Debian MiniConf ARM Cambridge 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 5 - Wrap ups

For those following along at home - that was Holger Levsen and Chris Lamb talking about Reproducible Builds immediately followed by Lucy Wayland on SIMD or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Vector.

Next up Lars Wrizenius on the vmdebootstrap sprint and the results.

Last of all will be Steve wrapping up, chasing us out and the clear up team doing a final chase around.

Apparently very slightly lower turnout than last year - but still some new faces, lots of familiar faces and a lot of "stuff" : some awesome Debian merchandise that I couldn't quite justify to myself but there's always next time :)

Almost at the end of a really enjoyable four days for me - back to work tomorrow :(

Thanks to all our sponsors [ARM, Codethink, HPE] whose names you will have seen in between the video segments for facilities and sponsoring meals and the like.

MiniDebconf ARM Cambridge 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 4 - lightning talks

Ian Jackson - dgit in two slides with attitude :)

Mike Crowe - Code Club - volunteering to teach programming to school children in after school clubs. Scratch: version 1 is packaged for Debian and Raspberry Pi  CSS HTML Python - all materials provided. Projects for Microbits as well. No slides.

Dimitri Ledkov - SPI board - explaining about SPI. SPI - US non-profit, also registered in Europe. Collects donations, can register trademarks, can hold assets on your project's behalf.  Volunteer project: controlled by member orgs.

Guus Sliepen - ifupdown -  dual protocol, bonding, VPNs, wireless,
- too many slides :)

MiniDebconf Cambridge, ARM, 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 3

Just about to watch Daniel Silverstone demonstrating his new FPGA board.

Mystorm - open hardware - growing out of Icestorm. Programmable hardware - toolchains - and showing the hardware.

The Debian video team have advised that they are about to start the transcoding process - videos will be available soonish :)

http://video.debconf.org/minidebconf-low.webm

Debian MiniConf, ARM Cambridge, 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 2

Just watching Lars Wirzenius talking about Qvarn - identity and data protection management on large scale. Compliant with EC data/identity management regulations and concerns.

The room fell silent at 1100 for two minutes - as we did on Friday 11/11/16.
This is remembering the dead, wounded and those  affected by the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Inevitably, it also reminded me of friends and colleagues in Debian that are no longer with us: for Espy and so many others before and since, thanks from me - you are well remembered here.

Debian MiniConf, ARM Cambridge 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 1

Just got here, partway into Guus Sliepen's talk about issues with sourceless packages and the DFSG. Lots of problems with, for example, music for games and imagery and also areas where packages autobuild / use generated blobs which are not supplied or are not able to be regenerated.

Checked in by front desk - thanks again to Lisa, to Jo McIntyre and Lucy Wayland who have been very patient waiting for us, very helpful as ever, chasing us at the end of each day to reconcile badges and people and doing all the useful stuff that no one sees.

ARM security folk are still here, obviously, and the building work has stopped for the weekend so we can get in and out of the building more readily.  Thanks once again to the ARM staffers who are also Debian-ites and to the ARM management who have to authorise all of this and allow us to use their facilities, buildings and guest WiFi. It's testament to a whole lot of hard work  behind the scenes that this all seems seamless and (generally) works so well

Debian MiniConf ARM Cambridge - post 5

Daniel Pocock finally getting Jitsi to work - us talking to Berkeley, CA.

He's just given a talk on OpenPGP / Clean Room ISO creation for creating keys / CA certs appropriately offline and keeping everything secure.

It's been a good day, but I'm feeling pretty bushed :)

Debian MiniConf ARM Cambridge 12/11/16 - Post 4

Now Daniel Pocock on RTC. Again, a few technical issues :(

Big thanks to the video folks who have been working hard: they couldn't get into this room until 1800 last night and spent until about 2000 fixing the cameras etc. They must be shattered.

Thanks for front desk: who also pointed out that the security staff in over the weekend are also volunteers.

MiniDebconf ARM 12/11/12 - post 3

A crazy presentation on amateur radio and dongles for SDR for which I was at least partially responsible which may well have inspired others and piqued their interest - but, if nothing else, it was a lot of fun.

KiwiSDR - there should be anything up to 200 deployed in the end worldwide - look for them on sdr.hu - all done on top of a Beaglebone running Debian.
Four users independently tuning the receiver from 0-30MHz
Lunch was sandwiches in the kitchen - much hilarity as the door appeared locked, folk were shut outside - and the door was open all the time.

A presentation / group discussion on diversity and on ways that we can improve the understanding of Debian

Debian Miniconf ARM Cambridge Day 3 12/11/16 - post 2

Steve Capper on Java.

