Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
|
|
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.
Older items:
2023: (
J
F
M
A
M
J
),
2022: (
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
),
2021,
2019,
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2010,
2009,
2009,
2008,
2007,
2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
legacy html
-
Mail chew; partner call, lunch, interview, partner call.
Amused to read more about the supposed panacea that is distro-less
containers.
-
Also read RedHat
Open Source commitment. I have a number of thoughts:
- First what we do: Collabora Online source code is open - our releases are tags
in a public git repo, which we also link from help->about - that helps us support
people better, and makes everything super transparent.
- But - I have huge sympathy with this sentiment; emphasis mine:
"The generally accepted position that these free rebuilds are
just funnels churning out RHEL experts and turning into sales just isn't
reality. I wish we lived in that world, but it's not how it actually
plays out".
- One of the troubling things about being in business is having to live in
the real world which can get extremely and painfully
real. It is
particularly annoying at such times to be told - that making it ever easier
for people not to pay is the only true solution.
- The risks of people taking your hard-work, slapping their brand on it, and
not contributing significantly are ones we all have long and disappointing experience
with too. Of course the FLOSS licenses allow it - but to feel entitled to have
this made extra easy for you is unfortunate.
- My take is a simple and perhaps radical one: Making it easy for everyone not
to pay to support development is profoundly counter-productive. Put
another way: someone needs to pay for something scarce. We can try to work
out who that someone should be eg. "very large IT organizations" are a traditional
favourite, and what is scarce (traditionally signed enterprise binaries), but some degree
of compromise is inevitable - I have a long write up on various different compromises
in the space here: Sustained
Freedom from slide sixteen.
-
I have even more sympathy with the rationale, because RedHat is a pure-play FLOSS
company. If you are part of the Proprietary periphary mob (also known as
OpenCore) - then you have your own proprietary stuff that allows you to make it arbitrarily
hard for people not to pay to support development. As such - ironically - as a
community it seems we're once again focusing our criticism on those who differ
least from FOSS orthodoxy, and who are doing the best job of up-stream contribution.
-
However - this rationale as presented:
"Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any
way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a
real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source
back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity."
simultaneously seems contrived. Surely that is what Linux Distros do: they
dis-intermediate FLOSS projects - but it is perhaps also an opportunity, let me explain:
-
One of the significant concerns around commercially funded FLOSS projects is
that of being dis-intermediated: having their latest code bundled into a Linux distro
where it is simultaneously extremely hard to get leads (which drive sales) from
downloaders -and- long-term support guarentees are met by that distributor; often
without any feature contribution back. The same dis-intermediation threat is there
around cloud provision of pure-play FLOSS products.
-
Sometimes creator companies are simply acquired to get the support team in-house;
while fair - that seems far from optimal. I see a potentially lucrative opportunity
for the first enterprise distro that can build a wider partner ecosystem of contributing
open-source companies by - including them into their enterprise products via some
transparent business and support co-development model. We have lots of excellent,
standard FLOSS licenses for code, but few successful open-agreements for go-to-market
FLOSS collaboration - building a more diverse and widespread Open Source business
community.
-
Can you imagine the power of the possibilities of RedHat/IBM's scale and experience
helping to bring their extraordinary reach into enterprises to a snowballing set of
businesses built around the RedHat platform with some turbo-charged mutual partnership
model? The volume of FLOSS that could be written & improved, and the niches we
could fill and sustain?
-
Either way, it will be interesting to see where this goes long term. For those
with very long memories I believe that Cygnus tree used
to be distributed only to their customers - in the 1990s.
-
Early morning accessibility call - good stuff, sales call.
Interviews with PM candidates, partner call; mail chew. Interviews
into cell group + dinner combination until late.
-
Partner call, weekly sales call, admin, PM interviews,
catch-up calls, admin. Pushed some tile management wins.
-
Nissan Leaf not charging, silly messages on the car
console - expect its down to the well known low-charging problems
of the 12V battery; annoying. Bought another, and replaced the
battery: lead & acid still: amazing. Still no joy, re-booted
pod-point: perhaps the problem is there, charged on a 13A socket
instead.
-
Catch up with Andras, lengthy partner call, lunch.
Sync with Pedro, more admin, got to a bit of hacking in
the evening - fun; then couldn't sleep.
-
Mail chew; planning call, chat with Elisa; lunch.
Helped Nick with an unusual macro problem and an upgrade.
-
OpenChain
training, more admin.
-
All Saints, helped Peter with the organ, noticed
how a mid-week practice is rather a benefit by its absence.
Back for pizza lunch. Rested variously into the evening;
watched Ad-Astra with J.: curiously dissatisfying. Chatted
with the babes on their return from church.
-
Up lateish, off to open-Church; back for BBQ lunch
with David; attacked the hedge together on a super hot day:
great progress. Off to Bob & Dee's leaving do in Beck Row.
-
Up early, out for a run with J. partner call, interview,
lunch, interview, partner call, admin. Booked travel to
LibreOffice
Conference 2023 which should be fun.
-
Technical planning call, COOL community call, sales
call, interview, offer, customer call.
-
Up extremely late hacking on tile caching.
