Operations have been on stand-by since then. We have just paid all outstanding bills; and some of our websites which had been cracked are clear again.

In February 2010, the organisation will be either dis-mantled or profoundly re-structured. We are toying with various prospects for a lighter, more maintainable structure, though a complete fade-out still is the most likely option. If you are a non-profit organisation and are interested in taking over some or all of our websites or activities, now is a good time to contact us. Otherwise please check back in a couple of months.

The most regular followers of GNU/Linux Matters‘ work will have noticed that publicly-visible activity has almost stalled over the month of October. There are important matters which keep us occupied behind the curtains.

As any activist or voluntary worker will surely know, one does not always have the resources to keep working at no cost forever. Of GLM’s two project leaders, one is combining non-profit work with international studies, and the other will formally leave the organization altogether within a handful of weeks, for personal and professional reasons.

This does not mean that GLM is shutting down tomorrow morning. First of all, development of our linking platform is well and progressing, and the translation community is still present and active. Secondly, we still have financial resources to keep the servers running for a comfortable amount of time.

We are, however, looking to pass the legal ownership of the websites over to another organization. This would not only free the only one of us living in France where the non-profit is legally registered, but most importantly, give the new eventual project leaders the full freedom and means to develop the project in the direction of their choice.

In the immediate weeks, we will likely be shutting down our advertizing service, nonbreakingspace, which has not contributed to the organization’s funding in a satisfactory way. Another suspended project is the T-shirt shop, this time purely due to lack of time. But in the meanwhile, all servers and development services remain up and running.

Again, this is neither an upcoming downtime notice, nor (yet) a formal goodbye. We are interested in any proposals from existing formal non-profit organizations who would be interested in taking over the project. You can contact us at committee at our domain name – we kindly ask for your understanding that we have extremely scarce time resources.

Thank you very much, and we shall keep everyone updated on how the situation evolves.

Olivier,
on behalf of the GNU/Linux Matters team.

The event will also see the announcement of the laureates of the Lutèce d’Or awards, in which we hope to qualify as the best project for promoting free software.

We won’t be giving a talk this time, but we’ll be very busy staffing the booth and looking for corporate sponsors. Our new T-shirt is already in the making, the printing shop reported, and should make its debut at the Paris event.

We’d be delighted to meet and talk to anyone who passes by (the entrance is costless, but registration is required). Particiipants and translators, if you happen to be there, please stop by and we’ll get you a drink!

(The video is a 26 MB Ogg file, viewable with VLC or any other decent video player.)

Given the hurried pace, the continuously moving camera, some disarming questions, and the speaker who consistently mis-pronounced every name he could read, it wasn’t such a bad performance after all. We’ll try hard to be interviewed in English, next time.

The first reason is obviously that we grow in our capacity to reach out to everyday users and provide them with prime-quality web material about GNU/Linux and freedomware.
More specifically, we are able to enter a part of the web where information about the free software world is relatively scarce. We hope to be all the more effective in fostering Linux usage in these languages.

Another great reason to rejoice is that this release marks the completion of our translation system. From the first words down to the last localized URL, these four websites have been translated, built, checked, and published with a web browser only. The ease and maturity of the process —even right-to-left languages are displayed faultessly, as honalinux.org testifies— makes us proud.

The translations are a trimmed edition of GetGNULinux.org, containing less pages and thus allowing an earlier release while the full edition is being translated. This method allows us to grow at a much faster pace and we shall be making use of it again soon. A few people deserve great credit for this release:

• Most of the credit for DungLinux.org goes to Clytie Siddall, from the Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team. Clytie, a familiar figure among internationalized free software project communities, simply stunned us with the efficiency and speed at which she worked through the translation. Many thanks also go to Minh Ngoc Le for his patient help and participation.
• The bulk of both OtrymayLinux.org and PereidinaLinux.org was built by V’yacheslav Stetskevych — who didn’t give up despite the fact that we (still) cannot differentiate written Russian from Ukraininan.
• Hassan Ibraheem took most of HonaLinux.org upon him, while we learned to write websites to suit his beautiful language (written and read from right to left!). A friendly wave also goes to Farid Fakhreddia for his encouragement and advice.

A press release (also translated in Russian, Vietnamese, Castilian (Spanish), and French) has been issued on this opportunity.