Finally after three months and a half Lionel shows us what he was doing all the time!

Yesterday I returned from a really cool two-day research seminar of our chair at ETHZ. We discussed a lot about the future research topics of our team and defined the following areas:
1. Knowledge reuse (current project about Debian source package repository)
2. Knowledge creation (see “Enabling Knowledge Creation” of 2000)
3. Communal/open innovation (distribution, participation, process, transformation)
4. User Innovation (recent trends in internet communities etc.)
5. Forking (comparing oss communities to firm processes)
6. Realm of validity of the private-collective innovation model (see paper Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model)
So by reflecting about these six research areas our focus is clearly set towards basic research rather than applied science, as stated also on our research summary on the chair’s website.

Finally, Google released a Linux version of Picasa. Although it’s not published below a OSI license this photo organizing software is still a great thing - as far as I know the only Linux application with cross-fading slide show option.
Update: So far, I only get some sort of Windows/wine error on my Ubuntu Dapper Drake…

The author of the German Ubuntu Userguide, Marcus Fischer, releases since February a monthly Ubuntu newsletter, now slowly becoming a simple German Ubuntu Magazine as of this month.

In today’s issue “Der Bund” technology journalist Nick Lüthi wrote a clear statement about the use of Free and Open Source Software in education. It’s all about this week’s votation of the 8.5 million Swiss Francs the city of Bern intends to spend on new computers for their schools. Meanwhile, a hot debate on what to vote is happening on the Wilhelm Tux mailing list. Personally, I more or less agree with the current project since I assume the local IT people in charge will accomplish their promise to “apply Free and Open Source Software as far as possible.” Of course, there is still a lot of bottom-up advocacy necessary, like our OpenSource@School event for teachers some days ago.

I just wrote a summary about this weeks second meeting of the local StopArmut group:

Am 10. Mai 2006 trafen wir uns von der Regionalgruppe Bern zum zweiten Mal. Es war ein spannender Abend, mit grundlegenden Diskussionen und intensivem Austausch. Erfreulicherweise waren wir dieses Mal mit 12 Personen noch mehr Teilnehmende als beim ersten Treffen! Die im März neu gegründete Gruppe scheint offenbar Leute in der Region Bern anzusprechen, sich über die Millenniumsentwicklungsziele, die weltweite Armutsbekämpfung und die konkreten lokalen Aktionsmöglichkeiten Gedanken zu machen und zu handeln.
Nächstes Treffen: Dienstag, 20. Juni 2006 um 19.00 Uhr im Raum “eleven” der Vineyard Bern, Nägeligasse 11

A half month before the official release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake I successfully installed last week Beta 2. It’s indeed working quite faster with the new GNOME 2.14. Also the GNOME Deskbar is working well and so is Beagle, the clever desktop search engine. Funny is 3ddesk, a cool 3D desktop switching tool.

The only problem I had was a CUPS/Samba error while connecting to a network printer. Fortunately, somebody has already published a patch. So if you encounter the same problem, just add deb http://www.linux2go.dk/ubuntu dapper main to your sources.list and it will update the necessary packages.

Right now:

Last week’s event about open source software in Bern was a success. I just posted a short review (in German) on a seperate page.

If you’re insterested in doing research about open source software components, particularly analyzing the libraries of the Debian package system, you’re very welcome to apply for the following job in our team!