Ubuntu’s Brainstorm = Fedora 9?

Heh, how about that

I thought I’d have a quick look to see what suggestions have gone up on the Ubuntu brainstorm website already, and was pleased to see that a number of the most suggested items are either already features in Fedora or things that are actively being worked on for F9. For instance:

• Provide a simple graphical interface to manage any network connection. I’m pretty sure most of the network connections mentioned (3G/GPRS data card, bluetooth phone, modem) are all planned for integration into Network Manager 0.7, which Dan Williams is currently working on.
• Create a better hardware database. OK, not exactly but Smolt definitely has the potential to help build something like this and new features are being added all the time. Hopefully if this gets picked up we can see some inter-distro collaboration. Pretty sure Mike McGrath and others who work on Smolt would be more than happy for this to happen!
• LiveUSB. Hmm… I’m pretty sure this was one of the major selling points of Fedora 7 and the livecd-tools package.
• Delta (patch) based updates. Hey Presto! Ah OK, I couldn’t resist, but seriously, I hope Presto keeps making progress and will maybe be the default in F9 – would be super cool.

Basically, I just wanted to say a big congratulations to all the Fedora developers who are clearly doing a good job at working on what people actually want and need. I know I appreciate all your hard work every time I boot up my computer! Keep up the good work

Fedora and Nasa

Jack, your post was awesome! Not wanting to crowd planet Fedora with lots of posts linking back to it, but I’ve submitted it to digg because a) It’s NASA related awesomeness, and b) It’s NASA related awesomeness involving Fedora – a lot!

People reading this, check it out and give it a vote if you think it worthy

http://digg.com/linux_unix/NASA_uses_Fedora_a_lot 

Write to them!

photo credit: Lonely Angel CP

 Oh man, while I’ve known this existed for a while it’s only just struck me how awesomely cool this is and I thought I’d share.

Here in the UK a group called My Society have created an amazing website called WriteToThem that allows you to easily find out who your MP is and then to send them a letter. All you have to do is enter your postcode and it will come back with all the information about your different representatives – that is MPs, County Councilors, District Councilors and MEPs. You then simply select the one you wish to contact, fill out your contact details and write your message. They handle the rest!

For an example of how good this is with respect to campaigning, check out the Open Rights Group blog post about the plans to extend copyright term in the UK (grr). I’d encourage all UK citizens to read that post and send your representative a message

This is super awesome, and what’s even better is that some of the people behind My Society and WriteToThem also created a site called TheyWorkForYou that allows you to look up who your representative is and information about them such as their voting record, how many letters they respond to, alert you to speeches they give etc etc. It’s a very useful site.

P.S. I’ve just found Photo Dropper – cool idea

NetworkManager Interview

OK, another interview is up and this time it’s with Dan Williams about the improvements being made to NetworkManager in Fedora 9. Some of them are sounding awesome, like ad-hoc networking and multiple active devices

You can read it here, and if you enjoy it you can digg it here (I personally recommend the latter).

Thanks Dan!

I

Thanks Nicu – I love this

Why not spread the love!?

Free Me Too

Wow – super cool news just appeared on the Fedora Marketing list that I thought I’d share on here.

I posted a few weeks back about a project I’d worked on a while ago – Free Me. Basically the goal was to create a disc with loads of cool free content on it and send it out to MPs etc as a lobbying tool. I never really had the skills or time to polish it though, and with the arrival of the CC LiveContent disc I gave up.

The super cool news is that Rahul (and others?) are going to put together a kickstart file for a Fedora Live CD based on Free Me (called Free Me Too). While I don’t think their goals are to send discs to MPs etc, it’s still cool to see some people pick Free Me up again! Maybe if they get a polished disc together I’ll see about getting some funding to send them to MPs etc, all printed out; I even have a few contacts from last time who might be able to help me get them out to SUs around the country

There’s a wiki page for the project here.

In other good news, the nurse finally told me I don’t have to go back again! I’m excited but a little nervous as this is the third time this academic year I’ve been told that, and all told I’ve walked to the health center and back more or less everyday this year…fingers crossed.

Currently I’m hoping that good news comes in threes, like its bad counterpart – and that there’s one more unexpected surprise around the corner.

KDE 4 Interview

I’ve slowed down a bit lately with the interviews, but hoping to begin picking up the pace again a bit. With that in mind, I’ve just published an interview with Rex, Kevin and Sebastien about KDE 4 and Fedora 9 You know the plan here, go, take a look at the interview and if you enjoy it give it a digg – if you do you’ll be forever in my good graces!

