alex.polvi.net

As an undergrad, the OSL pretty much changed my life. It lead to my internships with Mozilla and Google, along with set me on a career path that seems pretty solid. The OSL has given many students a chance to learn and work with open source. Furthermore, it has supported most of the major open source projects out there (Mozilla, the Kernel, Gentoo, Debian, Freenode, Drupal, to name a few).

So yeah, OSL FTW. If you are a manager/oss-lover type, and interested in joining the fun, you should check this out.

update: goto jobs.oregonstate.edu and search for #0000693.

Check it out, three friends and I are trying to raise $10,000.

http://pleasesendustolinuxconfau.info/

Know any companies that could help? Can you?

Yup, we resolved 347226. See the full details and photos.

Tonight we had a meeting with Greg and he blew our socks off. He had heard that mozilla released during one of our meetings, so being the Linux kernels 2.6.x.y maintainer he did the same. He showed the entire release process from checking his email for patches to uploading the .tar.gz. He even went as far to name this kernel release “Woozy Beaver” (2.6.11.8)!

In the announcement to the Linux kernel mailing list he thanked us, but the real thanks goes to him! Greg, thank you thank you thank you for everything you have done for the community including our own!

Photos here

The Linux Users Group shirt is finally coming together. I asked my friend Logan, who is very graphically inclined, to try and whip something up for us.

Needless to say, Logan rules. I could see this becoming a great logo for Linux in general.

Full pdf: front, back

This is by no means a topic I am an expert on. I do not develop the kernel, am not even on the mailing list, nor do I know the full story. The only shred of credibility I have is that I stayed on Larry’s couch nearly a year ago. Even then, however, we only had one good bitkeeper discussion. Alas, everyone has an opinion…

BitKeeper is right on. From the discussion with Larry, allowing open source projects to use BK was something he was doing out of sheer kindness. The bonus for the project is that they get a good source code management. For BK there might be some marketing wins, a few write-offs, and get to help out the community. A nice win win. When people, or companies, do something stupid that takes from this common good it is only reasonable to end the situation.

Linus is fine with it. Greg is fine with it. Larry is obviously fine with it. Seems like the situation is a win win again.

Now I am super excited to see what source code management software comes out of the woodwork. Something is going to have to step up. Thank BK for forcing innovation and creating another win!

Today the OSDL, from Portland, came to OSU to talk to students about a “membership” into the OSDL. Sort of like how ACM, NSPE, or EFF is funded.

Here are my notes:

- About the OSDL

* Mission: “… Center of Gravity… ”
* Vendor neutral
* No products
* Supply full time developers to the community
** Linus
** Mortan
* “doing patches to 2.7 right now”
* “All tests posted on the web”
* Production kernel: Morton, Experimental: Linus. (I thought it was the
opposite)

- About the memberships

* OPB style
** Gifts for contribution
* Supports kernel development
* Supports Legal efforts
** SCO Suit
** Easier for users because they do not have to worry about SCO
** Grow legal fund
** Open Source Licenses.
** Works with OSI

* Do not sell members products
* Trying to get involved with the end user.
** Getting involved with the desktop initiative.

“What would make you feel good about giving a donation?”
* Help kernel devs
* Help engineers
* more projects
* more initiatives

Pays Linus to work full time to develop the kernel.

She also said twice “Down with Microsoft.”

My comments on the situation:

Honestly, I am not quite sure what the OSDL is up to about this. This
could easily be looked as a fund raiser, but I do not think it is.
Simply because they would not make much money from us poor college kids
;) They seemed to understand that. So what else is there? I suppose they
could be trying to build an elite community, but that _sort of_ goes
against the whole open source world. Even though there are some elite
OS groups out there — nobody (that I know of) paid to be in them.

If they really want to build a good relationship with FOSS users and
devs in college, they need to offer scholarships and internships. This
year was the first year they provided internships to the popular MECOP
program on campus. Good start. They also need to be proactive about
getting speakers down here to talk about how cool they are. The OSDL has
plenty of interesting resources, in people, that could greatly benefit
students. Now we just need to get them to share, with out having to buy
our way in.

We told them all this.

I think this was a good start for them. They started by coming to our
community and gathering our thoughts. However, the fact that they did it
as a “Focus Group” just screams cooperation. If they want to come
across as a community member they need to interact more with the
community, in a community style. They probably would have gotten more
feedback and attendance if they just would have came to a LUG meeting.
:)

If nothing else, they understand that selling a college student this
“membership” is not going to be easy.

I successfully wasted my weekend doing random things.

UPDATE: I put apache2 and my gallery software on it. Then I hacked up gallery a bit so I can click “View this on Frame” and it will show up on the frame! Pretty slick!

Our recent installfest was a major success. We had over 65 people attend, in which about 3/4 of those brought a machine. Pretty fantastic.

We got some fancy press before and after the event!

If you scroll too fast, your browser may crash. Well, if you are running it out of a ppc32 chroot on top of a ppc64 kernel and userspace. So far the only application that I cannot get to compile on ppc64 is mozilla and/or firefox. In my 32bit environment I have gotten both to compile, but Firefox will not start. Mozilla works about 86% of the time… the other 14% being when I scroll too fast, or google the wrong terms, or even just find a particular Mosaic killer killer website. Over all it sucks, but it is better then no browser at all!

I try to ask my questions in the appropriate IRC channels, but most of the time I just come across as being annoying. Guess I should just have to figure all this out on my own, right?