Just posted to d-d-a, here is the monthly report about my DPL activities.

Dear project members,
last bits of the past DPL term and first bits of the current term, all in one. Here is a report of what has happened in DPL land last April.

Highlight: call for DPL helpers

Before the report, though, let me point out that your friendly neighborhood DPL could use some help. As discussed during campaign, there are some intrinsic transparency and scalability limits in the DPL institution, when run by a single person. Before trying something new to fix that, I'd like to give a last try to an old "tactic": calling for help. If you're considering running for DPL or if you're simply interested in the job the DPL does and willing to help with that, please let me know. Ideally, if I find a group of people I'm happy to work with, I'd like to set up periodic IRC meetings with all "DPL helpers" to publicly discuss items in the DPL agenda and share the work-load.

Ongoing discussions

A big topic of last month has been the proposal by Francesca Ciceri to publish a diversity statement for the Debian Project. After a lively discussion on -project, we reached consensus on a text, and I've been happy to help with that. To finalize statement publication we now need to vote on it with a GR. I've helped drafting a corresponding GR proposal that has already been posted to -vote by Francesca. A final one, looking for seconds, will be posted there soon.

Wrapping up March discussions on a revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo, I've announced my intention to finalize the agreement and have done so shortly thereafter. The Iceweasel maintainer has deployed the corresponding search engine query string and other web browser maintainers could do the same, if they want to.

In April I've also spent some time to move forward the long running conflict on Python maintenance, reported to the tech-ctte more than 2 years ago. With the help of people on the -python mailing list, I've now submitted to the tech-ctte an up to date list of potential maintenance teams. I hope the tech-ctte now have all the information needed to come to a decision. Speaking of which, I'm also discussing with tech-ctte members the possibility of having periodic ctte meetings; the idea is to ensure that outstanding issues are periodically reassessed, improving the reliability of tech-ctte decision times.

I've also discussed at length with members of the pkg-multimedia-maintainers team the relationships with the unofficial debian-multimedia.org (d-m.o) repository, that have been a cause of tension for Debian multimedia users and maintainers for quite some time. On behalf of the team and of the Project I've now reached out to the d-m.o maintainer, hoping to come to some sort of amicable agreement on which packages belong where.

Hardware replacement

As anticipated in last report, I've started approving hardware purchases to implement the yearly hardware replacement plan prepared by DSA. During April I've approved requests to buy servers to replace the machines running the bugs-master, bugs-mirror, and UDD services. The total expected expenditure is about 15'000 USD.

Communication

I've delivered my classic Debian "18^W 19 years" talk at UNIVPM, a polytechnic university in center Italy; slides are available.

I've then been contacted by people from the European Synchrotoron in Grenoble who, beside having recently migrated their infrastructure to Debian, are looking into organizing a workshop on Debian usage for large science facilities. I've been happy to help out providing a list of potential topics and speakers for the event.

Also as anticipated last month, the Debian Project has been present at the OpenStack summit. Loic Dachary has represented Debian at the event and provided a nice report about his experience there. Speaking of which, I've also coordinated a news release about the availability of cloud technologies in Wheezy, taking the chance to point out the relationships between what Debian stands for and the ability to deploy your own private cloud.

Sprints

April has been a rather calm month on the sprint front, with the notable exception of the I18n team who is organizing a sprint for June in Paris.

Miscellanea

• Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has now started and for Debian is already quite a success. Wrt last year we doubled the number of student applications and we jumped from 9 to 15 approved projects. More details about Debian in GSoC have been posted by Ana. I encourage all of you to take the chance of GSoC to bond with students and show them how nice is the Debian community to work with: that's the prime trait we need to exhibit to make sure we'll always have enough volunteers to run the Debian Project.

• The one month notice before opening up LDAP dnsZoneEntry has expired and the field has now been opened by DSA. Practically, this means that the full listing of *.debian.net entries can now be queried publicly via LDAP. If anyone would be so kind to provide a script that does so and produce a nice looking HTML index, we can now publish it somewhere and replace the perennially out of date wiki index

Thanks for reading thus far,
HDH! (Happy Debian Hacking)

PS the boring day-to-day activity log for April is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201204

Debian, free software, and critical consumption

As mentioned in my last report, about a month ago I've been interviewed (in Italian) for la Repubblica, a major general-interest Italian newspaper.

Matteo Cortese has kindly contributed an English translation of the interview (thanks!), which I've just made available.

