Creative Commons retiring the Public Domain dedication

I strongly believe in not re-inventing the wheel, not only in the technical parts but also in licensing, this is why I use and promote Creative Commons licenses (despite their flaws) and this is why I supported using the Creative Commons definition of Public Domain for projects like the Open Clip Art Library. And it worked well for a while.Until Creative Commons was unhappy with the Public Domain dedication, probably not branded enough for their taste and for their need for attention, and "invented" a replacement, CC0, which was received not as warmly as they hoped.

Now we are at a new milestone: Creative Commons is retiring their Public Domain definition, they leave many of us, users of their licenses, in the dust, with only two options: embrace their new CC0 license or use a scary Public Domain Mark, plastered with "not recommended" disclaimers. Take the poison of your choice! That much for trust and continued services... I had better expectation from a community project.

Now projects like OCAL are at a crossroad, having to decide a way forward. People like me are also in trouble: I used the PD dedication quite a lot to share many resources, now I have to update some of my websites and not sure how... I can see two ways:

• write my own dedication, as much as I hate re-inventing the wheel and writing one
• use a more restrictive license, that will harm my users and the usefulness of the shared items

. There is one thing that is guaranteed I won't do: migrate to CC0... on top of the objections I had before, now I feel Creative Commons betrayed me. And for betrayal, there is no forgiveness.

Quality journalism

At the end of the last week the FOSS news exploded with titles about Fedora and Wayland, in many cases going as aggressive as "Fedora to ditch X.org for Wayland" and "May bring Wayland Fedora 15", all of them based on an insightful post made by ajax, the X.org maintainer in Fedora, but most of the time letting out relevant details as "eventually", "not usable default", "something you can play with" or "don't have a timeframe".

The result was a flood of posts, comments, dents, twitts and so, many of them based only on partial titles and raving about how awesome Wayland is going to be, now that Red Hat will put resources behind it (that's really jumping to a conclusion!). Net effect: the community moved focus from singling out Canonical for they anti-community perceived Wayland announcement from a couple of weeks ago. That's good relations with the press! And that's spinning!

Of course, there was a number of news sources with good headlines and good content as there were also sane reactions but somehow most of the time only the bad ones were filtered to the channels I read. I think I should probably read less "social news" or at least filter better my sources.

I am not a designer

Last week for Ceata's anniversary I had to deliver a couple of presentations and when they were ready I did a sanity-check with a friend from the community. The feedback received was like that (she should know I won't get upset even with reactions like "it totally sucks"):

tatica: downloading
nicubunu: the slides are quite simple, i am counting on my personal charm :D :D :D
tatica: hahahah that's enough
[...]
nicubunu: they are short and easy, i will have 10 minutes for each
[...]
tatica: I like it
tatica: but you need to add more style to it u_U
tatica: you're a designer....
nicubunu: nah... that's enough. i won't work more on them
nicubunu: and i am not a designer.... i only do graphics and photography
nicubunu: and i hate the designers that ruined the experience of me using many apps
tatica: hahahahahahahhaha
nicubunu: :)
tatica: then add some "graphics" and "phptographs"
tatica: people like to see draws... no letters
tatica: you know it better than me :P
tatica: you....
tatica: SYSADMIN!
nicubunu: i tried to add a picture in every slide
nicubunu: but won't bother with fancy backgrounds or so
tatica: lol

I have to acknowledge, the slides were bare, which I don't have a problem with (I hate slides shouting "Martetroid") and... I had my own things to care about than prettify a presentation. Considering that, probably neither the "personal charm" part didn't work, but that is at least recorded on video, so easier to judge. But I digress, the executive summary here is me not considering myself a designer.

Vodafone stormed by Androids

For quite a while the TV channels are bombarded with commercials (good thing I only watch very little TV) for various phones which have touted as ultimate feature the Android operating system but today I saw something that made me smile: received from Vodafone a quite spammy-but-not-realy-spam presentation (I am the official contact inside our company, they are a big communications provider for us) about they introducing the Samsung Galaxy TAB in the offer.

Usually I read such mails directly with the "Delete" key, but this time being an Android device I was curious enough to read it, wanted to see the price and put in perspective with the epected wave of Chinese devices (that would probably be the time to evaluate a purchase for me).

And reading the presentation (PDF not PPT!!!) I saw something that made my day a little better: on the page outlining the advantages over iPad they have (translation mine): "Open development environment allowing for more freedom for user application usage". Yay!

Icons uploaded

After a well deserved delay, I uploaded, complete with SVG sources, the Public Domain Event icon set made for WorldLabel.com to the Open Clip Art Library and also to my own clipart collection, download them from any of those sources, they are equally Free.

At least this circle is closed.

...and we celebrated Ceata

It happened yesterday: Ceata celebrated its second anniversary holding an event at the The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, so here is a short report: we had a few presentations - general introduction about who is Ceata and what we want (Tibi), a definition about Linux (me), an introduction to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice (Răzvan), a few words about CreativeCommons licenses (me again), all of those linked together by our wonderful host (Irina) and supported technically by Andrei. It ended with a short Free movie from the Blender Foundation.

We managed to gather a number of students in the audience, with some of them completely unfamiliar with the world of Free and Open Source Software:

It, of course, ended with socialisation, beers and good time at a nearby pub:

As a honest evaluation, I don't call the event a success, we didn't have the audience which I setted for myself as a threshold for calling it so, but won't call it a failure either, we had a presence in a new place, an event organized by a new contributor, nothing really bad happened...let say it was OK and conforming with my expectations.

Let me try to end this in a funny way, showing how two of our colleagues (Irina and Eugen) saw the party after in a drawing (myself, I still can't draw):

...and we partied for F14

As planned (and according with a long standing tradition by now) we celebrated the release of Fedora 14 right on the release day, contributors from the local community and friends from other communities, we were about 15 people and had a few hours of fun time, good talks and cold beers. Of course, we planned some improvements to the website and also used the opportunity for a last check for Ceata's anniversary that will happen later today.

What can I say more? Oh, yes... it was a good opportunity for me to use the new lens and I hope I made a few people regret they didn't attend.

PS: no, I didn't start wearing glasses (yet), I was just fooling around.

Fedora 14 Release Party in Bucharest

This is pretty much a tradition in our (Romanian) community: at the moment of a new Fedora release we are partying. This time we'll meet (again) at Curtea Berarilor in the old city of Bucharest, Tuesday 2 November 2010, starting hour 19:00. You know you want to be there.

Ceata two years anniversay in ASE

For the two years anniversary Ceata is planning something bold: an event with presetnations about free technologies and free arts at the The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, a bastion of closed source and proprietary technologies (they are pretty much in Microsoft's pockets). I guess we are kind of crazy, but were is the fun if you don't aim for high goals and tough challenges?

Come with us, I hope it will be fun, we will have a few presentations (I will bore the audience with a general introduction about Linux and a general introduction about Creative Commons licenses which will complete a program with Tibi talking about Ceata, Razvan about OpenOffice.org and Doru about AplixERP) but also one or two short films from the Blender Foundation and some beer after.

The full program of the event (and the ways you can help) is available on the wiki. Join us on Wednesday, 3 November 2010 in the 2013 hall, Virgil Madgearu building, The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies.