Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Dug into regression test problems with Bjorn at some length, startup (particularly with pipes for IPC) is a fun problem. Chat with Mark W. Lunch.
• Reviewed some patches for master, fixed some bug-packed code happened upon from a compile warning. Encouraged to see 32 modules converted to gnumake on master, of which fifteen are in tail_build (and thus can be built in parallel) - nice indeed.
• Out for a run, dinner with Lydia & J. worked late.

• Up early, bank holiday - decided to defer it. Chewed mail, Caught up on the weekends action, reviewed patches - lots of nice fixes coming up for 3.4.1.

• Up early, baby-sat while J. slept. Off to NCC, played with Mediashout for the first time - seems simple enough. Home for lunch, applied slugging.
• Out to see the Castros in the afternoon; fine tea, babes played happily. Home, quick tea, chatted to Rob in the evening it seems his company doing heat pump installation around Oxford is doing well. I love the monster solar PV installation pictured.
• Sermon on Daniel 3 in the evening, sleep.

• Up late, Skype with James & Kate - lovely to hear from and see them. House tidying, Bruce & Anne over for lunch, great to see them; fine afternoon together.
• Played reprap, got the comms code into some slightly better order and cleanliness; eventually worked out that my complex 'ok' accounting was un-necessary, the controller hyper-actively emits as many 'ok's as it wants new commands.
• Call with Thomas and Becky until late, lots of excitement going on there in Boston. It seems the Parent's house in Brighton looks rather fantastic for the old family home.

• Babes on holiday - half term; up later, mail chew, wrote up some analysis. Bus to Cambridge - lots of fun with the Collabora folk at the Cambridge Beer Festival variously.
• A number of people have asked about how I feel about: Mark's latest advocacy for to-corporate contributor agreements (CCAs). I have a number of thoughts.
  • I agree - that there is a 'spike-filled canyon' between proprietary software and open development of Free Software. However, I don't blame this on ideologues, but on the sheer economics. If you try to choose some middle ground - where you open up slightly, and 'harvest IP' into your commercially licensed products through CCAs there are many dangers. First - others will ship your product without paying you a cent, but worse - since there is an asymmetric barrier to entry you struggle to build a community, certainly fail to get other companies involved and have to do all the work. Thus you capture the worst of all worlds: no money, and no co-development - perhaps analogous to Miguel's comic "Part time vegetarianism". As one of those supposed ideologues - I want to get companies to choose clearly, not half-heartedly, and get across the canyon quickly without expending their initial goodwill and into a place that works well both for both their business and the wider community.
  • As someone who has advocated circumspection (not fear), of companies vs. well governed non-profits - I don't believe that view is 'childish'. Companies have mixed motives, but they also have fiduciary duties wielded by those very distant from the communities they are (not) involved in. These can lead to some perverse outcomes: of business people over-ruling and ignoring all the better advice from their technical staff, a trivial example might be around the questionable wisdom of pushing the use of CCAs at all.
  • Then we have an extended section pitching a nice vision of companies owning pieces and layers of the Linux stack, and playing nicely together. My skepticism of this is documented with a nice diagram too. I don't believe it can or will work, and I've seen it fail severally. The example with MySQL vs. PostgreSQL is not a great one - the latter is not a CCA project, with the same (very liberal) license available to all. Certainly no-one is arguing against corporate contribution, (I work for a corporation at least), instead they argue against corporate ownership through CCAs.
  • It seems that Mark's view is that - the thing holding back the world from providing him with a desktop that he can achieve 200 million users of Ubuntu with is: other people's bad attitude to assigning rights to Canonical (and others). It is an interesting thesis. Personally I have a couple of thoughts on that.
  • First - the simple point: it is curious to see the organisation that has set the price-point for preloaded Linux, and enterprise updates at near to zero is suddenly concerned about the lack of money, and hence jobs in Free Software. It is a great realisation that the economics of the ecosystem matter, and that it is important that the answer to "where can I get a job writing Free Software that everyone benefits from" needs to include Canonical, as it increasingly does.
  • Second - my counter thesis: Collaboration is key. which has many corollaries such as Diversity of contributors is a strength. Clearly CCAs result in single companies owning pieces of the stack - Mark appears to implicitly agree with this, apparently believing that this sacrifice will allow them to invest, and there is perhaps a grain of truth there. I believe this single company outcome is just a recognition of business reality, and not a result of my (and others) pernicious lobbying. Set against this presumed benefit then, is the inevitable stifling of collaboration, which creates systemic risk (via unrelated corporate failure), while breeding conflict. It is hard enough to get opinionated individuals to work together, and take the risk of re-using others' code. That is worse across company and group-think borders, and practically impossible if one company has to assign rights to another. Take for example GNOME Shell vs. 'Unity' - the problem (of having two teams of half the size, tackling twice as many bugs) is ultimately one of collaboration. This seems transparently obvious (and foolish to me), but is by no means unique - quite the opposite, it is replicated dozens of times. Though I can well believe the blame for this instance is quite evenly spread, and complex, the issue of a single company owning the user experience and strangling collaboration is quite serious, and something GNOME's guidelines on CCAs would rightly forbid. Indeed - we all need to work hard to ensure that we are as diverse, and open to new entrants, ideas and contributors as possible. Creating more excuses to not-collaborate is not wise even if they were immaterial (which CCAs are not). Indeed I had thought that working hard to help people collaborate is/was a key thrust of Mark's thinking underlying launchpad, bzr, etc. My concern is that, by making collaboration around CCAs much easier, it will inevitably create more, and ultimately substantially hinder the laudable goal of greater diversity and collaboration around each piece of software. That in turn will multiply duplication, conflict, and wasteage of resources, which in turn will slow our progress further.
  • In sum total, despite the bus-load of barbs: immature understanding, idealogue, childishly afraid, idea-less (no proposals), uncool, fundamentalist, radical, factionalists, claptrap, non-generous. I am mostly just amused - it seems a good sign of the strength of an argument that such an abundence of patently absurd ad-hominem is needed to articulate it. Simon Phipps has a nice article addressing the LibreOffice related sillies that will pop out of LWN sometime soon too.
  • Anyhow, despite much diverse contribution to many communities, discussion, thinking and advocacy on the topic, I would love to debate the issues with Mark personally, perhaps I'm wrong after-all; and I hope that he will deign to show up at the scheduled Desktop Summit panel on CCAs to defend both his ideas and adjectives, if this is indeed the issue blocking our success, it is a discussion well worth having.

