Linuxtag and Beyond

After taking one year off, I will be back in Karlsruhe for Linuxtag this week. I have two papers in the Linuxtag conference proceedings and will giving talks based on each. These include:

  • Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects – The talk will be at 16:00 on June 24th. I’ve already distributed a draft of this paper and received some good feedback.

  • To Fork or Not To Fork: Lessons from Ubuntu and Debian – There are, believe it or not, two Ubuntu talks running head to head at 17:00 on June 25th and mine is one of them. It seems that Michael Kofler (who I did not even realize was giving a talk on Ubuntu until I saw the schedule ) is giving more of a general overview and introduction to Ubuntu. My talk will go into a good deal more technical detail and be geared more toward developers who want to learn from Ubuntu’s experience in trying to create a project that is developed in parallel with an existing project by diverging and maintaining a sustained inter-project relationship over time.

    It’s tricky stuff and I don’t claim to have all the answers but I hope I can shed some light on the situation. There’s been a lot of noise about this lately on Debian lists — some positive and some very critical. I hope that my talk can help describe the processes so far and the thinking behind them, distill some solid advice out the criticism we’ve all heard, and package it all in a way that is educational and helpful for folks working on very different types of projects.

I’m going to work a little more on my paper for the second talk and I’ll link that that here when I’m done. As always, I’ll also post slides and such for people that want to give similar talks of their own.

I am told that the Ubuntu community in Germany has arranged for some space sharing with GNOME and will have a bit of table space in that booth. I’ll be there there for some time handing out CDs and answering questions. There will also, I’m sure, be a great Debian booth packed full of hackers and you should be able to find me there as well.

I’ll be staying in Europe until the very beginning of August and will be at RMLL/LSM, Debconf5, and WhatTheHack. I’ll have a bit of time in between and will be popping up here and there for talks on Ubuntu around Europe and in areas nearby. If you’d like to host such a talk, and especially if you’ve got a great LoCo Team, get in contact with me and lets see if we can arrange something.

2 Replies to “Linuxtag and Beyond”

  1. I hope you can organize your thoughts and presentation in a form that can be publicized to non-attenders.  It’s a challenging and interesting problem that many would like to know more about.

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