If you're a Free Software enthusiast, there is probably nothing new in there for you. But for a different public the story is quite another. In many countries it is still very difficult to find room on general-interest newspapers to explain why Free Software matter to people, and how not caring about it will lead consumers to progressively lose their rights while software become more and more common in the stuff they buy. So many thanks to journalist like Giulia Belardelli who show a genuine interest in these topics and try to bring them "to the masses".

Posted a week ago, already deferred back then, this report is even more deferred now! But as there are people interest in knowing what the "DPL job" is about even among non debian-devel-announce subscribers, here is a blog-conveyed reproduction, for the records.

Dear project members,
here is my monthly DPL activity report, this time for last March. It is delayed by a couple of weeks because, myself being both incumbent and candidate DPL, I preferred not to use d-d-a during the voting period unless really needed. Apologies for the delay (or the unneeded paranoia, you name it).

As a side effect of the delay, the results of the DPL election are now known. I'd like to thank all the people who took part in the elections: voters, people who asked questions on -vote, the secretary, and obviously Gergely and Wouter, without whom the campaign wouldn't have allowed to discuss relevant aspects of Debian "politics".

Thanks for your trust. I'll do my best to match your expectations.

... and just to remind you what you've just asked for, here goes the BigMonthlyBlurb!

Highlight: long-term hardware replacement planning

The highlight for this month is long term planning of hardware replacement. It's something I've been discussing with DSA for quite a while and on which DSA has worked hard during the recent sprint. As a result, we now have a quite ambitious 5-year hardware replacement plan that will guarantee that all machines in production are under warranty at any given time (with the nice side effect of generally better performances, as they go hand in hand with newer hardware).

The current estimated cost per year is 29'000 USD. That does not yet include buildds and porter-boxes, so it is expected to increase a bit to cover all our hardware needs. But we expect it not increase too much, as we tend to get explicit hardware donations to cover arch-specific needs.

Given the current state of Debian finances and donation trends, the plan looks sustainable for at least 2-3 years. But this assessment still needs to be refined as soon as, together with the auditors, we'll manage to obtain the history of past Debian transactions, in particular from SPI. We've been waiting for this for about 5 months now, but I'm positive it could become a reality in the next weeks. In the meantime, it is surely safe to start with the plan for the next 1-1.5 years, so I'll give green light to DSA for the first acquisitions as soon as they're ready for it.

When implemented, this plan will increase our ability to rely on hardware. But it also means we will need to become a bit more organized about fund-raising. The discussion started with the sprint report has some insights about how to do that. As part of this, we'll also need to share resources (e.g. contact databases, people, etc.) among the yearly DebConf fund-raising initiatives and the initiatives mentioned in the aforementioned discussion.

Ongoing discussions

• A couple of important clarifications on how to deal with trademark-encumbered software in the Debian archive have been posted to -project. It seems to me there might be consensus on the overall topic, but we need to write down guidelines for maintainers (and possibly a project position statement?). I could use some help on that front, so if you've followed the discussion and/or have an interest in trademark and free software, please get in touch.

• To put an end to the long and glorious life of DEP-5, I've marked it as ACCEPTED given that it has been "implemented" in February via inclusion in the debian-policy package. You still have some time to port your debian/copyright-s to it before the Wheezy freeze.

• I've been contacted by the DuckDuckGo about a revenue sharing agreement for the inbound traffic they already get from Debian browsers. I've informed -project proposing to accept it and that has spawned a discussion that has won us an LWN article. I haven't yet summarized the thread proposing a way forward; I'll do so shortly.

• as part of a discussion on unofficial "debian" repositories, I've proposed to open up the list of *.debian.net domains. As nobody disagreed, consensus has been quickly reached and the announced change is now imminent. Thanks to Carsten Hey and Gerfried Fuchs for their help in figuring out the details of the last discussion on the matter and DSA for their feedback.

Summer of Code

Debian has been accepted as an organization for the Google Summer of Code. At the time these bits go out, the student application deadline has also elapsed. In March I've contributed a few project ideas and chased potential mentors for them, when I thought the project could be important for Debian and the prospective student. I'm happy that one (a dak building block needed for the implementation of PPAs and more) has found both mentors and students. We'll see if any of the corresponding student proposal is retained and how it goes.

