If you hurried and answered "crack" you are wrong, look below to learn more about the things Fedora are made of:
So far at least seven people asked me about a webcomic special for FUDCon, so I had to do one. But I think I am going to have even less shame than usual, trying to change the bribery... I know I have to expect the beers, but can I have something else instead? I need to buy a FUDCon T-shirt, M size. Thank you in advance :) I have no shame :D
Sitting in what was supposed to be a meting of Fedora Design Team contributors at FUD Con Zurich but momentarily was deturned in a boring presentation about not really Free Design books:
As you know, with the advice of Red Hat Legal, Fedora is actively protecting its logo and trademark (and we have some real problems in this area. As a consequence, the logo usage is not as Free as we wish, we must apply some restrictions.
One of the ideas to make this easier, an idea which as the moment is not agreed, was to produce a secondary logo, created by the community and used by the community with no restriction in usage. If this idea will ever get steam, I think this night in the bunker I discovered the perfect graphic for it (if you look at those pictures will see the sign practically everywhere):
There are many tales to be told about the bunker where many of us, FUDCon participants, are spending the nights but I am in a hurry, with the Design Team meeting starting in less than 30 minutes, so I will tell my story for now only with a few photos. Expect more for later.
A the same time with FUDCon another event, FrOSCamp, is tacking place and today they have a party called "Wired Dreams"... unfortunately, the party is boring. How boring? Just look at my friend's Adrian face:
So we were hungry and went out for some food at a kebab place for the unhealthy (but tasty) stuff:
Just arrived at FUDCon and in a hurry to see as many as my Fedora friends as I can, so will spare the useless prose and just show some photos:
Monkey see, monkey do... so when I see other people posting screenshots of their "sexy desktops" and recipes to configure like that, I can't resist the urge and to the same. here is how my desktop looks at the moment:
Andreea is my friend and besides being a beautiful model she is quite a geek (and a photographer too), she definitely is a Caroline... the only downfall: she does not use Linux, nor plan to do it (she's content with Windows and Photoshop) but she understand and likes the community... enough that when she started making Fimo models, one of the very first things she did was a Fedora bubble :D
In an earlier post I talked about Fedora supplemental wallpapers and our effort to check the license, the replies are positive but I wanted to share with the world one heart warming reply from one of the photographers I contacted:
I'm honored that you chose one of my photos, and I'm quite happy with your attribution mechanisms.See? Is not hard at all to become a contributor to FLOSS and Fedora.
Feel free to contact me if I can be of any further help.
Thanks,
Nic
P.S. I teach computer science at the University of Minnesota, Morris, the public liberal arts campus of the U of M. Our CS lab has approximately 35 clients, all running Fedora Core. Thanks for your good work - it's nice to be able to contribute something small back.
I am sad today: learned yesterday a good friend may possibly attend the Zurich FUDCon which would have been nothing short of awesome. Half a day later, sad reality hits: she won't be able to attend for the stupidest reason of all: didn't get a few days off from work. It's a shame! And her employer is supposedly in the FOSS business...
We at the Fedora Design Team are not arrogant enough to think the default wallpaper we provide is the ultimate choice for everyone, we understand the diversity of our users and their tastes and trying to make a larger audience happy we want to provide a set of alternatives. The idea is not new, we started playing with it a couple of years ago, but only now it came to fruition.
Of course, other distros are doing it too and they may arrived faster to results, but we used the "Fedora way", more Free and more Open :D It started with a wiki page collecting submissions from everyone, it was announced on blogs/Planet, Fedora Weekly News, microblogging and so (as a writer for FWN I made sure the happenings are documented as they go).
After a generous submission interval we had the members of the team expressing their option/preferences/votes (you want the selection made by someone with an understanding about design, usability, photography and such) and this ended in a "winners" page containing the most voted images, some of the submission are creation of Fedora contributors and some are Free images gathered from the internet (Flickr)
Last week being out for a photography camp (don't ask for the photos, I don't have any ready to show yet and then will have to wait more for signed release forms) I missed a good part of the talks (mega-flames?) about the Fedora vision and mission, happening on the advisory board, respectively development lists. Only now I start having a little time to get a glimpse of it and maybe making my point in the process.
People that know me pare probably aware I like to quote a lot an old but famous piece by jwz about software development and its purpose, here's an excerpt:
"How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).I agree it is true about any type of software, not only "social" and to be clear, is not literary about helping people having intercourse but in a larger sense making their lives better.
"Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
Somehow I managed to put myself together and do my job, a couple of FLOSS graphics workshops, and not suck completely at it... it probably helped the audience was small, 6-7 people at each.
The first one was Friday evening at Ceata and I fulfilled an old-time request, teaching people to make their own hackergotchi with GIMP... pretty much basic introductory things but supposedly to be fun and show various tools. Still... it seems I managed to bore part of them. Maybe the beer & pizza after was too tempting? Or maybe the late hour...
Saturday was the RLUG day and its new tradition of monthly workshops. with my turn today. The idea was to reply to questions from the audience, but as nobody asked I took the freedom to show some pretty but simple things in Inkscape, it was entertaining to see people play with it like kids and to hear "wow! I won't use Dia ever again".
Still, I have to keep myself together even better, next week is going to come with a few days off, in a photography camp for which I know some friends from the community would be full of envy.
I am back home after FLOSSCamp 2010 and swamped with work, having to prepare a lot of content, photos and videos, since many communities are waiting for them (mostly the photos only). So long story short, here are the photos, enjoy them.
Now short story long, we left Bucharest as a group from 3 communities, RLUG, Ceata and Fedora:
I literally count the hours until FLOSSCamp (BTW, less than 16 hours remaining until we leave the city) where I will meet my friends from the Debian tribe, from the Ubuntu tribe, from the openSUSE tribe, from many other tribes, as well from my own (Fedora) tribe... is going to be fun, probably the biggest inter-tribal meeting so far in Romania (and all of it is community, no money, no sponsors, no commercialization, no companies, no politics).
But before going, I feel like I have to let out my mind about the tribal debate. I am sad to see how, caving to the pressure or maybe trying to show he's the bigger man, Greg backpedaled, but I am freer, I am no CEO or such, nobody cares about what I say, so I have the freedom to speak my mind. From what I see, Greg is mostly right and Mark mostly wrong and is true Canonical is mostly a marketing company, not an engineering one.
Still, if I think Mark is right on one point, and IMO he is right on one I want to acknowledge that: I agree with him about GNOME going in the wrong direction and being driven there by a group of Red Hat desktop developers that are so arrogant and full of themselves, they refuse to listen to any critics, labelling them as unneeded "stop energy". But this is not something anti-Canonical, they do it even inside the Fedora community.
But back to my original point about counting hours (now about 13 hours remaining - this post was in editing for a looooong time, with many interruptions): I am going to FLOSSCamp!.
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