Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up earlyish, packed people off to school. Poked at yast2-gtk, fixed up the regression tests, created a new version with more nice fixes from Ricardo. Recalled I need to commit to the osc branch I created.
Noticed some of the on-line interest in my article last Friday;
- LWN's excerpt of my conclusion is perhaps more stark when dis-connected from my definition of an 'active developer' (and the several caveats around that); obviously the real number of active developers (in either the Linux kernel or OO.o) is unlikely to actually dip around release time, yet it's clearly an interesting metric.
- The high-bloodpressure-brigade apparently think I'm a hijacker (clearly an under-emotive & balanced view; After all, I have a beard; what more proof should be necessary !). Admittedly I would love to see some sensible changes in control & direction for OO.o, but I happen to think these would be good for Sun as well as OO.o. As for the rampant factual inaccuracies the most amusing is the apparent lack of understanding that Sun's OO.o 3.0 ships with built in MS/OOX import too, oh and that Sun have a patent cease-fire in-place with Microsoft.
- Of course, it's right to be frustrated that OO.o is not getting enough developers - join the club. This guy clearly has the right attitude, apparently I should get actively involved in OO.o (the sad truth being that I have less time than ever before on it currently - with lots of other Desktoppy things to look at). In general though, that's excellent advice, please do mail me if you are a developer and want to get actively involved, we can help out.
Poked at espeak vs. festival, some Evolution bits - seemingly performance is substantially improving wrt. the sqlite re-work. Lunch, Clarity, FATE, hopefully, eventually back to prodding gdm.
Interested that Roy published Simon's (apparently private) E-mail: verbatim; quick call with Simon. Fascinating to hear Simon holding forth on behalf of the OO.o engineering community, while in the same breath accusing me of spin; cue reality check. In other sections we start with a reasonable summary: "he doesn't trust Sun to use the aggregated copyright wisely." before moving on to something I happen to be sure is a rather egregious falsehood: "Note that the aggregated copyright has been used twice in the last 4 years, once to drop SISSL as a dual license (an act that got IBM to start contributing) and once to adopt LGPLv3 instead of LGPLv2.". If this is so, and the ownership rights are just used to simplify really occasional re-licensing between free-software licenses (and they're not needed to drop a second license), it should be trivial to proscribe that use in the SCA, and I (for one) would be thrilled; sadly it is not so. Much more spin than substance there, but I'll go easy on Simon since apparently it was not for publication & thus not dissection proof, or apparently well researched.

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.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2008-10-13: Monday.