In the end, it is only a difference in the way you describe things, or pure hypocrisy.

I was and I'm still convinced. There is no non-arbitrary difference between hardware, software or even pharmaceutical patents.

The real goal of patents

The budget for one patent is several ten thousands of euros^[1]. Not used to handling so much money, I asked if, instead, we could consider using the budget to build a cool prototype. That would be more useful and cooler.

A the same time, my employer went under patent attack. As the attacker was a direct competitor, we had very similar products. We were thus infringing most of their patent portfolio and were asked several millions of euros.

Hopefully, our lawyer answered with our own patents portfolio. There was a secret agreement and the case was dismissed.

My boss told me the story to demonstrate how important it was to have patents. "Patents can save millions of euros"^[2]. Also, I was told that I could not work on any prototype if we didn't had a patent. The reason was simple: if we don't have a patent, our competitors will fill several patents the day my feature is made public and they will sue us when it will be available on the market, without any easy way for us to strike back.

At this point, I realized that patents might do a lot of thing but clearly don't help when it come to encouraging innovation.

Patent with an open mind

It was not that easy for me. I liked my job, I liked my colleagues and I had admiration for my boss, who was very smart and interesting. I considered my own position: wasn't I brainwashed by the Free Software fanatics?

I decided to take honestly the challenge to work on a patent. That way, I could make my own opinion. Everybody was saying that having a patent was good for your career, it couldn't hurt.

Prior art

When you think you invented something, the first thing to do is to write the state of the art. You will try to find all the patents that cover more or less the same aspect of your invention and you will make a summary of that. Your patent itself will be a little something which is not handled in the prior art. It is very similar to scientific publications.

Using Google Patents and some tools internal to our company, I dived into the patents world.

And I was struck.

Everything was already patented. Every single thing you can possibly think about is already patented. Not once, not twice but at least ten or twenty times.

How could you possibly work with that? How can you hope to add something or to find relevant prior art? Everything is already relevant.

What patenting really means

At this point, I received some training to learn how to read correctly a patent and to write my own.

First thing: a patent is nothing until it has been accepted by a court. Having a patent granted only means that the patent office "think that it might be a valid patent and that no trivial prior art has been found yet". Yes, you read it well: it *might* be a valid patent. Nothing more.

I always thought that when you had a patent, it was a proof you were the inventor of something. Not at all. It only helps you to prove that in front of a court. Let me repeat that again: a patent is *nothing* without having being tested in court.

Second point: a patent usually entails several "claims". Each claim is one innovative point which is part of your invention. When you read a patent, it looks like the claims are what is protected by your patent.

But to make a valid patent, you only need one valid claim! You can write whatever claims you want, your patent will be accepted if only one of the claim is valid. Worst: there's no way to know which claim was considered as valid by the patent office.

To give you an example, let's imagine that I've invented a very efficient way to put jam on a sandwich. I would write a patent with the following claims:

How to make bread
How to slice bread to make a sandwich
How to make marmalade
How to efficiently put marmalade on my sandwich.

Because the fourth claim is valid, my patent will be accepted. Note that by "valid", I mean that the Patent Office didn't found a trivial prior art for this. It doesn't mean that there is no prior art or that I'm the real inventor or that my invention works. Worst of all: in fact, I'm not forced to describe how to put the marmalade on my sandwich. I can write a patent describing "a potential way of increasing the efficiency when putting jam on a sandwich".

Now, with that patent, I will pay a visit to all the bakeries and tell them I own a patent on "making bread". This is not true, of course, because that claim is not valid. But who would have the money investigate and fight in court? It would be a lot easier and less risky to simply give me a small amount of money, called "licensing fee", and forget about it.

You may think I'm making up stuffs. During my prior art research, I found a patent that was describing exactly my invention. It was word by word what I had on my desk. With one exception: no algorithm was given. It was "a way to predict user inputs based on sensors". On the schemas, there was a big black box call "computing processor".

I said: "look, it is already patented". But I was told to take that as prior art and to patent the algorithm in the black box. We would extend an existing patent.

Not too small, not too big

I started writing a paper describing my algorithm using mathematical formulas. Sounds logical, right? But remember, it is forbidden to patent a mathematical formula. I was thus asked to describe everything using boxes and arrow, showing how an input was affecting the final output.

My job became hell on earth. I had to spend my days translating very elegant formulas into dumb boxes. Each time, I received comments like: "make it less software", "hide the fact that we are patenting a formula" or "make it more confusing. You don't want competitor to be able to implement your patent, right?".

In the end, I was working hard, without any joy, on making the world a worst place.

What's your quest?

I always thought I was not a very moral person. But, to my own surprise, I discovered that I couldn't cope with intellectual dishonesty. Lying to myself was the worst thing I could possibly do.

The first reaction of my management was to try to buy me. They said that the company was giving a bonus for each patent filled by an employee. As I said, I'm not terribly moral. I consider that everyone has its price. But the amount of that bonus was so ridiculously low that I felt it was an insult^[3].

Then I took my boss in an eye-to-eye discussion and told him frankly: "I've always done my job honestly. What you are asking from me is pure dishonesty. People who can't see it's dishonest are completely stupid (which happens more than often) or lying to themselves."

His answer still resonate into my mind: "It is the system. It is like that. Either you work with the system and you don't ask question, either you try to change the world. But here is not the place to change the world"^[4].

Conclusion

I refused to work any longer on patents. As you might expect, this story definitely broke my career in that company. Even if I still worked there for several months, mainly because I liked the people, the wheel was turning and I had no choice but leaving for somewhere where, at least on my small scale, I could work on changing the world.

It is also funny to note, nearly five years after my original idea, that the feature is still not available on any product on the market. Having deep experience with it and taking into account the huge progress of the embedded market in the last five years (Iphone, Android, …), I can certify that only a handful of man-months would be required to put it into production, to make users life easier.

But it is still blocked due to the patent system. Which tells you everything about how effectively the system fosters innovation.

Picture by Alexandre Dulaunoy (his website)

Notes

[1] 50,000€ if you do it alone but you usually need a patent attorney and support through the life of the patent, which means at least 80,000€ per patent.

[2] Which is a wonderful sophism

[3] I even learned later that because it was divided by the number of names on the patent and that each step in the hierarchy put his name on it, the real amount I would have received was 10% of that sum.

[4] Which, I admit, is a sane position. My problem being that I can't stop asking question.

The Quest for the Best GNOME 3 distribution

Ploum — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:09:00 +0100

End of last year, I've quit Ubuntu, after more than 7 years, to find out what was the best GNOME 3 Linux distribution. I've selected three major distributions: Ubuntu 11.10, Opensuse 12.1 and Fedora 16. I spent more than a month with each. Here's what I've found and learned.

What I'm expecting from a distribution

Before asking yourself what is your distribution of choice, maybe you should start by clarifying what you really expect from a distribution. In fact, the list is quite short for me:

I expect a good GNOME 3 experience, as close as possible from upstream.
I want an easy way to install/manage software.
I want all the software easily available and upgradable. This includes proprietary codecs, flash plugin, games, etc.
I want the latest versions of those software and quickly after they are released.
Be easily installable.
Good default: the less I've to do when reinstalling, the better.
Other than that, stay out of my way. No specific configuration tool. GNOME should handle that.

But that's not all. Being a Linux evangelist, I install Linux for a lot of people. Which add completely different requirements.

There should be a stable version with a long support time so I upgrade those people as rarely as possible.
The stable version should be stable and as trouble free as possible. This include incremental upgrade and they should be prevented to make a complete distribution upgrade (because it is never trouble free).
The stable version should be smart enough to update important things like hardware drivers, major versions of Firefox, etc.
The installation should come with a selection of pretty wallpaper, good default, most needed software. (the less I've to do when installing, the less I forget something which may block them as soon as I leave the room).
Installation process have to look sweet and requires the minimal input from me. I will be installing it when drinking tea with them.

Ubuntu 11.10

Ubuntu has the easiest and most efficient installation tool. Installing is a breeze: boot, answer very few questions, handle your complex partitioning scheme if you want, click install, wait. You are done. It's hard to think of an easiest way to install a distribution.

When it comes to handle software, Ubuntu is at his best: very graphical applications manager or synaptic and apt-get for those who prefer being efficient. Ubuntu packages most of the software I need. For more exotic or experimental stuffs, there is the concept of PPA, a small repository maintained by the developers themselves. This is a two-edged sword as I often end with tenth of PPA, conflicting with each other.

It has good default with video and music sample and pretty wallpapers.

Ubuntu has a good version scheme. A "normal" version, released every six months, which is perfect for my use, and a "long term support" version, released every two years. That would be perfect, isn't it?

Unfortunately, this has a price.

I had lot of problems with GNOME 3 under Ubuntu, including regular freezes and annoying bugs. This could be acceptable but there's a communication problem between Ubuntu and upstream GNOME. Ubuntu developers keep telling you that the bug is upstream, GNOME developers reject bug as being specific to Ubuntu. In the end, you have to live with those bugs. It is true that Ubuntu patches GNOME a lot. Having a regular GNOME 3 experience under Ubuntu requires a lot of boring tweaking (replacing ligthdm by gdm, removing overlay scrollbar,…).

This is of course a problem when I install Ubuntu for someone else. Should I heavily modify his/her installation or make him/her use something I'm not comfortable with (Unity)?

Ubuntu also reveal its dark side when it comes to upgrading. As a rule of thumb, I reinstall Ubuntu every six months. Upgrading Ubuntu is a recipe for disaster and not making a clean reinstall will be paid, sooner or later.

This is to the point where nearly everybody I know has a bad experience with upgrade. As a consequence, all my "non-geek" friends don't upgrade. Not at all. They don't understand the difference between simple upgrade and major upgrade. Even after I explain it, they either go through the big dist-upgrade (and break something) or dismiss any upgrade completely.

Opensuse 12.1

Let's forget the time I've lost to found an installable image of OpenSuse GNOME and switch to installation process itself.

To my great displeasure, I discovered that my keyboard layout (which is shipped by default with X.org) was not supported during installation, making everything even more complicated.

Once you have a working OpenSuse, it doesn't get better: installing a software is *always* a pain, whatever the software is. Each software seems to have its own channel that you have to figure out (when it's packaged at all), to add then to install. The architecture of packages management is so complicated that it it was still a major pain after six weeks of intensive usage. And whatever you want to do, zypper will first wait for twenty seconds doing nothing. At the end of a stressful day, it made me on the verge of smashing the computer through the window. The only positive aspect is zypper command line UI. Seriously, it is the best interface I've ever seen for package management: everything is logical and under one command, not like the cryptic apt-get I've learned to love.

As soon as it comes to administer your system, be warned that Yast will always get in your way. Through its interface inherited from the Windows NT4 era, Yast offers you something ugly that mess up with everything done through GNOME administration tools. Installing a printer with a proprietary driver, which is plug/accept the license that automatically popped up/print under Ubuntu, took me one half day. Somewhat, it reminded me of the 2002-2003 era, where everything was a real challenge under Linux.

Not everything is bad: the GNOME3 experience is way better than under Ubuntu although I had some severe bugs with Evolution. It is not pure GNOME as it's mixed up with a lot of Qt/KDE stuffs but might be okayish. Also, OpenSuse offers a lot development packages that don't exist anywhere else, which is sometimes interesting.

Fedora 16

The installation went fine even if it was not as easy as Ubuntu. No seamless encryption of my /home partition was offered and, once again, by keyboard layout was not available. Which means that it is impossible to have good support for my keyboard in console and in GDM. You might say that I could tweak that manually after installation. No! It will be reset after each upgrade^[1].

But let's forget about that.

Fedora is probably the most popular distribution amongst GNOME developers. And, indeed, you could call it GNOME OS.

The GNOME experience is wonderful. Also, a lot of packages are available. If you want all the usual non-free stuffs (flash, DVD, non-free repository), my advice is to use a small tool called FedoraUtils. In fact, that kind of tools was very popular in the early days of Ubuntu. But, at some point, Canonical understood that if people develop those tools, it is because there's a need to adapt the default installation.

Fedora didn't yet. The most infamous example is SELinux. By default, nothing will work on your Fedora. The first thing to do is to disable SELinux. Every single Fedora howto starts with "disable SELinux". Security is important but failing to realize that SELinux is not a good security model for casual laptop users shows how Fedora doesn't care about them.

While the overall Fedora experience is enjoyable, it has very rough edges. Why is yum updating the cache at each request, making it a painful experience? Why is a root account required by default? Using Fedora will require you to use the command line from time to time or to fix something that was broken by a small upgrade. Don't expect exotic hardware or some rare proprietary software to work out of the box.

If you are afraid or making your hands dirty or are uncomfortable with playing with the console, don't even think about using Fedora. You are simply not the targeted user.

For very conservative users, CentOS might be an option. I was tempted to try it for my parents and my non-geeks users.

Conclusion

What I've learned during this experience is that Ubuntu is now the de-facto Linux standard. If a software is told to support Linux, it often means "Ubuntu support". This is kinda sad for diversity but I don't complain: the situation is thousand times better than what it was ten years ago, where Windows was the only choice.

I would say that Fedora is now the only truly popular GNOME distribution, meaning that you will have the latest GNOME quickly, by default and not tainted with any distribution specific thing. If you are a GNOME fanatic and have the technical skills, you should probably use it. On the other hand, I would say that Fedora cannot be used by non-technical persons if they don't have very regular support.

It is also very surprising that no popular GNOME 3 Ubuntu distribution has taken-off, if you exclude Linux Mint, which is far from offering a vanilla GNOME 3 experience and not something I'm interested in. I'm also sure that many readers will point out ArchLinux and Debian as alternatives but they are simply too far from my needs (easy to install, good default, nearly nothing to do after installation, etc). It should be noted that I'm comparing distributions against my own needs, I don't make any judgement to those who simply have different needs/vision of what they want from a distribution.

After writing this comparison, initially envisioned as a Fedora praise, I was frightened when I realized that removing my "good GNOME 3 experience" from my distribution expectations list makes Ubuntu wins in every single other point.

This experience refreshed my vision and leads me to the terrible question: do I have any logical reason to have that GNOME3 requirement? Should I put my GNOME loyalty in question?