Communication

I've given an interview, about Debian and Free Software in general, to La Repubblica, one of the major newspapers in Italy. The interview is available online, but only in Italian. If some kind (and Italian-speaking) soul would like to translate it into English, I'll be happy to publish the translation as well. (update 22/04/2012: Matteo Cortese has contributed an English translation of the interview, which I'll make available shortly)

Legal stuff

In order to transfer ownership of the Debian trademark in Japan to SPI, I've contacted the current owners (all Japanese Debian Developers or contributors) to do the needed paperwork. I've been blessed by the help of Kenshi Muto that has taken the matter in his hands. He is now navigating through Japanese trademark procedures, a subject neither myself nor SPI lawyers were familiar with. Thanks also to Jonathan McDowell who has done the needed paperwork, SPI-side.

Sprints

Plenty of sprints and sprint reports in March!: Debian Med, DSA, DAM/FrontDesk. Everything should also be available from the wiki sprint page where you can find info to organize your team sprint.

Assets miscellanea

• I've signed the annual memorandum of understanding with the financial entity that will help us with local expenditures for DebConf12 in Nicaragua. This year is ISIC, with whom we have an important trust path via Norman Garcia Aguilar, member of the DebConf orga team.

• After discussion with auditors, we've resolved to set a 1 year deadline for reimbursement requests. The reason is that it's a PITA to keep track of longer-running requests (yes, they do happen!) and they add uncertainty to our available finances. There can be exceptions, but please help on this front by timely requesting reimbursements after travels or other expenses.

Cheers.

PS the boring day-to-day activity log for March is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201203

long life to notmuch-mutt

• Bad news: I've just killed mutt-notmuch
• Good news: mutt-notmuch has been integrated upstream as a notmuch contrib script under the name notmuch-mutt
  (note the word switch, due to uniformity with other tools of the notmuch suite)
• Good news (for Debian users): starting with next notmuch upload there will be a Debian notmuch-mutt package. It will work out of the box with Mutt, without requiring any ~/.muttrc fiddling

As a consequence, no further separate releases of mutt-notmuch will be made. Future releases (of notmuch-mutt) will happen as part of notmuch.

In other news, several changes have been implemented in notmuch-mutt wrt mutt-notmuch 0.2:

• move cache dir to ~/.cache/notmuch/mutt/ by default
  (Note: given that, from the point of view of notmuch, the next one will be the first release, no migration code from the previous cache location is present. Please switch to the new version and get rid of ~/.mutt-notmuch* manually.)
• support for XDG basedir, allowing to override the cache dir
• switch to String::ShellQuote for proper shell escaping in all notmuch calls
• system-wide Mutt configuration snippet for /etc/Muttrc.d/ (Debian-specific) or /etc/Muttrc

Many thanks to David Bremner (for shepherding my changes in) and to Ben Boeckel (whose desire to package mutt-notmuch in Fedora made me kick Debian bug #628018, this time for real).

Debian, software libero e consumo critico

[ english version ]

Qualche settimana fa sono stato intervistato telefonicamente per la Repubblica da Giulia Belardelli, a proposito di Debian, software libero, e temi affini.

Dalla lunga telefonata, di un'ora circa, Giulia ha estratto un'intervista scritta che è stata pubblicata online qualche giorno fa su laRepubblica.it con il titolo L'avanzata del free software: «Non rinunciate al controllo». Riporto qua sotto l'intervista scritta nella sua interezza, a futura memoria e più libera licenza.

(L'incipit e le domande in grassetto sono di Giulia; il resto sono estratti da mie risposte.)

Parla Stefano Zacchiroli, direttore del noto progetto Debian per un sistema operativo libero. L'appello ai più giovani: "Siate vigili su ciò che organizza la vostra vita". La ricetta per il cambiamento: alfabetizzazione informatica e spirito critico

Quando ha iniziato a "smanettare" con l'open source, Stefano Zacchiroli era poco più di un ragazzino. A quei tempi, studente di Informatica all'Università di Bologna, non avrebbe mai immaginato che nell'arco di una decina d'anni sarebbe diventato il leader di Debian, uno dei più importanti progetti per la distribuzione del software libero. Un'istituzione, per chi conosce almeno i fondamentali dell'universo open source. Oggi Zacchiroli vive a Parigi, dove oltre a dirigere la vivacissima comunità di programmatori insegna Informatica all'Università Paris Diderot. Repubblica.it lo ha raggiunto per farsi raccontare il presente del software libero e provare a immaginarne il futuro. Un futuro in cui - avverte Zacchiroli - gli utenti dovranno sviluppare un maggiore senso critico, se non vogliono correre il rischio di rinunciare ogni giorno a un po' della loro libertà.

