Over the last month or two we’ve been having some discussions about a national Linux organisation and what goals such a beast would want to accomplish. We’ve reached a point where I think everyone has pretty much agreed on a set of goals so I’ve put forward a proposal for what I would like to see happen to accomplish these goals.

You can see the list of goals at https://secure.meta.net.nz/pipermail/discuss/2005-August/000197.html.

My proposal is below

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I propose two separate structures to carry out the two different strands. One branch for outward focussed activities, another branch for inward focussed activities.

The outward focussed branch should be NZOSS in it’s current format. I don’t see any reason for not using the excellent structure and organisation that is in place already. Without a doubt it needs re-invigoration but the goals of this branch can easily be 100% met within NZOSS. This branch would cover both Linux and all other Free andOpen Source Software and Operating Systems (as NZOSS does now)

The inward focussed branch could either be an entirely separate organisation to NZOSS or could be a separate “sub chapter” of NZOSS. This branch would be specific to Linux and would provide primarily Linux resources to Linux User Groups. I think this limitation is necessary to ensure that we do not over commit and try and accomplish too much at once. The functions performed by this branch are not currently undertaken in any NZ organisation and would be completely new.

I think having this inward branch as a sub chapter of NZOSS is probably the best option, but the branch should retain a strong individual identity and I would like to see it branded as “LinuxNZ” perhaps with a secondary byline of “a division of NZOSS”.

Should demand for *BSD type user group co-ordination develop in the future it is then very easy to create “BSDNZ” as a second sub chapter within NZOSS.

I imagine that the outward focussed branch would simply be run by the present NZOSS organisational structure. Although perhaps as part of reinvigorating NZOSS a more comprehensive review of the current organisational structure should be undertaken.

I think that the “LinuxNZ” chapter of NZOSS should have a seperate organisational committee under the NZOSS committee. Although we do get in danger of having too much organisation. I think a seperation is beneficial to split the workload. There also seems to be a reasonable proportion of people who care less about advocacy and NZOSSes goals than they do about LUG resourcing and just “getting things done” - this is a further argument in my view for having a distinct brand / organisational structure to help keep these people included.

Utilising NZOSS to achieve our goals has a lot of benefits in my opinion.

• We avoid needless duplication of advocacy tasks
• No need to go through all the rigmarole of setting up an incorporated society
• Brand already established
• Userbase already existant

I imagine we would need to make some significant changes to the NZOSS constitution to make all this happen, but the indications so far is that they would be open to a “semi-hostile” external “take over” of this sort.

I haven’t posted this to nzoss-openchat yet as I think that would be a bit presumptuous given that somebody else on the discuss list may want to propose a different method of reaching our goals that doesn’t involve NZOSS at all. However I do think that if we intend to pursue this proposal (or a variant) of this proposal it would probably be good to involve the general NZOSS community sometime soon.

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This proposal is also found on the list at https://secure.meta.net.nz/pipermail/discuss/2005-August/000198.html.

So now I get to sit back, and wait for the reaction.

There has been some discussion on the Linux AU mailing list in the past few days about Software Patents, and in particular asking for specific examples of a situation where development of a peice of Open Source Software has been hindered by software patents. The best example given was an application called rproxy created by Andrew Tridgell (of Samba and Rsync fame) and indeed rproxy uses the same underlying principles as rsync, it uses delta compression to speed up HTTP browsing. The problem is some company in America has a patent on this. Tridge managed to get a “gentlemans agreement” that the patent wouldn’t be enforced against rsync, but couldn’t secure the same agreement for rproxy and hence the development stalled.

I found this example fascinating, rsync is a hugely useful tool that I literally use every day, so it’s a great example to bring home to me why software patents are a threat to the open source community. More details of the rproxy situation at:

• The Tragedy of rproxy
• RFC 3229
• Old rproxy homepage

In light of all this I found the following IEEE article quite interesting because it proposes a solution to the software patent debacle rather than just further bemoaning the current situation. I also like it because it lines up with my personal ideas of what should and should not be patentable.

• IEEE Spectrum: Software Patents Don’t Compute

Saw the movie ‘The Island’ tonight starting Ewan McGregor and Scarlet Johannsen. I’d read some good reviews of it previously and I was not dissapointed, while much of the action and chase scenes was completely unbelievable it was of such high quality and originality that you couldn’t help enjoy it. The story and acting was also reasonably strong. Sean Bean also put in a good performance as the (evil?) director of the facility. Overall I’d give it a 9/10 and highly recommend seeing it.

Seeing as everyone else online was talking about it I found a Nasa TV feed and watched the final 10 minutes of Discovery’s approach and landing. Starts out a big white blob from an infrared camera and finally morhps into a more distinguishable shuttle shape as it lands. Despite having a 256/128k DSL connection I could only get a steady stream that didn’t buffer every 5 seconds if I see my average/maximum bandwidth in the Real Player preferences down to 56/128k.

Well it’s been a productive weekend. Not only did I get Planet WLUG up and running but I also managed to get my personal blog (Matt’s Musings) setup and running at http://www.mattb.net.nz/blog/. Along the way I also redesigned the theme that I use for my personal site.

I’ve been meaning to setup a blog for a while now, but never really got around to it. I had a blog during my 420 project last year and I found it really useful to be able to look back and see what I was working on a month or two ago. I certainly don’t intend to post daily diary entries here but hopefully I’ll keep a record of some of the more interesting things I’ve been doing. I guess we’ll see how things evolve as they go along.