Open Warrior » gpl

ubuntu global jam cape town

Kyle Williams — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:53:52 +0000

Ubuntu Global Jam

The Ubuntu Global Jam took place around the world this weekend. The Ubuntu Global Jam is an international event in which volunteers from LoCos (Ubuntu Local Committees) all around the world get together to work on improving Ubuntu. The purpose of the event is to encourage people to get involved with Ubuntu on a large scale and learn about ways in which the can contribute to Ubuntu. For instance, people can learn about and work on bug fixing, translation, documentation, testing, packaging or anything else that interests them.

The Ubuntu-ZA South African LoCo team hosted a bug fixing event at the Yola offices in Cape Town as part of the Ubuntu Global Jam, with a focus on fixing broken packages in the upcoming Ubuntu Oneiric, set to be released in October this year.

Since many of us were from a scientific background we decided to focus on fixing broken scientific packages, though that didn’t really happen and we just ended up fixing things that sounded cool or that we were specifically interested. For instance, given that I am a huge KDE fan, I tried to focus on fixing KDE packages, though I did fix a few others.

Fixing Bugs

We ended up being quite a small group with Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed), a Debian Developer and Ubuntu Master of the Universe (MOTU) leading the group, Michiel Baird who (I think) had a bit of experience fixing Ubuntu Bugs and Marco Gallotta and I who had no experience fixing Ubuntu bugs. Stefano was great in walking us through fixing broken packages – from identifying them, to figuring out what was wrong with them, fixing them and then contributing the fixes back to Ubuntu and in some cases Debian and upstream.

The great thing about the Global Jam is that it encourages everyone to get involved, regardless of their skill level. So even if you’ve never touched source code in your life, you can still help out by testing, writing documentation or translating the software. It was a great experience for me – I’ve always wanted to put my skills to use and get involved in helping to improve Ubuntu, but have never known where to start. The Cape Town Global Jam, under the lead of Stefano, was a great way to get stuck into it and has set the ball in motion for a lot more work to come!

Get Involved!

On a similar note, remember that Software Freedom Day 2011 is less than two weeks away so be sure to get involved! The Cape Linux Users Group and the UCT Linux Enthusiasts Group will be hosting an event on Software Freedom Day at UCT, so check out the Facebook Event if you’re interested in being part of it, even if it’s just to pop in and say hi

dropbox-servicemenu-kde

Kyle Williams — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:11:10 +0000

I just wrote a KDE service menu wrapper around the Dropbox python CLI. For more information please go here.

On another note, if you haven’t tried Dropbox I advise that you give it a go by clicking here

my first commercial gpl software

Kyle Williams — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:44:33 +0000

Yesterday I was approached by a financial analyst and asked to write some commercial financial software which will be used in calculating bond rates. This is my first commercial project and has created the opportunity for me to test the sustainability of the open source model when it comes to commercial software.

The software will be GPL – it has to since it uses a GPL driver. I’ll develop the application and give it to my contractor, from there it will be interesting to see how the contractor handles distribution and what profits (if any) they make.

Profits can be made with GPL’d and other open source software – one only needs to look at RedHat and MySQL as examples. RedHat and MySQL however are large companies, it will be interesting to see how sustainable the model is for small projects.

I might write a paper on this once the project is completed and has been successfully deployed – I’m sure a case study of this type will be very valuable to the community.