Fabrizio Balliano

Yesterday Russ Nelson wrote in the OSI licence-review mailing list that finally the AGPL 3 was approved!

You can already see it in the OSI approved licenses page.

I think AGPL3 is really important for web applications and I’m really happy that OSI made AGPL official. Now I hope that more FLOSS projects will use it.

PS: This post is a sort of answer to post about Magento’s license where Roy Rubin (CEO of Varien) told me that AGPL wasn’t OSI approved (it was true in that moment, but now it isn’t anymore). Hey I don’t want to reopen the licenses war of that post, this note is just to join the arguments :-)

UPDATE: Matt Asay says that AGPL is a cure for the cancer within open source. I agree.

Many blogs talked about that in the latest 2 days, while a was taking a break, but I can’t stop myself for writing a headline about this news from ars technica.

I hope that this unification idea will go on and complete successfully, it should happen for many other projects, I also hope that this will be taken as an example of the right direction for companies that want to work with open projects (ok Apple is not a saint…)

People are claiming that Wubuntu brings Ubuntu into your browser, this is totally wrong! Wubuntu is just a web application that tries to emulate the graphic theme of Ubuntu, nothing to do with the real operating system behind.

I think wubuntu is a good work (also if I don’t like web desktop projects) but it should be clearly stated that Wubuntu is not related to the real Ubuntu! This could confuse users and bring bad results for Ubuntu.

Movable type is opening part of the code, but:

• there will still be 2 versions, the open one and the commercial one
• the open version will be released in Q3 2007

So why the big announce now? I think it’s to get attention, I heard about some big MT users that were about to move to wordpress but now MT says “hey wait wait, you want open source, we’ll give you open source” and now they’ve time to evaluate feedback.

Personally I like double licensed software but only when the only different thing is the license, anyway a bit of open source competition will be a good thing.

Because I don’t want software that doesn’t integrates with my desktop but most of all, should I see again shareware/trialware closed source projects and maybe pirated software on the beautiful and free (as FREEDOM, always remember the meaning and the importance of that word) Linux…

Subject says it all, here you have the official IDC note. Why was it canceled? None tells it.

I was there last year (or maybe 2 years ago, I can’t remember now) with a talk about UfficioZero and it was a good manifestation but… in the next months I saw a big commercialization of the initiative, with many sponsorship appliance requests (money guys, money) and I lost my interest in that.

In a few years the usage of mobile computers will grow, we know Ubuntu will work on a “mobile edition” thus powertop from Intel will allow us to build power cheap software, enhancing the Linux mobile experience.

Intel is also maintaining a set of patches for some Linux software, I hope those patches will be integrated in the mainstream releases as soon as possible because we need to make Intel know that we really appreciate their work for us.

Good work Intel, also for the open video drivers announce.

Things are getting really interesting in these days :)

UCK and reconstructor are both good software to create a customized Ubuntu derivative.

I’m working hard on UCK in these days thus you can expect big changes soon, but I’m also a user of reconstructor and I can do some considerations, in this post I’l talk about the next UCK release so maybe you can think that something I’m saying is wrong but that’s because you’re still working with the old UCK.

• UCK is bash scripting, reconstructor is python GTK. For some things UCK is easier to script and customize because many users know bash, less know python
• reconstructor does many things that UCK doesn’t: gnome environment customization, alternate cd customization are just two examples
• UCK can used to automatically generate ISOs without user interaction
• UCK has a nice support to install language packs and customize gfxboot language selections
• reconstructor has a nicer GUI also if it’s GTK only, UCK GUI can be used within CLI/GTK/QT environment thanks to dialog/zenity/kdialog but we can’t build complex UI with those tools

So what are the conclusions? Both projects have the same goals, both have a common part of code that could be reused.

The next UCK version will bring a good set of small scripts that everyone can call to do every single task of a remastering, thus my thought is that UCK should concentrate on the back-end scripts and reconstructor on the GUI. I hope for the future that reconstructor could drop his back-end scripts and use UCK’s ones, working together to bring better software for everyone.

If you want, check out the development version of UCK.

Reading my latest post someone can say

hey you started many projects but what did you do for the fragmentation problem you’re talking about?

That’s absolutely right!

Something like 3 years ago we started the Knoppix italian community, after some time (maybe 1 or 2 years, I can’t remember) some other guys started another knoppix italian community, we told them they should join our project becase our was already known and active but nothing. We continued with our project for a bit but, monitoring the others’ work we found it was good and we decide to close ours to make users join the new one.

This is a good defragmentation I think, I don’t care about the 10 euro/month for the adsense banner on my site, I care about the idea, what’s the goal? 10 euro/month or the spread of knoppix? IT HAS TO BE THE SECOND!

Our website is still there just for reference but it’s read-only, hope we did a good work, I think so.

I feel this as a big problem in Italy because of my involvment in some free projects, I don’t know if it’s the same in other countries but I can imagine that’s pretty the same situation.

A free project is created starting from an idea of a single person, some other joins, some other say “hey I want to do this instead of this” and create another project. What’s the result? The failure of at least one of the projects.

It’s absolutely sad to see good projects dying because people can’t find common objectives and work together!

If you come second, don’t impose your ideas, join the community and work for it, if you really want to contribute put down your own pride and work for the free software, not only for yourself and your name!