Note

[1] It raises the question: X.org has done a great job including a variety of keyboard layouts to cover many use cases. Fedora and OpenSuse both considered that they were more intelligent and unilaterally decided to only allow their users to use a subset of the layouts offered by X.org. It's not like it could save place on the installation disk or whatever: the layout are there, shipped with X.org! They are simply not selectable during installation. And each time I complain, I receive the "you are using an exotic thing". Like Fedora or OpenSuse were so mainstream they could afford that…

The Backyard Digging (and filling it back afterwards) Point

Ploum — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:26:00 +0100

Traduction francophone disponible

Dear politician,

If you have been pointed to this text, it is because you tried to justify your position or your actions by the fact that "it saves jobs".

Sorry, you have reached the infamous "Backyard Digging Point". Your argument is invalid. Don't worry, you are not the first nor the last one. Let's see together why this argument is invalid and, even more, why it is very dangerous to rely on it.

A job is a service that a provider give to a customer in exchange for money (or other form of payment). The job exists as long as the price asked by the provider is inferior to the price the customer is willing to pay. If the customer doesn't want to pay that amount, the provider either has to lower his price, to offer more to the customer or to radically change his business model.

How much would you pay me to dig a big hole in your garden then to fill it back afterwards? As it would probably take me several hours of work, I guess that 200€ is a good price. I would even cut it down to 150€ for you. Would you pay for that? Probably not. Maybe I should consider that a job that nobody is willing to pay for is useless.

As the world is evolving, the society changes. A good business model of the past may not be relevant anymore. New business opportunities appear. Companies could make radical shift and grow even stronger. Or try to stick to their old paradigm and disappear. This happens every day: icemen go out of business because of better and/or cheaper alternatives. It is not a political issue, merely an evolution.

As a politician, you are elected by the citizens. Among your duties, you need to ensure that the state provide some services for less than it would really cost : education, transportation and many others depending on your political stand. Profitability of private businesses should never be your concern. If the service provided is seen as critical but unprofitable, maybe it should be managed by the state in the name of the citizen.

When they earn money, private companies pay politicians to stay far away. But as soon as something may be a threat to their future profitability, they will make friend, asking "to be protected". As a representative of the citizens, not the companies, you should not enter this game. Why?

Firstly because the evolution is unavoidable

Like it or not, the changes you are trying to avoid are already here. You can fight against them and make the transition longer and harder. That's all you will ever gain. It is like building a wall in the middle of a river. At best, you will be able to stop the flow for a few moments. But the water will eventually find its way around your barrier. That means flood, damages. Adapt yourself to the river and let it flow, everything will be easier.

Secondly because it is an economic disaster

Saving jobs or avoiding job loss is only a temporary measure. If the job doesn't pay for itself now, nothing will make it more profitable in the future. You are investing money and effort in a black hole. As a politician, remember that you are not playing with your own money, you are spending the money of your citizens. Your responsibility is to invest in something profitable for all your citizens. True, investing a lot to save some jobs for a few months might make a few votes. Is being re-elected your only political vision?

Thirdly because it is not ethic

Do you think that we should keep death penalty in order not to put the executioner out of a job? Extreme example? What about saving the planet? Why do we still hear that ecology should be balanced with the economy? If there is no planet, there will be no economy anymore.

By trying to "save jobs", you are hindering the natural evolution of the society. New companies, new business models, young entrepreneurs are directly hurt by your attempt at "saving jobs". It is a simple as that: despite all your good intentions, you are in fact destroying future jobs. A lot of businesses will never see the light because of your action.

Fourth, because it makes everyone's life a bit more difficult

Today's technology is wonderful. Administration and paperwork is a thing of the past. With very few investments, most procedures could be automatized, making everyone happy. But, guess what, we fear it. We are trying to make every step a bit more complicated to save the work of the guy putting useless stamps on a piece of paper.

This is mostly visible in public administrations but can be applied to most big organizations. The Luddite fear of "losing jobs" makes us rejecting everything that could make our lives easier. "We have always done like that" or "Everybody is doing that" are excuses, not arguments.

Last but not least, because jobs are not necessary.

Work is just one way of earning an income and having an income is only one way of living. Some people live perfectly happy without income. And, more importantly, a lot of people have an income without working. In fact, there are very few rich people that earn their income from their current work.

Younger generations are often considered lazy because they don't want to work as much as their older counterparts. The reality is that they only want to live more. With today's technology, they don't see why they should waste their time doing useless stuffs. Yes, they will work but only if they see that it is worth the effort, if it's for something they care about. And backyard digging is not one of their priorities.

Very often, you will hear concerned people saying that not everybody can be an engineer or an artist, that we also have to give some work to the "stupid" people. Just like the world could be separated between “smart-asses” and people that don't have more capabilities than a machine. This question is raised every day since the industrial revolution and, so far, we still exist, globally more prosperous than ever. Nevertheless, some politicians are working hard to make digging your backyard and filling it back mandatory, proud of their patronization for the “stupid” people.

Conclusion

Dear representative of the citizens, from now on, each time you will say “saving jobs”, you will think “making people dig their backyard and fill it back”. You know that anything which is only justified by the need "to save job" is against the interests of your citizens. Give people more freedom, more time, less stupid stuffs to do and high-value jobs will spontaneously appear. People are not stupid. They may seem so because we are giving them stupid backyard digging to do. If we stop, we will realize how creative the mankind can be. Have you never dreamt of a world without any boring or useless tasks?

And, when you think about it, aren't the "stupid" those who fight and invest in a lost cause? Don't forget that the more the technology evolves, the closer you are to seeing your actual work done by a machine. It is only a matter of time so start investing in the future now.

Pictures by Chiot's Run and Travis S.

Traduction francophone disponible

Getting Thing GNOME is alive (and released)!

Ploum — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:34:00 +0100

TLDR: GTG 0.2.9 has been released, spread the word!.

For those who don't know Getting Things GNOME yet, it is a todo manager. In fact, it is, to my knowledge, the only todo manager that :

has a clean and simple UI (see my French explanation to use GTG)
allows you to have infinite level of subtasks
to have the same task being the subtask of multiple parents
to easily classify your tasks with colours and tags
allows you to see only the task that can be done right now with the concept of workview
allows you to quickly enter a lot of tasks in a few keystrokes
has a DBus interface

As a result, gtg was in the Techradar's top 50 best Linux application of 2011 despite the lack of regular releases. It is probably packaged as "gtg" in your distribution so it is probably better that you try by yourself.

For the last year, I've been often asked if GTG was dead, if we planned to release something new.

This is my fault and I apologize for such a long dead time. I could explain you all the oddities GTG went through but it is not interesting. I will talk you a bit more about the solution we created when the liblarch documentation will be finished. The good news is that GTG is not dead and that we have been actively working on it in the last two years, including some wonderful GSoC.

Izidor, my GSoC student, is now the co-maintainer of GTG and released 0.2.9 today. Last week, he came from Germany to Belgium to sleep with my cat, enjoy the Frozdem (Frozen Fosdem) and, as a side effect, polish all the little details that would make 0.2.9 a rocking release.

Why 0.2.9 ? That's the bad news part! Mainly because the "backends" feature, which allows you to store/retrieve your task from an external source, is still very unstable and most of the backends had to be disabled for the release. But don't worry, we want to stick to a much shorter release cycle and bring a polished 0.3 in a few weeks. I hope I will learn from mistakes of the past.

