Big Buck Bunny

What is common to The Gimp, Python, Inkscape, SVN and Ubuntu ? They are all part of Big Buck Bunny‘s subtitles. I was very amused finding free software programs/projects in the subtitles (although expected in an open source movie).

Except from the result of a funny movie, one of the things I like the most about the Peach project (and the Orange project who proceeded it), is the idea of developing the software in parallel to the creation of the movie and for the movie by adding missing capabilities or features.

I’ve seen some of the new developments (mostly the particle engine) in Shlomi Israel’s lecture (in Hebrew) about Blender during August Penguin, and I really been impressed. Especially since I first heard about the new capabilities, and got a demonstration and only them saw the movie and understood where the particle engine was used.

I’ve also seen similar behavior in my community by Guy Sheffer who developed two small tools for Cinelerra during the editing of the August Penguin videos.

To conclude, I think there is room for similar projects in other areas for free software. Although a movie production is something non-technical people can understand, other projects can also select simple (but ambitious) objectives.

Defining to where you want to go, or where you want to be is an important part of getting there. This might sound trivial, but a lot of people aren’t sure about the big picture of what they’re doing. That’s way I’m so happy to see such projects succeeding in fulfilling their objectives.

Thanks to free software – Google uses Microsoft’s code

Scott Hanselman noticed in his “The Weekly Source Code” that Google’s new Chrome browser uses Microsoft’s Windows Template Library (WTL) licensed under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

Chromium is the open-source project behind Google Chrome. A list of the libraries that Chromium uses is available here: http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html.

I wonder if Microsoft will consider it’s free software strategy or not. On the other hand, it might be just what Microsoft wants – to get more application running on Windows than on other operating systems.

How to know you’re dating a free software guy?

You can recognize you’re dating a free software guy by:

• You know what Linux is (and not from reading the newspaper).
• You start to recognize names of free software projects.
• He can chat with you in whatever AIM you use (gTalk, MSN, ICQ…), and can do that simultaneously.
• When you say windows, he mumbles something.
• You started using Firefox.
• You suddenly realize that the internet has a lot of standards (and a lot of application/websites not using them).
• You started attending open source conferences.

And the #1 way is:

• Google returns more accurate reasults about your name and linux than only about your name.

Feel free to add other methods…

p.s.

For the more advanced couples:

• You start using Linux (dual boot or just Linux)
• You start translate / document free software applications.

Kaltura

During the organization of August Penguin 2008, I got in contact with Kaltura, an Israeli startup which works on open source video platform under the GPL.

I didn’t investigate the technical level in depth, but I know they now work on making video really easy on many of the popular CMS: Mediawiki & WordPress, and coming soon are Drupal & Joomla.

Version 1.1 of their wordpress plugin was just released, and they are looking for feedback. Some of the plugin capabilities:

• Upload, and import videos directly to the blog post;

• Edit and remix videos using Kaltura’s online full-featured video editor;

• Easily import video and other forms of rich-media from other sites and social networks, and;

• Allow readers and subscribers to add video and audio comments, and to participate in collaborative videos (I welcome your video comments to this post).

Here are some useful links for those who want to get involved:

• Sourceforge project page
• Community forums
• How to get the source code

If you decide to test the plugin, Please let me know…

“apt-get install love” – what more do we need?

Going over the NEW queue, I found a package named “love”. The first things I could think about is the line “apt-get install love” and the related jokes.

Seems that the love package won’t do what you think it will do, as the ITP says:

ITP: love — easy game development framework based in Lua and OpenGL

I don’t have any idea what do people think when they name their project with such a name… But good luck with the framework.

Is building packages like riding a bicycle ?

It has been 3 months since the last time I handeled a debian package. I got a few days of, and want to return to care about my packages (some got new bugs, others have new upstream versions).

I found it a bit weird to return to handle the packges, felt a bit rusty at the begining. It took me about an hour to remember everything I need. I started with my php-doc packages, which had her last upload about a year and a half ago.

Grabbing the new source from CVS is easy enough, but starting to track all the changes took some time. It seems that the PHP Documentation Group have (finally) chnaged the license (bye bye OPL) to CC-BY v3.0. It took me some time to figure if that’s a DFSG compatible license, but since the CC-SA v3.0 is good enough, so should the CC-BY be.

The package build system has also changed, and I still need to learn it. They decided to stop using autoconf/make to configure/build the package, and create something of their own.

All of this takes a lot of time, but I feel that most of it comes back quite quickly. I just need to start doing packages in order to have everything return… just like riding a bicycle (:

p.s.

I’m verry amused about using the bicycle analogy, since I don’t know how to ride them. Hope people won’t say that about my packges…