Partiamo proprio da qui. In che senso un software può incidere sul nostro grado di libertà?

"Un software è libero quando l'utente ne ha il controllo totale. Che questo software giri su computer, tablet, telefono o televisione, poco importa. Libertà vuol dire poter usare il software senza limitazioni di scopi, poterlo copiare e soprattutto poter guardare come è stato fatto, ossia vederne il codice sorgente, e modificarlo. Ciascun programmatore sa decifrare il codice sorgente, mentre se ha solo il codice binario non può fare granché. Avere a disposizione il codice sorgente significa poter modificare il software e ridare al mondo, come un atto di collaborazione, le nuove modifiche".

Proviamo a fare qualche esempio attinente alla vita quotidiana...

"Un esempio emblematico è quello del tostapane. Cinquant'anni fa uno "smanettone" era in grado di aggiustare un tostapane rotto adattandolo a un diverso impianto elettrico. Oggi, se prendiamo un tostapane su cui gira del software proprietario, non abbiamo più quella libertà. I software ci consentono di realizzare tantissime cose che prima erano impossibili. Trattandosi però di un concetto difficile, alla gente sfugge che di un software proprietario il consumatore non può fare nulla: è come avere un oggetto, ma possederne in realtà solo una piccola parte. Dal momento in cui la presenza del software negli oggetti quotidiani è destinata ad aumentare, non vedo perché i consumatori debbano rinunciare ad avere il controllo dei loro oggetti, e dunque alla loro libertà. L'obiettivo, al contrario, dovrebbe essere quello di estendere il controllo individuale a tutti i dispositivi che utilizziamo e che contengono del software. Ce ne sono un'infinità: dai computer ai telefonini, dalle macchine agli aerei, per arrivare ai pace-maker che abbiamo addosso e ai dispositivi ospedalieri che controllano la nostra vita".

Quali passaggi segnano la nascita e la diffusione di un programma open source?

"Il software libero è un modo di rilasciare un software: il programmatore che scrive un software può decidere se rilasciarlo sotto una licenza "libera". Poi ci sono le distribuzioni: dei progetti che prendono tanti pezzetti di software sviluppati da gente molto diversa, li mettono insieme e li rendono utilizzabili dagli utenti finali. Il che vuol dire facilitare l'istallazione di un sistema operativo, agevolare la ricerca di nuovo software, rendere più immediato il passaggio alle nuove versioni".

Dal 2010 è leader del progetto Debian, una delle prime iniziative di sviluppo e distribuzione del software libero.

"Debian è nata nel '93 ed è stata una delle prime distribuzioni del mondo. In particolare, è stata la prima ad aver sposato il concetto di "comunità", ossia a capire che una distribuzione software libero raggiunge il suo pieno potenziale non se è opera di due-tre persone, ma di una comunità. La nostra è composta interamente da volontari: oggi il progetto conta oltre 1.000 membri e 3-4.000 persone che contribuiscono da ogni parte del mondo. Insieme, si collabora per costruire un sistema operativo completamente libero che chiamiamo "distribuzione Debian". In buona parte vengono dalle università: sono studenti, professori, ricercatori. Alcuni sono amministratori di sistema, geek, hacker e appassionati di tecnologia in generale. Ma ci sono anche degli umanisti. Debian può essere visto come un esempio - funzionante - di società politica. Tutto si svolge secondo i criteri della democrazia; c'è un processo di "mentoring" e verifica per entrare. La qualifica di membro corrisponde a quella di cittadino: ogni membro è come se diventasse cittadino di questa società chiamata Debian, che si basa su una vera e propria costituzione. Il contratto sociale regola anche i meccanismi di voto: il leader è votato su base annua dai cittadini. Ci sono procedure di candidatura, dibattito più o meno politico, e infine di voto. Si tratta di una particolarità di Debian, visto che di solito le distribuzioni sono frutto di un mix di aziende e comunità".

Quanti progetti di distribuzione ci sono in giro oggi? Quali sono i più promettenti?

"Al momento il più famoso è sicuramente Ubuntu, che in realtà è basato su Debian per il 90%. Hanno preso la nostra distribuzione e ci hanno costruito sopra un nuovo sistema (è il bello del software libero!), scegliendo come target di riferimento l'utente desktop casalingo. Altri sono SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora, ma ce ne sono centinaia e centinaia, ognuno con il suo pubblico di riferimento e le sue specificità".