• Up early, to work - mail; happy to have J. working next to me for a while on a funding proposal.
• Amused by Louis's latest great idea is to have Apache own OO.o. Apache seems to have quite a sensible approach to incubation that includes many criteria, taking just a few items of the first category 'Legal':
  • All code ASL'ed - which means Apache licensed. The Apache license is a non-copy-left license, OO.o's licensing has traditionally been copy-left indeed the community decided to go this way in the past to increase contribution. Traditionally OO.o's has had no problem getting companies to use the code, the problem has been getting contributions back. Making it easier to consume the code by destroying the requirement to contribute back - seems to fix a problem that we don't have, while exacerbating the problem we do have. LibreOffice's choice of MPL provides a commercially-friendly copy-left that allows businesses to ship under their own license: after they have contributed code back. In my view that is a good choice (when combined with the LGPLv3+ of course).
  • The code base must contain only ASL or ASL-compatible dependencies - this is quite a hurdle for a featureful OO.o. Particularly since all of the LibreOffice patches we've been accepting are under an MPL/LGPLv3+ dual-license. But more so because OO.o itself contains and requires non-Apache licensed code to be useful, lets look at some of that (some of this is listed at the external project).
    • [Update]: dmake - required to build the software - GPL
    • Hunspell - critical for spell-checking - MPL/LGPL
    • NSS libraries - document signing and crypto - MPL
    • The built-in regular expression library (useful for search, taken from glibc) - LGPL
    • cppunit (key for during-build unit testing) - LGPL
    • libwpd - the wordperfect file filter library - LGPL
    • libwps - the Microsoft works filter library - LGPL
    • libwpg - wordperfect graphics library - LGPL
    • Artwork - Tango, Crystal, Human etc. icons are under various licenses
    • Mozilla - needed for addressbook integration - MPL
    • Graphite - needed for very complex text rendering - LGPL
    • ... and more ...
    So - in summary, passing incubation would require either discarding features like spell-checking, document signing, file compatibility etc. etc. etc. or instead re-writing purely for licensing reasons. That doesn't sound like a winning strategy to me.
  • CLAs on file. - Apache projects require members to sign and send a CLA licensing their rights to the Apache foundation. This creates some beaurocratic hurdle of unclear usefulness that is likely to stifle volunteer contribution - whatever its merits. Since the Apache license is not a 'plus' license, this is necessary, but I for one prefer plus licensing to achieve the same effect without paperwork.
  So - in summary - it doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to me. The idea that TDF is missing some 'business expansion promoting' friendliness is somewhat risible.
• Back to the real world for some patch review, built a new Evolution patch to test a sqlite deadlock fix from Chen. Ran into another stl migration crasher, hmm.
• Team meeting, then TSC call, chat with Bjoern.
• I seem to be getting much more spam these days, and it is strange - after a decade of predominantly male enlargement advertisements, I'm now deluged with Bra adverts: what changed ? worrying.
• Dinner, read stories, call with JP, then Thorsten.

