Of course this is a presumptuous title, given that only three talks were given – but it’s fun to pretend that we’re a large organization “touring” events in Europe.
I just completed three talks, two in the Benelux and one in eastern Germany. The first two talks announced our ambitions for 2008 (more to appear here soon) and the third focused more on developers, explaining how to rethink projects to find an extra million users. It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable experience, also very exhausting because of the enormous time spent preparing, traveling, and wrapping-up.
For this reason there will likely be no more talks until the summer, when we will (hopefully) speak at the French RMLL (Libre Software Meeting) in Southern France. We’ve got plenty of things to work on before then, so there will be no time to fall asleep.
The slides for Linuxdays.lu are now online (those of FOSDEM were nearly identical), as are those of the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage conference (I am told an audio recording is on the way). They are licensed as CC-BY-SA.
I think 3 talks in such a short span of time does qualify as a small tour. :)
Btw, I like your slides and I have watched some videos of earlier talks. The notion of putting de-prioritizing quality seems to be easily misunderstood, but anyway, you usually explain that well in Q&A session.
One thing though, about people never requesting the source, even in cars, in one sense I actually see this as a problem. True, we have to adapt to the situation to an extent if we want to change things to the better, if people just wouldn’t react otherwise, but I think the long term goal everywhere (even outside of the software field) should be to allow for less dependence on vendors. A car which you can’t fix with your tools, even though I’d bet there could be tools which would allow diagnosis and even fixing of small problems without paying a mechanic (and only one vendor’s mechanic at that), just makes you more dependent.
So I think, while we tell our advocates and marketeers that people currently don’t desire the source, this should be the view we should encourage the public to have. In other words, adapt to the situation at hand, but keep in mind that once we’re successful enough we should use our success to make people less dependent.
> this should be the view we should encourage the public to have.
I meant, this should *not* be the view we should encourage the public to have. Sorry.
Thanks for the comments.
- About quality: you are right, it’s something that didn’t quite get accepted easily, at first. It took me at least 3 or 4 conferences to express it right. There in Chemnitz, it went nicely. I now describe how quality is managed in “real world” engineering & industry projects - the development of a “high quality” car, for example.
- About the un-fixable car: right again. My car is 11 years old and already changing the oil filter is extremely hard because they didn’t intend end-users to do it. Now on modern cars (such as the one I put up in the slides) it’s totally unthinkable. Absolutely everything is managed with the on-board proprietary software, which (with low accuracy) diagnoses the engine and tells the vendor what to address.
I used to think of this as something that would annoy users, but it does not seem to be the case. Part of the reason is that leasing/long-term rental is extremely commonplace these days (it shifts the burden of maintenance), another part is the consumer desire for “high-tech” (on-board computer, automatic wipers etc) which overtakes the desire for simplicity. The market has changed.
We could use this as a warning, when talking to everyday users (as in “see? look what happened to the car market”) but I’m pretty sure it would not work well - old-school car owners like myself aren’t commonplace these days.
I think it should mostly be a warning *to us*. That “source-code” speak didn’t work for cars. I think trying to restore that line of thinking in the public is rather futile - But I’m quite convinced that the idea of freedom, if expressed correctly, will always be appealing.