-
Mail chew; early partner call, sales call; admin; Lunch.
CP all-hands, sync with Miklos. Managed to re-activate bank
account dongle after some HSBC oddity.
-
Up early, out for a run with J. chat with Kendy, product
call, admin, slides. Lunch, monthly mgmt meeting, more calls.
-
Caught up the blog; mail chew, status report. Planning call,
chat with Shehr and Pedro. Lunch. Customer call, sync with Andras.
-
PCC meeting in the evening, wrote minutes.
-
All Saints in the morning with H. Sue spoke - caught
up with the wider church family; home for a pizza lunch with
B&A visiting - lovely, baked Alaska as birthday treat
desert.
-
Slept in the afternoon, watched The Ballad of
Buster Scruggs - amused by the Cohen Brothers.
-
Up earlyish, babes sleeping - out with J. to Lavenham
for a walk through the beautiful countryside nearby in the
sunshine; pit stop at a pub. Home for BBQ in the evening with
the family.
-
Worked on slides until late.
-
Out for a run with J. in the morning.
Partner & customer calls, worked on project slides.
Catch up with Luigi, sync with Andras.
-
Catch up of E-mail backlog; technical planning call, COOL
community call, catch up with Sarper, 1:1 with Miklos, chat with
Caolan; more admin. Picked up E. from Soham, bible study group
with Cyrille & Jan.
-
Up earlyish, trains to the airport, flight home - hacked
on cleaning up a re-work of tile management in our javascript for
more performance - fun.
-
Trains home variously. E's birthday dinner in the evening,
so lovely to see the daughters grow up.
-
Up early, found the venue, talked to lots of customers,
partners and listened to some great presentations; talked about
CODE
23.05 - out today and some of the great new features there,
as well as the great integration work Julius & team have done
at Nextcloud with the SmartPicker and other bits around COOL.
-
Interesting lunch with some customers. Back to more talks,
partner event slides; talked with lots of partner and sales people
until late; out to dinner in town again, bed late.
-
Up early, train with H. and M. to Cambrige,
set off to Munich. Discovered another joy of TravelPerk:
it allows business travellers to book back-packer style
tickets without making it clear - where you have no
guarenteed seat.
-
Eventually arrived, texted a few people to meet
up - I should really organize my life further in advance.
Headed to the hotel, met up with Marc, Niels kindly took
us to the beer-hall for dinner with the Nextcloud team.
Great evening, home late.
-
All Saints, played with H. Bridge Violin
starting to have a buzz & also flaking audio
wise; a stray cable inside? may have to go back to
a louder wooden violin & a pick; perhaps carbon
fibre is best only for bows.
-
Home, pizza lunch with the babes, hot day -
slept exhaustedly in the garden for much of the
afternoon.
-
Up earlyish, worked on tile code on and off
much of the day, rather rapid interview.
-
Helped E. with her statistics after
BBQ dinner; worked until late at night & slept
badly.
-
Poked at 23.05 testing, marketing, and dug
into a tile management issue with large presentations.
Came up with an entirely better way of doing this and
hacked on it between partner meetings.
-
Another CODE 23.05 release standup; chasing
some interesting performance regressions interactively.
Making some good progress, exciting times.
-
COOL community call, partner call, catch up
with Andras, more marketing review. Cell group in the
evening.
-
Day full of meetings; stand-up for 23.05
release. Accessibiltiy call, catch up with Sarper,
two interviews, marketing call.
-
All Saints band practice with H.
-
App early, off to the Drivery to record some
Hub 5 announcement segments with the team - lots of
interesting kit there.
-
Out for a rapid burger, airport, RyanAir -
flight delayed by an hour on the tarmac baking the
occupants for a mechanical fault. Home late.
-
Checked in late at night for flight;
apparently TravelPerk/RyanAir think it is clever to
give users a much worse experience than booking direct
when using a booking agent: had to re-validate passports
pay Eur 0.6 and similarly bogus stuff: annoying.
Much easier to book directly.
-
Planning call with the team; lots of good
things happening. Drove to STN, flight to Berlin,
BBQ at Frank's (nice!) pad, and talked with the
team until late. Found and managed to check-into
room rather late.
-
All Saints, lunch; slugged tiredly much of
the day. Watched a Potter, fantastic beasts - well
made it seems; still with a repetitive junior/outsider
motif.
-
Dropped jacket to the dry cleaners, and went
shopping with J. at Aldi - watched a shop-lifter get
caught red handed there; interesting.
-
Got some work backlog done, candidate
application triage. Plugged away at a lathe tool
for copying things, and a shelf for J.
-
David & Allison over for a BBQ in the
evening interupted by J. doing lots of ferrying of
small girls; lovely to catch up.
-
Mail chew, partner call, sales meeting, tested
collaborative editing in a call; lunch, partner call.
More mail chew, syncing etc. partner call. Continued
combing through CVs for various new roles at Collabora.
-
Good to see LibreOffice in the Flatpak app-store announced
as the future on RHEL; and for those that missed it glad to have
Caolán
still on the team.
-
Up, had some meetings. Technical planning call,
COOL community call, catch up with Kendy, 1:1 with Miklos.
Encouraging marketing call.
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)
