Avec l’équipe de QuteCom, Neary Consulting a participé à la soirée téléphonie libre de La Cantine le 18 avril 2008.

Devant une publique connaisseur en matière de VoIP, plusieurs présentations sur le thème de la téléphonie ont été proposé et français et en anglais:

• Sylvain Boily de Proformatique en maître d’oeuvre a présenté la soirée
• Le projet OpenMoko a été présenté dans ses grandes lignes par Bearstech
• Dave Neary & Vadim Lebedev ont présenté le logiciel le WengoPhone, devenu QuteCom
• Schuyler Deerman of Digium a présenté les arguments d’Asterisk
• Nicolas Bougues de Axialys a présenté un cas de figure d’utilisation d’Asterisk en pratique

Après ces présentations, courtes & plein d’information, un atelier démos a été proposé autour d’un pot d’accueil, ou les gens ont pu voir la visiophonie en oeuvre, et jouer avec un GTA01 de OpenMoko.

From maemo news:

Dave Neary is reading all kinds of maemo content as we speak: developer documentation, mailing list archives, web pages at maemo.org… He has a good reason for that: Nokia is funding some of his time to work as the content guy for the maemo community. Just like Niels Breet, he is being paid to follow your agenda and move forward those tasks and topics that interest you more.

Dave is a good organizer, communicator, writer and DIY professional, with proven tracks in the GIMP, GNOME and OpenWengo communities. While Niels concentrates on the web applications and server infrastructure, Dave takes care of the content in the website, and the ways for you to help improving it and get the ownership. Last year we made some steps in this direction with the social news and the revamped downloads. Now the revamped wiki plan and the fact of having someone listening and thinking how to go further should bring us to a next level.

I am looking forward to working with the maemo community and Nokia to make their collaboration rock.

(reposted from my personal blog)

Lots of people are up in arms because Red Hat’s desktop team released a statement containing this: “we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future”, and Ron Hovsepian said “Novell’s Suse Linux at the desktop is unlikely to be popular with consumers in the next three to five years”. To me, this is not defeatism, it is simply an example of positioning in action. Last year at Solutions Linux in Paris, I did a little experiment, designed to show that Mandriva have a problem with their positioning. I asked several people to tell me what market they thought the following popular distributions targeted:

• Red Hat
• Novell
• Ubuntu
• Mandriva

The answers were unanimous:

• Red Hat: Enterprise servers
• Novell: Enterprise desktops
• Ubuntu: Consumer desktops
• Mandriva: Ummm…

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The Libre Graphics Meeting fundraising campaign has come to an end. After two weeks, the campaign raised USD$11,368 from over 275 donors, and the campaign badge which people could use to publicise the campaign appeared on over 750 sites, generating in excess of 850,000 page-views over the duration of the campaign.

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The 3rd GNOME Mobile Summit being held as part of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin from the 8th to the 10th of April will be a forum where industry and community merge into one, enabling effective collaboration on adapting the GNOME platform to the needs of mobile computing.

The GNOME Mobile Initiative, which first met at GUADEC, the GNOME Users’ and Developers’ European Conference in 2006 and publicly launched in April 2007, is a community effort to ensure that free and open source software is optimized for the growing Linux-based mobile device space. The Initiative has already had several meetings, both formally and
informally, and garnered considerable community and industry support.

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The Libre Graphics Meeting needs your help!

In its third edition this year, this conference brings together  developers and users from free software graphics projects including the GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, Krita and more.

This year, the organisers are asking for your help to make the conference rock, and to cover the travel costs of as many key developers as possible from these projects.

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Last week I was in China for the first Linux Foundation/COPU China Developers Symposium.

I got a chance to catch up with some people I had met before including Jim Zemlin and Bill Weinberg, both of whom had very encouraging things to say about GNOME in mobile platforms. In fact, I will be organising a meeting of GNOME Mobile at the upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, Texas in April.

Reposted from Dave Neary’s blog

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Linux Magazine France, November 2006 (article online, December 2007):

On n’utilise pas des mots comme “turnover” (taux d’attrition) pour les volontaires, mais il est intéressant de regarder pourquoi ce phénomène existe. Quels sont les caractéristiques qui font que certains projets ont plus de facilité à garder leurs développeurs que d’autres ?

Like professional projects, some community projects are better than others at getting new contributors, and keeping existing contributors engaged over time. This article (in French) explores some of the characteristics of a good community.

(read more for a translation).

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