Nevertheless, let's celebrate the first release in nearly two years. Please share the news, package GTG, report bugs, help us, follow us on G+ and spread the word.

By the way, we are looking for a communication manager/webmaster and a Django/CSS/JS hacker to work with us on a GTG web interface. If you want to join a cool project with an insane potential, contact me!

FlattrStat, a small statistic tool for Flattr

Ploum — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:58:00 +0100

I'm a big fan of Flattr. But I find it hard to have some statistics about your things that have been flattered.

On my Flattr account, I receive flatts for both my blog and for Getting Things GNOME!. But I want to keep a clear separation. There are multiple persons now involved in GTG and they deserve part of the money (we will use that to buy beers at FOSDEM).

Also, on my own blog, I was interested to know which posts where the more successful, speaking of revenue. I knew that, so far, this post had the most clicks but I had no idea which one received the most money (for the curious, it is that one).

In order to do that, I quickly wrote FlattrStat, a python script. You need to download all the csv files from flatr, put them in a folder then run the script with "python flattrstat.py".

It will outputs the total clicks and revenues for each domain separately and, for each domain, sort all your things from the most successful to the least one.

Ideally, it should download the CSV files automatically and have a nice GUI but I don't really need that. It was for my own needs but I realize that it might be useful to someone else. So, feel free to use it or to contribute, it is under the WTFPL license.

FlattrStat on GitHub

Why I'm a Pirate!

Ploum — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:56:00 +0100

Traduction française

Dear copyright industry, I'm a pirate. I'm the typical user you are fighting. I'm downloading everything and not giving you one single penny. I don't even attend concert. You hate me and it's reciprocal.

When I discovered high-speed Internet, I was a naive young innocent. I was downloading to discover new stuffs. Whenever I liked something, I would go to the shop and buy the CD. I discovered lot of music thanks to the pirate networks. Randomly or following advices. In the end, I bought something like 200 CDs. The first group I've joined on Audioscrobbler was called "I still buy CDs". But today I regret that. I'm asking everyone to not buy CD any more. Not a single one !

Because you are not offering a good service

When I want to discover an artist or a movie, I'm heading to The Pirate Bay, I launch a search and I click. In less than 10 minutes, I've a full movie on my disk. In 20, I've the complete discography of an artist.

I would pay for such a service if it is as simple, as fast and, unlike the Bay, if it can make some guarantees on the quality. But you don't offer that. Instead, you are trying to build fences and limitations. You are asking for huge amount of money only through credit card and you don't have half the music I'm looking for. That's not convenient and it's more expensive.

I don't even talk about CDs any more. This is now only a huge quantity of plastic waste, sitting in my living room. They are expensive, they become unreadable through the years or, thanks to DRM, they are unreadable since the first day.

In summary, you are offering less for a more expensive price.

Because you don't use my money well

I've probably spent something like 2000€ for my CDs. You need to add the taxes on all the blank CDs I used to burn Linux iso. From that money, how much went to the artists and their studio? 100€? 200€? Everything else was probably diluted in stuffs I don't need: packaging, distribution, transport, marketing, …

Your companies are in the top richest ones. The artists that are the most downloaded live in huge luxury houses. Others are dead. Don't you find it a bit shameful to try the "bad pirates are killing the poor artists" story?

I'm sorry but I don't think you need my money. I've showed my support to small artists with Flattr, Jamendo, CDbaby or Magnatune. For everything else, you will have to live without my wallet.

Because you are messing with my life

That's it. Every penny I will give you will be used against me. Firstly, by making it difficult for me to use what I buy. Zoned DVDs, encrypted movies on the DVD requiring illegal software to be read under Linux or DRM to be sure I'm not able to listen to a CD.

Worst, you will use my money to sue me in court because I would have downloaded something that I didn't want to buy anyway! With the change left, you will pay lobbyists to ensure the governments make stupid and dangerous laws.

Do you want me to pay lawyers to sue myself and lobbyists to make laws to send me in jails? Really?

Because you are destroying the whole society

Messing with my life was not enough. You are even trying to destroy one of the pillar of our society: education. Your heavy marketing is starting to work, people now understand the importance of "intellectual property" and that "sharing is bad".

Bloody ignorant morons.

Thanks to you, schools are now afraid to give lectures in case there are some copyrighted materials in them. Teachers fear to be sued. To the point where giving the strictly minimal lesson is better than giving some examples. Famous works are not part of the education any more.

Some teachers themselves start to consider their lectures as "copyrighted material", refusing to share it with colleagues. And when they attend training sessions, offered by the state and paid with public funds, it is to hear that the material of the session can be read but has to be bought if the teachers want to use them in their own classroom.

You are destroying the very symbol of civilisation: the enjoyment of knowledge, the joy of sharing, the cooperation and the education. I will never forgive you for that. Never. If I'm not taking action right now, my children will be more afraid of reading a copyrighted book than stealing in a shop or hitting someone with a knife. Those crimes are anyway less punished by the law than sharing a song on the internet.

How can you look at yourself in the mirror after that? How can you still have a peaceful sleep ?

Because your time has come

If I'm a pirate, it's not to have some cheap music. It is because the time has come for you to fuck off. In your arrogance, you are hurting the fundamental value of freedom only to save your little petty interests.

The only comfort is to know that you will disappear soon. And nobody will miss you.

Pirately yours,

Picture by arbyreed
Traduction française

The End of the Revolution

Ploum — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:49:00 +0100

Traduction en français disponible

Lot of people think that we are on the verge of a revolution, that the foundation of the society will be shaken. I don't think so.

For me, the revolution has already happened, we are at the end of a transition period. We need time to realize it but the changes are there, unavoidable.

The revolution I'm speaking about is well known under the name "industrial revolution". Started in the middle of the XIXth century, it became prominent with the launch of the Ford T in 1908. And ends today, with Internet and the worldwide network.

For ages, humans have worked. That work was, granting a few exceptions, mainly proportional to the final result. As a farmer cultivated more field, he had a better harvest. A craftsman was working more hour to produce more. As the money^[1] earned was directly proportional to the result, we could say that the more we work, the more we earn. One hour of work was roughly equivalent to a given sum of money.

The industrial revolution changes completely this paradigm. The price of a good becomes inversely proportional to the number of produced goods. If Henri Ford had produced only one Ford T, it would worth millions. But the more he was producing, the better the return was. To the point where buying a brand new good is often cheaper than repairing and existing one.

The industrial world is thus characterized by the desire to duplicate as much as possible in order to lower the unit price. This world is not directed by the direct production but by speculation. To launch a business, you need a complex estimation about when you will have a return on your initial investment. The more you produce, the richer you are. The richer you are, the more you can speculate and thus become even richer. Money attracts money, the society itself is directed toward speculation.

The funny side is that the first beneficiaries of this revolution don't want others to share the pie and try to convince everyone that the old rules still apply. Work is still paid by the hour, even though the principle itself is not founded any more and leads to hidden conflicts of interest.

It is also noteworthy that, even though the industrial revolution funding principle is to duplicate as much as you can, tools are created to avoid that very same duplication: Patents, intellectual property and, later, DRM. Depending on the context, duplication will be translated by production, growth or by counterfeiting, piracy.

