Planet FLOSS Research

Daniel Izquierdo

Changing your max_heap_table_size variable

Sometimes, when you use the engine memory in a MySQL database, you could face some problems related to the maximum size in memory available. (This is shown with a 1114 error). By default, this value is around 16MB, what in some cases it is not enough for your purposes. In my specific case I was [...]

Adriaan de Groot (KDE Quality)

Back in time

Back in time. That is, back (from vacation) in time (to avoid the long drizzly tedious soaking rains of today). I was off for a week, bicycling with the family in the Netherlands. We did not go camping this time, just to "trekkershutten", which I suppose can best be translated with "simple holiday home for a traveling family". The week was hot and sunny, which was just the right kind of weather for us. This year the kids had to ride their own bicycles — no more tow or kiddy seats! For both Mira and Amiel 25km per day is really the maximum they can handle. On 16" and 20" wheels that’s still a long ways to go. Amiel just pedals along fanatically, at a steady 9.5 km/h. So while it’s a real distance and endurance achievement for a 5 year old kid, mom and dad’s main challenge is cycling that slow all day.

So today was rain all day, and I’m glad we didn’t have to ride through that. Catching up on a week’s worth of email (#1: I really need to install Kontact on my n900; #2: expensive hotels in Amsterdam charge you 7EUR an hour for internet, while cheap hostels in the middle of the forest offer wifi for free) and trying to ignore all but the most urgent for now.

Carlo Daffara (Conecta.it)

The basis of OSS business models: property and efficiency

It is now time to write the closing part of our long multi-part look at open source business models. After all the discussion on how to look at the various parts of a model and how to improve it, I will try to summarize a bit on how to look at an OSS business model, and what implications can be made from a specific choice (for once, without mentioning open core).

The basic idea behind business models is quite simple: I have something or can do something – the “value proposition” – and it is more economical to pay me to do or get this “something” instead of doing it yourself (sometimes it may even be impossible to find alternatives, as in natural or man-made monopolies, so the idea of doing it myself may not be applicable)

There are two possible sources for the value: a property (something that can be transferred) and efficiency (something that is inherent in what the company do, and how they do it). With Open Source, usually “property” is non-exclusive (with the exception of Open Core, where part of the code is not open at all). Other examples of property are trademarks, patents, licenses… anything that may be transferred to another entity through a contract or legal transaction.

Efficiency is the ability to perform an action with a lower cost (both tangible and intangible), and is something that follows the specialization in a work area or appears thanks to a new technology. Examples of the first are simply the decrease in time necessary to perform an action when you increase your expertise in it; the first time you install a complex system may require lots of effort, and this effort is reduced the more you experience the tasks necessary to perform the installation itself.

Examples of the second may be the introduction of a tool that simplifies the process (for example, through image cloning) and it introduces a huge discontinuity, a “jump” in the graph of efficiency versus time.

These two aspects are the basis of all the business models that we have analysed in the past; it is possible to show that all of them fall in a continuum between properties and efficiency:

Among the results of our past research project, one thing that we found is that property-based projects tend to have lower contributions from the outside, because it requires a legal transaction to become part of the company’s properties; think for example at dual licensing: to become part of the product source code, an external contributor needs to sign off his rights to the code, to allow the company to sell the enterprise version alongside the open one.

On the other hand, right-handed models based purely on efficiency tends to have higher contributions and visibility, but lower monetization rates. As I wrote many times, there is no ideal business model, but a spectrum of possible models, and companies should adapt themselves to changing market conditions and adapt their model as well. Some companies start as pure efficiency based, and build an internal property with time; some others may start as property based, and move to the other side to increase contributions and reducing the engineering effort (or enlarging the user base, to create alternative ways of monetizing users).

This is the last post in our little mini-serie on OSS business models; I hope that my archetypal three readers will have enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing them. Of course, I will be happy to read and respond to any comment – even negative ones.