A una persona non esperta può risultare difficile capire perché il free software sia ovunque, anche in sistemi/programmi tutt'altro che gratuiti. Ci spiega perché?

"Chi crede nella filosofia del software libero, accetta che il software sia un bene comune: si lavora su un prodotto che, una volta pronto, è per tutti. Non si mettono restrizioni su chi può o meno usare un determinato software. A questo punto, ecco che tra gli utilizzi possibili rientra anche il "fare soldi". Per questo il software libero è presente in tantissimi oggetti commerciali. Ci sono dei vincoli, come ad esempio l'impegno a condividere con gli altri eventuali modifiche, ma non c'è nulla di illegale. Di conseguenza, enormi sono gli interessi commerciali delle aziende che si basano sul nostro lavoro. Gli sponsor delle nostre conferenze sono Google, IBM, HP; l'azienda che sta dietro Ubuntu ha 500 dipendenti ed è una multinazionale. Il bello è che in buona parte queste grandi aziende si affidano al lavoro fatto da noi: mille prodi volontari".

Dall'elenco mancava Apple, la nemica giurata dei sostenitori del free software.

"Dal mio punto di vista, il successo di Apple sta nell'aver trasformato i computer da strumenti su cui si producevano contenuti a macchine per consumare contenuti. A ciò bisogna aggiungere un'attenzione maniacale ai dettagli, che li ha portati a meritarsi il primato. Secondo me, però, stanno facendo un sacco di danni ai consumatori. Punto primo: non sappiamo cosa fanno i loro dispositivi. Ad esempio, è stato scoperto che gli iPhone tracciavano gli spostamenti degli utenti, un fatto a mio avviso molto inquietante. Il secondo aspetto è legato ai DRM (Digital Right Management): ogni volta che compriamo delle canzoni su iTunes, non sappiamo se ce le avremo per sempre e non possiamo prestarle ai nostri amici. Quando compriamo un cd, invece, sappiamo che sarà nostro per sempre. Hanno trasformato il concetto di app store (che trae le sue origini dalle distribuzioni di una quindicina d'anni fa) in un dispositivo di censura: il software disponibile su un iPhone non lo decide l'utente, bensì deve aver passato il vaglio della Apple. Nel mondo Android, per lo meno, ci sono anche gli store non ufficiali".

Oltre alla libertà, quali sono gli altri vantaggi del software libero rispetto a quello proprietario? Cosa intende chi parla di "superiorità" del free software?

"Da tempo si sa che il software libero non ha nulla di inferiore a quello proprietario, anzi. È bene non generalizzare perché ci sono software proprietari fatti benissimo e altri malissimo. Da anni sappiamo che, in termini di sicurezza, il software libero offre vantaggi inimmaginabili. Tutto è visibile, quindi anche se potenzialmente i "cattivi" (i cracker) possono trovare più facilmente delle falle, c'è anche molta più gente che può controllare e risolvere. Più in generale, un'azienda che fa business su software non libero ha interesse a nascondere i problemi di sicurezza perché sono cattiva pubblicità. Nel software libero, invece, tutto è già visibile e non c'è nessun interesse a nascondere".

Perché, malgrado tutti questi vantaggi, i sistemi operativi liberi faticano a prendere piede tra la maggior parte degli utenti?

"Oggi non c'è nessun motivo oggettivo per cui un sistema operativo basato su Linux debba essere meno popolare di uno basato su Windows o Mac. Ci può essere ancora qualche problema di supporto hardware (ad esempio una scheda appena uscita, ma sono questioni che si risolvono molto in fretta). Ciò che più preoccupa, di solito, è il costo del cambiamento. La nostra è la prima generazione cresciuta con il computer. Purtroppo in molti abbiamo imparato a usare il PC in modo assolutamente visuale, cioè abituandoci al fatto che per ottenere un risultato bisogna cliccare su un'icona con un certo disegnino. Se il disegnino sparisce, panico, non sappiamo più che fare. È un problema innanzitutto di educazione. Diversi studi di usabilità hanno mostrato che, prendendo dei neofiti nell'uso del computer, esistono in realtà moltissime interfacce lato Linux che sono più intuitive. A casa mia ho fatto usare a nonni e genitori Debian senza alcun tipo di problema".

Come si fa a "educare" gli utenti?