Internet, digital products, globalisation and 3D printers are only the logical consequence of this duplication revolution. Duplication tools are cheap, easily accessible. Everyone can become a producer, everybody can benefit from the revolution and that's why we can say it has succeeded. Dear big manufacturers, being first granted you a lot of benefits during 150 years. Now please be kind enough to not fight against the unavoidable spread of your privileges.

That's it, we are entering the post-industrial era. I've no idea what it willlooks like. I will probably never know if we are currently living a new transition period of the founding of a big, Millennial Worldwide Society.

What I know is that the industrial era is coming to a end, that we need to redefine fundamentals like money, work, wealth, property, power. That those who took them for granted will not be happy. But who cares about them anyway ?

Pictures by ialla and danmachold
Traduction en français disponible

Note

[1] or related reward like food

Crosscompiling LibreOffice for Windows on Linux

Ploum — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:06:00 +0100

LibreOffice heads to become one of the most prominent Free Software in the desktop ecosystem. Despite an increasing trends towards alternatives, most of desktop users out there are using a Windows operating system. The implication is straightforward: most of LibreOffice users and potential users are running Windows.

On the other hand, most of LibreOffice developers are currently under Linux. Which means that early testing, nightly builds and debugging mostly happens on Linux.

This is a known problem in free cross-platforms software. Tristan Nitot, head of Mozilla Europe, explained several times that he was using Windows not as a choice but to experience what most of Firefox users are experiencing.

Without being as brave and dedicated as Tristan, there is still some way to improve the situation. The first one is to allow Linux developers to easily produce a Windows build from a Linux machine. It will make the Windows testing community feel like a first class-citizen, allowing them to catch bugs early and have access to automated nightly builds.

To achieve that, two steps are mandatory: cross-compiling and building the installer.

Cross-compiling

The LibreOffice community did an awesome job in order to make the project cross-compilable. I wrote a step-by-step guide to cross-compile LibreOffice on my wiki page. Everything was done on an OpenSuse 12.1 although it should not be hard to transpose it to other distribution.

Feedback is appreciated, especially on 64-bits installation.

Building the installer

Having the Windows binaries is not enough to do a good testing job. Indeed, LibreOffice is composed of hundred of files, scattered everywhere. In order to test it properly, you need to install LibreOffice with a proper installer.

LibreOffice comes as a MSI installer. Of course, building such an installer requires lot of Windows tools. The LibreOffice community then had this idea: why don't we use Wine to build a MSI from Linux?

This is a great idea and that's what Lanedo is currently working on. We are currently in the process of refactoring the whole MSI make process, in order to put every Windows specific call under one interface. The next step will be to implement that interface with Wine tools.

Stay tuned, I hope to have some good news for you in the coming weeks!

What happened during GSoC 2011?

Ploum — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 19:23:00 +0100

I know I'm very late, but I really wanted to talk about this year Google Summer of Code.

For the third year in a row, I was a mentor. And this year I have a huge deception to share. I'm really sad. This week, I'v received the GSoC 2011 t-shirt. They sent me the wrong size. XXXL. I can use it as a sleeping bag with my girlfriend. I'm really disappointed.

Hopefully, GSoC is not only about receiving a t-shirt. It is also about mentoring a student.

Nearly two years ago, I started working on a complete refactoring of GTG. The code was a mess, with a lot of duplicate everywhere, with two bugs appearing while you were trying to solve one, etc.

I abstracted the structure we were using in several places and started to write a library to handle those "Acyclical Directed Graphs". As usual, it appeared that development was taking longer than expected. Weeks turned into months. Then, when it started to look good, I discovered that I forgot one critical point: thread-awareness. I felt hopeless.

Because I didn't had the motivation to do that heavy work, I proposed it as a Summer of Code project to a very motivated student: Izidor Matušov^[1].

Words doesn't do any justice to the excellent work that Izidor did this summer. He's simply awesome. Some students are goods because they have previous experience. Izidor kicks asses. He learns so quickly, he's so assertive. The work was even harder than what we anticipated. But he managed to achieve everything, including feeding me with cookies at the Desktop Summit, where we met and had an awesome hacking week.

As much as I'm deceipted about the t-shirt, I'm delighted about the work achieved this summer. Izidor now knows GTG nearly as much as I do. He's taking initiatives, like organizing an online GTG hackfest on November 26th^[2] and he's a bug-answering machine.

Dear Google, GNOME foundation and Lanedo^[3], I would like to thank you. Thanks to your support:

I received a worthless piece of clothes that travelled half of the world in order to clean my cat's dirtiness.
GTG 0.2.9 should be released before the end of the year
GTG gained a new co-maintainer
I gained a new friend. And it probably worth everything else.

Congratulations, co-maintainer Izidor. And welcome to the community!

Notes

[1] Yes, I'm able to write his name correctly, thanks to my wonderful keyboard layout

[2] #GTG, on Gimpnet, during the whole day

[3] Lanedo paid for the travel, the accommodations and, as you can see on the picture, the clothes during the Desktop Summit

The aristocratic desktop (part 4) : Kill The Double Click

Ploum — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:17:00 +0100

Part 1 : Introduction
Part 2 : Home is Desktop
Part 3 : There's no tray icon in GNOME !
Part 4 : Kill The Double Click

When I started installing the best desktop possible for Marie and Jean, we were still in the GNOME 2.X era. GNOME 3 solved my previous concerns. No in the way I envisioned it, but solved them anyway. No more desktop icons, no more tray icons.

But now that I'm introducing Marie and Jean to GNOME 3, I still have some concerns. And one of that main concern is the infamous double-click!

Do you remember? Jean is a very brilliant mind, even though he never used a computer during his whole life. As a reasoning scientist, he was trying to find the logic behind my teaching.

During one of our first lesson, "Using the mouse", the conversation went like this:
— How do I know if I have to click or double click?
— Well, you double-click on icon and simple click on links and buttons.
— How do I know what is a button or an icon?
— …

Since that time, I've tried many times to find a logic behind single or double clicking. There is not. You have to learn it by experience. And it is totally, utterly pointless.

I also realized that a single click was something really hard for Jean. Achieving to click on a given point without moving the mouse is really hard for older people. Then, ask them to click twice, with a completely arbitrary speed, without moving the mouse, not to quickly, not to slowly. Impossible.

Marie, on her side, was double-clicking everywhere. And, surprisingly, it works most of the time.

So, why do we have double-click in some places? Because we want to be able to select an item without "activating" it. How often does it happen? Never for Jean. Very rarely for Marie.

To summarize, we are making the most frequent action very hard to nearly impossible in order to allow a very rare action?

I tried to disable completely the double-clicking in Nautilus.

Do you know what?

It works. Even for me. I had chronic pain in my hand and disabling double-click was a relief. I explained to Marie to never double-click anymore. She's still double-clicking from time to time but everything works even better than before. Jean was eventually able to launch a file from within Nautilus.

Selection of one or multiple file with single mouse click

What about selection of files? I explained to Marie to draw a square with the mouse. And, yes, she found that absolutely intuitive. The only drawback I found so far was the inconsistency with lists, where double-clicking is still required. Marie called me one day because she tried to play a specific song in Rhythmbox. It wasn't working. I realize that she had to double-click on the song. "But you told me to never double click anymore!". Sorry Marie.

I'm myself incredibly frustrated by any system that requires double-click. Why do we still have double-click by default in GNOME3?

