daniel.haxx.se

I did a 25 minute talk yesterday in Swedish on the topic at the foss-sthlm meetup #5, and the slides from my presentation are available below.

In the series of Free Software and Open Source talks and seminars we’ve been doing in the Foss-sthlm community, we are about to set off the fifth meetup on February 24, 2011 in Kista, Stockholm, Sweden. This time we will offer six talks by six different persons, all skilled and well educated within their respective topics.

The event will be held completely in Swedish, and the talks that are planned to get presented are as following:

1. Foss in developing nations – Pernilla Näsfors
2. Open Source Framework Agreements in the Swedish Government – Daniel Melin
3. From telecommunications to computer networks - security for real-timecommunications over IP – Olle E Johansson
4. Maintaining – how to manage your FOSS project – Daniel Stenberg (yes, that’s me)
5. Peek in HTTP and HTTP traffic – Henrik Nordström
6. Cease and desist, stories from threat mails received in the Rockbox project – Björn Stenberg

As usual, we do this admission free and our sponsor (CAG this time) will provide with something to eat and drink. After all the scheduled talks (around 20:00) we’ll continue the evening at a pub somewhere and discuss open source and free software over a beer or two.

See you there!

[continued from FSCONS 2010 day 1]

With the previous night’s social event ending fairly late and involving a fair amount of good beers, it was nice to be able to sleep in a bit and have one of those great hotel breakfasts in a slow and relaxed manner.

I then checked out from the hotel and walked over to the venue, this time not as mislead by google maps’ directions as I was yesterday.

The economics of open innovation and FOSS. was the first session I attended and the talker Karthik Jayaraman did a good job of explaining and showing how things can happen fast and why and he did some interesting predictions of the future.

I followed Kathik’s talk in the same room with my 30 minute session Future transports in which I discussed and explained a bit about transport protocols today and what might come tomorrow.

Glyn Moody is a bit of a celebrity (he has for example written several books) and you can tell he’s done this before. He’s an excellent speaker and as he’s a native English person he has a bit of an edge compared to most speakers at this conference. Mr Moody got the biggest room at FSCONS filled up to the last available chair and there were still a bunch who had to sit on the floor.

Glyn talked about Ethical Monopolies, the history of patents and copyright and how they have changed and how they today no longer are even close to having the purposes they were created for.

He advocates that we stop talking about “Intellectual Properties” but instead refer to them as “Intellectual government-granted monopolies” as that is a much better use of words when these subjects are brought up. The ordinary person thinks people should be able to keep properties, but would in many cases object to (more) monopolies.

The last session I got to enjoy this year was Mikael von Knorring’s “Who are the free users” which did present a good view of things but I wasn’t very focused during the talk so I’ll refrain from judging it in any direction.

I took a last stroll over to the cafeteria area where I found some friends, said hello and good bye and then I took off towards the train station and my 3+ hours train ride back to Stockholm on the other coast of Sweden. (It could be noted that I left early, there were at least two session slots that I missed.)

My head is packed with impressions. I met lots of great people and friends, both old and many new ones. We had awesome discussions and I hope at least some of the ideas that were brought up will be turned into reality. I will post more about those here if/when they happen.

The future for Free Software (in the Nordic region) is bright!

07:02: The alarm of my mobile never rang, because I was already up. I got to play with my two kids a while before the taxi arrived to pick me up at 07:30.

The X2000 train from Stockholm to Göteborg took off exactly on schedule and we were off. I learned that the on-board Internet service wasn’t possible to sign on to with Chrome but I had to fire up my good old Firefox for it. Going with first class X2000 offer free Internet all the way, and free coffee. Two of my favorite frees.

The train arrived only 10 minutes late in Gothenburg. I took a taxi over to my hotel, checked in, put my smaller laptop in my backpack and walked over to the FSCONS venue.

After having had lunch and caught up with some friends, I sat down in the big audience listening to the presentation about the Inhana project, by Kyrah. Interactive storytelling and about helping female artists in Syria to play/work with technology in the form av Arduino boards.

Kyrah had the room full. Not that many remained when I entered the stage after her and did my talk on scalable application layer transfers.