Olivier Berger (GET/INT)

Report on ALM, QA and industrialization methods and tools presented in “development” track at RMLL 2010 (2/n)

This is the second part of my report from the recent RMLL/LSM 2010 “Development” technical track (see the first part here: http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/2010/07/22/report-on-programming-languages-and-techniques-in-development-session-of-rmlllsm-2010-1n/)

The next group of presentations I want to cover was dealing with industrialisation, ALM, QA and other methodology aspects :

• Java development Industrialization using a technical base (by Stephane Traumat – slides: FR / speech: FR) which presented the tools and methods used by Scub (and released as open source as “scub foundation”) to conduct clients’ industrial projects in a Java environment.
• Industrialization & agility : the HELIOS project (by Laurent Laudinet – slides: EN / speech: FR) which presented the open source ALM platform developped by our partners in the Helios project, and insisted (too much maybe, to my own flavour ) on the challenges of industrialization in big industry.
• Bee Build management tool (by Michel Casabianca – slides: FR / speech: FR) a short presentation which introduced a smart object-oriented build management tool named Bee.
• Extending the GCC compiler with MELT to suit your needs (by Basile Starynkevitch – slides: EN / speech: FR) an amazing speech about the internals of GCC, and how it would be interesting for big projects to extend it with the MELT scripting solution in order to adapt GCC to the particular QA constraints of these projects. Quite technical, but very interesting : GCC is a world in itself, it seems.
• Agile development with IceScrum (by Vincent Barrier – slides: EN / speech: FR) nice presentation including lots of demo of the Scrum methodology and the IceScrum tool, that may be used to support it in distributed development teams. Worth attending if agile methods seem interesting to you.

Then we had 2 more talks on the subject of bug tracking (in the frame of an all-english afternoon):

• Peer to peer issue tracking with SD and Prophet (by Jesse Vincent – slides: EN / speech: EN) : great presentation about SD, a “universal” bugtracker client / mirroring tool using a distributed database, which allows to work on bug offline, or in a distributed team synchronization. I’m looking forward to playing with it. Would be great if it could sync with Debbugs.
• Client to deal with great amount of bug for Launchpad: BugHugger (by Didier Roche – slides: EN / speech: EN) short presentation about bughugger, a graphical desktop client for Launchpad’s bugtracker aimed at developers who need to manage lots of bugs. I wonder if bughugger could be used as a frontend to SD…. It already uses desktopcouch AFAIR, so why not prophet also ?

During the last days of RMLL, we had planed to hold a PlanetForge gathering to discuss forges interoperability. Unfortunately, the outcome is not so good, as it was difficult to gather people at the same time due to giant (mess) distributed nature of RMLL (too many tracks in parallel ?), and for me, as I was chairing the session in another room. We’ll try to prepare a report of what happened anyway, including discussions on forges interoperability, fusionforge bugs fixing, or topics like bug tracking at a large scale (Fetchbugs4.me).

See also the forges “session” on similar forges related subjects (next part of the report, stay tuned).

Please tell us what you thought about this session (including links to other reports), and any suggestions for next year (use comments in this post).

Previous parts :

• (1/n) Report on programming languages and techniques in Development session of RMLL/LSM 2010 (1/n)

Twisting the bytes - Felipe Ortega (LibreSoft)

Wikimania 2010 recap

OK, now it’s time for Wikimania 2010 summary. I’ve been thinking a lot on the best way to concentrate my thoughts in a short way. I think the best one is this: whenever I attend a conference/meeting, and I have real difficulties to decide which session to attend (because all of them are terrific) is a good signal. Well, every minute I spent in Wikimania 2010, I felt like that. “Mmmm, look at this one….but wait! I wanted to attend that one, as well… Oh no! Strategy Plan at the same time I’m giving one of my talks … What the heck!”.

I admit it was pretty easy that this occurred to me, because: a) this was my first Wikimania; b) I gave too many talks (3!), thus missing other interesting slots and c) I wasn’t ready for the really active ambient of Wikimania. But, let’s go on with some futher details, since I have some “mixed feelings” about certain points.

