Archives par mot-clé : Tech

Freedom takes the streets in Bogota, Colombia

If you are in Bogota, Colombia or know anyone interested in free culture and content production living there, this may be of interest 🙂 There will be a screening TONIGHT at 6:30PM of the BBC’s Codebreakers documentary at the Mediatorta, a public cultural space provided by the city 🙂

I am really excited that the spanish subtitling was possible after I managed to obtain a release of the original english transcript under a Creative Commons BY licence. Getting the transcript was the easy part but translating it to spanish was a huge effort by a few dedicated individuals – credit goes to Gustavo Gonzalez at Kazak for his dedication to have this completed!

See: Bogota esta empapelada and this announcement for more information.

 

New Launchpad release out, news blog online

This morning I was really excited to see the Launchpad 1.1.6 milestone announcement! Launchpad is a collection of services that assist in software development. Ubuntu uses it to manage its specifications, bugs, meetings, events and other assorted things. the Launchpad HowTo describes how this is done.

Among the many details of bugs and new development in this announcement, a few are of particular interest to any Ubuntu LoCo teams using Launchpad to manage their community and keep track of participation:

  • Teams can now only join other teams with the approval of the first team’s administrator.
  • Team members can now renew their own memberships, when their membership is close to expiry if the team is set-up with an on-demand policy.
  • Answer contacts will now receive notification of new questions in their preferred languages only. – as a team administrator, visit any project’s page (like Ubuntu’s, then go to the Answers tab, and choose  » Set answers Contact » from the left menu. Previously you also received notices in English. If you don’t select a preferred language, it will automatically be set to your browser language preferences.

This last feature alone is very important for local teams that wish to have their members keep track of the help they provide to local communities in their native language. I also think it will be a good way to keep answers to common support question out of the mailing lists – sometimes a few technical questions can generate a *lot* of email traffic. An added bonus, you loco team members will get precious karma for every participation.

There were also two nice changes to improve privacy of participants in Answers and the bug trackers:

  • Email addresses inside the Answer and Bug Trackers are now obfuscatedto anonymous (not logged in) users – e.g. Google.
  • Quoted emails and standard signature lines are now stripped from emailed responses to Answer Tracker questions and also bug reports.

There are many more improvements and new features, the full announcement is in the Launchpad-users mailing list archives.

Additionally, there is now a Launchpad News blog now available at http://news.launchpad.net/ – it’s great to have another channel with regular updates and insight directly from the users and developers behind Launchpad.

Now, to make this a perfect « Launchpad fans » day, it would have been lovely to see an update about making Launchpad free and open source under the GPL or another licence… 🙂

 

Prrésentation mensuelles FACIL: Sécurité des applictions en lign

Nicolas nous rappelle que jeudi prochain (21 juin) il y a une présentation organisée par FACIL au CRIM. Damien Seguy va nous sortir de notre petit nid douillet en nous parlant de La Sécurité des applications en ligne.

J’ai rencontré Damien à plusieurs reprises et je dois dire que je regrette beaucoup de ne pas pouvoir aller à sa présentation, alors ne manquez pas de lui dire bonjour de ma part si vous y allez suite à votre lecture de ce billet 😉

 

D

Depuis quelques jours mon carnet n’est plus repris dans Planet Ubuntu-fr. Il semblerait que mon dernier billet au sujet de Radio-Canada et son utilisation de formats non-libres était un peu trop incisif, et il a donc été censuré assez rapidement pour donner lieu à une discussion assez animée parmi les membres de ce planet. Le ton incisif, OK, mais ensuite on m’a repproché n’avoir aucun rapport avec Ubuntu – la critique des utilisateurs du forum francophone étant jugée comme une quantitié insignifiante de contenu Ubuntu. Pour ne citer qu’une raison

Parfois ignorées et parfois appliquées sans appel ni recours, les règles implicites de ce planet m’étonnent. Espérons que les règles officielles du planet francophone seront mises à jour pour qu’on puisse enfin s’y fier sans avoir peur de faire dériver dangeureusement le sujet vers les standards libres. Et pour le Code de Conduite Ubuntu, lors des échanges, on repassera.

Pour moi pas d’autre choix que de cesser d’y contribuer, car personellement je ne compte pas obéir aux humeurs changeantes du groupe éditorial qu’est devenu l’ensemble des contributeurs qui votent pour ou contre de telles décision de censure.

 

Regarding patents and Ubuntu

Almost two moths ago I remember reading that Canonical signed a License Agreement with Open Invention Network, but I can’t remember seeing much mentions of that – or any commentary. Earlier today I found some interesting questions and discussion in this blog post, however I’d be interested in revisiting that announcement with the information we have today, in particular the recent Microsoft deals and FUD around those. Well, dear lazy web, you know what I mean by I would be interested in… 🙂

The Open Invention Network site has interesting links about their licensing, the patents they own, and other details.