FOSDEM 2006

This year, the days before FOSDEM were the stressful ones, as I got to organize accomodation. Initially, we wanted to have similar appartments as last year, but by the time I was less busy at uni to actually look into it, most of them were already booked, so we had to put up with a youth hostel instead. The positive sides of this were the much lower expenses and a location in the city centre, making us actually look at Bruxelles a bit in detail this time.

"Us" were the Hurd people, including Martin "earliest Hurd adopter present" Michlmayr. I got to FOSDEM by car again, picking up Marcus Brinkmann, Neal Walfield and Olaf Buddenhagen on the way in Cologne. Finding the youth hostel seemed to be pretty hard as we just had a street address and a map without street names, but we managed to find it pretty quickly to my great surprise (driving around in Bruxelles usually ended up being a complete disaster over the last years). After a strange encounter with a Guillem Jover lookalike in front of the hostel, we met the other guys (Thomas Schwinge, Marco Gerards, Stefan Siegl and Ognyan Kulev) and had a discussion about Neal's and Marcus' plan to move to a persistent system.

After dinner, I met the other Debian people in the Roi d'Espagne and hat some longer chats with Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Rob Bradford, Martin Michlmayr and Jordi Mallach, who I finally met for the first time and who did not cop out of FOSDEM this year as usual... The pub is getting more and more crowded each year, all the hackers barely fit even though they opened the balustrade this time as well. It was great to see everybody again and have a few beers. Martin and I then managed to find the way back to the hostel by foot.

We had no developer room, and no talks in the Debian room either, so FOSDEM was a pretty relaxed event this year. I met some more familiar faces like Noel Koethe and Andreas Mueller and listened to a couple of talks, most notably Richard Stallman's and Jeff Waugh's keynotes and Hanna Wallach's talk about FLOSSPOLS. Stefan Siegl also managed to get GNU Mach working for both my 3Com PCMCIA NIC and my Orinoco PCMCIA WLAN card, confirming his title as Hurd "hacker of the month".

On Saturday evening, we (at this time, Guillem Jover, Gianluca Guida, Bas Wijnen and Jeroen Dekkers had joined) had dinner with the french Hurd guys (Manuel Menal, Marc Dequenes, Richard Braun, Arnaud Fontaine and others) in an italian restaurant. At 10:40 PM, the waiter told us in a rather unfriendly tone that they would close at 11 and presented us with the bill, along with handing out the menu again so that we could look up our share. By the time the bill arrived the french part of the table (at 10:55 PM), the guys were pretty surprised by this whole business and complained loudly that they did not have a dessert yet and insistent on having one. After some more minutes of discussion, the waiter gave in and served their desserts, after which each of them paid his share with his carte bleue. I believe we left the restaurant around 11:30.

On Sunday evening, we had dinner again (the french guys had left Bruxelles already) and then drove back to Germany after having desserts and coffee in a bar. We left Bruxelles at around midnight and arrived in Duesseldorf at 2:30 PM, so we were glad that Neal offered us to stay at his place. We had breakfast the next morning with him and Isabel and then I proceeded to drive back to Frankfurt in the early afternoon.

FOSDEM rocked, as usual. After being with the Debian crowd for the first three years or so, and mostly sticking with the Hurd crowd last year, I think I managed a pretty good balance between the two this year. This will not have been my last FOSDEM.

Systems 2005

Another year, another Systems. This year, however, sadly the first time without Jens, so organization was harder than usual. C&L again provided an Open Source area where we had a booth along with GNOME, KDE, the several BSDs, PostgreSQL and some smaller Open Source projects. As we were not able to build up the booth on Sunday already, there was only a pretty bad location left on Monday, facing towards the wall. Roland Stigge provided a huge 1,5 by 1,5 metre Debian swirl banner, which we mounted in the vicinity of the (too small for that) booth. Michael Ablassmeier brought a Shuttle PC and a TFT display so we could show visitors around the Debian desktop and point them towards further information on the internet. Credativ again kindly shipped posters and flyers. We sold the former and distributed the latter to passing visitors. Unfortunately, Credativ did not receive any LinuxTag DVDs this year, and we were unable to obtain some from other people (apparently they are spared for LinuxWorldExpo in Frankfurt next month, though most visitors there should know Debian already I guess), so we only had about 30 DVDs, which were left from the pack I took back from LinuxTag myself. We sold those for 2 EUR, and later distributed some shiny new Breezy CDs the GNOME booth acquired on Thursday and had some Sarge CDs pressed at a nearby CD production booth which we sold for 2 EUR as well.

