Linux Australia overview presentation

Spoke at LinuxSA on Tuesday night, with a 20 minute overview of Linux Australia. Slides here.

Received well, as was Geoffrey's talk on setting up basic services (www, sendmail, pop etc).

tech/LinuxSA | 24 Sep 2004 | #

Beagle and Dashboard

The Beagle project had a hackfest with the Ximian^WNovell dudes visiting Novell in Bangalore. Results look good.

I really like the Beagle/Dashboard projects because adding implicit search as a fundamental feature of the desktop is a great leap forward. Being able to find artifacts of any type, cross-referencing between them, and to do this as you work, leaps over the competition. As I've blogged before, the idea is so grand Microsoft and Apple have started their own projects to replicate what the OSS community is doing.

rml started PlanetBeagle to track this stuff. Woohoo! I'm looking forward to hearing rml talk on Project Utopia at Linux.Conf.Au 2005 in April next year.

tech/GNOME | 24 Sep 2004 | #

Sun and Linux contributions

Sun complained about the difficulty of getting their patches into Linux, Greg K-H rebuts well.

I think it's important that Linux keeps on doing what works. There has been, and will continue to be, lots of groups that want to integrate their code into Linux as they see the strengths of this operating system. They will try and make Linux adopt their techniques. And that's ok, just so long as that doesn't make Linux transmogrify into something it isn't and lose the qualities that have made it so successful.

SCO have whinged about IP, so now Linux has responded with better IP assignment, and Groklaw has been pointing out the errors in the acqusations. Novell, IBM, SGI etc have successfully adopted their mature development practices to fit in with the community - the question is, will Sun? They have cool stuff to contribute, but that's only going to get in if they do it Linux's way, and is clean good code, and gets there by meritocracy rather than bullying. Sun has done it in the GNOME community, they just need to do the same with the Linux kernel community.

tech/code | 24 Sep 2004 | #

Why is the iPod for sale in Australia?

Kim Weatherall talks about how putting music on your iPod is illegal in Australia. She also references the Builder AU article on the MPAA acting like a big ignorant bully in Australia.

I'm really glad that people like Kim are taking the time to point out what our laws say - and point out where they conflict with what people think the law says.

tech/IP | 24 Sep 2004 | #