rants

What a month! This June is full of important dates, at least in Italy the Free Software enthusiasts have all weeks full.  Tomorrow Richard Stallman will speak in Rome at Università La Sapienza in Roma. He and Bruce Perens will also be heard later by the President of the Italian Chamber. Many Fellows will be there with FSFE merchandising: look for the "plussy" 🙂

Next Sunday, June 10th there will be the Pluto Meeting in Padova: special guest Richard Stallman that will receive the official paper attesting that Internation UNESCO  Clubs (FMACU) inserted the GNU Project into the list of World Treasures.

On June 12th in Milano I will participate to a panel promoted by AICT about Free Software trends where I have been asked to speak about DRM.

But first I will have to give a lesson to the Executive MBA in ICT students of Politecnico Business School, MIP on June 9th.  I’m preparing the slides now and I’ll publish them later.

And this is only the first half of the month 🙂 For the second half I think all FSFE will be super-busy preparing the yearly General Assembly in Bruxelles.

Roberto has noticed that within the long list of ribbon campaigns over the internet, there isn’t any promoting Free Software.

I agree with Roberto that there is a need for connectors, especially we need a way to expand the community beyond its current boundaries.  I’ve been humbly trying to do this in Italy launching GNUvox and also promoting the Fellowship. 

Regarding the color of the ribbon, green is my choice.
 And instead of a ribbon, I would chose ‘plussy’ as a connector. The Fellowship as a wider connector?

This is something worth announcing during FOSDEM 🙂 In a chat with Gnash maintainer,  Rob Savoye, Peter Brown discovered that YouTube videos will soon be available for Free Software users and all free digital citizens.

It works in CVS as a "hack job" […] I expect, that with community help for Gnash and support from the ffmpeg and Gstreamer folks, the next release will enable us to put an end to the number one bug report we receive – Gnash won’t play YouTube videos.

This is good news.  Gnash is one of FSF’s high priority projects.  If you wish to contribute go to  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/.

Few days ago I posted about Second Life client being released as Free Software.  I have a dual opinion on SL.  On one hand I am amazed by a completely digital world, it’s fascinating for me to think that I’m living something that historians of the future will mark as a ‘first’.

On the other hand I’m not so amazed to actually jump in SL to ‘play’.  The more I read about it the less it is appealing to me…  But then again, probably I’m missing something.

Look at Bob Sutor’s series on SL: why is a important IBM guy spending time and money to buy land on SL to host virtual meetings of his staff? What am I missing?  Should I just try?  Is any Fellow already a SL citizen? Let me know, I’m very curious.