ineptitude! – Or why Firefox 3.5 does not have a Swahili translation when there is one done…

Firefox 3.5 has just arrived!

This should be celebration time for the Umoja Project, but it is not. And you know why? Ineptitude!

The story in short. There are 2 teams translating Firefox to Swahili (sw-TZ):

• The first one is an academic group (mob) had funding and has used 4 years with no visible results.
• The second one is 100% community based which did 80% of the job in a Christhmas sprint. And got finished by the middle of April.

So why is not Mozilla Firefox 3.5 shipping with a Swahili translation? Politics. The Mozilla people want to play nice with everyone instead of giving priority to the team that has actually showed results, real result!

The Swahili transaltion is not even shipping as a beta version. Simply it doesn’t exist in the public eye only as a bug which should be closed.

You know what irritates me? That the people in the community, that actually worked hard, won’t see any visible result. Do you think that is the way to motivate people?

I don’t.

Next time, please, do the right thing. Go with those that do the work, not those that “own” the translation branch and haven’t done anything for years.

At least I hope the translation hits Karmic…

My €0.02

Ubuntu Norway – New loco-contact and meeting on Sunday @ 21.00 (Norwegian local time) #ubuntu-no @ FreeNode

News from our team:

• Karianne Fog Heen is stepping down as contact member for our team and I am taking over her job. Previously I was the contact member for Ubuntu Ecuador and now I am looking forward to grow an even greater Norwegian team!
• I want to thank Karianne for her hard work and wish her good luck with your future projects! Thanks to the team for giving the opportunity to be the contact member!

I have called for a meeting on Sunday the 25th of June @ 21.00 (Oslo UTC+2). The agenda (in Norwegian)

• Ubuntu Norge, en gjennomgang:
  * Hvem er vi og hva vil vi?
  * Infrastruktur (webside, forum, chat, launchpad, mailister)
  * Aktiviteter (oversettelse, friprog bevisstgjøring, eventer)
• La oss se fremover:
  * Hva kan du bidra med?
  * Forbedringspotensial?
  * Arbeidsgrupper (team infrastruktur, aktivitetsgruppa, oversettelsesgruppa++)
  * Oversettelse: i18n-no, launchpad+upstream samarbeid
  * Team infrastruktur ansvarlige
  * Eventer: Større fester og holde dem flere steder, samt andre fysiske møter for Ubuntu entusiaster
  * Samarbeidet med andre friprog/fri kultur interesse organisasjoner
• Synliggjøre bruk av Ubuntu i Norge: lokalt, nasjonalt, regionalt, globalt

If you are interested in contributing to the Norwegian team or have thoughts about better cooperation among teams at regional levels (Nordic, European) this is your chance!

• Where: The meeting itself is on the Ubuntu Norge channel: #ubuntu-no in the FreeNode IRC network: irc.ubuntu.com
• When: 21.00 (UTC+2 – Oslo/Norway)

Hav e a nice weekend everyone!

SpreadUbuntu meeting – This Thursday 18th of June 20 UTC – channel #ubuntu-marketing @ freenode IRC network

Sorry for the title.. I am just getting used to the identi.ca 140 chars…

As mentioned before, the SpreadUbuntu team has been planning a meeting for a while now. We decided to take the synergy generated by the Ubuntu Global Jam meeting and ride their wave into land! Thanks for that Efraín and Evan!

See your local time for the meeting here. Our agenda goes like this:

• SpreadUbuntu: a little intro
• Defining SpreadUbuntu a bit more
• Drupal6 move before the 9.10 release
• Include the Global Ubuntu community

See the agenda details in the SpreadUbuntu wiki.

Everyone that is interested in SpreadUbuntu or just curious is welcome to join our meeting. It’s for everyone!

Want to know more? Please see (and Add/Change if you feel like):

• SpreadUbuntu Wiki
• SpreadUbuntu Team
• SpreadUbuntu Project (bugs, code, etc…)

See you at the meeting!

Is mono a problem outside the US and other patent friendly countries?

Here in Europe we do not care about software patents, at least not yet.

As Canonical is based in the EU this should not give the Ubuntu community any issue by itself. So keep any patent related problem for United-States based distributions and leave Ubuntu alone. Or move to a country that enforces your freedom all-day-every-day!

While working with Egil (aka redhog aka representing-the-Pirate-party-in-Norway-colleague) in the iFolder packaging for Ubuntu I have seen the DRMish “safety computing” signing issue with dynamic linking to be a bigger problem than any patent issue that mono may represent, at least in our jurisdiction (Norway).

This is because if I link a proprietary applications to a library I should be able to change or replace that underlying library without modifying the application itself. At least if you think LGPL compliance. Thus there is a design failure that makes this mono thing a lot more complicated than I thought in order to comply to the LGPL with mono apps that are not free, since you would have to change the signing in the propietary application in order to link it to a new library, which is by no way trivial in a proprietary app. Is then mono/.net even an option?