After some initial doubts on whether we would be able to properly man the booth, it turned out that the local Debian community was enough to guarantee presence except for Friday morning. Michael Ablassmeier, Erich Schubert, Simon Richter, Roland Stigge and Rene Engelhard manned the booth besides me. So we were in the fortunate position that we had two people at the booth most of the time while shuffling around personnel, while most other booths were operated by the same one or two people throughout the week.

This year, almost all people I asked (I usually offered a flyer and asked "Do you know Debian already?" to all passing visitors, unless they quickly tried to run through our territory) knew about Debian at least somewhat, and surprisingly many people said they had Debian installed and were happy with it. Thanks to the Sarge release and the almost-official amd64 archive (the respective lack of which were by far the most prominent questions last year), we had almost no recurring questions to answer; probably the most frequent question was about Ubuntu and our relationship with it, but those were pretty scarce and I expected much more of that. Likewise, only very few people were unhappy about Debian (far outweighed by the happy bunch), and most of that seemed to be due to specific technical issues rather than any general reservations about the Debian development or community processes. Most of the remaining questions were pretty specific, e.g. people having issues installing Debian on their hardware or trying to do some exotic stuff.

To summarize, it was a nice having a booth again and getting in touch with visitors and users. I did not see much else of Systems this year due to being busy with university as well, but I do not think it would have been worth it anyway. Murray Cumming and Joerg Kress (who were managing the GNOME booth) helped me dismantle the booth and carry back the hardware and leftovers on Friday evening and we decided to have dinner together at a nice pub in Munich.

On Saturday, 30th July, my friend and fellow Debian Developer Jens Schmalzing tragically passed away. When I learned about his death, I was shocked and have been mourning him ever since. Jens was not very publically active in the Debian community (he preferred to do work rather than discuss), nor did he attend Debian conferences or international events like LinuxTag, but he was an important part of our local Munich Debian Community. He frequently organized meetings, even back at the time when we met only very irregularly. He also co-organized the real-life Bug-Squashing-Party in Munich last year (providing rooms at his university institute, besides others) and represented Debian at local Linux events like Linux-Infotag Augsburg or Munich's Systems.

For me personally, Jens was also a friend, my Debian advocate, and one of the first Debian Developers I met personally. He perhaps also was the Debian person I met most frequently and we phoned each other occasionally or met privately, e.g. when we made the LaTeX layout of the Debian Flyer for LinuxTag 2002 (which later on got used for other events as well), when he managed to install Debian GNU/Linux on my (or rather my dad's) Apple Mac SE/30 and when we drove together to Linux-Infotag Augsburg last year show-casing FAI and Debian-Installer.

As he did not show up for the last few local Debian meetings, I was about to phone him to see whether he was fine. Now, I will never be able to do so again. Instead, I will remember the nice times we all had together with him during the various Debian meetings in beer gardens or pubs. My best wishes go to his widow and his three little sons.

Jens, you will be missed.