"Bisogna cambiare il modo in cui insegniamo l'informatica a tutti i livelli, sia per gli addetti ai lavori che non, e stimolare lo spirito critico. Un elemento che potrebbe rivelarsi utile è il dibattito sulla privacy che sempre più spesso arriva sui giornali. La gente sta iniziando a capire che se Facebook o Twitter ti danno un account "gratis", in realtà anche tu stai dando loro qualcosa. Allo stesso modo, si sta diffondendo l'idea che non sei davvero libero, se non hai il controllo dei tuoi dati. Sono passi nella direzione giusta, perché ci stimolano a porci domande su chi controlla veramente il software che usiamo".

Trova che ci sia un ritardo particolare nel nostro paese?

"Rispetto a paesi come la Francia e la Germania, il nostro mercato è indietro. Se il software libero fosse più diffuso, potrebbero nascere tante piccole società in grado di modificare e ottimizzare autonomamente determinati software. Uno scenario del genere comporterebbe la creazione di nuovi posti di lavoro nel mondo IT, senza barriere artificiali imposte dall'impossibilità di accesso al codice sorgente. In Italia esistono aziende che offrono questi servizi, ma si tratta ancora di un numero molto esiguo. In ballo c'è però anche una questione politica: a puntare sull'open source dovrebbero essere in primo luogo il governo e le amministrazioni pubbliche, perché non c'è nulla di peggio che spendere soldi pubblici nello sviluppo e nel mantenimento di software non libero. Come si fa a cambiare? Puntando sulla competenza di persone qualificate, che al di là di tutto in Italia non mancano"

Update 27/04/2012: publish an English translation, kindly contributed by Matteo Cortese

As we're doing trends today, I got curious about Debian. I don't particularly care about popularity contests other than popcon, and Debian choices surely aren't driven by them. But hey, curiosity is curiosity, right?

So, here are today's w3techs trends for websites using GNU/Linux, with all lines shown:

(As thou shall always read methodologies before stats, here is the technologies overview page.)

Debian is the top entrant with 30% of the websites using GNU/Linux. What I find interesting is that Debian has jumped at first place in January 2012, significantly after the release of our current stable release, Squeeze, that dates back to February 2011.

It is also interesting to see community distros (Debian and CentOS) starkly ahead of commercially backed distros. That is what I find most fascinating about our projects. Whether that will remain the case or not is, for me, one of the big questions of the decade for the self-determination of Free Software communities.

The statistics of the "who wrote Linux x.y.z" series date back to at least 2.6.20. According to my experience talking with users and Free Software enthusiasts, those statistics really make a dent in the public perception of who is giving back upstream.

Obviously, one should not take a single upstream, even if it is as important as the Linux kernel, as a measure of how much a given Free Software entity is giving back upstream overall. But users still seem to be fascinated by them. As a result, I have often had to answer the question: why Debian doesn't show up on those statistics?.

My answer has always been something along the lines that Debian Developers who maintain Linux kernel packages, the almighty Debian Kernel Team, do that mostly as part of their volunteer engagement in Debian. As a consequence, they do not earmark their contributions as if they worked for a company and they add up to the hobbyist count instead (although you can you can routinely spot individual Debian Kernel Team members among the most active contributors for specific Linux releases).

The above is the true and honest answer. But every time I've given it, I couldn't help feeling that the user who asked went home with a "yeah, well" afterthought.

If you don't want to take my word of it, fine. Here is what Greg K-H had to say about Debian contributions in a recent blog post about the stable Linux kernel:

I would personally like to thank the Debian kernel developers, specifically Ben Hutchings, Maximilian Attems, Dann Frazier, Bastian Blank, and Moritz Muehlenhoff. They went above and beyond what any "normal" developer would have done, ferreting patches out of the kernel.org releases and the different vendor kernels and bug tracking systems, backporting them to the 2.6.32 kernel, testing, and then forwarding them on to me. Their dedication to their user community is amazing for such a "volunteer" group of developers.

I firmly believe that without their help, the 2.6.32 kernel would not have been the success that it was. The users of Red Hat and SuSE products owe them a great debt.

Buy them a beer the next time you see them, they more than deserve it.

I'll take good care of following his wise advice. Please do the same.

(Thanks to Sylvestre for pointing me to Greg's blog post.)

Ho accettato con piacere l'invito a partecipare (a titolo gratuito) al percorso dell'Agenda Digitale di Bologna, come membro del Comitato Scientifico.