I think I am right about this, but please can somebody shed light on this from a technical/juridical point of view? I might be wrong, you know… As I’ve been before.

Anyway I hope to be able to tell you that iFolder 3.7 is ready to be sponsored into Ubuntu within the Karmic release cycle (and of course added to debian as well), and that this bug can be closed. So we all can finally just drop that box!

Untill then, have a nice weekend!

Bandwidth?

My speed

Let’s put this in perspective:

• Burkina Faso has 30 Mb/s bandwidth for the whole nation (I know this because Alberto told me, and trust me, he knows)
• In Ecuador, where I come from originally, you get “broadband” starting at 64 Kb/s and up to 2 Mb/s, and it costs a fortune!
• When working with the Umoja project, Emanuel, the technical lead was just amazed at how fast we could download Ubuntu. In Tanzania the Umoja team had trouble just uploading and downloading the Firefox translations to the SVN server… Not to speak of the trouble they had with getting the whole Mercurial (HG) repository from the Mozilla upstream…

Let’s now threat the United Nations Millenium Goals in the light of this small facts. Let’s take a peek at Goal 8:

DEVELOP A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT

• MDG Monitor for Goal 8
• Fact Sheet for Goal 8

And specially the goals’ target 5:

In cooperation with the private sector, make available benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications

• Mobile phones are expanding communications in developing countries
• Internet use is increasing rapidly, but the poorest regions lag behind

My conclusions:

• I do not believe that poverty eradication will be achieved as defined in the Millennium Goals within 2015
• I believe changes are not done by signing papers in a big oval auditorium. No matter who signs what!
• I believe in individuals like you and me to make changes
• I believe that individuals have evolved themselves towards what works best for survival: cooperation
• Let’s keep changing the world (do we ever do anything else than change the world in every action we take?) in the small things, like making our beloved OS rock
• I am spoiled and I love fiber

Thanks for reading

Drupal Open learning Repository – Launching after 2 years of development!

I was reading Heidi’s entry and I just had to let the world know about this, as the Drupal funboy I am (love WordPress and Joomla! too so no worries there)

The Norwegian National Portal for Education Utdanning.no is now releasing dopler’s code for everyone to download. See the invitation here (thanks Google Translate!) and come by (registration open and free)  if you are nearby  Oslo the 18th of June. You can see it up and running here.

I assume this is the FLOSS world answer to a Kitsch vernisage

So now I see my tax money being used in an interesting project! Let’s hope to see more of this coming along this campaign year here in Norway

It’s fantastic to see how Drupal, the CMS and FrameWork, can be used to do lots of things… Maybe it is time for me to go play some more with the up and coming Drupal6 based SpreadUbuntu alpha?

Well… enjoy the Dopler code when it comes out and manage your content in the classroom in a way that your students will love!

ITSM, PM and Free Software – www.itframeworks.org

So, we all heard of IT Service Management frameworks such as ITIL or Project Management frameworks such as PRINCE2, right?

At least here in Europe there’s a huge industry around those frameworks, and nonetheless the technology surounding them.

So what do you do when you realize that you, yes you, can see a business opportunity right here and right now that is worth billions of € £ and $ and that not many people have actually hit upon? You blog about it, right? Because ideas are to be shared

An example of sharing is this, a complete free ITIL tool overview made by ITIL experts. Giving people real choice and freedom is what we live for in the Free Software world, right?

Ever seen a CMDB that is actually ment to be used by its developers and has real ITIL experience behind it?

Why go pay a lot to learn about what this is all about when you just can learn while you are sharing your own knowledge, we all love wikis, don’t we? Share it all away baby! Sharing is caring and a fantastic way of learning

The anthill spirit is indeed powerful!

On the technology behind UbuntuOne: iFolder, mono and all that jazz…

Well… keeping myself to the technical side of things. I know the following about UbuntuOne:

• It is one week ago I heard about it for the first time after blogging about iFolder, weird eh?
• I found the O’reilly UbuntuOne link after googling Ubuntu One. Comments on blog posts rock!
• A lot of people have been ranting about it, and others just discussing it
• Too many blogposts, bugs and mailing list threads about it for me to link to any of them. I am actually kind of done with that discussion. Business is business! Freedom is freedom!
• The client side seems to be free software and based in mono  (since it seems to use the iFolder client code base, although this might be wrong as this mono assumption is based on a comment on my blog.
• I like the idea of having iFolder or part of it at least in Ubuntu as I have expressed in previous entries since I dream of dropping that box in my own server or servers, since simias, the iFolder server side, actually might even support p2p tech now

So now, let’s wait and see how people start using the mono argument against UbuntuOne (even if it ends up being wrong)… People have too much time available for ranting.

Meanwhile those interested or involved on the technology behind UbuntuOne (client and cloud) please drop a comment and let us all know more. I want to know it all. Thanks in advance!

And yes, I got an invite. Yes, I have signed up for the service. Yes, it rocks! Yes, I still want my own server to do the same (or similar) thing.

Go iFolder and Drop-that-Box now! MOTUs step up to the task, please…

As a follow in up my last entry on mono related tech I wanted to thank Rui Boon for beeing a true iFolder hero!

The problem is that compulsory military service has taken him away from Ubuntu business so we need someone else to take on this task. Rui Boon was the guy that made some packages available for the 3.6 release on his PPA and he started to work on the 3.7 but didn’t haqve time to finish. On an email he told me:

Good news here. Managed to get simias to run. Just need to follow the instruction at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/iFolderEnterpriseServer under “Setup environment”

(Not enough time to get my hand on the client though)

As Jorge and many other have remarked iFolder is the Free Software answer to Dropbox and the like. Really just drop that box and go iFolder: You will never go back!

The good thing about the 3.7 release is its community commitment. Novell is finally learning to cooperate with the Free Software ecosystem, they are slow learners as a corporation, but still they have done things right this time!

So why do I want to use blogging time on this? Well because iFolder needs packaging in both Ubuntu and debian!

Now that someone took the trouble to make this awesomeness, we should actually strive to distribute it as mcuh as we can. Alien won’t cut it this time around, it needs real packaging!

If you like challenges and result-based fame join this great effort and make this awesomeness shine for the Karmic Koala release. This would be one of the most awesome features you can add to an OS both in the server and a multi-platform client. People has been waiting for ages to do “apt-get install ifolder” forever!

Why? See iFolder’s features:

• iFolder clients for Macintosh and Vista
• SSL Communication
• LDAPGroup Support
• Auto-Account creation using response files
• iFolder Merge (existing folders can be merged with iFolders)
• Improved file conflict management
• Enhanced web administration
• Mechanism to re-provision users to other iFolder servers

Not sure yet? See the data sheet

And no, I am not a Novell or Suse fanboy, I have never sold any of their products but I still believe that iFolder is one of the most awesome projects in the Free Software world the last 5 years, that Novell is behind it just shows that there’s still something backing up those shares.

So, please do not make me use unison when I can use this instead! If you know of other, similar options, let me know in the comments.

Thanks in advance!

Please help us with ideas for SpreadUbuntu

You can see how the site looks now here.

Mock-up for proposed changes:

SpreadUbuntu Mockup

As written today I want to gather ideas for the further development of the SpreadUbuntu site.

The goal with this is that after some feedback:

• We get some people interested in helping out.
• We make a to-do list in our wiki and concentrate in the gathered proposal as project packages/features implementation
• To have a roadmap based in features towards the release and graduation of this Ubuntu Marketing team project as www.spreadubuntu.com and www.spreadubuntu.org

My proposition in the mockup is as follows:

1. Web 2.0ish banner
   It might require changes in the theme we are using or at least the implementation of a script. My idea is to have a set of images that change randomically and that are appealing to the users. I just put some examples in my mockup, but it does not have to be like that it can be just one image or something.
2. Launchpad Login
   Implement this neat feature that give access to all Launchpad users automatically through the use of the OpenID module. You can see it working in The Fridge or in the Ubuntu Ecuador site.
   In that way we can remove the CAPTCHA system we use today and not allow any unlogged users to upload material. You MUST login. That way we make people aware of the importance of launchpad and its role in the Ubuntu Community.
3. Get, Make, Share Material menu improvements
   This menu is great, but we need to improve it in the Ubuntu.com spirit. Try clicking the menues there ans you’ll see what I mean. Basically we have to use the Drupal menues to make it even easier to understand how to move around the site.
   A little improvement of the Get, Make, Share pages should also be part of this change.
4. About SpreadUbuntu section changes
   Here we need to make the introduction quicker here and give the users access to a couple of things:
   * Either a campaign, what to do and it’s related material
   * Access to material in general
   Little text and a picture to send people either to the DIY part or the Campaign/Site part
5. Campaign Focus area
   Show the main campaign running now, and if we have several make it easy to show them randomically. Here we should have a calender or list of campaign-related events as well, which could use some space in point 8.
   I’ve taken a look at the Fridge calender, but it seems too general… It might just be me but we should have a campaign focused calender.
6. The top right area
   Here we need:
   * A set of RSS feeds for material and campaigns
   * A text box for search
   * A place to choose your language
   Default language of this main page should be English, but the marketing material being shown should comprehend ALL languages, not just English.
7. Media section
   Should give a quick overview of what type of materials we have but be smaller than the one we have today and probably more fancy.
8. Top Downloads / Most Popular
   This area could show the top 10 downloads or the material with most pointsand should be an area where images come and go dinamycally (JS).
9. Recent material
   Get inspired and show the last 20 uploaded materials as dynamic content. Flashy without flash is possible

All feedback is welcomed! Use the comments section in this post or send me an e-mail.

Thanks in advance UbuSpreaders!