• Up, finished talk on Matthew 2; practise with N. prodded mail quickly. Off to TEAM, call with Simon, good day of study, helpful feedback on talk (torrent of words, slow down, pause/repeat etc. more for emphasis), and so on.
• Home, bathed babes, put them to bed, more mail - caught up with Thomas, reprapped a bit. Pleased to see Nat joining Xamarin.

• Up, patch reviews for RC2. Pleased to read Bjoern's nice blog entry about long-term planning for incompatible changes in 4.0.
• Prodded at the 3.4 bug list, and poked at RC2, reviewed more changes left and right. Pleased to see Lanedo's new website and their stewardship.
• Slogged away at prose for Linux Format column, and ran builds variously.

• Tired, practise with babes, the end of a week of sight-reading practise with N. to learn how to cope with not being able to play things immediately - good.
• Admin, Clarity, chat with Simon, mail, patch review, GSOC mentoring, more mail, iogrind explanation and prodding. Lunch with Tony. Wrote weekly status, call with Kendy.
• Babes to bed, PCC AGM (with cake) at our house - lots of lovely people around. Worked late and got some banking done.

• Off to NCC, Helen spoke; back for lunch with Tim & Jackie, lovely to get to know them a bit better. Lolled around suitably.
• Babes watched Alice again, put them to bed, had another go at improving the libreprap API and implementation towards getting repsnapper master working again; not there yet though.

• Up earlyish, re-wiring around the blown-up stepper controllers etc. (three down), and got the reprap working again.
• Tristan, Molly, Ethan & Ben over for lunch, lovely to see them again - turns out they're Rob McQueen's neighbours too. Out for a walk onto the heath, found a tree to climb.
• Back, food, put babes to bed; watched sitcom in bed.

• Reviewed and tested patches in the mail for 3.4.0, lots of nice fixes flowing in, and useful reviews too.
• Boggled at the sheer rigour of the FMR imaging science that, having carefully identified "the brain areas that have evolved to process religion" they amazingly discover that it is active when Apple fan-boys see Apple kit. I wonder does it also light up when communists see Marx / Engels or even Marx & Spencer - how about coffee lovers' reaction to beans ? No chance of course that the basic assumptions that brains have a special religious bit, that it is in a well defined place, and that activity there implies worship might be a tad suspect. Then again - anyone passionate about anything, their wife, family, God, job - must be deeply suspect in the first instance particularly if they have a brain. Amusing BBC3 program on brands though.
• Lunch; chat with Caolan. Finally started to get to near the bottom of my mailbox.

• Bad sleep again, annoying - lots to be doing of course. Mail churn, finally getting close to the pre-LinuxTag strata. Reviewed patches, printed expense claim, read the bug list. Lunch.
• Poked at a similar python problem, but now in-process instead of via a remote bridge; fun - discovered a pile of stale and unpleasant code. Created new commit account, fun.
• Dinner, put babes to bed. Toyed with the new javascript as virtual-machine fun from Fabrice Bellard, which comes with a C compiler. A simple app that does:
  volatile long j; for (j = 0; j < 1000000; j++); (on the same CPU takes) one second under emulation, and 0.004 seconds natively. Only 250 times slower, not bad.

