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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- Bugs & mail; set too installing debuginfo packages
to profile yast2-gtk's package selector. Fixed some iogrind issues -
user feedback is so good.
- Lunch, more yast2-gtk hacking, hugely accelerated package
search / selection, a couple of seconds down to sub-second, with some
smallish hash of package name to summary text: good. Discovered
another 20% of the time we're rendering the (beautiful no doubt)
progress bar; hmm.
- Marveled at
Slashdot's inflation of the go-oo.org mess; a few points
- This is hardly a fork - and it's not even something
very new in practical terms. As I said very clearly, we're still
contributing the majority of our work to Sun, (and hence OO.o) under
the JCA, and will continue doing so for the bits that touch their
code. Indeed, right after I commit this yast2-gtk thing I'm going
to get on with un-stalling my up-stream configmgr re-factor / speedup
work, (actually a substantial LOC reduction, for those that like to
count such things). So, there is simply no walking away from OO.o here,
indeed why would we ?
- http://go-oo.org/ has
been around for 5+ years, and despite a new & prettier web-site,
simply continues a long tradition of pragmatic workarounds for
various sub-optimal situations in OO.o. This is
only one of tens of different OO.o variants out there: from
StarOffice, RedOffice, Symphony to every linux distro I'm aware
of that ships a custom version of OO.o, then of course there are
tons of local variants, and individuals re-building & brand
it in various ways.
- Wrt. copyright assignment, yes it's good to keep
unified copyright assignment for (hopefully extremely rare)
changes of Free software license etc. The problem lies not
with the license, but the idea that a single company, with
it's own agenda, having set itself up as the sole owner of an
open source project, will then always act in that project's
best interest. That just seems unrealistic, and the bigger the
company - IMHO - the less likely it is. Now - a
meritocratically constituted foundation, to which all code /
translation etc. contributors belonged, with some truly
representative governance - I'd love to belong to something
like that & assign my rights to it.
- Another (possible) benefit from unified copyright
assignment would be defending the copyright in court; again
that is something a non-profit (like the FSF) has done in the
past, and is presumably handled even in totally eclectic
ownership structures eg. the Linux Kernel. And of course, OO.o
already includes non-Sun-owned LGPL code.
- Richard Moore replied: with luck we'll get system-tap to
generate application profiles faster than valgrind can (but without stack
trace information), so we can trace & simulate a whole-system-install
to be able to improve layout. Then we just need some clever kernel hacker
to do some major surgery job on the kernel, so we have ~only the page-cache,
and file-system code and we can plug that into
iogrind instead of my lame FS modeling.
- Thanks to Huw for pointing out that Alan's diary has
moved (unfortunately server apparently down now), and turned into Welsh.
Alan was the first blogger I was aware of & of course a personal
inspiration; fixed the link.
- Correction, Albert Chin-A-Young points out that libxml2 is
in fact not LGPL licensed these days, and he's right: horribly, it
seems the license
changed a while back, and I'm behind the times; apologies. Luckily
the point wrt. LGPL code inclusion is aptly made by other examples:
libwpd eg. there are plenty of more eclectic licenses to choose from
in the (incomplete) external
list.
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)
