Migración

Suso Baleato has written a very nice article (in galician) about the urgent need of a “Migración” in the galician government to Free Software.

As he says: “Socialmente xusto, tecnolóxicamente sustentabel: o software libre é a única opción se queremos incrementar a competitividade económica ao tempo que a nosa viabilidade cultural.” (Socially fair, technologically sustainable: the Free Software is the only way if we want to increase our economic competitivity at the same time we increase our cultural viability).

We will see soon if the winds of change are real.

Fisterra: GNOME development framework for business software

If you need or want to develop business software, like Gnome technology and desktop, and don’t want to reinvent the wheel, you should have a look to this project developed by us at Igalia:

Fisterra logo

From the project webpage: Fisterra is an open source GNOME development framework. It is indicated for the implementation of whole business management applications, ad hoc ERPs or modules of other management systems.

The main features of the project can be found here.

All the code is under GPL license. In the webpage there is a lot of information on how to collaborate in the project.

SCIGen: the art of generating research articles

“SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather
than coherence.”

Pretty impressive what they manage to do. One of the goals is to be able to find out conferences where they have very low submission standards. They even have some examples of articles submitted.

Let SCIGen improve your CV!

The Ututo-e project

When Stallman came to give a couple of talks in May, someone from the public asked him about which GNU/Linux distribution would recommend to the people in favor of Free Software, and he suggested Ututo-e, as the only one that was free (according to the FSF). I bet that 99% of the audience had never heard about such a project, mainly developed by people from Argentina. In the webpage, they say the distribution has between 150 and 200 thousand users.

European Parliament Says No to Software Patents

From the FFII webpage: “The European Parliament today decided by a large majority (736 members, 680 votes, 645 yes, 14 No, 18 abstentions) to reject the directive “on the patentability of computer implemented inventions”, also known as the software patent directive. This rejection was the logical answer to the Commission’s refusal to restart the legislative process in February and the Council’s reluctance to take the will of the European Parliament and national parliaments into account. The FFII congratulates the European Parliament on its clear “No” to bad legislative proposals and procedures.”“.

Great news. Some days I even have the temptation to believe in Democracy.

Back from Guadec 2005

The past week we went to Stuttgart for a week to attend Guadec and also do some turism in Germany. We spent the first four days visitting Stuttgart and Ulm, and the last four in the conference.

Guadec 2005 - Ulm

It was a pretty impressive edition of the conference, with more than 300 people attending, and very interesting talks. As a summary of what was discussed, I would recommend the Glynn Foster’s “101 Things to Know about GNOME” and Jeff Waugh’s “10×10“.
I also liked a lot the talks of Miguel de Icaza, Mark Shuttleworth and Robert Love.

Guadec 2005 - Esslingen

Guadec 2005 - Stuttgart

During the conference, the Maemo development platform to create applications for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, was announced. It seems that Nokia is committed now to support the Gnome project.

Guadec Hispana 2005: a few days after

I shouldn’t be the one saying this, but I think the conference was a success.

In the web page we have been uploading all kind of content related with the three days: pics, audio, slides and articles of all the talks are available in the program section.

The proceedings with all the articles are also available in PDF format under Creative Commons license.

We finally managed to have a short but very interesting videoconference with Miguel de Icaza, who was very kind with us and woke up really early on Saturday in order to be able to connect with us before the end of the morning session.

The conference has been covered by several newspapers, and we have uploaded a summary of this to the web page.

Next year’s conference is likely going to take place in Las Palmas. See you all there!