• Up at 5ish: not sleeping - hacked on LibreOffice instead until the family awoke at 6:45, J. dropped Mike & I into Cambridge.
• Teaching on Christology, Men & Women's ministry, and practising Evangelistic Talks - fun, lots of lovely people there. Back with Miriam (who recently got engaged in Afghanistan - horay).
• Dinner, bathed and put three babes to bed; read stories. Back to work - reviewed and merged misc. patches, and beat back the E-mail a bit too. Boggled at LWN for a bit.

• Up early, tired. Mail mucking out, still trying to get back to before LinuxTag's hot topics. Reviewed some patches, and some more, read bugs. Lunch.
• Slightly worried, that when doing an operation I know is a very heavy I/O user I hear seek noise ... even when on an SSD - until I think and listen more carefully. More mail, worked out where the spare disk space I was missing had migrated to.
• Fixed a silly crash-on-start; libpng not considered wise to link to if you want to run on lots of distributions. Tried to square circles. Discovered the shutdown syscall rather late in life - I knew there was a reason that dbus didn't need two sockets per connection, dug fairly deeply into the binaryurp / python UNO fun.

• Up, two rounds of practise with N, and M. To work - avoided reading mail, by writing it instead. Lunch, clarity, status report writing.
• Tried to get my inbox in good order; cleaning out the stale imap cache, and so on. Back to E-mail. Filed expenses.

• Off to NCC, spoke on Daniel 2 (the latter part): God rules - despite sometimes contrary appearances, and his Kingdom is awesome mp3 (and the somewhat over-lengthy part1: mp3).
• Off to Thetford Forest for Laura's birthday party (and high-wire course for J.). Solo, child entertainment in groups up to seven (necessitating frequent stand-still re-counts), much fun.
• Back, put babes to bed, listened to More or Less - which appears to do the job of rigorous scrutiny that journalists would do, if only they were half-way numerate. Fascinated by a pointer to The Decline Effect - crazy / provocative enough to be an interesting read (when published) ?

• Up rather late; family at a party, tidied the house, prodded mail etc. Slugged and watched an Alice in Wonderland (based) movie in the afternoon - fun.
• Up very late working on sermon for tomorrow.

• To the conference; wandered hither and thither; lunch with Lennart. Caught up with Thorsten and Bubli. Misc. conference-calls. Out for the beginning of a dinner with the German Free Office Association, misc. trains to the airport, just in time. Flight home, bed extremely late.

• Up lateish; breakfast - met an interesting bio-informatics lady at breakfast; set to work on my slides, so much has happened, lots of good work left and right, hard to compress it into the slides.
• To the conference, snatched lunch while doing more slide massage. Caught up with Tim Janik, then Dirk, gave my talk, conf-call, chat with Holger; off to the evening party with Alasdair.
• Slides are as: odp & pdf:
  
• Caught up with the openSUSE guys variously, good to hear of the reprap fun happening in Prague, and elsewhere. Met the new DPL, Credativ's Michael, and got to bed in one bit.

• Up before the crack of dawn, taxi to Stanstead; flight to Berlin - a very prolonged experience of the train system, and a long walk and finally arrived at LinuxTag; checked in.
• Wandered the conference floor meeting people - fantastic LibreOffice booth manned by all manner of local volunteers; good to meet Thomas and Mike in person for the first time. Lunch with Lennart and co. interesting systemd updates.
• Chat with Wim, wandered the show floor, Out in the evening, to crash a party, and then to a beer garden to eat sausages and talk until late, nice.

• Up early; quick mail poking, worked away at 3.4 bugs - nailed a couple. Interesting, internal SUSE call.
• Pondered if underwater balloons anchored to a sea-floor rotary cable-drum would provide a nice energy storage mechanism; there is a lot of 3km+ deep sea, with clear vertical runs above it - so probably not given its not being implemented somewhere.
• Lydia & Janice over for dinner in the evening.

