Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
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- Up late, ill & tired - an exciting cold. Prodded mail
gingerly, responded to yast2-gtk thread, merged Radek's nice iogrind
patches. Call with Thomas at lunch.
- Finally got to a reply for Louis Suarez-Pott's LXF Interview
(LXF97, October 07 - sadly print only). An extraordinary interview from the
Libre Graphics meeting. Some fascinating highlights:
- "A great example of a stride in strategy" &
user-friendliness ... would be for OO.o (writer?) to add a feature
that noticed if the user would be better off using a DTP app and
recommended Scribus instead. Apparently "In the open source world, you
loose nothing by advertising somebody else's product..." - really !?
- Most problematic for Louis was (apparently) Novell subsidising
a river-boat last year at OOoCon Lyon with meal & champagne. Incidentally
we tried to do a similar (wrong?) thing this year but ran into problems...
"Rather than a junket,
perhaps the money could be better spent by sponsor companies on, for
example **training project managers how to work in a more non-hierarchical
fashion**" - one has to wonder: which project managers ? and who
introduced all the unnecessary (& often dysfunctional) hierarchy we
see in OO.o today ?
- Apparently "some companies don't really act as a sponsor in a
true sense - they're prepared to contribute resources by supplying people
to work on areas of programming ... and don't really work with the
non-developer community" - well it's true: we hack on things that we
think are interesting & useful to our customers & wrt. growing OO.o,
and we invest ~nothing in non-developers. It seems clear (at least to me),
that to improve OO.o - we need a lot less talking, and a lot more coding.
- "It would be great to have companies like
Novell working more fully with the community, and not just in this
market heavy fashion. Novell sponsors OOoCon, which is great, but
rather than a barge cruise, using that money to help with QA,
localisation and training etc. would see a better return for both
Novell and the community as a whole." - some sage advice for sure.
I mean, why sponsor a time for OO.o contributors to relax & talk
(as a thank-you present for all the hard work they have done in the year)
- when instead we could fund a fraction of an extra QA person ? oh &
perhaps eat gruel to save money for critical project-manager training ?
- Then we move on to the vexing ethical concerns surrounding
the sponsoring of events, we have "How much does it cost to buy the
interest of the developer ?" - in general my feeling is approximately
the cost of their salary. If anyone feels obliged to be nice to Novell on
account of free beer, please don't be. Louis is at least correct to be
un-fazed himself. I certainly don't feel indebted to VA, Google, IBM, Sun,
Intel, Microsoft, and many others whose hospitality I've enjoyed over the
years. Clearly the hope is not to buy people off, but instead to build community
by putting people in a single boat, with some beers & encouraging them
to talk to each other. From a stark hard-nosed perspective, I would try to
persuade management that if we build a more fun & friendly community,
Novell benefits via. a better product, though there is some brand,
product awareness & feel-good factor too.
- Anyway, it's refreshing to know that the hard issues of the
day in OO.o lie, not where I think they are: in the code, it's stewardship,
and development: but instead in the ethics of accepting unwanted &
unconditional hospitality. Cheers.
- Continued poking my DiskSim file to try to persuade it that adjacent
track reads are fairly inexpensive, managed that, but apparently seeks are
under-valued too now.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
