NMAMIT, Nitte

Just back in Pune after 4 days in Nitte in between Mangalore and Udupi in Karnataka state. The best part was the awesome food we had every single day! I never liked Sambar in my 3+ years in Bangalore, but it was so awesome here! (I don’t know how many times I can use the word ‘awesome’ in a blog!) I still think the “Mangalorean Pomfret Masala” was bliss!

Of course meeting awesome people is given, for any Free Software conference, so I don’t have to highlight that Chandan had interviewed Jonas Smedegaard and it was excellent – both questions and answers! The best question was “what is your message to Canonical/Ubuntu?” We had to cut the interview and let him think about an answer. He said “When a kid leaves their home, we just say best of luck with whatever you do. Ubuntu is like a kid leaving home to debian – so best of luck!” It was so thoughtful and graceful, at debian ubuntu has always been a strain – how do we deal with it? It looks like most people have swallowed the bitter pill and adjusted to Ubuntu being more popular. Jonas kept telling Ubuntu is also a debian user and we have made an oath “Our priorities are our users and free software“.

There is much more to write, hopefully I will find some time to write more later.

It all started with an email about conducting another dedicated debian developers gathering in DebianIndia group. The idea was well received and we started planning the event. It took a while to decide on a date for event, but rest is – as they say – history! Abhijth offered to host it in COEP and Vipul was ready to host it in PICT. We decided to choose COEP, because Free Software community was already active there.

We had a rocking event thanks to hard work of a lot of people. I have to mention Abhijit, Vipul, Kartik and Pavithran who were there from the beginning to end in making this event a success.

Abhijit’s enthusiasm and passion for Free Software has been very critical for making this event possible. He has been instrumental in creating a vibrant Free Software community in COEP.

Vipul was our official designer and he made sure we have good posters, tshirts, buttons, stickers … He is also working hard to bring up an active community in PICT.

Kartik has been always there for Debian and he was instrumental in making sure we are a debian proper event. Of course, he advocated me to be a DM

Pavithran has been our main spokesperson on irc and his interactions with debian community helped us in making sure debian people knew about this event. He was there from Friday to Monday and made sure we have everything in place.

There were lot many people who helped in many ways.

Naveen Kumar has been encouraging me in every step and interactions with him every day helped make this event much more organised. He was insistent on meticulous planning even to the minute details.

Kushal Das for having played and excellent role. I guess every one got a clear understanding of upstream and downstream. I found having upstream author, maintainer, mentor and sponsor at the same place was a wonderful way of demonstrating the relationship between different communities in the Free Software world. Back and forth between me and Kushal about copyright was the best part. Understanding about how copyright is fundamental to being part of the Free Software community.

Onkar Shinde for helping me with my intro talk and workshop. Being part of Ubuntu and Debian gave a different perspective and it was an important one.

Amit Karpe and PLUG team for joining with us for organising this event. It was good to see him contact us and offer help.

Sasikumar sir of CDAC for supporting this event and making sure we have a good interaction with BOSS team. Also for coming as a chief guest and delivering and inspiring inaugural address.

Ashok Kumar and BOSS team for a healthy dialogue. Hopefully, we can work together more closely after this interaction.

Vikram Vincent for his energetic talk, he was talking to students in their own language.

Raghavendra for sharing his vision and experience.

I’m definitely going to miss many volunteers’ names because I have interacted directly with only small number of them and I don’t
remember most of their names I will attempt some names Swapnil, Avinash, Madhur, Aswin and many more.

Plus all the awesome participants, who stayed up till 10 pm on first day, came at 8 am on the second day and stayed till 8pm, that is quiet an effort. Again I will try some names, but I know it is incomplete, Arnav, Vivek, Sana, Priyanka, Sushant, Raghavendra …

Oh yeah Ninad Pundalik was helping with the workshop and his microblogs. Ramakrishna for his great insights. Shirish was keeping the sessions alive with lot of questions.

Karunakar helped answering some questions on input methods. His presence itself is great motivation for any FOSS event. We planned a session with him, but he had other plans on that day, which got canceled at the last moment, so he could come for the event.

Pravin Chavan from CoEP for arranging delivary of flex,buttons,and bunking whole day of college!for placing order of
tshirts in desperate times..

And of course our sponsors Media Magic Technologies and Nexenta systems. Hopefully Linux For You will cover this event in their coming edition.

An old Chinese saying says:

Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach a person how to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.

That has been my approach through out the workshop. I taught them where to find the information they need, gave hints when they needed it, shared my experiences. I started with asking them to search for ‘debian policy’ and keep it open in a tab. Then ‘debian new maintainer guide’ and lekhonee. It is important to remember the key words, we can always find the link with a search engine.

