Ah, the life and times of a kernel hacker…

So am I paranoid? Are invite-only events a necessary evil? Or should I let my curiousity overcome my principles? Hey, maybe one of those web 2.0 types could help me enable comments on my blog… — Rusty Russell, The foocamp clique?

… so I wrote down some of my musings for Rusty in an email, but then another discussion prompted similar thoughts, so I figured I’d blog about it. Of course, I did take the opportunity to suggest that Rusty try WordPress.

Pia and I went to baacamp (ha ha, “baa”, etc.) last year, being on the O’Reilly radar through my participation in OSCON and stuff like that.

Although it was sponsored by O’Reilly, it was very much a Nat thing compared to the “real” O’Reilly FOOcamps. They’re all very skewed towards Web 2.0 people and topics, but working with a different crowd who care about Freedom in different ways is great… It resets your reality distortion field, no matter how much clarity you start with!

It’s easy to forget, but linux.conf.au is also very cliquey, even beyond the silly name.

The invite-only thing is a bit weird, but if you have faith in the person doing the inviting, it’s very similar to the trust we invest in our FLOSS leaders, and the meritocracy which stems from them. For instance, Nat asks the people he invites to suggest other people, and uses that feedback very well. So, it’s like accepting or rejecting patches, and filtering good and bad contributors.

There’s also the problem of trying to inflict ideas about Software Freedom onto other, sometimes incompatible, structures and interactions. I think there are a lot of dangers to that route — largely because I’m not a crazy libertarian or genuine anarchist — and because I think misapplication of those ideas leads to the kind of behaviours that are well described in Geek Social Fallacies.

Finally, foocamp inspired greatness in its bizarro mirror image arch nemesis, barcamp. I had to say arch nemesis for effect. I like the idea of conference philosophies competing with each other in some kind of comic book Dante’s Inferno thinking man’s action-comedy.

If baacamp didn’t conflict with linux.conf.au, we’d be there in a jiffy. I’m falling in love with New Zealand and its inhabitants. We have a lot to learn from them, but also a lot to share. Some of our NZ friends are here this week, helping us turn Australia’s OOXML vote from “abstain” to “no” — hooray!

Of course, when Hilf says “commercial”, he really means “proprietary”, or he’d be supporting the awesome commercial efforts of so many FLOSS companies around the world, who not only provide great support (as a fundamentally necessary part of their business model!) and a throat to choke, but give you the freedom to find support elsewhere.

From what I’m seeing in the market, every month there are fewer and fewer ICT decision makers who are being hoodwinked by lies like these — and this time, as a direct quote from Bill Hilf, who is now Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Server marketing and platform strategy.

Given the feature list for WordPress 2.3 and the very strong warnings that came with every pre-release, I figured I should actually test this upgrade before going live.

So I did my usual process of importing the tarball into my bzr branch of mainline and merging with my customised perkypants.org branch (I really ought to document this some time — using bzr is such a massive time-saver!), but this time I did a trial upgrade on my local web server instead of pushing directly to the production site.

I ran the database upgrade script. Uneventful.

The category page included a conversion tool to switch categories to tags. I’ve been using categories as if they were tags for a while now, so I converted a whole bunch. Uneventful.

All my plugins were compatible, though I removed one in favour of the internal canonical permalinks support. Uneventful.

At this point I decided to push to the production server and migrate the other WordPress sites I administer, Pia’s blog and the Liberty Theatre blog. Uneventful.

So, does this mean I regard the WordPress 2.3 release as uneventful?

No way, it’s totally sweet! Another great incremental release with lots of under-the-bonnet improvements. I particularly like the Atom feed and publishing support (though I do wish the WP hackers would bite the bullet and switch to Atom by default — I like Internet standards more than Internet soap operas).

But the upgrade was blissfully uneventful.

Thanks again, WordPress hackers!

If you’re an Aussie FLOSS contributor (no matter how far or how wide you roam) or if your company sells, services or supports Open Source related technologies in the Australian market, this is for you!

There’s heaps of information on the website and in the announcement.

Meanwhile, we’re just about to leave for Darwin, the first stop on our “Meet the Open Source Industry” roadshow. Incredibly (or at least to us), Darwin has had the highest number of registrations so far. Rock on!

While we’re doing this to promote our Australian Open Source Industry & Community Census project (which you’ll hear more about soon, but you can read about some of it on our website already), we also wanted to make it useful for the whole industry, by educating potential business and government customers about Open Source and showing off our local talent. That’s how we roll!

So, come along for the breakfast and networking action! Make sure you RSVP so we can cater appropriately.

If you’d like us to introduce you during our presentation — and give your company or product a plug! — please send a 1024x768 slide for display, and let us know which city we’ll see you in. Our contact details are on the Waugh Partners website.

(Note: To support our rocking industry association, we’re only going to plug OSIA members. If you provide Open Source solutions and/or services, and you’re not a member… join OSIA today!)

All kudos to Canonical for selling women’s form-fitting t-shirts at their new online store — they’re smart enough to know that their brand recognition rises faster on Pipka’s ample bust than mine — but why the cutesy variation on “Linux for Human Beings”?

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the GNOME project we are having a very special Hug Day on Wednesday, August 22nd. We will be focusing on the collaboration between the Ubuntu and GNOME projects by working on the following topics.

That’s this Wednesday, freedom lovers! How will you celebrate GNOME’s tenth anniversary?