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Ciarán's free software notes

Ciaran O'Riordan's irregularly kept software freedom journal

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FOSS Means Business: March 16th, Belfast

ciaran

Tuesday 14 February 2006

I think this is going to be big. Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens are confirmed speakers, and Spires in Belfast is confirmed as the venue. "FOSS Means Business" is the title and it's a whole-day event. It's tailored to particularly attract to IT decision makers in medium-sized businesses and in public administration - but the content will be of very wide interest.

Google are also sending a speaker, and there are other speakers from public administration from the UK and maybe from Ireland to be announced.

Stallman is going to give his rarely-given business speech: "Free Software in Ethics and Practice", and he'll include a substantial section on GPLv3. Bruce Perens will deliver a CEO/CIO targetted speech, and we hope this will help fuel IT department transitions to Free Software.

Promotional help would be appreciated. March 16th isn't too far away, and because it's a daytime event, many people need to book time out of the office (and get their boss to book time out as well, and come along). So bloggers, mailing list posters, forum users, event guide writers, people with contact lists for the public and the private sector, etc. Please help spread the word about this FOSS Means Business event.

A website has been set up and the the details are going up there right now:

BelFOSS.org

(Think of "Belfast", said with a Belfast accent)

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GPLv3 launch, transcript and report, from January 16th

ciaran

Monday 13 February 2006

about: GPLv3

It's been a month now since the conference that launched the GPLv3 discussion process. A busy month, so I'm only blogging it now. There's now available:

At the start of the year, I wasn't planning on getting heavily involved with GPLv3. It looked like it was a project for experts and I thought that software patents would keep me too busy anyway, but actually GPLv3 is quite accessible and I've ended up working on it without specifically trying.

One reason for working on the above transcript is that it can be used by others as a base to make their own presentations. Other reasons include grep-ability, web search engines, translatabilitiy (human and machine). In general, just to make the information propagate more conveniently.

Most people who've read the draft GPLv3 seem pretty happy with it, so I first made a

GPLv3 project page for IFSO

to make it easier for people to read about the license and participate in the process. I hope to do something similar for FSFE when I, and others, get time. I've also found myself participating in mailing list discussions about GPLv3 and incorporating GPLv3 information into talks that I give.

The conference itself, on January 16th and 17th, was pretty interesting, although I think the social networking was more important than the license discussions.

The majority of my work is done with people I know by their email address - so it was good to put some faces and accents to those addresses.

The other big thing on my plate is the March 16th event in Belfast with Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens, and yup, it's turning (in part) into a GPLv3 event.

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