In the first place, some words for the organizing team. I think  they didn’t do a bad job, since the size of the conference demands a lot of energy. Honestly, many people were dubious the week before about it, since there was certain organizational mess with some issues (schedule, registration, wifi connectivity…). Granted, some issues  must be improved for next editions  (vanishing wifi, and accommodation for many colleagues on Sunday). But the conference itself went on really well, the venue was excellent and they were really helpful, so thank you Marcin and the rest of the organizational team for your hard work. I only miss my Wikimania bag. I didn’t get one because I registered on Friday 9 evening, (I was busy all the day in WikiSym 2010 :-/).

Something quickly attracted my attention: there were virtually no “general sessions” or “keynotes”, besides Sue’s and Jimmy’s. This leaves a lot of room for parallel tracks, but it also makes you rack your brain to decide which talk you should go to in the next slot. Attendees were quite friendly in general, and I had the opportunity of meeting a lot of interesting people (WMF staff, community members, researchers and consultants), most of them for the first time (unfortunately, Jimmy wasn’t among them, since it was terribly difficult to approach him at any time). Support from Wikimedia Deutschland (special thanks to Daniel Kinzler and Pavel Richter) was awesome, like it was impressive the feedback from the audience after the presentation of latest results of the flagged revisions study. However, I could also see that there were many different groups, and people merged together only up to some extent. No surprise, though, since this is a conference for community members, and it’s natural that you tend to spend more time with your long-time mates. I was also really happy with the interest attracted by the summary of research works on Wikipedia (with Mako and Jodie Schneider) and the subsequent panel on research ethics in Wikimedia communities.

The Wikipedia Strategy plan was, obviously, one of the core issues along the conference, as well as presentations and discussion on how to improve relationships between local chapters and wikipedia communities (most popular talk in the program). Finally, the WMF role in this Strategy Plan seems to focus on 3 main areas (alternatively, you can also have a look at the movement priorities):

• Improving WMF technical infrastructure to answer the constantly increasing demands of a growing number of readers.
• Strengthen, grow and increase diversity of the community of editors, something I specially applaud since it has been one of my main requests since long time ago.
• Catalyse impact on geographical areas of interest and key (mobile) technologies to empower WMF projects outreach and penetration significant portions of their target audience

This will involve some big challenges. In my opinion, the most difficult one will be to increase WMF staff at a rapid pace, fast enough to tackle all these priorities, while maintaining at the same time internal coordination in good shape. Community hiring could be a very smart move in this regard to provide additional capillarity to their actions.

The worldwide premiere of the movie “Truth in numbers: The Wikipedia Story” also deserves some lines. The film has been produced with ~500K$ from private donors and it aims to offer an informative introduction to the Wikipedia project with an accessible language for the general public. I really like the way they mixed praise and critics (including self-criticism) and how they stress the tireless work undertaken to increase awareness of the project in numerous countries and remote regions around the world, sometimes facing very difficult conditions [sorry, but you'll have to wait until October 2010 to learn more details on this!]. However, I don’t like at all the common baseline built to present most of the critics against Wikipedia.  Almost all invited speakers rising concerns and negative comments were scholars, holding extensive academic experience and (curiously) some sort of “hostility” to digital media. Sorry but 1) I don’t think they’re representative of the whole group of critics and, inversely, there are many scholars with more positive opinions about Wikipedia (I only remember Ed Chi showing up, right now); 2) given the current need to advocate for use and contribution to Wikipedia from the academic world, to fill in specific knowledge niches, I don’t think this approach makes a real benefit as for the image of Wikipedia among this audience; 3) the good point of surprising all these speakers with the good quality of their own biographies in Wikipedia should have been highlighted much before, closing this line perhaps to let some room for other different points of view. I’d like to hear sociologists, journalists, tech practitioners, industry executives… Some showed up just briefly. Please, wait patiently for the final version to be aired, so that you can build your own point of view.

Some people told me that the big party was good, but too far away from Gdańsk downtown and the way back was not very funny. I was partly thankful, since I was really shattered that night after too may endless days of work that week. After that, Jimmy’s talk was really good, presenting some refreshing videos that displayed nearby stories of wikimedians around the world, with emphasis on mid-size Wikipedias (one of the main targets for the next 5-year period). On top of this, Spain won the World Cup that Sunday (July 11, 2010) and despite of the fact that we couldn’t gather together to watch it, it was an amazing experience to feel the ambient in Gdańsk downtown that night.