Part 1 : Introduction
Part 2 : Home is Desktop
Part 3 : There's no tray icon in GNOME !
Part 4 : Kill The Double Click

Picture by Dave Dugdale

So long Ubuntu, and thanks for all the fish

Ploum — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 15:25:00 +0200

Disclaimer: this is a long and boring story about my life.

In the end of year 2003, under the Newtonmas tree, I found a new computer with a big flat screen. My heavily customized FVWM config being hardcoded for the resolution of my old monitor, I temporarily switched to GNOME 2.4, the default desktop of my distribution.

And never switched back since.

I thought that, as a geek, I wanted a heavily customized desktop. I realized that having something easy to use was relaxing. And that it allowed me to convert more people to Linux. To demonstrate, to experiment.

Nevertheless, the experience was far from perfect. There was a lot of rough edges. I took notes of everything that could be improved and published it on my personal wiki under the title: "Debian + Gnome = The Perfect Desktop".

This text has been lost for long but, from what I remember, I was discussing about different stuffs like making ESD completely transparent to the user, having the installation process be part of a live CD^[1], automatic download of codec when playing a media, having good default set of installed applications without any server stuffs.

To handle the packages, I did a huge list of Synaptic improvements^[2] but I said that Synaptic was too geekish, that a simpler Software Manager was needed, which would offer "software" and hide the package layer from the user. Each software would have a screenshot, a description and maybe users rating. But I dismissed this idea as too crazy because it would require a massive effort in translation.

Believe me or not, but I also considered that such a distribution should be time-based and in synchronization with GNOME. I wrote that releasing once a year would be perfect (thus missing every two release of GNOME) and having the year as the version number.

Following this text, I was contacted by the UserLinux project and joined the effort which didn't produced anything except a nice icon and lot of useless discussions.

Then, in July 2004, I was contacted because some people were really interested by my text. I was asked to test a secret project called "no-name-yet" and I joined a mailing-list called "Warty Warthog". In August and September, I did some heavy testing, burning a new CD and installing that new OS every day.

In October 2004, Ubuntu was publicly announced. It has naked people as the default wallpaper and it was brown. The Linux world had kind of mixed feelings. To convince the French-speaking community, I created a FAQ on my own wiki. That FAQ evolved and, for a few weeks, was the "nearly official source of information in French about Ubuntu". Then some more motivated folks decided to set a real ubuntu-fr website and the content of my modest wiki was migrated there.

I was completely enthusiastic about Ubuntu. When I look back, I realize that Ubuntu achieved what I envisioned. Really. Even my "Software Manager" dream became true. Most of the work has not been done by Ubuntu itself but, in my humble opinion, Ubuntu managed to launch a trend. Before Ubuntu, a typical Linux Newbie forum was something like:

I compiled mplayer with some GCC optimisation but now I've a segmentation fault when playing MPEG files. Could it be the consequence of the optimisation or a bad linking ?

A few years after Ubuntu, a typical Linux newbie forum was:

Can I haz a wallpaper on my desktop pliz? I want to change it lool!

Isn't that an achievement?

But, after seven years of Ubuntu, I'm becoming tired. I envisioned something really close to Debian and, I think, it was more or less the case in the first years. Gradually, patches became more and more important. Because of the very short time between releases, Ubuntu developers hadn't the time to properly send the patches upstream, at least not as much as I would like. In my eyes, the Ubuntu community started to become a "groupie" community, closed on itself, discussing less and less with upstream and cheering itself for not-so-extraordinary stuffs.

Quality became an issue with 8.04. Bugs were simply dismissed, even some which were, I consider, critical. Lately, I've been receiving hundred of mails for bugs I reported months ago, all of them because they were filled against a version of Ubuntu now at the end of its support cycle.

And then, at UDS Brussels, Mark unveiled Unity. I remember exactly that second. At the moment he announced Unity, my instinctive reaction was "facepalm". What is he thinking? Developing a prototype like that is quick, fun and nice. But maintaining it for years, fixing annoying bugs, integrating it with the ecosystem is another story.

With Unity, GNOME became a second class citizen. And as a GNOME fan before all, I was not comfortable with that. I honestly tried Unity but was not satisfied by the result. I'm still not convinced that Unity was needed^[3]. Not to add the fact that you have to sign copyright assignment to contribute to Unity or any Canonical project like Bazaar.

Let be honest: for me, Ubuntu has its peak. Now, we are starting the very long fall. Why am I staying with Ubuntu? Mainly for historical purpose. And because of the habits engraved in my keyboard.

That last point definitely convinced me to try something else. You have to put yourself out of your zone of comfort from time to time. You have to go out in the cold.

Because I still want to stay kind of mainstream, I did choose two main distributions: OpenSuse and Fedora. Both have a vivid community and are huge contributors to GNOME. I will spend two or three weeks under both of them. After nine years using exclusively Apt, I expect some hard times^[4].

After that, I will eventually make my choice or decide to come back to my hated/beloved Ubuntu. If anyone is interested, I may publish some feedback here.

Let's start with that greenish stuff pushed on me by a crazy penguin and a mad hacker…

Notes

[1] At the time, only Morphix was doing that. Even Knoppix was not installable

[2] and, to my astonishment, I received a great feedback from the developers who implemented all my suggestions in only a few weeks

[3] Could some tweaks to GNOME-Shell produce a similar result?

[4] and I'm not alone

One year of LibreOffice

Ploum — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:13:00 +0200

Not so long ago, OpenOffice.org was the less attractive project of the Linux ecosystem. You would need it, you would use it daily but you would not think it was possible to contribute to that project or to improve it in any way.

It was a necessary pile of spaghetti code from the eighties that only Michael Meeks was able to understand. He was even spending every FOSDEM trying to convince you that compiling OpenOffice was not so bad, that it took only a couple of weeks and a few terabytes of hard disk.

Then, in only one year, multiple things happened:

OpenOffice.org was forked into LibreOffice
Lanedo, my employer, started to offer services around LibreOffice.
The first LibreOffice Conference took place in Paris.

The achievements of this year are amazing.

LibreOffice managed to build a strong and really friendly community. The conference was packed by awesome people and I immediately felt welcomed.
Michael Meeks did a demo of LibreOffice OnLine (Lool), a version of LibreOffice displayed in your browser thanks to GTK+3 and its Broadway backend.
The Région Île-de-France announced that they will ship hundred of thousands of USB keys with LibreOffice to their students. They will be shipped with an extension that allows direct access to their own cloud server. That extension was developed by Lanedo and I'm proud to be part of this project.
Other personal achievement: I gave a talk about Usability in LibreOffice which resulted in an afternoon-long meeting with insanely great usability guys. I'm really delighted to see that usability will soon become a major concern of LibreOffice.

UX team improving usability of LibreOffice

But let's not stop there. There are many more stuffs for the future:

Work will happen on an Iphone and Android port of LibreOffice.
Compiling LibreOffice under Linux is easier those days (and I will gladly help anyone who want to give it a try). But Windows is another story, even though most of LibreOffice users are using it. Let's face it: building, testing and debugging LO on Windows is time-consuming and slow down the whole project. As a consequence, The Document Foundation and Lanedo decided to join their effort to improve this situation. I will cover our progress on this blog. Not that I'm particularly impatient to get my hand filthy with Windows mud but, hey, it has to be done!