Room quiet - lots of folk listening and typing simultaneously.

A couple of folk behind me are writing for later in the day.

Thanks to all for their help (and what is it with me and typing dates this week) :)

Debian MiniConf, ARM, Cambridge 11/11/16 - Day 2 post 2

It's raining cats and dogs in Cambridge.

Just listening to Lars Wirzenius - who shared an office with Linus Torvalds, owned the computer that first ran Linux, founded the Linux Documentation Project. Living history in more than one sense :)

Live streaming is also happening.

Building work is also happening - so there may be random noise happening occasionally.

Debian Miniconf ARM Cambridge - 11/11/16 - Day 2 post 1

Lots of chatting at various points  - a couple of extra folk have joined us today.

I've been fighting UEFI network booting: found inconsistencies on various Wiki pages - then found that the laptop I was intending to boot was just too old to support UEFI properly. In the meantime, the person I was intending to help has moved on and hit something else ...

Release team have managed to hammer out a couple of points: various other progress from the video team. It's all going fairly well.

Lunch - and coffee - excellent once again.

Thanks to front desk folks - and ARM folks - who are tolerating the end of their working week being invaded by Debian folk.

Debian Miniconf ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - Post 4

As we left at about 1740, Wookey was still working on the Cubietruck I'd left him with but had made progress.

Dispersed to various pubs and eateries: we all ended up talking a great deal, much as last year. Tsk, tsk - you hardly see people for 20 years then you see the same people twice in two years :)

Though I didn't see that much of them through the day, thanks to Jo, Lucy and all who kept front desk running as ever and thanks to all the various ARM staff who were helpful with opening doors for the visitors and all the little things around administration - wifi access, badges and all that goes with hosting.

And why, O why, did I not notice that I'd subconsciously typed 10/11/12 not once but three times

Debian Miniconf, ARM Cambridge 10/11/16 - post 3

Quiet room with occasional outbursts of talking. One of my problems with radio gear down to broken cable so that's OK-ish - I have spares.

And suddenly it's 1720 and we need to leave at about 1730.

2 x radio receivers tried: 2 x transmitters working ready for talk on Saturday.

Spare huge bag of cables appreciated by others - it's amazing how often you find someone else needs stuff :)

Debian Miniconf ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - post 2

Now about 30 people here: the video team are chasing down power leads and cables in readiness for the weekend.

One large open plan room with about 30 small quadrilateral tables - two make a hexagon. Very quiet for open plan: periodically the room falls completely silent - lots of developers quietly coding / reading screens.

Lunch was very good curry: ARM caterers feed us very well indeed :D

The radio I'm trying to program refuses to play with the software: the maintainer is at the back of the room and has offered to sort out a backport to Debian stable. Debian can occasionally seem like a dysfunctional family but it's good to be a member.

The Cubietruck I bought last year is sitting with another developer as I speak - he's going to try adding multiple disks for a RAID array on a machine that only draws 5W or so.

Debian Miniconf, ARM, Cambridge 10/11/16 - Post 1

More or less just getting going: there are eight of us here.

Release team are round one desk and a couple of others of us are on adjacent tables. Coffee is good, as ever :)

ARM very helpful as ever: they have been able to provide a disabled space for me though parking here is really, really tight

Who wrote Hello world

Who wrote "Hello, world" ?

Rereading Kernighan and Ritchie's classic book on C - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language - almost the first thing you find is the listing for hello world. The comments make it clear that this is a commonplace - the sort of program that every programmer writes as a first test - the new computer works, the compiler / interpreter produces useful output and so on. It' s the classic, canonical thing to do.

A long time back, I got asked whether programming was an art or a science: it's both, but most of all it's only good insofar as it's shared and built on. I used hello world as an example: you can write hello world. You decide to add different text - a greeting (Hej! / ni hao / Bonjour tout le monde! )for friends. 

You discover at / cron / anacron - now you can schedule reminders "It's midnight - do you know where your code is?" "Go to bed, you have school tomorrow"

You can discover how to code for a graphical environment: how to build a test framework around it to check that it _only_ prints hello world and doesn't corrupt other memory ... the uses are endless if it sparks creativity.

If you feel like it, you can share your version - and learn from others. Write it in different languages - there's the analogous 99 bottles of beer site showing how to count and use different languages at www.99-bottles-of-beer.net

Not everyone will get it: not everyone will see it but everyone needs the opportunity 

Everyone needs the chance to share and make use of the commons, needs to be able to feel part of this 

Needs to be included: needs to feel that this is part of common heritage.

