My blog at Igalia

Today I was talking in “Free Software World Conference” in Caceres about a project Igalia is developing for Xunta de Galicia and naval companies. We don’t have name for it, I think we will have one at the end of  December. However, we have some public resources:

• Git temp repository: http://git.igalia.com/xestion-producion.git
• Bugtracker https://naval.igalia.com/bugtracker
• Last deployment: https://naval.igalia.com/navalplanner-webapp/. User: admin/admin.

This project is licensed as AGPL. You can test it and if you have any comments they will be welcome.

Tomorrow is the last day to register in Master on Free Software, organized by Igalia and URJC. I would like to encourage everyone in doubt to join this master because you will learn and work a lot , if you need more information you could access to our website.

During last days, Chema and me have been talking to some radios explaining how this master is and I hope some of you could listen to us .

Go for it!.

During the first week of July I enjoyed a week in Gran Canaria with my colleagues in Guadec 2009, where I attended very interesting conferences about the future of Gnome. Some weeks had gone by since then but I would like to talk about it because it was my first Guadec.

I am founder of Igalia but because of professional or personal reasons I had never been to a Guadec. However, my personal assessment for my first time in the Guadec is very positive, because this kind of conferences are good places to learn what other people is working on, to meet them and to do some interesting networking. But it is also important because it is a very good place to enjoy a good time with all the community.

About lectures, I enjoyed the lectures with new proposals for Gnome 3.0 but I would like to stress the one made by Xan López and Fernando Herrera about the history of Gnome. It was very funny!.

About organization, I would like to thank all the volunteers who were part of the organization for the effort done helping us and trying to make us feeling the best we could. I know there were problems (connection, first days with restaurants) but it is very difficult to avoid them in an event like this.

It was a great time so I’m looking forward to enjoy this experience again.

Next 22th of July, I am going to give a lecture about Igalia in OS Revolution Conference as part of Summer courses of USC .

In this lecture I will try to talk about how Igalia was born and what Igalia represents to me and I will touch some topics that make the company so special:

• Our philosophy.
• Our flat organization.
• Our relation with free software and projects.

It’s a good course for people who want to know more about free software dynamics and know some companies that work in free software.

Today, it is a hard Monday. Why ? Because last week was full of activities in Igalia, some of them, essential for us.

We started last week with our “Opening party”. We invited a lot of relatives, friends and collaborators to have some snacks in our new office. Some of my colleagues (Mario, Joaquim, Javi and Sergio) posted about it. It was an incredible day where I was talking with a lot of people and enjoying the night.

On Friday, we held our internal meeting, the assembly. A meeting were every main decision about Igalia is taken. I think this is the real party of Igalia, the party of the democracy because every Igalian give “her” opinion and “her” vote during a complete day.

Finally, _The Igalia Summit_, a weekend in a rural hotel for everybody. We played some team games, went to a spa and met to talk about interesting topics (for example, _philosophical document_ ). I wasn’t able to sleep a lot, but I enjoyed every minute of this Summit.

Here we are:

Yeah! An strenuous but satisfactory week!

After a quite interesting month, in which I attended two very interesting lectures (Carlos Guerreiro and Richard Stallman lectures) and a very good fortnight in London I wasn’t sure what to talk about in this post. However, I liked so much an example that Richard Stallman told us talking about software patents that I needed to say some words.

I’ve been always against software patents, Igalia as company was in some campaings against them. But last week, I listened a very good example to clearly explain the reason in better way.

First, some context, software is an engineering area very different to other ones. For example, architecture or pharmacy need to deploy ideas in some physical medium, hence you have a real limit and you are not able to propose any combination of ideas for some specific purpose. However, in software, you can mix thousands of different ideas to develop a product. Maybe patents, in other areas, were created to avoid people dying with their secret.But software is different, and I think Richard Stallman is right trying to compare it with music.

Music is an abstract art where you can combine any idea to create a new one and music genius would never died with their secret. Do you imagine that in the first years of music height “music patents” existed? I do not think that would be fair for us that the first person who had the idea of mix some arpeggios could avoid other people from combining them, that is, without paying a good amount of money. Probably, we would not have Mozart or Beethoven works to enjoy because it would be impossible to reuse some previous ideas during their composition.
For me, software is similar, there are some obvious abstract ideas that should not be patented. Sooner or later people would need them to build better ideas, in the way musicians combine them. If software patents are approved, only big companies will be able to develop software programs. In Spain most of companies are “pymes”. They would be the only ones to fight against lawsuits because they have a lot of other patents to get a good agreement (if you do not hurt me I do not hurt you).

