Free culture

Benjamin Mako Hill describes why the famous painting American Gothic should be owned by the people.

Software projects

Stormy Peters gives early notes for her State of GNOME talk.

Software development

Matt Zimmerman wants to close the gap between projects in need of developers and projects in need of testers.

Stewart Smith is poking at Drizzle with DTrace.

David Malcolm can render badly in ways that are not dreamed of in your philosophy.

Miguel de Icaza introduces continuations in Mono.

Glyph Lefkowitz never wants to see radical front-end changes until they’re actually an improvement, unlike, he argues, the new Ubuntu notification system.

Dave Neary argues that copyright assignment is often not helpful, and sometimes harmful.

Kernel

Evgeniy Polyakov compares Linux and FreeBSD POSIX mutexes and semaphores.

Testing

Matthew Wilson likes doctests.

Community

Lennart Poettering continues to question the usefulness of Planet Fedora.

Paul W. Frields discusses sensible contributions to Planets.

James Morris observes the way different conferences create develop communities around the world.

Metrics

Paul Adams wants to add quality metrics to the Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software.

Desktop

Stormy Peters has decided this year is the year.

John Palmieri explores the unlikely scenario of GNOME using Qt as its toolkit.

Miguel de Icaza thinks Gtk+ 3.0 will be a disaster, Emmanuele Bassi summarises an IRC discussion concluding it’s not as bad as all that, Miguel maintains it will be a disaster for independent software vendors.

Havoc Pennington is unsure if Gtk+ 2.0 is as appropriate for newer platforms as it is for the Linux desktop.

Morten Welinder doesn’t want to have to update applications and Martin Sevior says Gtk+ 2.0 does what AbiWord needs.

Jeffrey Stedfast is bothered by the move to break the long term API/ABI stability promise, and thinks ISVs will be too.

Kernel

Ben Collins clarifies Canonical’s upstream contributions.

Sound

Jeffrey Stedfast doesn’t think end users should be doing PulseAudio’s QA.

If you happen to stumble across this site and want to recommend links for us published between 13 and 26 July 2008, please comment on this post. Review the kind of links we post, and then make a comment suggesting a link. In your comment include:

• the URL of the entry you recommend to us
• the name that the author goes by, and the project they’re most associated with

I will delete comments containing non-relevant links, off-topic comments, and spam.

Big plans

Lucas Rocha gave a talk on GNOME 3.0 plans at GUADEC.

Panu Matilainen annoucnes a new RPM version heading rawhide’s way.

Community

Sure enough, there was more action on the microblogging syndication issue: Mikal Still, Matt Bottrell.

Stormy Peters is the new Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.

Software development

Mukund Sivaraman lists some useful programmer tools he’s come across.

Havoc Pennington wants string error messages as well as error codes.

Keith Packard gives an update on his work on the Graphics Execution Manager.

World domination

Colin Walters reviews the state of the Free desktop.

Translations

Asgeir Frimannsson supports moves away from translations having the same licences as the code.

Version control

John Palmieri reports that git has the numbers, Tim Penhey replies “not those numbers”.

Aaron Bentley and Tim Penhey argue that Bazaar has the model right.

Our licencing is up at Site licensing.

Attribution

John Palmieri discusses the pros and cons of acknowledging coders in press releases.

Version control

Justin Dugger talks about version control from a packager’s point of view and reviews some of the discussion to date.

Tim Penhey looks at using Bazaar’s loom plugin.

Casey Dahlin can’t stand Bazaar’s shortcomings.

Russ Albery is considering how to maintain a git repository for an upstream Bazaar project.

Elections

Jon Stanley discusses voting turnout in the Fedora Board elections.

Community

Sridhar Dhanapalan checks in from the Education Expo 2008.

Stuart Langridge announced the end of LugRadio, as did Jono Bacon.

Og Maciel discusses the suitability of political posts on Planets.

Tim Connors, Andrew Pollock and I, and undoubtedly others to follow, all weigh in on having Twitter feeds appearing on Planets.