 

If you work for an employer: get them to contribute code / money / resources - even if it's as a charitable donation or to offset against taxes

If you work for a government: get them to use Free/Libre/Open Source products

If you work for a hosting company / ISP - get them to donate bandwidth for schools/coding clubs.

Give your time, effort, expertise to help: you gained from others, help others gain

If you work for an IT manufacturer - get them to think of FLOSS as the norm, not the exception

 

 

"But I'm a commercial developer / a government employee"

Following on:

Having seen some posts about this elsewhere on the 'Net:

• Your copyright remains your own unless you assign it
• Establish what you are being paid for: are you being paid for :

1. Your specific area of FLOSS expertise (or)
2. Your time / hours in an area unrelated to your FLOSS expertise (or)
3. A job that has no impact or bearing on your FLOSS expertise (or)
4. Your time / hours only - and negotiate accordingly

Your employer may be willing to negotiate / grant you an opt-out clause to protect your FLOSS expertise /  accept an additional non-exclusive licence to your FLOSS code / be prepared to sign an assignment e.g.

"You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written 
by James Hacker.

signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice"

[http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

If none of the above is feasible: don't contribute anything that crosses the streams and mingles commercial and FLOSS expertise, however much you're offered to do so.

Patents / copyrights

"In the 1980s I had not yet realized how confusing it was to speak of “the issue” of “intellectual property”. That term is obviously biased; more subtle is the fact that it lumps together various disparate laws which raise very different issues. Nowadays I urge people to reject the term “intellectual property” entirely, lest it lead others to suppose that those laws form one coherent issue. The way to be clear is to discuss patents, copyrights, and trademarks separately. See further explanation of how this term spreads confusion and bias."
 [http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html - footnote 8.]

If you want to assert a patent - it's probably not FLOSS. Go away :)

If you want to assert a trademark of your own - it's probably not FLOSS. Go away :)
 [Trademarks may ordinarily be outside the scope of normal FLOSS legal considerations - but should be acknowledged wherever they occur both as a matter of law and as a matter of courtesy]

Copyright gives legal standing (locus standi in the terminology of English common law) to sue for infringement - that's the basis of licence enforcement actions.

Employees of governments and those doing government work

• Still have the right to own authorship and copyrights and to negotiate accordingly
• May need to establish more clearly what they're being paid for
• May be able to advise, influence or direct policy towards FLOSS in their own respective national jurisdiction
• Should, ideally, be primariily acknowledged as individuals, holding and maintaining an individual reputation  and only secondarily as contractors/employees/others associated with government work.
• Contribution to national / international standards, international agreements and shared working practices should be informed in the light of FLOSS work.

This is complex: some FLOSS contributors see a significant amount of this as immaterial to them in the same way that some indigenous populations do not acknowledge imposed colonial legal structures as valid - but both value systems can co-exist

How to share collaboratively

Following on:

When contributing to mailing lists and fora:

• Contribute constructively - no one likes to be told "You've got a REALLY ugly baby there" or equivalent.
• Think through what you post: check references and check that it reads clearly and is spelled correctly
• Add value

 When contributing bug reports:

•  Provide as full details of hardware and software as you have
• Answer questions carefully: Ask questions the smart way: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
• Be prepared to follow up queries / provide sufficient evidence to reproduce behaviour or provide pathological test cases 
• Provide a patch if possible: even if it's only pseudocode

When adding to / modifying FLOSS software:

• Keep pristine sources that you have downloaded
• Maintain patch series against pristine source
• Talk to the originators of the software / current maintainers elsewhere
• Follow upstream style if feasible / a consistent house style if not
• Be generous in what you accept: be precise in what you put out
• Don't produce licence conflicts - check and check again that your software can be distributed.
• Don't apply inconsistent copyrights

When writing new FLOSS software / "freeing" prior commercial/closed code under a FLOSS licence

• Make permissions explicit and publish under a well established FLOSS licence 
• Be generous to potential contributors and collaborators: render them every assistance so that they can help you better
• Be generous in what you accept: be precise in what you put out
• Don't produce licence conflicts - check and check again that your software can be distributed.
• Don't apply inconsistent copyrights: software you write is your copyright at the outset until you assign it elsewhere
• Contribute documentation / examples
• Maintain a bugtracker and mailing lists for your software

If you are required to sign a contributor license agreement [CLA]

• Ensure that you have the rights you purport to assign
• Assign the minimum of rights necessary - if you can continue to allow full and free use of your code, do so
• Meet any  required code of conduct [CoC] stipulations in addition to the CLA

Always remember in all of this: just because you understand your code and your working practices doesn't mean that anyone else will.
There is no automatic right to contribution nor any necessary assumption or precondition that collaborators will come forward.
Just because you love your own code doesn't mean that it merits anyone else's interest or that anyone else should value it thereby
"Just because it scratches your itch doesn't mean that it scratches anyone else's - or that it's actually any good / any use to anyone else"

Why share / why collaborate? - Some useful sources outside Debian.