I followed up with a cup of coffee after some private discussions on SCTP and how to do fast transfers in the Tor project and then I headed towards the talk about data structures in the Linux kernel by Allesandro Rubini.

Mr Rubini is a long-time involved Linux kernel hacker (and well known co-author of the Linux Device Drivers bible) and in a very casual and effective style he taught us how we can use regular Linux code for lists and trees in a GPL licensed project and how the clever container_of macro works. To me, its biggest drawback is that it relies on a gcc-specific feature: typeof(), but otherwise it is a beautiful craftsmanship.

Allesandro brought down the biggest spontaneous applause when he responded to someone’s question “but couldn’t you also do this using templates in C++?” by suitably and appropriately bashing C++…

.

Anders Arnholm followed along in the embedded track and he talked about using Linux in the automotive world and I think many of us thought the best part of his talk was the numbers and comparisons he had when trying different flash file systems to increase boot performance and really cut down startup time to a minimum. The initial kernel startup time was 6 something seconds when using JFFS2 and they managed to get down to below 200 milliseconds with the use of the AXFS (Advanced XIP Filesystem, where XIP is short for execute in place).

… after Anders’ talk I followed the crowds, got a seat in a bus and we were transported over to the social event. I mentioned a little bit about that in my previous post, the award for me.

My FSCONS 2010 day 2 entry will be posted within shortly.

I was asked what the Nordic Free Software Award that I received last year meant to me. This was my response that I now repost here for the public to see:

To me, the NFSA is a recognition from my own kind. A really big thumbs-up from within my own team. From fellow hackers who know.

In a world where we spend lots and lots of time alone in front of screens during long dark hours, where most of what you do is just silently pushed into source code repositories or consumed by eager downloaders distributed all over the world, getting that kind of positivism is invaluable.

I found it to not only be a very big ego boost, but it also really ignited my desire to do more, to reach further and to prove that my receiving of the award is the beginning and not the end of what I am set to do in our free software world. In my particular case it was a primary factor behind the start of the Foss-sthlm network that I co-started not long after I got the award. I’ve pushed foss-sthlm forwards during this year with several meetings with a hundred or more attendees.

Getting weird looks from outsiders or a thank you from the occasional user is fun, but getting an award from people who actually know what you might have done and what it takes to do it, is priceless.

I’m perfectly aware that I am the super-nerd. I’m not the social guy. I’m not the person who unite crowds or inspire teams to create miracles. I’m a software developer and I design and create code. Lots of it. I debate technical details, protocols and choices on mailing lists. Lots of them. I share as much as possible of all that of course and I’m thrilled that what I do is considered this good and is appreciated to this extent.

Everyone doing volunteer work wants to get recognition for their efforts. I got it. Thank you!

During the social event at FSCONS 2010 when we announced the winner of this year and handed him his prizes, I was also given the prize I never received last year because I wasn’t around at the actual award ceremony then. And of course, these guys love puns so…

From the left: a box with rocks (for my work on Rockbox), a transformer toy (I don’t quite recall the reason for that) and curlers (for my work on curl). Click on the image to see it in full resolution, it is taken with my crappy mobile camera.

As a session during the Internetdagarna conference (orginized by .SE), Björn Stenberg, Daniel Melin and I joined up to talk about open source with the title “Living With Open Source” (”Att Leva med Öppen Källkod” in the language of the brave: Swedish) on October 27. We did a 90 minute session split up between the three of us. The session was in Swedish and it was recorded so I expect that it will be made available online soon for those who are curious but didn’t attend.

Björn (on the picture above) started off by talking about how to work with Open Source as a user when using Open Source components. How to deal with changes, sending upstream, the cost of keeping changes private etc.

Daniel Melin continued and talked about open source licensing. It is quite clearly an area that people find tricky and mysterious, judging from the many questions that followed. I think large parts of the audience wasn’t very advanced or well versed into open source details so then of course there is a lot to learn and to talk about. I think we all felt that we tried to cover quite a lot that together with the questions was hard to fit within the given time.

