Today I represent /ch/open and OpenExpo at the Linux Days 2008 in Geneva. It’s a neat open source conference and exhibition for the French-speaking part of Switzerland. And it’s great to make some French connections, e.g. Thierry Stoehr of Association Francophone des Utilisateurs de Linux et des Logiciels Libres. And of course it’s fun to meet the hospitable Swisslinux.org community (photo below)!
Yesterday’s research seminar with Prof. Gareth Morgan inspired my a lot and revived my research vein. Although Gareth’s message was basically “There is no such thing as objectivity” and “Do not confuse your data with reality”, his comments about science, subject and object, reality and its representations motivated me in my own research work.
Thus this morning I started reading the short but fascinating article about the 2.6.xx Linux kernel development, published by The Linux Foundation. It contains a lot of hard facts about the past 3 years of kernel development, e.g. who and which companies contributed how much code. Then I continued writing on the theory part of our new paper on innovation and control trying to come up with literature for our hypothesis. Then in the afternoon I had a great 1.5h phone interview with Mickey Lauer of OpenMoko talking about the challenges making a completely open mobile phone. The conclusion is basically: Although you might need to use inferior hardware (in the case of OpenMoko it’s the GPU of SMedia) since the major manufacturers won’t open their drivers, in the end the community will be more helpful and loyal contributing thousands of brains for your innovation project if you stick to your openism paradigm. E.g. in the case of optimizing the power management, voluntary community members even found ways on how to improve the use of the highly complex power management unit. This annecdote shows how powerful the support of the crowd can be if you open source your software, communicate transparently and accept external contributions.
Also method-wise I’ve learned a lot. However, while I’m now a PhD student for over 2 years, it’s time to diffuse the experience on how to write scientific work. Thus I convinced Peter, Zeynep and Jan to offer a 2-day course for MTEC students about the basics of scientific work. For those of you who can’t wait till Fall, this is our preliminary syllabus:
What is science? How do we know what we know?
Introduction into philosophy of science
Strengths and weaknesses of different research approaches
Differences between solving practitioner’s problems and contributing to theoryWhy theory is important
How the scientific publishing process works (about journals, editors, reviews etc.)
Where to find previous research about my area of interest
How to read a scientific paper
How to reference literatureFormulating the research question
Characteristics of good research questions
Deriving a question from theory: Finding contradicting theories, unexplainable phenomena, combining different research streams (Y-approach)
The question’s relevance to theoryIntroduction to methodology
Inductive (out of data) vs. deductive (hypotheses testing) research
Qualitative and quantitative methods – Designing Interviews and Questionnaires
Overview of different methods (single/multiple case study, survey, grounded theory building…)Data gathering and analysis
Sources of data
Quality of data
Instruments for data analysis (SPSS, MaxQDA etc.)Power of conclusions
Summing up the findings and interpreting results
Generalizability of results
Implications for research and management
Limitations of own research, future research questionsSo how do we start?
Writing good proposals
Planning the thesis
How the thesis will be graded
Last week we published the program of the upcoming OpenExpo on March 12/13, 2008 in Bern (list of the eight presentations in English). Our most famous guest from the FOSS community is Alan Cox, Linux kernel developer, visiting Switzerland for the first time.
A side note concerning the creation of the 32p booklet and how the open source process works in practice: This time I layouted the booklet with an own compilation of Scribus 1.3.5svn. It was not just a proof-of-concept concerning the great DTP software but also a real world test of community responsiveness: Three times I reported a minor software error through Scribus’ Bugzilla (e.g. bug 6622), getting informed that Franz Schmid submitted a patch 24h later and then downloading the new source code and recompiling the stuff - fixed! Now I’m trying to get sponsoring from /ch/open for a bounty enabling true PDF handling (scaling, croping…) - let’s see if it works till the next OpenExpo booklet creation!
The Economist has a positive foresight for Linux and Ubuntu in particular for 2008:
Bulletproof distributions of Linux from Red Hat and Novell have long been used on back-office servers. Since the verdict against SCO, Linux has swiftly become popular in small businesses and the home.
That’s largely the doing of Gutsy Gibbon, the code-name for the Ubuntu 7.10 from Canonical. Along with distributions such as Linspire, Mint, Xandros, OpenSUSE and gOS, Ubuntu (and its siblings Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu) has smoothed most of Linux’s geeky edges while polishing it for the desktop.
