Ciarán's free software notes

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:

• a transcript of the presentation and explantion of changes
• and a video of same, downloadable by bittorrent

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.

There's a lot of energy in Northern Ireland right now about free software, particularly in medium-sized businesses and the public sector. One sign of the energy is that a big event is being organised for March 16th, with Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens - but that will soon be announced properly. Another is that the Belfast GNU/Linux User Group is becoming active again and is having monthly meetings.

There was a meeting scheduled for just after the launch of the GPLv3 drafting consultation, so I went to Belfast and gave a presentation about that. The pieces of paper which I used for my presenation were pretty low-tech compared to David Newman's MythTV presentation which was before mine, but I've now put online:

• 2006-01-19: Notes from GPLv3 presentation for Belfast GNU/Linux User Group
• And photo of the group while we were still sober :-)