Filesystems

Evgeniy Polyakov notes some filesystem development rumours about distributed filesystems.

Ted Ts’o is dogfooding ext4.

Testing

Curtis Poe recommends narrative testing for ease of maintainence.

Software development

Glyph Lefkowitz is thinks that most talk about software scability is wrongheaded and advocated the joys of static typing for on the wire protocols.

Ivan Krstić opens the floor for questions.

Ted Lueng is looking forward to DTrace getting a foot in the door on Linux.

Chris McDonough doesn’t like the distribution_links feature of Python’s setuptools.

Donnie Berkholz is outputting profiler results in colour.

Benjamin Carlyle has started collecting REST GET patterns.

Release management

Mark Ramm-Christensen is contemplating release schedules for TurboGears 2.

Deployment

Brendan Scott continues to review the hidden costs of closed source.

Library choice

Curtis Poe considers the problem of finding good software on CPAN.

Project websites

Brian Jones would like software websites to shape up.

Hacks

Atul Varma explains Scott Petersen’s work on porting C to the Tamarin virtual machine, thus running code on the web.

Hello, we’re just getting started around here. Find out about us and our editorial policy but remember, nothing is set in stone yet. We’re also not drawing from a very large pool: if you can recommend posts published since 27 June 2008, please suggest them for our next post.

Bugs

Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu) describes how important bug work is for distributions.

Free as in free

James Bottomley (Linux Foundation) compares the closed and open source driver models.

Brendan Scott (lawyer, AU community member) discusses closed source drivers and derivative works in the Australian context.

Design desicions

Bryce Harrington (Inkscape, Ubuntu) wishes user applications were more about streams of information and less about documents.

Debian had a lot of talk about the difficulty of visiting HTTPS sites without a trusted certificate using Firefox:

• Pierre Habouzit is seriously, seriously, seriously annoyed;
• Riku Voipo doesn’t like the HTTPS burden, but opposes bad solutions to it;
• Steve Langasek does like it; and
• Mike Hommey doesn’t like the UI design burden it imposes on all browsers using Gecko.

Packaging

Yaakov M. Nemoy (Fedora) is critical of the need for the LSB Packaging API.

Plumbing

Matthew Garrett (Fedora) makes the case for automatically determined power management settings.

Russell Coker (Debian) notes that reboots due to kernel security patches result in a non-trivial amount of downtime.

Version control

The GNOME blogs are all-in on distributed version control:

• Federico Mena-Quintero suggests how code archaeology would work after a Subversion to git conversion;
  
• Thomas Thurman thinks switching all GNOME projects at the same time is too much trouble;
• James Sharpe doesn’t think a choice needs to be made if the systems interoperate;
• Travis Reitter observes that git seems to be the sensible choice of distributed version control given its userbase.

Meanwhile, in X land:

• Lennart Poettering advocates git as the DVCS everyone knows best;
• Alberto Ruiz doesn’t like git’s UI or design;
• Adam Jackson points out CVS’s UI weaknesses; and
• Daniel Stone values git’s stable internal format.

Romain Francoise (Debian) is graphing VCS usage by Debian software.

Translations

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay (GNOME, Fedora) reviews the state of Firefox localisation in Indic languages.

Ivory tower

Biella Coleman (Debian) recommends Chris Kelty’s “Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software”.

Women in Free Software

Miriam Ruiz (Debian) asks about the possibility of a glass ceiling in Debian.

If you happen to stumble across this site and want to recommend links for us published between 27 June 2008 and 12 July 2008, please comment on this post. Review the kind of links we post, and then make a comment suggesting a link. In your comment include:

• the URL of the entry you recommend to us
• the name that the author goes by, and the project they’re most associated with

I will delete comments containing non-relevant links, off-topic comments, and spam.

I won’t be giving Interstellar Medium any publicity for a week or two yet, so sssh…

Hello out there. This is Interstellar Medium, currently the cold dark space between the Planets, but soon to be a veritable party, bringing you the brightest lights from the Free Software blogs each week, approximately. Posts will be frequent and small for a little while while we get our bearings.