pichel’s blog

So I was in Nantes this year to attend to the 10th edition of RMLL, a french acronym for Free Software Worldwide  Meeting. The term Wordwide is a bit exagerated since most of the conferences were given in French, and that the Association Village had mostly welcome french projects. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that about 30 % of the speeches were given in English… and that it is allways possible to speak English or French with hands, even with french people 🙂

Arriving monday in the afternoon, I was picked up by Rainer at the station, and we drove nearly two hours to reach the camping site, because of traffic jams caused by works on the road. We then discovered that driving in Nantes is often a bad option…

The booths were in a nice venue, even if organised in a too strict disposition that didn’t fit so well with opennes and diversity of people around there. More freedom, respecting security and practicability constraints would have been appreciated from many, but sure we have to recongnize it was a tough job to organize all this !

I helped Rainer at the FSFE stand the week long, despite beeing often away too because of all the insteresting conferences running all day. Every morning I came to the boss with my agenda asking for this or that schedule… with a laughing Rainer answering that I will never hold it – and it was always true :-)) We had a good help at the booth from a new Fellow from paris, Olivier which is working in a business about open and hackable devices. He held the stand few hours on Friday which aloowed me to attend to many interesting things.

This was the first time I attended such an event and held a booth for FSFE. I have to admit that I’ve been really surprised by how people got the FSFE message. I was afraid that the kind of topic FSFE deals with would seem too evaporated to people, but it was all the contrary : they seem to have empathy and sympathy for such jobs, and a good will to sustain it. The recent actuality having raised new threats for Freedom has certainly also raised people awareness about the Freedom concern that goes with Free Software. I went to talk and learn technics and I came back having talked about politics much more !

This was definitely a really good week, for us and also for FSFE which gained a lot of awareness in the french Free Software community.

Some interesting topics we dealt with :

• I had a very inresting talk with a collaborative from the City of Nantes who has been struggling for Free Software inside the office, and with the representatives for nearly seven years now ! He is still looking for material, ideas, arguments, tools to continue his battle. He’s already made some very interesting remarks and asled written questions to the representative, receiving only partial and off topic answers by now. This could be a topic where maybe FSFE could help. But it’s a huge job as every bit would have to be localized to conform local laws and habits.
• The licensing problem is one of the hottest for projects that are about to go public when having grown enough between the core developpers. I had a couple of talks with people from projects at this point. To put it short they want to distribute their piece of software now, make the stuff free… but they realise that crossing this point their level of insecurity will increase as they may have violate patents, or aren’t that much clean about their code “My stuff is Free, but I’ve used library X of which I’m not really sure of”. Well FTF is no way going to unemployment 🙂
• Part of the FSFE sympathy’s capital comes from it’s FSF like movement. Lots of people were happy to buy something from FSF’ sister organisation. So, whichever differences that happen to exist between the two organisations, the existence of a european level Free Sofware organisation is well perceived (even if they don’t perveive the inherent differences in speech and habits).

Another important topic that is not discussed here is Net Neutrality which has been extensively discussed at the political round table, but which will be the subject of another post to try to keep this one reasonable long.

Thanks a lot to Rainer that drove we the week long, while I was playing the GPS… with varying mileage :-)) Thanks and hello to all the nice guys (and girls) we met here : TuxFamily, Rhien, ubuntu-fr.org, Quimper LUG, April, FFII, and all those simple human beings with a laptop screwed under their wristles that we met, and that bring their bits of Freedom in their day to day activities.

Where Free Software is not that much about Software than about Freedom…

and I surely appreciate that !

Yes, another silly question you may think !

And you’d certainly be right in an ideal world made of Free hardware, open specs, and so on. But we aren’t, we are in the world of Hardware, deeply propriatery Hardware !

People tend to get more and more open to Free Software : they’ve heard about it, some of them tried it, other use some popular softs like OpenOffice or Firefox in their daily use of a computer. Why are those software so popular ? Just because they run on every platform you may find (OK, not only, also because they are very good software, but you already know this :-). The price is often statically linked libraries, but who cares except some nerds at the cost of broadband today ? What is important here is that you can totally abstract from hardware with those softwares, and nearly from the underlying OS.

Things get worse when you want to connect a printer to your brand new GNU/linux desktop. Even if most of the time you can click along “Add a printer” in a prefpane and get it work, there are some cases where this won’t work as simple. Here you loose your potential switcher which is afraid from what has to be done to get it work, or worse if the answer falls on “you’ll have to wait for someoneto write the driver, or write it yourself”. Yes, it’s partly the user’s fault because he thought he made a bargain buying this cheap d**l printer for an extra euro with his computer. But the fact is : even if he’s first thought was to throw away the original system, he’s now locked in by this little piece of hardware that has no Linux driver.

Things will go the same way with a scanner, digital camera, webcam, phone, pda… and every imaginable (or not) piece of hardware that one owns and want to use along with his computer. The longer the list, higher the probablility to find one that is not functionnal under GNU/Linux, or not fully, or without the support of this killer feature that made the appliance interesting.

If one would buy things when needed it wouldn’t be really a problem : one would search for a “compatible” model, et voilà ! But as the world goes, people tend to buy things because of mental images they made of them, or their use… et patatras, the dream flies away in the sky.

So using Free Software is also a way of consuming, and more precisely of less consuming. In running Free OSes, you learn to run away from advertising and to make opinions about things before buying them. You learn to go for Hardware made by people that are aware of Free Software and that write good drivers or at least give good specs on their hardware. In fact this simplifies a lot what and where you buy !

Finally, spreading Free Software, is also finding good hardware to spread it on. When you are given closed hardware, often you can’t go further with Free Software because you won’t get it working properly, or this would require too much work for what it’s worth… except with the help of the community of course, which solves many of those situations, but not all, far from that.