LinuxTag 2005

So, I think I figured out how to best do it this year, I can't believe it could be possibly better next year. As I had to give math tutorials on Friday morning, I only arrived at Karlsruhe after much hectic at late afternoon (yay for traffic jams), about five minutes early for my talk on the Ubuntu development and community model (slides are here). Considering that I did pretty much all of the slides in the car from Munich to Karlsruhe and my batteries went flat one hour early, that one went pretty well, though only around twenty people attended and I got some strange feedback. I talked for about half an hour and then we had long Q&A and discussion session afterwards. I met Oleksandr Shneyder (the guy who ported KDE to the Hurd) right after the talk and we chatted for a while about the Hurd and things in general, briefly meeting Wolfgang Jährling who was on the way out and later Marcus Brinkmann. Oleks had to leave some time later so I continued discussing with Marcus until he had to leave for his train as well, at which point I went for social event as well. The first person I met was Dogi, who I was delighted to see again (we didn't manage to meet up in Munich for months). The event was right next to LinuxTag this year and except for the fact that getting a beer was non-trivial due to technical problems and thus large queues, it was very nice and I met a lot of people I haven't seen in a while (Alfie, Martin Michlmayr and Mako Hill) or at all (Agnieszka Czajkowska, who designed the cover for the Sarge LinuxTag DVD, Yuwei Lin, a sociologist from Amsterdam, and Daniel Stone, who I only briefly talked to, unfortunately). After quite a lot of beers (couldn't recall how many) I finally left the party at around 2:30 AM and joined Mako in his hotel room which he had kindly offered to shar with me. He was still working on his talk for the next day so I read a chapter of 'After the quake' by Haruki Murakami, which he recommended to me and which I since have read almost in its entirety.

The next day, we went to LinuxTag at about 11 AM (I couldn't sleep anymore from 9 AM on though, so I only had a couple of hours of sleep) and I took a walk around looking at the booths. The Ubuntu booth as part of the GNOME booth wasn't immediately obvious, but there were some Ubuntu CDs and Michael Kofler's Ubuntu book on display. The Debian booth was looking pretty professional as always, thanks to the great work of Jörg Jaspert, Alexander Schmehl and all the others. HP's booth was by far the biggest, and I was a bit disappointed that IBM's booth didn't look much bigger than Microsoft's, but it was of course bigger than SuSE's (which wasn't really present at all). I briefly visited an introductory talk to Fedora (as part of FUDCON) and was thrilled to learn they still rather recommend a re-installation for major upgrades. I then had booth duty between 1 and 3 PM, but as the release was just out of the door, the questions weren't that predictable and mostly related so some hardware configuration making trouble or some specific software problems. The keysigning party took longer than expected, so the people who were supposed to be our relief showed up late and I was in turn late for the 'Debian Internals' talk and only saw the second part of Joey's turn, as well as Frank Lichtenheld talking about the website and Jörg Jaspert briefly mentioning how to get involved. Next was Mako's big talk about forking Free Software projects and the Debian/Ubuntu relationship. The room was packed and (Mako asked about this at the beginning), the majority of the people were Debian users and quite a few developers were present as well. His talk was really great (as I expected, having read a draft paper beforehand), he had to rush things a bit towards the end, though. After that, I wandered around a bit more and talked to a couple of people until LinuxTag ended.

After dismantling the booth, the Debian crew went to a pizzeria and then mostly split up, with Mako, Dogi, Alfie, Weasel, Flo, Andreas Barth and a couple of others going back to the AKK gym (where everbody had been sleeping) and the rest leaving Karlsruhe. I was initially pondering between several options such as going back to Munich (Martin was being driven there so there would have been a ride), going to Frankfurt to visit my parents or staying in Karlsruhe. I was really glad I did the last, as there was the big university summer party just around the AKK again that year (that party happened last year as well, but I went to Frankfurt in the late afternoon then). As the weather was still extremely good, a huge lot of people were at that party, which itself was huge, with two concert stages outside and three floors inside. Right at the beginning, the 'Martinazzi incident' happened. Two punk girls stepped up to Dogi, snatched the bottle of Martinazzi (a cheap form of Martini) from his loose grab and ran away. After a couple of seconds of surprise, Mako and Dogi pursued them, Dogi grabbed one of them by her skirt and then a small quarrel for the bottle evolved, which the guys finally won, whereas the girls begged a bit without success and then walked away. After a couple of meters, one of them suddenly turned around, walked straight up to Dogi and kissed him on the mouth. At this point, it was clear this party would rock. Unfortunately, the outdoor concert ended at around 11 PM, so we only banged to a couple of songs by some pretty good rock band and then Dogi, Mako, Alfie and me went inside where a cool hip hop band was just about to finish their set. We then danced on the other two floors until we were totally exhausted due to the sweaty temperatures present inside. At around 3 AM we finally called it quits and had a Falafel to cool down. We decided to sleep outside of the AKK gym and suddenly the punk girl showed up again. At that point I was too sleepy to notice, but Mako later said her boyfriend had shown up eventually as well. Sleep was not easy as some people had decided to play football with an empty plastic bottle on the concrete all night long, but I managed for a couple of hours eventually.