If there were a TPS report, it would be great!

The conclusion of all of this is that contributing to LibreOffice is not as hard as you would think. And that I'm already impatient to attend next year's conference.

Proposal for a decentralized and open online payment protocol

Ploum — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:21:00 +0200

During the year 2005-2006, I became a decentralization whore. I realized that, with XMPP, nearly anything could be decentralized. With one exception: online payment. Paypal was highly successful but also highly centralized. Was it possible to build a decentralized version of Paypal? I came with a solution which involved web of trust and shared debts around a virtual currency, which is more or less a kind of solution that the Ripple project is exploring. I thought that it was too impractical and not really appealing. I forgot that solution and the problem stayed in some obscure part of my brain.

Then I discovered Bitcoin. And I realized that my mistake was to consider the value of my virtual money as granted and as linked with a fiat currency. Bitcoin was the decentralized Paypal, someone did it!

Now, after a few months using Bitcoin, I'm not so sure anymore. Bitcoin suffers from to many problems, which are all usability related. In short, it was conceived by a geek.

First of all, it is impossible to grasp the concept of bitcoin easily. When I see comments on my posts about bitcoins, I realize that most people simply don't understand what it is. It is way too abstract. It is also a pain to use: you cannot send a message with your payment, you have to copy/paste long strings of random characters. I don't even talk about accepting bitcoins in a real-life situation: both parties should have a laptop with them and do all the operations on the fly while waiting for the network to send confirmations.

Because usability is poor, security is bad. People don't understand what they are doing and have their bitcoins stolen by malwares and viruses. Not to mention people losing bitcoins by sending them at a bad address or crashing their hard drive. Not to mention the fact that buying bitcoins is complex. You have to find your way through the jungle of bitcoin exchanges like TradeHill, Bitcoin7 or bitmarket while listenning to horror stories about MtGox.

Bitcoins users are happy, indeed, but they live on an island. Bitcoin is not the decentralized Paypal I was hoping for. But could we use Bitcoin to build a decentralized transaction solution?

Yes. Definitely. I called that "Bitcoin banks", although the term might be inappropriate. In the following paper, I describe how a "Bitcoin bank" should work, allowing to send money directly to your mail address thanks to Webfinger (something I already discussed before).

In the shorter term, implementing such a bitcoin bank would mean solving most usability concerns. It will allow people to accept bitcoins without the risk of losing value and put all the security efforts on a professional service, not on the end user. As a nice bonus, it could effortlessly decentralize the exchange market. It also has many other scary implications and I'm probably missing most of them. Yes, it might completely change our society, making the banks a simple useful services without the power they currently have.

So, please read and give me your opinion. If you are willing to implement such a service, don't hesitate to contact me. This could really be the next big thing. I also hope that it would appeal to people behind OpenTransactions or Flexicoin. It might even be compatible with Bitcoin's alternatives like Open UDC.

Description of a Bitcoin Banking system (PDF - 75ko)

I plan to release the document under a simple CC By license after some more work. In the mean time, donations are appreciated at 15SCCTDK9xcZyKFWXsPRXYS9s1m3Mikcxs.

Picture credit: las - initially and Jonas Hansel

Elections 2011: fostering the GNOME commercial ecosystem

Ploum — Mon, 30 May 2011 12:36:00 +0200

During last Fosdem, I bumped into Joaquim Rocha, from Igalia.
— I heard that you joined Lanedo, he told me with a bright smile. Congratulations!
— Well, thanks, I replied. I guess we are competitors now.
— Not really. There is plenty of room for everybody.

For days, his simple and direct answer stayed in my mind. Coming from the very conservative automotive industry, I still had some old aggressive reflex that I needed to get rid of.

In the traditional industry, Free Software is often considered as a geekish toy. Managers are eager to point at the danger of relying on a project that could be abandoned. And because Free Software are often not developed by a given company, they assume that there is no commercial support available.

GNOME is a typical example. It is a project mostly run by a non-profit organization, most of the work seems to be done by volunteers and there is no official GNOME commercial support. This is definitely not a serious project, unlike Lotus Notes or other boring but serious stuffs.

You and me know that this is only a perception problem. GNOME is a very high quality project, a lot of companies are selling professional support for the different GNOME technologies and it is used is a number of commercial products.

But this bad perception keeps a lot of potential users away. It means less market opportunities for GNOME companies and less visibility in the industry.

Joaquim's answer made me realize that we were not forced to accept this situation. We can break that vicious circle. Yes, we can!^[1]

Fostering the GNOME commercial market should be, in my opinion, one major role of the GNOME board of directors^[2]. But, as I discovered quickly, there was no representative of the GNOME companies on the board. Members were either independent or from those bigger companies using GNOME in their products.

I decided to tackle the problem and to stand for election on the GNOME board of directors. If you are a GNOME foundation member, don't forget to vote before Monday June 13th! Even if you are not really interested by the subject, please take the time to read candidacies instead of just voting for names you recognize.

Personnaly, I stand to represent GNOME professional providers. Not only Lanedo but all of those wonderful GNOME companies, existing or yet to come^[3].

There is a myriad of potential customers waiting around the corner, from very small companies wanting a quick bug fix or a small customization to the biggest phone makers who want to use GNOME in their products.

If I'm elected, I will work to ensure a better visibility to all the GNOME providers. I will foster the GNOME market by giving a more professional image, highlighting existing commercial support.

I would also like to promote the GNOME entrepreneurship state of mind, improving cooperation and communication between GNOME companies and, why not, helping in the creation of new GNOME related businesses.

This is a vision, of course, I don't except all of that to be achieved in one year. Anyway, I believe that fostering the GNOME ecosystem will create many business opportunities, will allow the creation of multiple GNOME jobs and will vastly improve the promotion of GNOME in the industry.

As Joaquim said: There's plenty of room for everybody!

PS: I'm pleased to see the candidacies of Ryan Lortie (Codethink), Andre Klapper (Openismus) and Diego Escalante Urrelo (Igalia) which are also working for GNOME companies. As you have multiple votes, nothing prevents you to vote for all four of us :-)

Picture credits: Ward and David Hepworth 1 - 2

Notes

[1] Since 2008, this obviously has to be posted in any election related post. Not to be taken too seriously.

[2] excerpt for the Foundation website : The Foundation will act as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software.

[3] After all, I didn't sign my Lanedo contract with my blood. Nobody can predict the future: Lanedo could disappear, I could leave Lanedo. But one thing is sure: GNOME will stay and it is my interest to make the GNOME market stronger than ever.

Open Discussion Day 2011 : Why Decentralization Matters

Ploum — Wed, 18 May 2011 23:10:00 +0100

Traduction française disponible

A boy that was just discovering Internet once asked me: “I'm wondering, where is located the content of Internet?”. I considered it as a silly question but, in fact, it is the most crucial question about the Internet.

And to answer it, why not celebrate the Open Discussion Day this Thursday like every May 19th since 2006?

Some people say that Internet was made to be able to sustain an atomic bombing. I find the solution incredibly beautiful: decentralization. Internet doesn't have a center or a major node. It is only a lot of interconnected computers. A bomb could destroy some of them, the network would still be there. Of course, some website would be offline but without major impact on the others.

One of the key aspect of a decentralized network is an open protocol. Indeed, you want to allow anyone to join the network without any prerequisite. We need a language that anyone is able to learn.