• Read mail; boggled at Louis' latest nonsense in the media. Apparently now he is smearing uncertainty about LibreOffice around the place, as well as his normal staple of knocking Novell. To review the stream of incisive insight recently first we get: "Novell .... [is] little more, as far as I can tell, than a proxy for MSFT" - apparently a comforting fiction to cling to until, unfortunately, a couple of weeks later, as the Mono team news breaks, it suddenly doesn't look like the hidden hand of Microsoft lies behind every move we make. Time for a new gambit "Should Novell effectively withdraw -- which I expect -- then what will happen" - yet we're all still here hacking to make LibreOffice better (is that the meaning of 'paralleling' ?). Then - yesterday we have an interview with Brian Proffitt who manages (somehow) to condense his fuzzy logic into a readable narrative.
• But first - Who is Louis ? - for those that may never have heard of him, it seems only fair to start with his own words:

  Louis Suarez-Potts is the longtime Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org; he has led the OpenOffice.org community since 2000 and currently works for Oracle. The lead and co-lead of several projects and the primary spokesperson and representative of OpenOffice.org ...

  While it is very unclear who really made many of the decisions that left such substantial room for improvement in the OO.o project, Louis had some leadership role. The gerrymandered, ineffective governance that entrenched layers of control for a single vendor, was created on his watch. The staggeringly bad infrastructure developers suffered for many years was provided by his original employer (before Sun), and the culture of secret deal making, instead of an open level-playing field, that starved the project of openness, and independence was continued under his watch at Sun.
• So perhaps it is useful to take the issues that are raised one by one and beat them about a bit. I've done that in a split out article here. In summary - I hope I don't have to deal with much more of this twaddle over the next months and years - and can get on with building some better software, and fixing bugs for 3.4.
• Clarity, call with Kendy & co. status report. Dinner. Rene & the Pregnancy Crisis Centre counsellors over for supervision; disappeared up-stairs to hack. Worked late on mail & code.

This is of course my view, and I hope yours, but naturally it is worth presenting at least some rational and working for this conclusion. Unfortunately, there are so many reasons why TDF and LibreOffice are done right, that I can't list them all in linear time. However, I'll try to address some of the major ones recently raised by congenital worriers.

LibreOffice is vendor neutral

LibreOffice does not belong to any single vendor, neither is it a single vendor's product. To characterise it that way is just silly. We have full-time developers from Novell, RedHat, Canonical and Lanedo working currently, with many key volunteer contributors, and contributions from other companies and distributions eg. CodeThink's Unity integration work, or the many Google Summer of Code students we've enjoyed working with. No-one is excluded from our governance - oh, except over-dominant corporations, there are strict limits in our bylaws on the proportion of representation (one third) that any single company can have in any of our key institutions. Elections will be by a fair method (Single Transferable Vote), and be participated in by all significant contributors equally. The contrast with the mess of ridiculously gerrymandered governance, with layers of stacked privilege given to a single corporation in a previous project is quite stark.

SUSE is the largest corporate contributor to TDF, though we are small compared to our huge group of motivated volunteers. My aim is to ensure that no vendor dominates (including SUSE): and that there is room for all contributors. Looking at our structures: the Steering Committee, Membership Committee, and the Engineering Steering Committee, we seem to be doing well there.

Of course, having vendor neutrality around open standards is also good, but this is someone else's fight. I'm interested in the best result Free Software implementation possible, with a fun community to stand behind it, rather than the different good of enabling competition between implementations.

LibreOffice is robust to participants leaving

What if SUSE, RedHat and Canonical stopped contributing to Free Software Office suites tomorrow !? would LibreOffice and TDF survive ? This seems like an extremely outlandish eventuality, it is hard to imagine a successful Linux Desktop without LibreOffice, and there is no functional alternative. But lets address it - would we survive - the simple answer is - yes, but how ?

Well, the answer is simply diversity - we have lots of contributors from all around the world: all are welcome to contribute to LibreOffice. Many of them have contributed code, and own part of the LibreOffice franchise: it is their code. We are all (employed or not) trying to build personal loyalty to the project, in itself, rather than to a corporate sponsor. We have volunteers who manage tinderboxes, and can build for each platform we support, we have hardware to do that scattered around the world. We use infrastructure services donated by many friendly organisations - like freedesktop, with many kind mirror sites. Our infrastructure budget is small.