The Ubuntu Community Model

Following up on my earlier post about the Ubuntu development model, this one will shed some light on how the Ubuntu community works. This is also to prepare myself a bit for my talk on that subject at LinuxTag tomorrow.

It is clear that Ubuntu managed to create a very strong and vibrant community in a very small time. This is largely due to a clear focus on creating a friendly environment people would like to get involved in, rather than having some elite society. The key points of their community are:

• The Ubuntu community is structured as follows: On the top, there is the `Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life' (SABDFL), Mark Shuttleworth. Then there are the Technical Board (currently Matt Zimmerman Scott James Remnant and Mark Shuttleworth) and the Community Council (currently Benjamin 'mako' Hill, Mark Shuttleworth, Colin Watson, and James Troup). Huge parts of the community are further organized in specific teams, like the kernel team, the desktop team, the porting teams, the documentation team or the various localization teams.

• As can be seen from above, Mark Shuttleworth is not just the guy throwing all the money at the developers and marketing people, he is actively involved in large parts of the development and directly interacts with the community. On the one hand, this means somebody with a great vision and charisma is leading the community and Ubuntu in general, on the other hand, there were some ex-cathedra decisions in the past the community did not support (most notably changing default Nautilus behaviour only days before the Hoary release)

• While the Technical Board steers the development of the Ubuntu distribution, the Community Council governs the evolution of the community. Both have public IRC meetings (including public minutes) every two weeks with a detailed agenda anybody can contribute to in order to get their concerns discussed. The members of both are appointed for a period of two years.

• There is the Code of Conduct which covers the behaviour from community members in any kind of communication, electronic or in real life. They are expected to be considerate, respectful and collaborative; flamewars, personal attacks and trolling are not tolerated. On the one hand, this makes it clear to everybody on what terms they are joining the community, on the other hand it also makes it easy to identify and possibly expulse people violating these principles.

• There are several levels of commitment to the Ubuntu community. Everybody who did a substantial contribution to Ubuntu (contributing documentation to the wiki, triaging bugs, helping users in #ubuntu) can become a 'Member' of the Ubuntu community, if the Community Council approves them. Members who want to become Maintainers (i.e. upload package) are supposed to find a mentor who reviews their packages and helps them along when questions arise. Once the mentor is satisfied with the members' contribution they will recommend them to the Technical Board and the Community Council, which guarantee to process the request within one month. Upload rights are usually restricted to the `universe' section of the archive initially, and Maintainers need to revisit Technical Board approval to upload to other components as well.

• They have a wiki. Besides mailing lists and IRC, this is their major way of communicating, and it seems to be working very well. As new content can be written very easy even by newcomers (no web admins need to check in things into CVS or change some static HTML pages), they have gotten a huge amount of contributions for end user documentation, HOWTOs and other practical things. Also, most members of the Ubuntu community have a wiki documenting their involvements.

• A large focus of their community work is based on translations and localization. They have so-called LoCo Teams in various countries who help spread the word of Ubuntu, translate things into their language, form sub-communities in their language and represent Ubuntu at trade shows etc.

That's it, so far as I see, comments welcome. It is clear they are doing some things radically different to Debian, and it remains to be seen whether Ubuntu can serve as some kind of soap box for how the Debian community could evolve.