Today, we fear a bit less a nuclear attack. But should we care less about decentralization?

Centralized communication means that everything could be controlled by one given authority. And today, it's often a private company. Facebook messages, MSN chats, Skype: you are maybe using centralized services yourself. Ant it matters:

You depend on the company willingness to provide its service. If they want to change their terms of service to something unacceptable, you are screwed.
A huge part of your private life is offered to those companies for free. They can use it at will. People tend to minimize that fact because it is quite disturbing.
A given company could decide to block all your messages or messages about a given topic. Not a big deal? In some troubled times, it does.
You have no control over your own informations. Not happy? Wanting to change? You cannot, all your friends are there!
You are encouraging your friends to join the network, making it even more powerful.
If you have contacts on different networks, you have to make an account on all those networks. Of course, they see interoperability as a disease!
Last but not least, it reinforces the big players and other monopolistic companies, which is a pity for small innovating businesses.

In order to be spread the word about decentralized networks and open protocols, May 19th is usually called the Open Discussion Day.

During one day, you are invited to use only decentralized services and open protocols. It means using preferably emails, XMPP, Google Chat, SIP and many others. On the black list for that day: Skype, MSN, Facebook messages and attachements .docs.

For a more hardcore experience, don't use Twitter or Facebook but only Diaspora and Status.net. The die hard fans will spend only bitcoins as even money is centralized.

One of the last centralized bit of the Internet is probably the DNS protocol. That's why I'm really excited to see a (very experimental) decentralized replacement: Namecoin.

I wish you an excellent Open Discussion Day. Don't hesitate to join our Identi.ca group.

Pictures credits: FredArt, Cap21Photo and olympi

Traduction française disponible

Emacs Intosh

Ploum — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:06:00 +0100

It always astonished me that pressing an apparently random combination of several keys, including a "Meta" one, is called a "shortcut".

The Bitcoin Bubble

Ploum — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:05:00 +0100

Currency is a way for people to exchange value. By itself, the currency does not have a real value. It only carries the symbolic value that people want to put in it. Try to pay with gold or euro in a Papuan tribe and you will understand what I mean.

In order to keep this value to a certain level, the currency should be scarce. The first solution was to use naturally scarce elements like gold. In a more modern way, a central authority "emit" the currency in a limited quantity. To avoid counterfeit money, a bunch of technical measures are taken, including a serial number. You can see those measure on any modern banknote.

But the money becomes increasingly virtual. For most of us, our salary is only a number on a computer screen. One might ask: how to avoid counterfeit money if it's only a number in a computer?

It's indeed a very hard problem. To tackle it, the central authority is constantly watching banks and institutions. There are central regulations. And do you know what? The system is producing counterfeit money anyway but in a legal way. Banks lend more money than what they own. It is easy: just adding some number on a computer. The quantity is regulated by the law but it is counterfeit money anyway.

As we see, virtual money cannot work without a central institution ensuring that there is no double-spending.

Here comes bitcoin. Bitcoin is a free software and a peer-to-peer network when every participant hold a certain number of mathematical objects. Thanks to some cryptographic algorithms, the network ensures that a given mathematical object belongs to one and only one participant. Participants are of course free to exchange those objects, called bitcoins, between themselves.

Without the need for a central authority, bitcoins are in limited quantity and cannot be counterfeit. If only they had some value, we could use them as money.

Wait!

As we said, money has value only because people are willing to accept it against goods. As soon as someone is willing to accept bitcoins for goods, work or anything else, bitcoins start to have a value.

And this is clearly what is happening right now: some people accept bitcoins for webhosting, sextoys or aikido lessons.

The more stuffs you might buy with bitcoin, the more value a bitcoin has.

Anticipating this trend, some people are buying bitcoins now thinking that bitcoin value will raise in the future. As there's a lot of demand to buy bitcoin, the value of bitcoin raise ever more. You probably know that principle: it's called speculation.

In less than 10 months, the bitcoin raised from 0,01€ to nearly 1,3€. But how much of this value is due to the market and how much is due to speculation? What will happen in the future?

There are three possible scenarios: infinite expansion, stable universe or big crunch.

The infinite expansion

That's what die-hard bitcoin fans are expecting. More and more people accept bitcoins as payment, bitcoin value raises a lot in the coming years before stabilizing when it becomes the official money for the entire planet. Governments tries to ban bitcoins to keep their own local economic power but fail to do so.

It looks like a very improbable scenario but, who knows?

The big crunch

Like every speculative bubble, it inflates, it inflates until someone wakes up one morning and thinks: "What am I doing? I've spent all my savings into virtual mathematical objects! Let's sell that quickly". As people start to sell, prices decrease. Seeing the decrease, those with the biggest shares panic and think "I've to sell quickly before everyone else" and prices go down at an insane rate. It might look completely stupid but if people are doing that with startups, why not with bitcoins? Hence came the .com era and the trend to buy for billions companies that don't even have a business model (who said Twitter?).

It could also happen in a more subtle way: people start to get bored. They have enough sextoys and aikido lessons, they don't see what to do with all bitcoins they have. They sell.

The flat universe

Where goes the money in case of a crash? For the .com crash, money was spent paying the rent, the employees and the subcontractors. This money cannot be returned, of course. People worked for you, they were paid. The fact that you asked them to do useless stuffs is not their problem.

With bitcoin, the situation is slightly different in the sense that there's little money actually spent. It means that, if bitcoin explodes as a bubble, there will still be the exact amount of money^[1]. In an ideal world, everybody will sell at more or less the price he bought. In the real world, some will be richer, some will be poorer but there will be some kind of balance.

Having a minimal risk makes a panic less likely to happen. Most of people who buy bitcoins are doing it in a reasonable range. Losing all their bitcoins right now would not be more annoying than losing their wallet. When an Aikido teacher accept a student for bitcoins, it's only one more student. Not a big risk.

Once the speculative bubble pops out, it is certain that prices will decrease, allowing bitcoin detractors to call it a failure or a ponzi scheme^[2]. Some will even lose some money, some will earn a lot.

But, in the end, bitcoin market will stabilize itself. The bitcoin community is here to stay, exchanging goods between themselves. At which rate? At which size?

That's a good question. If I only had the slightest idea, I would be buying/selling bitcoins right now.

But there's one thing I'm sure: who would have guessed, in 1887, that Esperanto would be spoken by millions of people? Who would have guessed in 1991 that Linux would have more than 1% market share on desktop computers? That XMPP would be widely used despite MSN/ICQ domination only a few years ago?

If you liked the article, tips are welcome on the following bitcoin address: 18khU9QhmxoSsLpjj3jWYMmdvS9zrTS4WT

If you want to try to earn some bitcoin, please offer your services against bitcoin. You certainly have some talents that people need.

Pictures credits: silly_a1804, epsos.de, melisdramatic

Notes

[1] except some electricity fees

[2] despite the fact that speculation has nothing to do with a ponzi scheme, it is now usual for any economy illiterate to call anything that involves risks a ponzi scheme. If you can lose money, it's ponzi. First, you have to explain them than Ponzi is not a pasta brand.

Visionary

Ploum — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:07:00 +0100

"Believe my investor experience Mr Young Visionary, nobody will ever be interested by a camera embedded into a phone!"