jmbuser

What I like about being involved in the Fedora Project, after many years of being a consumer of free and open software, is the opportunity to give something back to the community, to be, in a small way, a producer.

My profession for a very long time has been as an ICT Consultant. I've been paid to produce and maintain applications for clients, manage complex projects, and educate people in the use of technology.

Information and communications technology, or ICT, has undergone incredible changes in over the past few decades.

Computers are no longer confined to glass rooms in large enterprises, and communications has never been the same since the Internet and, especially, the World Wide Web.

Access to computers 25 years ago was a rare privilege; today, it is almost commonplace. I remember working on applications by coding on paper, and changing a few lines of code via batch update. Now, I can download entire Linux distributions and open source applications, read the code and modify it as I wish, with few restrictions. Now I can actually own a computer, the hardware and the software.

Access to information was mainly through printed manuals and books, purchased at great price. Now, I can use an internet search engine, locate volumes of information of varying quality, and even create and modify information myself. I can do this from just about anywhere on a variety of devices, ranging from SMS texts to sophisticiated multimedia presentations.

What is even more amazing is that, while ICT is definitely a noble profession, with its own expert subject matter, terminology and disciplined approaches, ICT is also a passion, not just for professional practitioners like me, but for people like my son, who most likely will pursue another line of work.

My hope for the future is that ICT continues to be transformed into a source of positive change for society, rather than merely a sophisticated way of taxing people for processing data and communicating, accessible only to the affluent and privileged few.

One of the best ways to do this is to provide people with the tools for change for the good. The Fedora Project, along with other FOSS communities, does this well. With these freely available tools, people can be producers as well as consumers.

Recently, Red Hat sent a "cease-and-desist" letter to the DataPortability Group concerning the similarity of its logo to the Fedora Project's logo. This action was made known to several online technical news sites such as TechCrunch. See the article "Logo War: Red Hat Takes On DataPortability"

Here's my perspective on the controversy.

First of all, I am not a lawyer (IANAL). I am writing this as a person who is an unpaid volunteer with one group, Fedora Project, who is trying to understand the motivations of another group of individuals, DataPortability.

How do I go about doing this?

1. I read their charter.

2. I read the group's forums here and here .

3. I see their affiliation with Identity Commons (IDC).

4. I see that the Data Portability Group is in the process of organizing itself as an officially recognized working group within ID Commons.

My conclusion is that this is a well-intentioned group of men and women who just happened to pick a logo similar to the Fedora Project logo. No malice or intentional confusion was intended, and many in the group would be more than happy to adopt another logo. Some even volunteered to design a new one.

One individual decided to publicize the "cease-and-desist" letter from Red Hat. This resulted in the article on Tech Crunch. I understand that it is upsetting to get such a notice. I also understand that Red Hat must protect its logos and trademarks from infringement. All major companies must do the same thing.

I hope cooler heads prevail. I actually agree with the aims of the ID Commons and Data Portability Group.

I wish them all the best. I might even join.

As I was doing online housekeeping chores today, like revising my Linkedin account, I realized that it's been exactly one year since I began blogging.

The main reason I began writing a blog was to help publicize some of the great things going on in the world of free and open software, especially in the Fedora Project. I actually joined the Fedora Project 6 months earlier, but it took me a while to see the value of keeping a web log. Now I wonder why it took me so long.

I've made some great friends while volunteering with the Fedora Docs Project, and more recently, with the Fedora Ambassadors. My blog chronicles some of the interesting events of the last year. To list them here would be redundant, but I will mention just one.

One of the high points for me of the last 365 days was the time in September when I helped organize and take part in GITEX 2007 in Dubai. It was challenging and fun demonstrating Fedora 7 and the OLPC laptop to the crowds. Red Hat did a great job representing FOSS at one of the world's largest commercial exhibitions. It was a privilege to share the booth with them and I'm glad to have Red Hat as Fedora's corporate sponsor.

I could list many more, but if you want to find out more, you'll have to read my blog.

I put "new" in quotes in the title because Publican, the documentation publisher, was formerly known as Documentation-Devel inside the Red Hat Documentation Group. As stated below, it has been in use for several years and is enhanced to include additional branding options.

This package goes a long way towards fulfilling my personal desire for "FOSS Docs the FOSS Way". A special "Thank you" goes to Jeff Fearn and the other Red Hat Documentation team members.

Read the announcement in full below:

>From Brian Forte:

Brisbane, Queensland, 2008/02/14 -- Red Hat Engineering Content Services is pleased to announce Publican, a new publishing package.

Publican -- which has been used by Red Hat's Documentation Group for almost two years -- takes DocBook XML input and outputs HTML, plain Unicode text and PDF. This output can be branded with the following brands: Fedora, Red Hat, and JBoss. A default, generic brand is also included. Further brands can be added, either by request, or by direct customisation. (To request an additional brand, submit a bug via <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/>. Submit the bug against the "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" product, and the "publican" component.)

But "make html" and "make pdf" are, perhaps, the least of Publican. What makes Publican worth announcing are "create_book" and "make dist-srpm".

"create_book" does what the command name implies: it creates a directory of the XML files you need to start writing a book or article using DocBook XML as well as a ready-to-roll Makefile for outputting HTML, text and PDF.

"make dist-srpm" takes a book, turns it into a tarball, adds an appropriate specfile and then wraps the whole thing up into a src.rpm. This makes it easy to incorporate documentation into the standard distribution build chain.

Publican is being incorporated into the Fedora tree in the coming days and weeks. To learn more, members of the Publican development and documentation team will be answering questions in #fedora-docs on irc.freenode.net on Thursday 2008/02/14 from 12:00 Australian Eastern Standard Time (2008/02/14 02:00 UTC/GMT; 2008/02/14 IST; 2008/02/13 22:00 American EDT; 2008/02/13 19:00 American PDT).

Thanks to Murray for posting this originally.

As mentioned in the above announcement, the meeting was held as scheduled on 14 February 2008 at 0200 hours UTC. Here is the IRC Log and the IRC Log in HTML.

See this wiki page for more details on Publican, including how to install the interim packages.

Okay, so I missed it by a day.

Bruce Perens published the Open Source Definition on 9 February, 1998

He commemorates the event in " State of Open Source Message: A New Decade For Open Source".

This is a great article and should be read in its entirety by anyone who appreciates Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

Two quotes reflect FOSS today:

Quote #1 - The Good News, or the Reason to Celebrate

"Had you asked me in on that day in 1998 how far I thought this phenomenon would go, I would not have come close to predicting the success that exists today. As we enter decade one, Free Software / Open Source is mainstream. Indeed, we are the leader in many business computing categories."

Quote #2 - The Bad News, or the Challenge Ahead

"There are also running suits against a component of JBoss (Red Hat is the defendant), and against the ClamAV anti-virus software (Panda [?] and Barracuda [integrator] are defendants) for the "invention" of integration of virus checking into email transfers.

At this point I don't need to re-iterate the evils of software patenting. That story has been well-told. But it's notable that Open Source is not the only entity that is threatened by software patents. Any small or medium-sized business - meaning any company with less than 1000 employees - is at risk, and has common cause with Open Source on this issue. But small and medium sized enterprises haven't been sufficiently educated on this issue. That must now change."

Happy Birthday, FOSS! And a special thank you to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds.

I am currently reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman.

I find myself agreeing with most sections of the book, since I am currently working overseas. For me, the world is undeniably flat.

"Flatness" is essentially the condition where modern broadband communications, especially the Internet, and global transportation, make every person connected to the World Wide Web a potential competitor. I prefer to think of these people as potential collaborators.

Many times in his book, Mr. Friedman quotes people he considers authorities in the field of information technology, my chosen field. He views the honorable Bill Gates as particularly insightful. Sorry, but I beg to differ. This is the man who almost missed the Internet and has difficulty grasping the power and revolutionary nature of free and open source software.

To his credit, despite his predictively upbeat portrayal of globalization, Mr. Friedman does see its down side as well as the up side. This is the reason I can continue to read this book and gain from his insights.

I plan to explore some of the themes in the book from my own vantage point in future blog entries.

In the 10 January 2008 article in Linux Journal, Linux Magazine’s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008, to no one's surprise, Red Hat is among the featured twenty.

I especially liked the following observation:

"We also feel it's worth noting that Red Hat has made some tremendous strides in its community relations with the Fedora Project. (See our interview with Max Spevack in this issue.) Once solely regarded as a beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) we think that Fedora has come into its own as an independent distribution over the last few releases."

Congratulations to Paul Frields on becoming the new Fedora Project leader.

Max Spevack made the official announcement less than an hour ago.

The Fedora Project has really come a long way under Max's leadership. I've worked with Paul as part of the Fedora Documentation Project and I'm convinced that Paul is the right person to keep the momentum going.

On the occasion of Matthew Szulik stepping down, and James Whitehurst assuming the role as CEO of Red Hat, Matthew has posted a message in Red Hat News. The message is worth reading in its entirety. However, one particular paragraph resonates strongly with me:

"As a leader of people, you search within your core to find a genuine common thread that exists to unite and inspire a multi racial, multi ethnic, mixed gender, global community called Red Hat. You attempt to create a culture of open mindedness and respect for diversity. You seek out those who believe that for any democracy to continue, free and unfettered access to information is an unassailable condition for advancement."

I see this as very relevant to the Fedora Project as well as Red Hat.

Congratulations to Mr. Szulik on his new position as Chairman of the Board and Mr. Whitehurst on becoming Red Hat's new CEO.

Spotted in the comments section of the Linux Journal article, "Putting Linux in Perspective" by Phil Hughes.

Anonymous comment:

"Just another data point. Coherent 3.0 for a 286 was $99 around 1990. Quite some way down from the $500. And the 1000+ page documentation was brilliant. Surprisingly the documentation was written by a single guy."

Anonymous wisecrack:

"Yeah, most really good documentation comes from guys who are married."

The election runs from 14 December until 23:59 UTC on 24 December 2007.

The self-selected nominees for the election are listed at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/SteeringCommittee/Nominations.

Full disclosure: I'm a candidate for re-election.

The rules governing the election are at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Policy/FDSCoElections.

Here's a short summary of the voting rules:

• Voting is open to all contributors in the Documentation Project who have joined the 'cvsdocs' group in the Fedora Account System.
• Contributors have up to three votes they can cast for the slate of nominees, with one vote per nominee.
• The four top vote receivers serve on FDSCo for 12 months, the next three vote receivers serve for 6 months.
• Following this initial election, regular elections are every six months. Half of the seats are up for voting each election, first three seats, then four seats, and so on.
• We are using the Fedora standard voting software.

If you haven't already, there's still time to get an account so you can vote:

1. Go to the account edit page at https://admin.fedora.redhat.com/accounts/userbox.cgi.

2. Under Add new membership at the bottom of the page, put yourself in the cvsdocs group