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These principles capture best practices for collaborating on hardware and software security to deliver projects and products that meet the requirements of system integrators, operators, deployers, and end users. The Chromium project’s Core Principles for security were a source of inspiration, but these principles dive into the realm of hardware engineering. Security as a shared…
Over the past decade, I’ve been researching open source and technology innovation, partly through employment at multiple different companies who engage in open source, and partly through academic work towards completing a Master’s degree and soon starting a PhD. The heart of this research is looking into what makes companies successful at open source and also at technology innovation.…
What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. — T.S. Elliot, “Little Gidding” Serving as president of the Open Source Initiative over the past few years has been a joy and an honor, and if I write a memoir someday I’m sure these will stand out as some of the best and brightest years in a long and happy open…
William Gibson has a concept of the future in relation to science-fiction, which he’s mentioned on many occasions in slightly different forms. My favorite source is the earliest one I can find, which isn’t quite as quotable as the more polished form on Gibson’s Wikipedia page, but it has a more authentic ring of roughness to it, as if he articulated the idea on-the-fly during the…
Shared Intro: After the summit (#afterstack), a few of us compared notes and found a common theme in an underserved but critical part of the OpenStack community. Sean Roberts, Allison Randal, and Rob Hirschfeld committed to expand our discussion to the broader community. Instead of sharing a single post, we wanted to bring our individual perspectives to you and start a dialog. See Rob’s post and…
Yesterday on Twitter I posted: Has anyone applied Einstein’s theory of relativity to radical skepticism? i.e. spaces of reference in knowledge relative to each other. Twitter is great for tossing out a quick idea, but on reflection, this one probably needs more explanation. To give credit where credit is due, the idea occurred to me while I was watching a Coursera lecture on Epistemology by…
At the very beginning, I should probably make it clear that this post is not a declaration of exclusivity in my relationship to Perl. I love programming languages. I first learned to program about the same time I first learned to read (English) and first studied French. My love for programming languages is very much akin (and I swear linked to the same part of my brain) as my love for human…
The 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” release of Ubuntu falls at the mid-point between the 12.04 and 14.04 LTS (long-term support) releases. This is the time in a development cycle when the balance starts to tip from innovation toward consolidation, when conversations form around what pieces need to be in place today to ensure a solid “checkmate” two releases down the road. With that…
This week in Oakland is the Ubuntu Developer Summit, a time for Ubuntu Developers from around the world to gather and plan the next release, version 12.10 codenamed “Quantal Quetzal”. I’ve shuffled and reshuffled the sessions several times, looking for the “governing dynamic”, the thematic structure that holds the Quetzal together. I’ve settled, appropriately,…
(My thanks to Audrey Tang for this lyrical transcript of my talk at OSDC.tw, to Macpaul Lin for the video, and to Chia-liang Kao for proofreading the Chinese translations in my slides.) Over the years, I’ve started thinking that participating in the open source community is like traveling on a path, toward becoming not only better programmers, but also becoming better people by working…
Failing to find any free software task manager I could live with, I created my own over the December holidays. I called it “Tody”. It’s a simple GUI app, focused on quick searching, editing, and tagging for tasklists. The file format it uses is identical to the plain text format used by Gina Trapani’s Todo.txt command-line tool and Android app, it even loads preferences…
I am perpetually trying out online task management tools. My never-ending quest is to tame the massive sea of things I should be doing at any given moment, both making sure that important tasks don’t get lost in the mix, and to extract a reduction more closely approximating “the most important thing to accomplish right now”. My two favorites at the moment are Thymer and Rypple,…
Today is Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, a new tradition in the Ubuntu community started by Ahmed Shams El-Deen of the Ubuntu Egypt LoCo. I’d like to take this opportunity to show appreciation for Kees Cook, who many years ago took time out of a busy conference to teach me how to build my first .deb package. That welcoming spirit – that patient recognition that every green newbie…
Following up on my earlier post on UEFI and Linux, I got access to an identical system to the one with the original problem (an HP S5-1110) this week to do some install testing with various scenarios: When I run through the standard install process with the Kubuntu 11.10 amd64 CD, I get exactly the same problem as James: I end up with a machine that has Kubuntu installed on a partition, but will…
I have an old iPod that I occasionally use on car trips, but haven’t really modified in years (it mostly sits on a shelf). This morning I decided to play around a bit with hooking it up with my main Ubuntu desktop. I found a good list of options for managing an iPod in Linux on Wikipedia, and decided to try out both gtkpod and Rythymbox. Both seemed to work pretty well for interfacing to the…
A recent blog post about a user who was having trouble installing Ubuntu on an HP machine, sparked off an urban legend that UEFI secure boot is blocking installs of Linux. To calm FUD with facts: the secure boot feature hasn’t been implemented and shipped yet on any hardware. It was introduced in the 2.3.1 version of the UEFI specification, which was released in April 2011. Hardware with…
Today we kick off the week-long Ubuntu Developer Summit, focused on the upcoming 12.04 release, “Precise Pangolin”, shaping the plans for the next 6 months, and breaking the goals into a manageable series of work items. With more than 20 rooms running simultaneous sessions, it’s a challenge to decide what to participate in, whether you’re here in Orlando or following…
It’s time for another round on the Ubuntu Technical Board’s review of the top ranked items on Ubuntu Brainstorm. This time I’m reviewing a brainstorm about a Unity Lens for contacts, together with Neil Patel from Canonical’s DX team. I volunteered to participate in this reply because I’d already been thinking about how to do it before I saw the brainstorm. I mainly…
The month before the Harmony 1.0 release was quiet, and I was starting to wonder if anyone other than the drafting group was even paying attention any more. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see the posts start to appear last week after the Monday release. Some more positive, some more negative, but the most important thing right now is that people are engaging with Harmony, thinking through what…
[This post represents my own memories of my own experiences. All stories have multiple sides, multiple perspectives, multiple angles, so if you’re interested in the story you should talk to other people involved in this first year of Harmony.] I first heard about Project Harmony around the end of May last year when Amanda Brock sent a message to the FLOSS Foundations mailing list, inviting…
I’ll take Dave Neary’s comments about private conversations to heart. To provide a little historical illumination, five years ago Dave and I founded a group, FLOSS Foundations, as a collaborative mailing list and face-to-face meetings for leaders in free/libre/open source software projects, focused on the community governance and legal structures of the projects rather than code. At…
Ubuntu Brainstorm is a website dedicated to collaborative greenlighting–anyone can post an idea for change in Ubuntu, and developers and community members vote and comment on the idea. As part of an initiative to increase the visibility of the highest rated ideas and speed their progress into the distribution, I’ve been asked to post my thoughts on an idea about multimedia performance.…
I started a new job last week, as Technical Architect of Ubuntu. I’m thrilled to be here, I couldn’t have crafted a more perfect job if I’d written the job description myself. I’ve been reflecting this week on how I got here. Many people know me for my involvement in Parrot, Perl, or Python, but my first love in free software was Linux, specifically Debian. I was already…