Furthermore, in order to make this unlikely eventuality even less potentially painful, we're rapidly working to remove one of our big bottlenecks: building on Windows. Currently to build on Windows, you have to buy expensive, proprietary Microsoft compilers - we are rapidly completing the gnu-make migration, as an initial step to much more reliable, and repeatable cross-compilation to Windows from Linux. When this is complete, almost anyone with a PC should be able to do releases. If you want to help out, here is a great task to get involved in.

How does this compare ? for OpenOffice.org almost all release builds came from a proprietary build environment inside Hamburg, run by a small team of build engineers. That single point of failure contrasts with a team volunteers and paid staff (we tend not to distinguish), with a shared responsibility and an open build process (modulo the hard-to-avoid windows compiler problems).

Linux distributions are safer with LibreOffice

As a Linux distro, clearly flocking with the other distros, and sharing your testing, bug-fixes, packaging problems, and integration code makes an incredible amount of sense. All known Linux distributions are currently doing this work in partnership with LibreOffice for their next releases. Doing anything else would be simply silly. Each major distro has great hackers working on the project, and with LibreOffice's time based release schedule, have assurance that it will be possible to get a known-good version, into their release in a predictable way. Of course, all of that is in contrast to the extra stability guarenteed by a diverse contributor base.

LibreOffice has a different, and better QA model

This process is still getting started, in large part due to the rush to get 3.3 out and stabilise that, early work on 3.4, in particular merging changes from Oracle took a hit. Similarly, building on windows is far less than ideal, both from a performance and reliability perspective. Having said that much progress is being made. I'll write up some more explanation of what a time-based release really means shortly, but suffice it to say that this avoids the multi-month release slips that we've seen in OpenOffice.org. It is also the same model that is used by both GNOME and KDE. This also gives more flexibility to the end-user, they can choose the required quality - either an older, more stable version say: 3.2.16, or a newer less stable one 3.3.3, or a very new one 3.4.0 with more problems. It is a matter of choosing your upgrade path carefully. That can make comparisons difficult - a release that has slipped by three months is somewhat less stable than a point-three release (for example).

Division is (sadly) sometimes necessary

Forming TDF caused a lot of heart-ache; in particular Oracle choosing not to join was extremely sad. Clearly, it takes two to go in different ways. Having said that, whenever I've written about it I've pointed out that Oracle were (and still are), encouraged to join in with The Document Foundation. Their influence, and contribution over many years would immediately give them a large say, and I'd love to work with their great engineers again. Though, of course, there is much public uncertainty around them dis-continuing commercial development.

In the light of that uncertainty, having a smooth, safe and predictable upgrade route, backed by commercial support for any users concerned about the future of OO.o is a good thing. There is also a welcoming new home for all who contribute, with good governance to match.

The Document Foundation champions ODF

I would have thought this was pretty clear; our announcement made clear that we are working with OASIS. We have a clear statement on OOXML. It reads like this:

The Document Foundation promotes and supports Open Standards. Among them OpenDocument Format (ODF), that offers many benefits to citizens, governments and businesses, and sets the documents and users free from proprietary lock-in.
The reason we enthusiastically promote ODF, is that we believe that no other standard provides the right level of vendor neutrality with widespread participation and implementation. We believe that ODF's absence of lock-in future proofs investment in both documents and software, to the great benefit of all citizens, governments and businesses. The Document Foundation does not promote nor support OOXML.

That aims to be clear; it seems so to me.

We are transparent about our contributors

We publish statistics on code contribution, to be sure these are not updated as often as they could be - but there are a number of things to be getting on with. Nevertheless, although all the contribution data, our code, and git repositories are public, and any half-way competent 'community exprt' type should trivially be able to analyse them themselves; we provide updates. The question of regularity of contribution was addressed recently by Cedric in How many frequent contributors to LibreOffice?. We publish more general stats to show trends: eg. Updated LibreOffice contribution stats. Unfortunately, judging the volume of contribution is excessively difficult - some simple changes can be automated and produce huge commits, while other key fixes can take longer and yield a single line. Measuring full-time-equivalents from commit lots is (as far as I know) an un-solved problem. Details as to contributors to translations are also available from each language's page in pootle.