I ended our triplet by talking about open source from a producer’s viewpoint, how we view things in a typical open source project and I used a lot of details and factual points from the cURL project.

The audience consisted of perhaps 50 people. We had a rather nerdy subject and we had tough competition from five other parallel sessions, with some of them featuring Internet and other local celebrities.

Over all, I think we did good. The idea that held our three talks together I think was fine, we kept the schedule pretty good, the audience seemed to enjoy it and I had a great time. And we got a really nice lunch afterwards!

Haxx is dedicated and committed to work with open source as much as possible, and we love and praise the virtues of free and open source software.

We have teamed up with a bunch of friends here in Sweden that share a lot of our mindset and spirit, and together we’ve created Fossgruppen, The Foss Group, and as an umbrella organization the group is all about making it easier for companies and people in Sweden and the world to find open source professionals. We offer open source consultants, foss-related training/courses and more.

If you’re looking for Open Source professionals in Sweden, no other company or association can compete with the amount of experience and core hacker geekness that Fossgruppen possesses. Together we also have contributors and maintainers of a range of foss projects. If you have any insights at all into foss in Sweden, there is no doubt that you will recognize more than one name in our group.

The guys in Fossgruppen are also involved in some of the biggest recent foss-related events in Sweden: foss-sthlm and FSCONS.

Fossgruppen currently consists of this team of elite guys:

• Daniel Stenberg
• Björn Stenberg
• Simon Josefsson
• Henrik Sandklef
• Jonas Öberg
• Johan Thelin
• Henrik Nordström
• Andreas Nilsson
• Jeremiah Foster
• Mathias Klang
• Peter Stuge
• Marcus Rejås

The web site is basic so far, and we don’t really have a shiny logo to show off with yet but I’m confident we will sort all that out over time!

Until October 22 you can nominate a person, a project or an organisation for the Nordic Free Software Award.

The Nordic Free Software Award is given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2010 in Gothenburg.

To nominate your favorite, email award at fscons.org with the following information:

• Name of nominee
• Description/Bio of the nominee
• Motivation for the award
• Description of accomplishments

Yours truly was awarded last year together with Simon Josefsson. 2008, the award was given to Mats Östling and 2007 to SkoleLinux.

Now go send in your award nomination.

Disclaimer: I’m a member of the jury this year!

I’m maintaining a bunch of projects and at times I think about joining some kind of umbrella organization to find a foster family for the project. An organization that’s bigger than just that single project that possibly could be helpful in a lot of ways.

One large and famous such umbrella project for free and open software is GNU, Gnu’s Not Unix. To submit your software to GNU, they have a set of rules you need to obey. and here’s my reasons why the projects I maintain most likely will not ever become GNU projects:

• GNU programs should come with documentation in Texinfo format – Oh man, so we need to provide an inferior documentation format of the docs for our software just to be GNU? It doesn’t make sense. And of course, info also sucks.
• A GNU program should use the latest version of the license that the GNU Project recommends—not just any free software license. For most packages, this means using the GNU GPL – for many existing projects the selected license was carefully chosen and if the project has existed for a while changing license is not an easy task. I would also consider it out of the question for many projects. A true stopping requirement for most of my projects.
• the documentation files and comments in the program should speak of GNU/Linux systems, rather than calling the whole system “Linux”, and should use the term “free software” rather than “open source”. – blah. I often speak of “open source” and I like the term “Linux” because of its simplicity and it being easier to pronounce than GNU/Linux.

In all, this just proves that I don’t share the religious and strong philosophical views on life and everything that the GNU people posses.

I’m quite simply not a GNU person. I sympathize with their general goals and I know and support a lot of GNU hackers and projects. I just can’t make my projects join the project.

I’ll be brief:

On the Software Freedom Day 2010 (September 18th), the guys in “The Swedish Linux Association” (Svenska Linuxföreningen) are organizing a day with talks and presentations about Linux and foss related subjects, which they call Linuxträff 2010. It takes place in Stockholm city, Sweden.

At that event, in the 11:00 – 12:00 time slot, you will be able to see and hear me do a little talk about Rockbox and reverse engineering to get free software on consumer electronics.

See you there!