Hull FLOSS SiG Inaugural Event

A fledgling group I pioneered the formation of, Hull FLOSS SiG www.hullfloss.org.uk recently held its very first event.

Since conception, it has been over a year long ardous journey for me in seeing it bear frution. Having heard so many false promises, and after approaching a couple of groups of people for their help/inclusion and their subsequent attempts at plaigarism, I was near to throwing in the towel and giving up all hope. These were disappionting and depressing times for me, especially after the amount of time & effort I'd injected and, even more so when you constantly hear the word "community" bounded around.

Within a few weeks of our offical recognition ie constituiton ratified, the appiontment of Chairperson, Secretary & Treasurer, opening of cosignatary bank account, we have generated quite a buzz in the local & wider community. Our provisional site has seen hits from a number of sources but most noteably the BBC and most recently Microsoft!

Our first event saw us attend the Hull University Freshers Bazaar, on both Sunday 24th & Monday 25th September, were we held an InfoPoint. This was organised within only a week, and saw the committee make use of a dedicated Wiki. Fortunately I'd already secured a number of CDs (OpenCd, KnoppMythTV, Ubuntu, Kubuntu - approx 200 in all) from LugRadio Live event and from Canonical (as part of the Software Freedom Day), so we wasn't short of freebies. Other members had brought their home machines with demo software running, and some nice movies of Open Source projects including XGL/Compiz, Elephants Dream and, a Spread Firefox advert (the Eskimo one).

We saw quite a significant amount of interest as midway through day two, we'd virtually exhausted stocks of CDs. A number of things that made the event a success for me was, the meeting & chatting with new people, an academic employee complimenting me on the website information. The highlight though was when three engineering students returned on day two, to say that despite their initial scepticism they tried the Ubuntu CDs, liked what they saw and thanked us :)

As we are in our infancy we still have a long journey ahead of us. I just hope that we do not lose sight of the future aims & objectives I had in mind, and that we approach our activities in a professional manner.

EP Software Patent War Rears Its Ugly Head (Again!)

A post on Znet "Software patent war ignites again"

informs that despite being derailed last year in a unanimous vote by MEPs, that the European Parliment Software Patent debate is once again raising its ugly head.

This time round it appears that if new measures are approved, of which voting is to take place next month on 10th & 11th October, this debate may possibly be removed from the hands of our elected MEPs!

Sounds like BIG businesses have spat their dummies out as they aren't getting their own way and are trying to influence politics to suit their own interests. I shall be emailing my local MEP to obtain further information and hopefully to have a dialouge with them.

Compiz to fork to Beryl

A recent premature announcment on Compiz.net forum from reports that Compiz, of XGL eyecandy fame, is in the process of forking the project to "Beryl".

"All of the work that had been maintained as the community or 'quinn' tree of compiz has become Beryl. This change is necessitated by the difference in direction and vision of our community as compared with davidr/novell's approach."

"This is intentional, and done because we are NOT creating an "angry fork", we want to make sure to stay out of davidr's way."

A more complete announcment can be found here.

Why the (old womans) name Beryl? A search on Wikipedia shows that Beryl is a gemstone

"It has a vitreous lustre and can be transparent or translucent."

Seems appropriate, although personally I think "compiz-beryl" would have at least maintained some form of continuity thus avoiding confusion within the community.