Next step was building the package from source. Instead of telling them what packages they need to install, I helped them find it out by themselves. First rule is always read README. It mentioned names of dependencies by their upstream/generic names. But they still had to find out debian package names because most of the time debian allows multiple versions of the same software, especially libraries to be present in the system. In those cases version of the library/software gets added to the package name. apt-cache search ‘upstream name’ lists packages with that name. But for building packages we need development libraries so they need to search ‘upstream name dev’. Once they found out package names for all the dependencies, every one built the package from source. I think it was Swapnil, who volunteered to show the students how to build a software from source.

Now we have all the required dependencies, so I asked them to improve README file with this information. Swapnil volunteered to improve README, but could not send to debian bug tracker on first day as we were getting late. On second day we were supposed to submit the bug report, but diff file was saved on Onkar’s laptop. So Raghvendra volunteered to do it again and others helped him with package names. This involved modifying code to improve it and creating patch. After we have the diff file ready, we submitted it to debian bug tracker.

Next step was getting them familiarised with wnpp. So I showed them and example ITP for burg and asked them to create the template for lekhonee-gnome in a text editor. They had to look in the AUTHORS file for upstream author. Then came the interesting part of license.

Everyone said the license is GPLv3, but Kushal insisted it is GPLv2. So we had to double check. It turned out COPYING file mentioned license as GPLv3, Kushal copy-pasted it from somewhere But before we could report it as bug, he fixed it upstream! But still Vivek insisted it is LGPLv3 (I also made the same mistake in my ITP). So I told them to run ‘licensecheck -r *’. This command lists out license of individual source files in the archive. Some of them had to search for this and install devscripts. Output of this command showed, individual files had a mix or LGPLv3 and GPLv2+.

Once we listed all licenses of individual files, the next logical step was finding out license of the combination as a package. We looked up text of GPL and LGPL licences on the internet.

I asked them to look at the relevant sections of each license to understand what each of the licenses say about derivative works.

Section 2b of GPLv2 clarifies the license of the whole program should remain as GPLv2+

2b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

Section 4 of LGPL gives user a choice of license for combined works.

4. Combined Works.

You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications …

If we want to comply with GPL’s requirement of same license for derivative work and LGPL’s choice of any license, the result is GPLv2+. (See debian/copyright file for lekhonee-gnome. It makes debian package GPLv3+, may be I should keep it at GPLv2+, I will think about it when I prepare next update).

Next field in ITP is description, everyone just copied the description given by Kushal, without thinking much about it (I did it too when I filed ITP – but Kartik made me change it to something more useful to users). I told them to be creative and think about users when writing descriptions.

It is already a long post and I better post it now, Pavithran has been behind me for my blog

To conclude, we ran dh_make and modified template files to build the debian package! If I feel like writing more, I will write more about the event later.

Thanks to Pavithran for photos (Pavithran’s Gallery). More blogs and after event activities. You can also get involved! Come to #debian-in at irc://irc.oftc.net

PS1: I started with lekhonee-gnome, but it supports saving drafts only once. So reported a defect and moved to web interface.
PS2: As usual, I went into minor details, because they say “devil is in the details”. I hope sharing this experience in detail will help other people organising Free Software events.

I found out the right combination of ffmpeg options by comparing a sample file created by EmoDio software that came with the device.

I created a script ffmpeg2svi with correct options to make the conversion easier. Here is the script

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -ne 2 ]
then
echo "Usage: ffmpeg2svi <input> <output.svi>"
else
ffmpeg -i "$1" -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec libmp3lame -f avi -s qvga -aspect 4:3 -sameq "$2"
fi

Hopefully this works with other models from Samsung as well.

The enthusiasm and excitement of students was very encouraging. From what they have told us it seems they enjoyed the camp as well. Gautam said he found the informal and interactive nature of the delivery very useful. Some of them wanted to go deep into speech recognition.

Every Localisation Camp targets at least one new translator in addition to spreading awareness about making computers available in a language that is used in every other communications. This time the main target was Labeeb When we met for the first time during gnunify he mentioned he wanted to help out with translations but did not know where to start. So I thought I will call him to Red Hat’s office one weekend and will sit down with him and show him how to translate applications. Moreover he is already a contributor to Malayalam Wikipedia. I already had my audience requirement fulfilled so I announced the event as a continuation of the translation camps smc started already.

I talked to more people and every one was receptive to the idea and offered their help. So at no point in time I had any tension about the success of the event. We had a meeting of Uncode, Lokayat’s Free Software initiative and we decided to have it organised jointly. Abhijit helped mobilise students from College of Engineering, Pune and their FSUG joined in as well. The idea of a small event was shared by so many and the event grew in no time.

