Why Hackers Will Save the World

For anyone that might be interested, my keynote from the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is now online as an Ogg video.

Where are the Alpha *Female* Hackers?

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

Not surprisingly, my first thought was: who have we got in the world of free software? There are certainly some big names like Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler of Mozilla and Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.

But notice that both of these occupy executive positions: they hack business/legal/social systems. And while there are plenty of female coders contributing to free software projects, I can't think of any high-profile ones that might stand alongside the obvious alpha males in the coding world.

Now, this is probably due to my ignorance as much as anything. So I'd like to put out a call for names that I ought to know in this context - women who code at a high level, and whose names I should be mentioning more often. And as a pendant I'd also be interested on people's thoughts as to how we can nurture more top-flight female hackers.

Update: Just come across this great List of women in Open Source.

Open Enterprise Interview: Tamás Bíró, Sense/Net

Once hackers have stopped arguing whether it's “free software” or “open source”, and discussing the relative merits of GNOME or KDE, they can always get stuck into the perennial question of whether they ought to develop applications using Mono, tied as it is to Microsoft's .NET framework, or not....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Haggling in the Bazaar

As open source becomes more widely used, people have started exploring how and why its approach to developing software works so well. The pioneering analysis here is Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar, but that was largely describing a prelapsarian world of free software with little commercialisation. An intriguing question is how the bazaar functions in the corrupting presence of serious dosh....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Respect, Nathive

In the world of closed-source software, it's hard to get a project going in a sector with established players. Since everything must be built from scratch - no building on the work of others *here* - it requires considerable financial backing.

Of course, that's not the case with free software, where the archetypal person in a bedroom can just start hacking for the sheer love of it - like this, for example:

Unfortunately I do not have much help... in fact I'm not a Gnu/Linux Expert, I'm not a superstar programmer, Simply one day I promised myself to do this, life is something strange... Born in 1985, like FSF, I became Gnu/Linux user in 2007 (never too late) and this is my first C program. I love to learn!

I would like to form a working group and continue learning more and more quickly.

The project is Nathive:

Nathive is a libre software image editor, similar to Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint or The GIMP, but focusing on usability, logic and provide a smooth learning curve for everyone. The project run over Gnome desktop and everyone can colaborate in it with code, translations or ideas.

The project is in alpha phase, so it is an incomplete work, the intention is to achieve progressively a professional graphic editor without giving up the initial usability. It's a made from scratch code, with C programming language and GTK+, simple, lightweight, easy to install and use.

I particularly liked the first statement of the following:

Nathive Philosophy

* Show respect and gratitude to GIMP community.
* First make it easy, then make it powerfull.
* The user don't need to see every options all time.
* If it seems absolutely absurd, might work.
* Everything should be obvious.

Respect and gratitude begets the same.... Good luck, Nathive.

GNOME Gets Stormy...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Can We Avoid the Great Schism?

At Linux Journal.

Spreading Spread Firefox

Most computer users by now have heard of the Firefox browser. This is hardly surprising given the extraordinary rate at which it is still being downloaded and diffused around the world well over a year since its formal launch.

Given that there have now been nearly 150 million downloads (converting that into a meaningful number of users is probably impossible), it is only natural that people think of Firefox as an incredibly successful free browser. It is that, certainly, but it is also much more.

After all, the open source community has shown time and again it can write great code: Linux, Apache, The GIMP, OpenOffice.org - choose your own favourite. But Firefox has done something else - something that has never been done before by a free software project.

It has translated the secret of open source's power - a huge, distributed and connected development team - into the sphere of marketing. The Spread Firefox site has mobilised tens of thousands of users - not as beta testers, as has been the custom previously, but as a guerrilla marketing force.

Most famously, that force was mobilised to pay for the double-page ad in The New York Times. Through the aggregation of many relatively small donations it was able to take out some high-price advertising. In other words, the approach scales.

But the real achievement of Spread Firefox is much subtler, and more diffuse. The tens - hundreds? - of thousands of active Firefox supporters are Microsoft's worst nightmare: a completely invisible - because distributed - team of product evangelists that it can never hope to pin down, let alone match.

This is such an important step beyond the traditional open source process that it is tragic not more has been done with it. For example, although there is a Spread OpenOffice.org, it is only now that a Spread KDE site has been created; both seem in their early stages. But where are all the others? Where are Spread Linux, Spread Thunderbird, Spread GIMP, Spread Audacity and the rest?

All these programs have enthusiastic users who could be directly mobilised across the Internet to spread the word about how good these applications are. Relying on old-fashioned, uncoordinated word-of-mouth is simply to throw away everything that has been learned from Spread Firefox - and to discard one of the strongest trumps in the free software hand.

Is KDE Winning?

Wow. Linus "my name is Linus and I am your god" Torvalds has spoken - and the answer is KDE.

If you haven't been following the great war between GNOME and KDE - and frankly, if you haven't, you probably made a wise decision - over what the face of GNU/Linux will be on the desktop, this news may not mean much. After all, Linus is just one voice, right?

Well, no: Linus is *the* voice when it comes to the Linux kernel, and his views carry enormous weight within the free software world. For this reason, he has always assiduously avoided coming down on one side of the other regarding desktop interfaces - until now.

As well as this flat-out endorsement from the man himself, there are other straws in the wind that suggest that KDE may emerge as the preferred desktop environment. For example, the amazing Knoppix live CD system, which has spawned dozens of other live CD systems, has always opted for KDE. More recently, the increasingly popular Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, which uses GNOME, has appeared in an KDE incarnation known as Kubuntu, and received the blessing of He Who Is Known As The SABDFL.

The reason this all matters is that 2006 may well prove the year that GNU/Linux makes its big breakthrough on the desktop. Just like 2005 and 2004.