I 4 assi dell'agenda digitale non lo menzionano esplicitamente:

1. internet come diritto
2. coinvolgimento della cittadinanza
3. innovazione tecnologica
4. open data

ma tutti hanno importanti affinità con il tema che più mi sta a cuore: il software libero. Cercherò di spiegare tali affinità e di avanzare proposte che aumentino la partecipazione della città di Bologna agli straordinari movimenti di partecipazione che sono nati grazie al software libero. Partecipazione non solo come utilizzatori — un punto di partenza, non di arrivo — ma soprattutto come produttori di / e contributori al software libero come bene comune.

Abitando a Parigi ho avuto modo di vedere quanto una realtà locale possa beneficiare intellettualmente ed economicamente dall'ecosistema del software libero. Due esempi su tutti:

• il polo Systematic che punta da anni sul software libero per aumentare la competitività della regione Ile-de-France (la regione di Parigi)

• IRILL un centro di ricerca ed innovazione sul software libero che facilita la creazione di sinergie e scambi tra aziende innovative, università, e comunità di hacker (full disclosure: lavoro per, ed ho contribuito a fondare IRILL)

Sono obiettivi ambiziosi (in termini di tempo e di budget) e lontani dagli assi dall'Agenda Digitale di Bologna. Ma tenerli presente aiuta a capire l'importanza potenziale del software libero per un territorio.
Teniamolo presente anche a Bologna!

Ma l'Agenda Digitale di Bologna vuole anche essere un percorso partecipato che raccoglie le propose dei cittadini (anche se si sarebbero potute/dovute scegliere piattaforme libere per raccoglierle ). Io avanzerò le mie, ma se avete vostre proposte che leghino i temi della agenda digitale al software libero, sono molto curioso di conoscerle. Potete scrivermi direttamente o segnalarmele su identi.ca usando l'hashtag #agendadigitalebo: sarò ben lieto di valutarle ed eventualmente sottoporle al consiglio scientifico.

Released a few hours ago, here is the monthly report of DPL activities for February 2012.

Howdy, dear Project Members,
here's another round of updates about what has happened in DPL land, this time during February 2012.

Highlights

Quit a bit of highlights for this month:

• The first item is not pleasant but important. Early February I've submitted to the attention of the Technical Committee the upload of multi-arch enabled dpkg to the archive. The Technical Committee quickly reached a decision. Shortly afterwards an upload to experimental has happened and discussions on -devel ensued. Please help out with testing.

• Thanks to IBM and OSUOSL we have some new fairly capable (virtual) machines for powerpc* ports. See the announcement for more info. In particular, please note the call for powerpc64 porters. If you're interested in contributing to such a port, please get in touch with DSA.

• Google Summer of Code project is up again. As usual, it is a good chance to get some work done and, more importantly, to let students who are passionate about Free Software discover Debian. I've delegated the task of GSoC admins --- thanks Ana, Gergely, and Sukhbir! A call for project proposals has already been sent out; there isn't much time left, so please hurry up and drop your ideas to the wiki page and contact the soc-coordination mailing list.

• A couple of important discussions have been going on on -project. The first is the old "trademark vs DFSG" discussion. I've posted there results from legal advice that I've sought on the matter, based on your suggestions. Then, I've posted a proposal on how to deal with trademarks issues in the archive.

• The second discussion is about Debian affiliation with OSI. We've been approached by OSI about that, as I've summarized on -project. Helped by the feedback received, I've decided to go ahead with affiliation and I'm now discussing with OSI representative the next steps.

• The long running work on software patent issues in the archive has been concluded publishing a policy on the matter. We now have a contact point and legal advice with whom we can discuss specific issues if/when they arise; hopefully that would help us to discriminate actual issues in the archive (if any) from the vast amount of FUD in the area.

Talks, interviews, and the like

• Following up Debian related talks at FOSDEM, I've been interviewed, together with Lars Wirzenius and Wookey, for The Register.

• I've took part at a FOSDEM panel session on comparing the organization of local user groups, ambassadors, and the like. We've mostly to learn from others in this area, but I've took the change to summarize what we currently have in a slide deck.

Sprints

Plenty of sprints related news!

• DSA and the Groupware team will be holding sprints later on in March, while DAM / FrontDesk are having one right now co-located with the BSP in Moenchengladbach

• the video team sent out a report for their sprint back in November

• debbugs (AKA bugs.debian.org) hackers are organizing a sprint to get people interested in contributing to the code base up to speed. If you're, drop a line in the thread

It would be amazing to have an average of one sprint per month for 2012, and we're on good track for it. If you want to help, organize one for your team as documented on the wiki.