I think European government should be aware of this wolf in sheep’s clothing that patents may be for medium and little companies and they should avoid software patents to be approved.

Last weekend Chema and me were working in London. Although it can sound strange, we were looking for a flat.

Why is Igalia looking for a flat? It is simple, one of our main goals is to be able to work in a complete English environment, developing, writing, listening and speaking in English. Last year we had an item in our budget for a subsidy to go abroad to learn English. However, this year, we have changed this item to take advantage of the amount of money we are going to spend.

This flat will be available for the members of the assembly to go to London to learn English or to work in a complete English environment during several weeks.

The first step of this experiment was to get the flat. At this moment we are in the process of renting it. You can see one of our bedrooms:

Now we have to prepare it for living there, establish some rules for share the flat between us and then, we only need to enjoy it!.

Last weekend I gave a class where our Master students could learn basic concepts related with LDAP. This class was part of  “Systems Integration with Libre Software” subject inside the “Master On Libre/Free Software”. In order to put these concepts in practice we created a basic LDAP and we configured our systems to authenticate through PAM with a LDAP. During the class, the students configured a very simple LDAP with these data:

• Base DN: dc=mswl,dc=com
• Users branch: ou=People,dc=mswl,dc=com
• Groups branch: ou=Groups,dc=mswl,dc=com

All the students were able to configure their own LDAP with a user and a group to test it. Once they had our LDAP configured, they could configure PAM to authenticate users, using pam_ldap.so, a module that allows to configure PAM with an existent LDAP server. For example, authenticating users that only exists in our LDAP.

All the information related with this class has been uploaded to the Master’s Moodle.

I hope the students enjoyed this class!

Next Saturday, I’m bringing to a close the subject I coordinate: Systems Integration with Libre Software which was set out in five different topics:

• Services related with systems and network administration.
• Web services related with web systems administration.
• Workshop on systems integration.
• Scripting.
• Network, user and physical security.

Berto, Javi Muñoz, Quique and me have been the teachers, but we counted on Marcelo Branco who gave a talk about “Libre Software and open standards in Public Administration”.

During this subject we have tried to teach in a practical way testing almost all the topics while the teacher was explaining the concepts. Thanks to this approach our students have been able to develop a custom Single Sign On and a Soap Server, analyze the configuration of different servers (Apache, LDAP, etc.), practice firewalling and some hacking concepts or develop some scripts in bash and perl. You can download documents and examples from URJC Moodle.

Next Saturday I’m going to have a debate with the students about all the subject and I will try to obtain some feedback in order to improve it for the next Master on Free/Libre Software in Vigo.

I’m back and working. I had several concerns about my trip but now I can talk about it without worry because everything was fine.
First of all, I want to talk about the accommodation and the English language school that I had to book from Galicia, only recommended by generic comments at different forums.

• Accommodation: It was fine because the apartment was as I expected. Although the general cleaning seemed good I needed to roll the rug because of the dust. The apartments location is very good because they are near Hyde park and close to two tube stations (Bayswater and Queensway).

• King Street College: It isn’t a big school and the courses are thought for longer periods (3 months for example), so I couldn’t find a specific course for me. However, I’m happy about the results because I could meet people from different countries and cultures (Korea, Japan, Poland, Germany, The Czech Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Turkey), therefore I could attend class in a completely English language environment with people who doesn’t have the same mistakes than I have. I was in different classes during the first week and the second week, you can see a photo taken during the my last class.

After school I always tried to visit the most important tourist places. I went to the museums, The Tower of London, The Tower Bridge, etc. And then, during the evenings I wanted to do different things that are difficult to do in small towns :

• I went to a classical music concert. I listened the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing Rossini, Beethoven and Mendelsohn. I like the classical music so I enjoyed a lot the concert because I could attend this concert.
• I went to the musical show “We will rock you!”: Incredible! I recommend it to everybody who likes Queen music.
• I attended a Jazz concert at 606Club. Although it isn’t easy to arrive at and the entrance can frighten a bit, once inside, the club is lovely and I felt very well in the club. The dinner was the best I had in London and they are very interested on having the best Jazz players performing in the club.  The day I went, Paul Booth performed and I was very satisfied with the concert.

Finally, I need to comment the “pure chance” of my holidays… I was able to see the controversial Olympic torch before a girl were to walk along the Tower Bridge with the torch. I approached to the group of polices that surrounded the girl and I could take a photo … But I didn’t know the attempt of boycott and I didn’t realize that the police was alert and I could have been moved apart from them .. but finally nothing happened and they only said to me that I should keep away (you can see the police warning me…).

To sum up, I’m very happy with my trip and I think I’ll repeat when I can…