"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris."
[Larry Wall, Programming Perl, O'Reilly Assoc. (and expanded at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris) ]

Because "A mind is a terrible thing to waste"
 [The above copyright Young and Rubicam, advertisers, for UNC Fund, 1960s]

"Why I Must Write GNU

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. ... "
[rms, GNU Manifesto copyright 1985-2014 Free Software Foundation Inc. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html]

"La pédagogie, l’information, la culture et le débat d’opinion sont le seul fait des utilisateurs, des webmestres indépendants et des initiatives universitaires et associatives."
 Education, information, culture and debate can only come from users, independent webmasters, academic or associative organizations.
[le minirézo http://www.uzine.net/article60.html]

We value:

1. Contributors and facilitators over ‘editors’ and ‘authors’
2. Collaboration over indiviualised production
3. Here and now production over sometime soon production
4. Meaningful credit for all contributors over single author attribution

 https://github.com/greyscalepress/manifestos - from whom much of the above quotations were abstracted - Manifestos for the Internet Age
Grayscale Press ISBN-13:978-2-940561-02-5]

[Note] Github repository is marked with licence of CC-Zero but explicitly states that licences of the individual pieces of writing should be respected

So - collaboration matters. Not repeating needless make-work that someone else has already done matters. Giving due credit: sharing: doing and "do-ocracy" matters above all

Perversely, Acknowledging prior work and prior copyright correctly is the beginning and end of the law. Only by doing this conscientiously and sharing in giving due credit can any of us truly participate.

It seems clear to me at least that contributing openly and freely, allowing others to make use of your expertise, opinions, prior experience can anyone progress in good conscience.

Accordingly, I recommend to my work colleagues and those I advise that they only consider FLOSS licences, that they do not make use of code snippets or random, unlicensed code culled form Github and that they contribute

Why I must use Free Software - and why I tell others to do so

My work colleagues know me well as a Free/Libre software zealot, constantly pointing out to them how people should behave, how FLOSS software trumps commercial software and how this is the only way forward. This for the last 20 odd years. It's a strain to argue this repeatedly: at various times,  I have been asked to set out more clearly why I use FLOSS, what the advantages are, why and how to contribute to FLOSS software.

"We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here
 ...
 In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish."
[John Perry Barlow - Declaration of the independence of cyberspace  1996  https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence]

That's some of it right there: I was seduced by a modem and the opportunities it gave. I've lived in this world since 1994, come to appreciate it and never really had the occasion to regret it.

I'm involved in the Debian community - which is very much  a "do-ocracy"  - and I've lived with Debian GNU Linux since 1995 and not had much cause to regret that either, though I do regret that force of circumstance has meant that I can't contribute as much as I'd like. Pretty much every machine I touch ends up running Debian, one way or the other, or should do if I had my way.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
Digging through my emails since then on the various mailing lists - some of them are deeply technical, though fewer these days: some are Debian political: most are trying to help people with problems / report successes or, occasionally thanks and social chit chat. Most people in the project have never met me - though that's not unusual in an organisation with a thousand developers spread worldwide - and so the occasional chance to talk to people in real life is invaluable.

The crucial thing is that there is common purpose and common intelligence - however crazy mailing list flame wars can get sometimes - and committed, caring people. Some of us may be crazy zealots, some picky and argumentative - Debian is what we have in common, pretty much.

It doesn't depend on physical ability. Espy (Joel Klecker) was one of our best and brightest until his death at age 21: almost nobody knew he was dying until after his death. My own physical limitations are pretty much irrelevant provided I can type.

It does depend on collaboration and the strange, dysfunctional family that is our community and the wider FLOSS community in which we share and in which some of us have multiple identities in working with different projects.
This is going to end up too long for Planet Debian - I'll end this post here and then continue with some points on how to contribute and why employers should let their employers work on FLOSS.

Helping out around the edges ...

for two point releases of Debian CDs.

Lots of testing, lots of folk chatting on IRC on #debian-cd - it's a good process.

Very impressed by processes behind the scenes to obtain necessary computer accounts, access to machines and various other things that are absolutely necessary and invisible from the outside. Hofstadter's law applies of course - it always takes longer than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.

Also many thanks for the patience and tolerance of people I've known for many years but who I get to see all too seldom. It's a nice group to be with, as ever.