Legal stuff

• Thanks to SPI, we've established contacts with the owners of debian.eu, domain we believe we legitimately own. As a first step they've set up HTTP redirection from debian.eu to debian.org (instead of a computer hardware shop, as it was before) and we're now discussing actual transfer of domain ownership to a Debian Trusted Organization.

• We've contacted the Japanese trademark office to transfer the "debian" trademark there to SPI. Thanks to the previous owners (all Debian developers or contributors) for agreeing to the move. Now "only" a nasty pile of paperwork remains to be done.

Appointments

In addition to the GSoC admins delegation (see above), I've agreed with former secretary Kurt Roeckx to reappoint him as a secretary for another year. Many thanks, Kurt!

Miscellaneous

• We have been invited to attend the OpenStack summit in April and have a presence there, free of charge. Loic Dachary, active member of the OpenStack packaging team in Debian, has agreed to go and represent Debian there. Thanks a lot to Stefano Maffulli for the invitation and to Loic for his availability!

• We are in the process of joining—as a project, instead of relying on individual maintainers as in the past—the ISC forum to get access to embargoed vulnerability information for important pieces of software such as BIND and DHCP. They've kindly offered us membership free of charge. I've submitted a draft of the membership agreement to SPI and I'm waiting for their decision.

• Steady progress on the front of periodic budget reports, thanks to the work of Martin Michlmayr. We've discussed at length during FOSDEM and agreed on procedures to query the state of Debian finances that work for both auditors and the DPL. Martin has also set up a shared ledger repository and already checked in into it a lot of money transactions for the past few years—not from all trusted organizations yet, though. Have faith, we'll get there

Happy Debian hacking.

PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

At FOSDEM, John Sullivan delivered an interesting talk titled Is copyleft being framed? to verify alleged claims on the decline of GPL-d software. (Slides are available.) The crux of the talk is the analysis he performed on the Debian archive to discover the amount of software we distribute that is covered by GPL, LGPL, or AGPL ("GPL-d" for short in the remainder).

John's talk steps in an interesting and long running debate (a recent summary of which is available in this ITWire article). The most interesting part is the discrepancy among John's results and Blackduck's, which are often used to argue how the popularity of the GPL license is declining. That might be the case. Or not. The more analyses we do to find it out, the better.

The underlying assumption on John's work is that Debian is a representative sample of the Free Software out there, which I think is a reasonable assumption. I find the analysis presented in the talk completely satisfactorily from a purely scientific point of view. The same cannot be said about Blackduck's result: both their methods and data are secret, making it impossible to reproduce their experiments. Highly unscientific.

Still, John's results are surprising: as much as 87 percent of Lenny's packages and 93 percent of Squeeze's are GPL-d. That seems a lot. Puzzled about that, John discussed with me the issue before his talk, in search for pitfalls in his methods or data. Finding none, I pointed him to the almighty DktrKranz for some extra review; who found nothing either. To stay on the safe side, even during his talk John called for independent reviews of his results. What could be wrong?

The tool used to gather the data is license-count from the debian-policy package. Input data are the debian/copyright files of all Debian source packages. If license-count is not bugged, our debian/copyright files might be. One thing that occurred to me only a few days ago is the habit of declaring a different license for Debian packaging (the files under debian/) than the software being packaged itself. That's a bad habit—because it might cause unwanted license mixtures via patches that live under debian/—but I've seen several occurrences of it in the Debian archive. For name and (self-)shame: I've also been guilty of it in the past, when I was young™.

Is that reason enough to skew results and overestimate GPL-d software? I don't think so, I hope not, but ultimately… I don't know. It'd be nice to rule out the possibility entirely. So if anyone is willing to do some sampling of affected debian/copyright files and propose patches for license-count to exclude those "false positives", please shout. (As a bonus point: that would also help to take more sound decision for the typical use case of license-count, i.e. deciding when a license should be added to /usr/share/common-licenses.)

Other independent reviews of the results are equally welcome.

Note: the above, as well as John's analysis, would be a trivial exercise if DEP-5 were already widely deployed in the Debian archive.

Update: add link to John's slides
Update 19/02/2012: Russ Allbery, author of license-count, posted a way more likely cause of data skew in John's analysis: double counting among the different types of copyleft licenses