Anyhow, what we have provides a high degree of transparency. Sun gathered, but did not publish their equivalent statistics. No good purpose is served by lying about our contributor base - clearly we need and want more developers, and there is a place for anyone that wants to actively contribute to be effective for software freedom. Furthermore, this contrasts with the inflated estimates of the past, supposedly OpenOffice had thousands of contributors in 2005, and Novell, RedHat and Intel's (much smaller) contribution then was called significant; yet we contribute many more full-time paid contributors these days.

In conclusion

While there is always scope for improvement, in my view TDF gets many things extremely right. We encourage contribution by vendor neutrality, and not putting barriers in people's way (such as ownership aggregation paperwork). We have a meritocratic, and yet fair membership and governance model. We have a competent and well advised steering committee.

Finally - we are executing, instead of sitting about talking, we are attracting contributors mentoring them, reviewing their code and including them into productive membership of the TDF family. Together, we are cleaning up the code-base, improving our build and release process, adding new features, undoing past mistakes, and providing an inspiring model for others to copy. Personally, I see it as a privilege to have been, and to be part of that story.

• Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept. Off to NCC; Claire spoke on fruit of the spirit; home for lunch with James, Ruth, Daniel and Thomas. Played in the garden with them much of the afternoon.
• Poked at the reprap in the evening; I wonder if the general killing of the Makerbot stepper controllers are down to some combinaton of the techzone remix 1.2 motherboard, and a new netbook's USB output. Ripped that to use the Makerbot controller instead, yielding one free controller to (finally) fix libreprap.

• Monster lie-in; somehow more tired after it. Lottie over, good to see her. Lunch. N. out to a party, pottered about playing with the babes.
• Worked in the evening, trying to beat back the admin to free up bug fixing time on Monday; tested and pushed python 3.0 work.

• Prodded mail, contacted my GSOC code (working on improved performance which is fun). Lunch, reviewed and merged a lingering python / mailmerge patch. Poked at the nice Python 3 work from Andreas too.
• SC call. Mary Rogers over for dinner, talked until late.

• To work; mail chewage; looked at a popup menu spacing issue, pruned some un-needed BrOffice pieces. Tried to get my FedEx account setup - "sign and fax" - what world do those guys live in ?
• Into town to DHL some prototype hardware back to Taiwan; lunch. Team meeting, fixed a math crasher, TSC meeting. More mail.
• Dinner, tried and failed to get RAMPS board programmed; flashed the bootloader nicely, but after programming with Tonokip or the stock controller, failed to communicate left and right; nasty.

• J. dropped me into Cambridge for TEAM; great day as normal, Malachi, ministry to the elderly, and evangelistic talks; back by bus rather late. Dinner, put babes to bed.
• Fixed a 3.4 bug with the quick starter, and killed the standalone 'pagein' on master (now part of an integrated ooqstart.bin). Poked at mail and other issues. Chat with the parents.

• Up early; started on the mail, and admin, clarity etc. Team call, setup yet another new commit account for a new, promising LibreOffice hacker. Some bug triage, and patch review, tweaked the website. More conf-calling.
• Out for a run; dinner with Lydia & Janice, worked late looking at bugs for 3.4.

• Lie in - and out to Studlands estate to put up tents, and get the Church's family fun day going - free hot-dogs, bouncy castles, cakes and so on etc. Lots of interesting people to talk to.
• Home in the afternoon; pottered around tidying up the mess. Switched an old Techzone controller in for the Z axis (strangely Y had recovered itself somehow but Z was dead), and ran another print, this time X died - mid flow; incredibly annoying; rather suspicious of things powered from the USB connection. Bed early.

• Lie in for J. off to NCC; Tony spoke - back home. Big lamb lunch, slugged about - tried to print out a plastic knot - but (somehow) blew up the Y axis stepper controller mid-print (not ideal).
• Watched Nim's Island with the babes instead, tea, and put them to bed. Drinks with Rob & Ilona before bidding them 'bye. Tidied up a little, poked at the reprap - unclear what is going on. Bed; tired.