No question, Gutsy Gibbon is the sleekest, best integrated and most user-friendly Linux distribution yet. It’s now simpler to set up and configure than Windows. A great deal of work has gone into making the graphics, and especially the fonts, as intuitive and attractive as the Mac’s.
Like other Linux desktop editions, Ubuntu works perfectly well on lowly machines that couldn’t hope to run Windows XP, let alone Vista Home Edition or Apple’s OS-X.
Your correspondent has been happily using Gutsy Gibbon on a ten-year-old desktop with only 128 megabytes of RAM and a tiny 10 gigabyte hard-drive. When Michael Dell, the boss of Dell Computers, runs Ubuntu on one of his home systems, Linux is clearly doing many things right.
[…]
Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud.
Today informatica08 will present its battle plan at the press conference to motivate young people to study computer science while the beginner numbers in Switzerland are steadily decreasing over the last couple years. In order to not forget the topic of openness within ICT, /ch/open started a Call for Open Concepts and received 10 great proposals on how to support open source software, open standards and open content in Switzerland. One of them, Hackontest, now saw the light of the day and actually received a nice website, again designed by Stefan Sicher: www.hackontest.org
Update 2007-11-20: inside-it.ch brings a great summary of today’s press conference. And below there is some bad photograph from me - yes, even Swiss television was there!
Last week I did a presentation at the eGovernment Symposium in Bern talking about opportunities and weaknesses of open source software within Swiss public administration. As I recorded the audio of the speech I tried a new tool called Slidecasting. With this you can now listen to the presentation by automatically following the slides:
I love this slogan of Lunatic, “…unsere Welt ist eine Scheibe”, although in English the point is little bit lost ;) Lunatic’s world indeed consists of discs - CDs and DVDs - and next week it’s 2000 copies more. With the financial support of /ch/open, the great technical skills of Debian developer Daniel Baumann, the creative design of Stefan Sicher and my last-minute acrobatics we produced this week the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Swiss Remix.
It’s a German/French adaptation of the current Ubuntu release in order to boot all the programs of the respective language from the disc. As Daniel encountered some problems with the language packages while removing the GIMP manual in order to save space (about 20MB), you have to reinstall the manual after hard disk installation if you want to learn all about this great graphical editor:
sudo apt-get install --reinstall gimp-help-de gimp-help-common #German
sudo apt-get install --reinstall gimp-help-fr gimp-help-common #French
The Swiss Remix is available as ISO image from Daniel’s server including the shell script (under GPL) for building the distribution. When the discs arrive next Friday we ship packages with at least 50 copies at a production price of CHF 2.00 per piece. So email me if you’re interested in a package. Otherwise come to the Ubuntu release party next Saturday at the Puzzle offices in Bern or become member of /ch/open and you’ll receive free copies of the first Swiss remix!
Update 2007-12-05: I’ve written a press release last week, Ursula published the new /ch/open website with the order form and inside-it printed a short note about the Swiss Remix.
Today the Berner Zeitung published a summary of a discussion about the political motion for promotion of open source software in the canton of Berne. Marc Jost, EVP candidate for the elections next weekend, and I advocated the Free and Open Source Software movement and Marc Holitscher and Thomas Reitze from the board of Microsoft Switzerland defended their proprietary view. Since the text represents only a fraction of the arguments I suggest to listen to the full discussion (MP3, 57min, Swiss German).
Today the ETH laptop selling program called Neptun opened its sales of Lenovo, HP and Apple computers. Next to really cool configurations they offer the option of not buying Windows Vista and thus saving CHF 125 of licensing costs. Thanks to advocacy efforts from The Alternative aca Marcus Dapp the Neptun team decided to request ‘naked’ machines from Pathworks, the equipments reseller (a move supported by the EU commission). Since Neptun has grown enormously since its start in 2001 and sells about 11′000 laptops per year, the impact of the ‘Windows Tax’ renouncement might be huge. Let’s get the figures from Immo as soon they close the orders.
Preparing for OpenExpo I was looking for a solution to connect a beamer video projector to our Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7010D presentation laptop. Since I had troubles with an external monitor for this machine with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn before (the screen is either flimmering or only on the external or internal monitor) I mailed some Linux friends for support. Luckily Sven Herzberg of GNOME had spent some days of googling before and found the solution. Thanks a lot for your great help!
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device"
Driver "i810"
Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
Option "Clone" "true"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection
