Open Source and Other Things
We arrived as earlier as we could, after the long first day of OggCamp 11. Again we walked to the station, train to Woking, and change there to Alton to get to Farnham; with an extra bus from Aldershot to Farnham because engineering works on Aldershot.
The organizers wished we had a nice hangover, but our problem wasn’t beer related, we were just sleepy.
We started with a nice talk by Lorna Jane Mitchell. I was interested in this talk, but as I was listening to Lorna I realized that I was been already there.
I’ve been involved in open source advocacy since 2002, and I’ve been lucky enough to focus my professional career in open source technologies and services since around 2004, and at the end I agree with Lorna in that this is not something you do to make you CV look nice but because at some point it becomes part of who you are.
It was a nice talk, but I do like slides… specially when I’m sleepy!
When I was based in Valencia I was reasonably active as Fedora ambassador, and even organized two editions of Barcamp Valencia, but since I moved to UK I’ve been quite demotivated (Gnome 3 doesn’t help, in case you’re wondering, but it’s not the main reason). I’ve attended different LUG meetings (D&C GNU/Linux User Group, Silicon Corridor Linux User Group and now the Surrey Linux User Group ), and it’s a positive experience, but it’s more a social meeting than an advocacy adventure (after all, the attendees are already Linux users).
So I was very interested in this talk, because may be it could be a good idea to get in touch with the Ubuntu community in the UK (after all I’m an Ubuntu user since Warty).
Alab Bell directed the talk/meeting, looking for different activities to promote Ubuntu in the UK. It was interesting, although I found quite surprising that he’s not a regular of LUG meetings (in fact he said he attended one meeting once). I mean, I would expect a LUG meeting a good starting point to promote Ubuntu (which is still Linux, isn’t it?).
I’ll keep an eye on the Ubuntu UK LoCo, just in case I can help.
Alex was attending the assembly demo performed by the skilled Ken Boak, and I could see the finishing touches to the assembly of a Nanode board. I don’t remember what happened, but Ken was supposed to bring some Nanode DIY kits to sell, but finally he brought only a couple (that was definitely insufficient! :P).
We already had the pleasure to meet Steve in Barcamp Oxford last year, but we had never seen his talk and it was really interesting.
The accessibility support of open source (specially Gnome) is excellent, and although I already know it from different articles and posts, I’d never seen some of the applications in action.
I knew some of these features of GTK+, but I didn’t know that using them could be that big difference for people with disabilities.
Finally we attended the raffle, without luck… but it was really fun (Alan Pope going up and down delivering the prizes), and it was a nice finish for two intense days in which we had the chance to meet a lot of interesting people and learn some new things.
Finally Janos, an Hungarian guy that we meet the first day, was so kind to give us a lift to Guildford so we felt like we were tele-transported home instead of suffering the annoyances of the engineering works. Thanks Janos!
The problem with this kind of event is… having to wait one year for the next edition!
Las weekend Alex and I attended OggCamp, a BarCamp alike unconference with a scheduled track of speakers and two more audienced-planned tracks that were scheduled each morning using the awesome CampFireManager.
The venue was really nice (Farnham Maltings), and the organisation recorded 325 attendees, so I would say it was a total success.
Like any other event with several tracks, we had to choose (wisely) the talks we attended.
The topic was the importance of freedom in open source and why we should protect and fight for that freedom.
Phipps is a great speaker. I liked his talk, was very clear and encouraging, although I found disappointing his reasoning to explain why he’s using Apple’s hardware and software in his laptop when he’s transmitting a clear message about the importance of protecting and using open source freedom.
I think that’s OK. The message of the talk is still clear and important. We like our heroes to be perfect, but everybody has a weakness, and that’s fine (ie. I can’t avoid using Skype). But I didn’t like his reasoning to use an Apple laptop because it was in direct contradiction with the main message of his talk and because he referred to Richard Stallman’s peculiar way of browsing the web (through an email gateway) as a poor excuse.
As I said, I think it’s OK Phipps prefers Apple products because it makes life easier for him in some aspects (it might get in the way of his message, but still). What I can’t understand is why the alternative to using an Apple laptop is extreme browsing using email.
This talk was about the different uses of technology that we have seen in action this years with the different riots and revolts around the world, staring with the the Arab Spring and ending with the Spanish 15M protests (he commented about the UK riots too; to state that looting it’s a different thing). Unfortunately we missed the start of the talk, but we could exchange some ideas with James later, in the corridor.
This was very interesting, thanks to the four panellists: Karen Sandler (Gnome Foundation), Simon Phipps (Open Source Initiative, amongst other things), Stuart Langridge (Canonical guy, Ubuntu One), Fabian A. Scherschel (Linux Outlaws) and Dan Lynch as host (Linux Outlaws).
They talked about a lot of different topics, but I would like to emphasize on their discussion about the Linux desktop (Gnome 3 vs Unity vs KDE vs the rest, current direction, the future, etc). It’s interesting how everybody wants a Linux desktop that is reachable for everybody, no matter the technical knowledge, as if Gnome 2 was overcomplicated to use.
Anyway, I’m not a big Gnome 3/Unity fan (although I’ve been using Unity at work for some months without too many annoyances, and I can’t say the same about Gnome 3), but I got a couple of refreshing ideas from that panel discussion (mainly from Karen).
Ken presented his Nanode board, that aims to be one board solution to getting projects on the web, available as a DIY kit around £20.
I’m not a big DIY fan myself (I’m the software-only-please kind of guy), but Alex found it very interesting and now she wants to do some kind of hi-tech watering solution for our greenhouse. I’m scared!
On the day two of the OggCamp Ken showed how to assemble a Nanode board in less than 45 minutes. Obviously he has soldering and assembling skills I can only dream of, but it was encouraging anyway.
This was the recording of a mashup podcast between Linux Outlaws and the Ubuntu UK Podcast, with the participation of the audience. I must confess I don’t follow regularly neither Linux Outlaws nor the Ubuntu UK Podcast (the only one podcast I’ve followed is Shot of Jaq, and it’s probably because it was a short podcast), but I found the show very funny.
We had never been in Farnham before, and it’s a cute small town. We tried to make the most of our visit going for a walk between the live podcast and the beer time.
Besides the talks we enjoyed the atmosphere of the event (remember, about 300 attendees!), with a geeknick (lunch on the park), we bought a couple of O’Reilly books (40% discount, yay!), and meet a bunch of friendly interesting people.
After the beers we went back to Guildford, tired but happy, resolved to come back for the second day of OggCamp.