Thanks to everyone for taking part, and I hope you all enjoy it…

Web Apps Co-Operative (1)

OK, in case anybody saw the last post and is interested to see this develop here’s an update.

I’ve managed to get a few interested people onto a mailing list. Currently we’ve just started some conversations about key points:

• How do we figure out if this project is worthwhile? How big is the potential audience?
• What are the project’s goals? So far this is shaping up like this:
  •  To start a hosted libre web apps cooperative
    • There’s still a question of what services to offer initially. It’s been pointed out that e-mail is very important to people and might be better to wait until the model has had further testing before considering this.
  •  Data security and privacy are important
  •  Anyone can join
  •  Transparency in billing, implementation etc is essential
  •  Find a sustainable way for the model to work – i.e. funding/maintenance of services etc
  •  Become a fully fledged co-operative under the International Co-operative Association
•  We need some technical info – i.e. how much space and bandwidth is going to be needed?
•  Is Cluenet a possible model to work with on a project like this?

If these issues sound like they might interest you, or if you’re just interested anyway, please feel free to join the mailing list and help us move this along

http://questionsplease.org/mailman/listinfo/webcoop_questionsplease.org

Web Apps Co-operative

Summary: A few freedom loving people could get together and set-up a co-operatively owned libre web apps service for their use and enjoyment – probably for a reasonable premium too. Being owned by its users our personal data and information would be secure, and we could do with it what we wish (i.e. transfer out to any other service). Interested? Drop a comment and let’s think about this seriously.

Read on for a more long winded, though not necessarily more carefully thought out, comment on this idea. I hope people find this interesting because I’m sick of using proprietary services like GMail which bombard me with adverts and make no guarantees about the security of my information: I want my freedom back!

It’s seeming more and more like web apps are the way forward; they may not have feature parity with their desktop counterparts yet, but their ability to allow for collaborative work and to get access to your data anywhere is a really big plus. The problem is that all of the popular web apps available today are gratis but not libre (that is, free but not free!). While the problem of exactly what constitutes a libre web app has not yet been satisfactorily answered it might be useful to being to think about a sustainable business model for such a system.

My idea is a timeless one but perhaps has potential in this realm: a co-operative. Speaking entirely for myself, my interest in freedom and the convenience of web apps is strong enough that I would be prepared to pay a small premium for a libre web apps service; assuming there are enough people with similar feelings to myself (I’m sure there are) it would be possible to set-up a co-operatively owned service for a reasonable premium.

The benefits of this are obvious, in my opinion: being co-owned, what happens to our data would be entirely in our own hands – nobody else’s; we could choose the software and interfaces that we like the most; we could promote the development of this software through our use and bug reporting, perhaps along with any excess cash we have.

Furthermore, most of the software we would need already exists as free software: the RoundCube webmail project (or bongo for that matter – which provides calendars too); WordPress’ blogging platform (perhaps); there are web based feed readers which are free software but I can’t remember their names now. What is lacking is any kind of libre web office – although I’m no coder but it seems a lot of the functionality for a word processor already exists in WordPress.

All I’m trying to say in this post is that I think it would be possible to create something cool if we could get a few people together willing to pay a small premium. We could maybe even reduce this if we could convince people with money such as Red Hat, Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Trolltech/Nokia to subsidise some of the costs; even without this I think it might be possible.

[Edit: Some random gestomates based on Amazon S3 and EC2 for costs:

• 500 Gb in
• 500 Gb out
• 500 Gb storage
• One large instance + 500 Gb transfer for this
• = $667 per month
• 500 co-operative members
• = $1.30 per member per month.

Even if we halved the number of users, or quartered it, the price still stays under or around $5 per person per month - that's not a lot of money!]

OpenID Spreading!

This is on the BBC website today – actually I think for the past few days. Surely this is good news:

Using your favourite websites and services could soon mean memorising far fewer passwords.

Tech giants Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo have joined the board of the Open ID Foundation which aims to streamline login systems across the web.

In case you didn’t catch it earlier in the week, it follows a move by Yahoo to begin allowing OpenID logins to some of their services, and even acting as an OpenID provider.

The only thing that I don’t quite get with this, especially with regard to Yahoo as provider, is how you can control which sites you reveal what information to. If I see a site with OpenID and put in my Yahoo OpenID information, will all my information get opened up to that site regardless?