We had to restrict the number of participants because we could not handle more than 25 people effectively in our venue. But without much wider publicity – considering how I used to spam every user group list for previous events, we had all the people we needed to get going. Then we went about deciding the structure and agenda of the event. Naveen Kumar, Ankit Patel, Runa, Ani, Shanky and the rest of Red Hat’s l10n team pitched in and we were all set with content of the camp.

Red Hat’s facilities team took care of all the logistics and everything went smoothly. We did not have to worry much about logistics, except for deciding the lunch menu Mintos, Naveen, me and Runa weighed in the choices and came up with the final list. Now you know whom to blame if you did not like any curry We had wifi setup and net connection was least of the worries.

We had very interesting discussion about Free Software philosophy and business models. Most of the time people complains philosophy talks are boring. So we decided to have a question and answer format. People like me and facilities at the office gave a definite notion that Free Software folks are not starving So most difficult part was already taken care of.

Naveen Kumar took most of the load and explained basic components of a localised application, from encoding to rendering. His fascination with numbers and deep knowledge about Unicode encoding provided a great opening and set the audience on a smooth ride ahead.

Ankit came in and introduced tools and processes in localisation. We gave participants time to get familiarised with typing in local languages and using translation tools like lokalize. Since we already decided the schedule is indicative and go deep or skip sessions based on response we were never looking at our watches (or mobiles or time applets). We had tea breaks when we felt like having a break. Karunakar kept every one in suspense when he started with his tricks for remembering inscript layout. He said he will continue the remaining parts the next day only!

Pavitran came all the way from Hyderabad and forgot to talk about kletters

Runa talked about tips and tricks and we had lively discussions, some time going very deep into the root of the issue. She walked us through some of the challenging strings translators encounters every day and asked us if it was easier to teach people English But we were not at all in a mood to give in and thought those challenges are nothing compared to expecting people to learn English. There were some interesting back and forth between me – Sankarshan, Ramakrish – Prashanth and me, Rishikesh – Prashanth. I was wondering why people don’t find computers listening in a port funny when they laugh at khidki. I think it is a deep rooted belief that is instilled in most of the society that everything foreign must be good and we should follow it (well I agree there is a logic other side also to it, every thing foreign is bad – but we should be debating and evaluating things on our own than blindly opposing or accepting anything).

Rajesh Ranjan talked about FUEL project – effort to standardize frequently used words and Ramakrishna discussed cross platform database for sharing this standardisation effort widely.

Rishikesh gave a social perspective and discussed how a language is related with local knowledge and culture and importance of preserving it.

Nadim showed interest in what we showed him and he admitted he is a crime reporter with DNA and came in to cover the event because no one covering technology was available

Abhijith gave different perspective about learning where people are taught to collaborate than compete. He also helped with making the press release. Sankarshan always gave helpful hints, suggestions and directions through out the planning phase.

Shanky and Ani were helping out every one with translations and their systems. We are expecting feedback and summary from the students who came for the camp. Also we have updated the coordinators list with our email addresses in case any one wants to contact us for anything. We have decided to have more sessions of this kind and planned one in CoEP in May.

I should say the availability of Red Hat’s l10n and i18n teams give a definite edge to Pune when compared to any other place in India. We had many people who could handle all the sessions. It was just a matter of sharing who does what. Here also we were least bothered. All in all it was a quite natural sharing of experience by many folks who believes computing should be possible in their own language.

If you came for the camp and reading this post, please go back to the same wiki page and provide your feedback.

See Events in Bangalore for more details. RMS will be in Mysore on 14th and Tumkur on 17th. Stay tuned to FSUG Bangalore mailing list for any updates.

Update 1:

Sujith has blogged about it (Also see his flickr photos)

Update 2:

Sreejith has written about RMS visit to AC3 (Ambedkar Community Computing Center).

Dual licensing and Free Software business models in general are one of my favorite topics. So I sat down and made a diagram explaining the source code flow of a dual licensed software.

In a debate on question of “free vs non-free” or “role of non-free in free
conferences”, this one is drifting towards private and personal references
which can be avoided. Let not Novell get off the hook by stirring trouble
here. There are countless private conferences and symposiums going around
nearby which promote themes of non-free and patents. No free software
activist goes there to register protest.

Differences of opinion are usually accorded highest priority in a democratic
institution, as they may be revealing something very surprising or
innovative – silencing and subjugating are hallmarks of despotic or
autocratic institutions. No one expects the entire rank and file of
organisers to be aware of non-free designs; Novell could have very well
evaded such a public scrutiny before gaining entry here, especially when it
has very little public presence in Kerala.

Free Software conferences serve many purposes and we can accept that one
such method in revealing or knowing about non-free intrusions could be
through some kind of non-violent protest – stickers, posters and T-shirts
are hallmarks of FS protests. Now many of us know what Novell does, and such
an exposure on Novell coincides perfectly with the theme of our public
conference in disseminating concepts on Free Software.

Since public institutions have a say on private lives, it cannot be beyond
criticism. Just like “divine rights” cannot be placed over “human rights”,
it would be equally suicidal if we uncritically submitted to “political
rights” of any party. After all, political parties gain power only after
they appeal before citizens – notably the poor-off ones. Hence sharing dias
or approaching leaders is in no way a transgression, it falls perfectly
under rights of citizens. No established leader or representative would ever
think this way.

Here, a wrong has been committed by (a) humiliating an individual who
protests against a non-free incursion inside a Free Software conference and
disseminates non-free ideology and (b) protecting the non-free intruder to
display their non-free trickery without objections. Novell has succeeded in
driving the wedge, inflicting a kind of perfect damage to a contributors’
community and getting away scot-free.

CK Raju

The most interesting thing about mukt.in was the level of interaction it offered. I had some very interesting discussions with many in the community and students. Pavithran had gathered many familiar names in the Indian Free Software community for the event. Hiran and Shyam decided to come in the last minute. Hiran was taking a session on font designing and Shyam on speech recognition.

Morning itself I met Warren of Drupal and started discussing with him about debian and ubuntu. We discussed issues relating to both the projects and was thinking of having some publicity efforts around lenny release in September. I started a thread in DebianIndia about this. Now that I won’t be in India for sometime, I hope someone would follow it up (Kartik?).

Pavithran and Shreekrishna were running around making things happen. We had some discussion around localization and challenges. Some things we discussed were having consistent translations across all applications and when to transliterate (use the same words in English).

Then Shaktimaan took out his Neo FreeRunner by OpenMoko project and everyone started playing with it. I got the chance to make first call on that mobile.

We had a plus meet at Paradise hotel with Riyaz Usman joining us for dinner. We ran in the rain, took a bus, walked on the railway platform and took and auto to reach Paradise. It was Pavithran’s brilliant idea to take a platform ticket and walk on the platform since all the roads were filled with water and would have to swim otherwise.

Second day we had a very interesting BoF on Education. Thyagarajan from ilugc was telling beautiful stories about his experiences and we all shared our experiences and views on what education should provide.

Then before we concluded the event there was lightning talks of five minutes by each speaker. It was with great happiness and satisfaction I started my journey back home. But there was a twist to that journey, that I will write later

• 
  Mukt.in gallery

Some statistics here shows the progress of Malayalam translations in a week (during the most active week). Click to enlarge.

Many of us were working till 3-4 am in the morning for the entire week leading upto the 4.1 deadline on July 11. #smc-project on Freenode IRC was the main connection for realtime collaboration with ‘mandoos’ (an IRC bot who can learn maanings and teach anyone who asks for it) helping the newly joined members of the team. You can join the IRC channel using your web browser by following this link.

People from all over the globe and round the clock joined this effort. Some places to mention are Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, USA … The enthusiam showed by the members throughout this great effort was amazing. In one single day 5 new contributors submited their first translation and more than 30 people contributed to this effort (Most of the contributors are listed here). It could be one of the few languages which completed kde essentials translations in such a short time.

You can see the list languages sorted by their percentatge of translations here. Malayalam is currently at 63rd position, 4th among Indian languages.

Here are some interesting screenshots of KDE 4.1 in Malayalam.

More screenshots from here.

I would like to thank the entire team for making this possible and do join us in the release party on Aug 9th and 10th at Thiruvananthapuram. Location and event schedule to be announced later (tune in to our mailing list for more details)

Update 1:

List of contributors. Thanks to Ani Peter for making this list.

1. Sasi Kumar
2. AnilKV
3. Ashik
4. Anoop
5. Anoopan
6. Prasad. S R
7. Hari Vishnu
8. Manu
9. Santhosh
10. Praveen
11. Manilal
12. Sushma
13. Sujith
14. Smitha
15. Remya
16. Hiran Venugopalan
17. Hitha Venugopalan
18. Chandrettan
19. Sankaranarayanan
20. Pratheesh
21. Syam Krishnan
22. Shiju Alex
23. Ragsagar V
24. Maxin B John
25. Sarath Lakshman
26. Baiju. M
27. Joju Joshua
28. Afsal
29. Nishan
30. Rajiv and his Mandoos
31. Ani

Update 2:
KDE 4.1 Release Notes – Malayalam English