How open is Erlang?

I liked this post about how open is Erlang/OTP as a development project. Being open is not only about having a free software or open source license, it is also about the way of managing the development process and the interactions inside the community.

According to that post, Erlang lacks a public development repository, a public bug tracker, and internal library documentation in order to be completely open.

I agree and would add a new thing that is lacking: an Erlang Foundation (similar to, for example, the Gnome Foundation) acting as an umbrella for coordinating all the efforts (projects, conferences, hackfests, tools, regional communities, marketing) and the different actors (users, developers and companies) cooperating around Erlang.

In other words: converting the Erlang language and platform in the “Erlang free software project”.

Erlang at the MIT

In November 2002, Joe Armstrong, one of the Erlang fathers, gave an invited talk at the Lightweight Languages Workshop (LL2), organized by the MIT.

The talk was titled “Concurrency Oriented Programming in Erlang”, and the video is still available in .ram format. The slides can also be downloaded from the web page.

I think that watching the talk -which is still very fresh almost 4 years later- is a really interesting way of learning more about the Erlang approach for programming complex distributed control systems.

Some years ago, during my stay at the Ericsson CSLab, I learnt from Joe that the key feature of Erlang was not being a functional language but being a distributed one, meaning by distributed that the concurrency model was built-in as a basic part of the language. In the talk, this concept is developed with all the detail.

Brand new Igalia logo

Igalia logo

It has been a long way, but we finally have a brand new logo for Igalia.

This very dynamic and positive logo, based in four identical pieces that cooperate, was designed by Denis Radenkovic, of 38one (recommended to us by Jon Hicks, the Firefox logo designer), and it is inspired by the concepts of collaboration and knowledge sharing that are so related to the concept of free(dom) software.

In September we will be 5 years old as a company, we are each time more and more involved in the free software community, and it seems to me a perfect moment for refreshing our image.

During the next weeks, our webpage, and all the corporative material will be progressively updated. Bye, bye, igalia’s triangle.

Igalia talks and the final Guadec schedule

As I had explained before, we had submitted three talks for the Guadec 2006. A couple of weeks ago we received an answer from the program committee saying that all were discarded for the Guadec Core (the main part of the conference, Monday to Wednesday). For the BoFs it was already what I expected, they fit better in the After Hours (Thursday and Friday), but as we did not receive any explanation about why the Fisterra talk was not considered interesting, we requested that information in the mailing lists:

Date: Fri, 5 May 2006 10:42:57 +0200
From: Juan José Sánchez Penas
Cc: guadec-papers@gnome.org, guadec-list
Subject: Re: [guadec-list] Acceptance mails sent

…

After receiving rejections for two BoFs, I have two questions:

a) Wouldn’t be a good idea to send together with the rejections an explanation of why the talk/bof/whatever got rejected? It is a bit frustrating to receive just the notification without knowing why it was not interesting for the selection committee. Knowing the reason would also help in order to propose better talks for future Gnome conferences.

…

We have not received any answer yet, and I am completely sure it is because of the lack of time, but I still think the authors would appreciate a lot some extra feedback from the committee.

Anyway, we decided to re-submit the Fisterra talk proposal for the Guadec Hispana in the WarmupWeekend (Saturday and Sunday) and the two BoFs for the AfterHours, and they all have been accepted and are now officially scheduled:

You can see the final schedule at the conference webpage.

Visited countries map by may 2006

Since the previous post on the topic, more than one year ago, I have only added Denmark and Germany to the list of visited countries. Have been again in Sweden (2 months), Finland (a few days) and Portugal (a week), and have travelled quite a lot inside Spain. For the near future, I have plans for going to Argentina in the autumn (spring there).

If you want to easily create your own map, go here.

New documents published in Igalia Community

Two small but very interesting documents have been published recently in the community webpage of Igalia:

  • Tinderbox/scratchbox integration: a short guide intended for helping developers to build a continuous integration environment with the scratchbox cross-compilation toolkit and some of the Mozilla Webtools. Scratchbox is used, among others, by Nokia in the Maemo platform.
  • XPTracker/TWiki vs. Trac: compares two web-based project management tools: XPTracker and Trac. The first one is a Twki plugin based on the eXtreme Programming development methodology, while the second one is based on ticket tracking.

All kind of comments, suggestions and contributions are very welcome.

3 talk/BoF proposals for the Guadec

From Igalia, we have submitted 3 talk/BoF proposals for the next Guadec, that will take place in less than two months in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Catalonia:

All have been provisionally placed in the skeleton schedule (the first two are part of the core Guadec days, and the third is proposed for the After Hours Workshops, during the last two days of the conference).

In a few days the committee will confirm which proposals are finally accepted.

The software I daily use (as a user)

Someone asked me some weeks ago for a complete list of all the software I daily use (as a laptop user, not as a developer, because that is a different business), so here it is:

  • Desktop: Gnome/Metacity/Nautilus
  • RSS reader: Liferea
  • IM: Gaim
  • IRC: Xchat
  • Browser: Firefox
  • Newsreader: Pan
  • E-mail: Mutt (work) & Evolution (personal e-mail)
  • Music: Muine & Banshee
  • Notes: Tomboy
  • CD/DVD Toaster: gnomebaker
  • Digital camera: gtkam
  • Docs&slides: LaTeX & OOo
  • Bibtex: JavRef
  • Spreadsheet: gnumeric
  • Fast Editing: Jed, Vi, Gedit
  • Editing: Emacs
  • P2P: aMule, gnome-btdownload, nicotine
  • Podcast: iPodder
  • PM: Planner
  • PDF/PS: Evince & acroread & gv
  • Pics: Gimp, F-spot, Gthumb, eog
  • Movies: Totem, mplayer
  • Internet voice conference: skype

I use other programs now and then, but this is the complete list of the ones I currently depend on. Some of them I have been using for years, some others I have just discovered. Most of them are part of the Gnome project. Most of them are GTK based.

I only use daily two proprietary pieces of software: acroread because I need to read some PDFs still not supported by Evince or other free readers; and skype because I save a lot of money, when travelling, using skypeout.

I will do again the same list next year by the same month in order to check how stable I am selecting my software.