OK, maybe a bit long, but there were many things to comment in this post. Looking forward to a great Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, next year!

Carlo Daffara (Conecta.it)

The relationship between Open Core, dual licensing and contributions

Open Core continues to receive substantial bashing, both after the announcement of the new SugarCRM 6 and after the recent OpenStack intitiative. Sugar introduces a new interface that is not available in the open source edition (they are not the first in this: actually, Open-Xchange did it before them, making the javascript code for the new AJAX interface not usable for commercial activities), but despite this they claim “We are an open source company” In the OpenStack announcement, The Register reports that it was not possible for NASA to introduce the changes to Eucalyptus because that would have undermined the capability of the company to make users pay for the enterprise edition. I already wrote in the past that Open Core is not evil per se, but that it does introduce difficulties in encouraging external participation; both because there is a very thin line in feature selection between the community and enterprise edition, and because open core naturally hampers participation. I had some readers asking me why, and I will respond with a subset of my LinuxTag slides:

Open core is usually built by a set of internal open source components held together by a dual-licensed wrapper, plus proprietary modules on the outside. One of the best examples of this is Zimbra (an excellent product on its own) but MySQL in recent editions can be included in the same group. As discussed in previous posts, dual licensing hampers contributions because it requires an explicit agreement on ceding rights to the company that employs it, in order to be able to relicense it for the proprietary edition. This means that Open Core companies, in itself, will have an easier time in monetizing their software, but will receive much less contributions in exchange. As I wrote before, it is simply not possible to get something like Linux or Apache with Open Core.

Again: open core is not bad per se (but I would have been more cautious in calling Sugar “an open source company”, for whatever definition you have of that). But it is a tradeoff: monetization versus contributions. And, my bets are on contributions, as OpenStack demonstrates – you need leverage and external resources to go beyond what a single company can do.

Carlo Daffara (Conecta.it)

The new EveryDesk and EveryDesk/MED health care desktops

We have finally released the new version of the linux-on-USB EveryDesk system, both in the plain version and the Medical release, that includes an IHE certified DICOM medical image browser, a complete R-based statistical environment and OpenOffice enhanced with a complete medical dictionary. The new version is faster, should be more compatible with older hardware, and in general was found by our beta testers to be fairly complete.

Its main appeal is that it can be tested without any installation: just download the image, copy it on the key and try. It boots fast, it is totally modifiable, provides local applications, Prism for web-apps, Chromium and several remote computing applications like the VMware View client, clients for IBM mini and mainframes, a full Java environment for Citrix, and much more.

The medical version still misses the final DICOM certification (you will see in the startup splash screen that it does have no CE marking), we are working towards the final release that will be certified and significantly improved. The R environment is also missing some modules specific to bioengineering, that were not ready in time for release; we expect to have a beta-2 version ready for the mid of august.

We have also a completely new website: http://www.everydesk.org where we added a substantial amount of material, and will be used to publish the training videos that we are preparing to help companies in adopting the desktop for their own internal use.

We have introduced a new policy: we offer unlimited and free support and helpdesk services for all users, commercial or not. To receive private answers we only as for an introductory email that provides details of the institution, contact points and the actual or expected number of EveryDesk installations. We will provide a separate customer ID, and it will be used for issue tracking. Large scale customers can request a private portal, with issue and bug tracking, device management and group update as a separate commercial option.

We are welcoming health care institutions that are interested in trying EveryDesk/MED, especially from developing countries; let us know what additional application may be of interest to be added to the default platform.

For more information: http://www.everydesk.org

Twisting the bytes - Felipe Ortega (LibreSoft)

WikiSym 2010 summary

Finally, I had some time to write about the experiences in WikiSym and Wikimania 2010. Let’s start with the first one.

WikiSym 2010 has been special in many aspects. The Symposium and Program Committees were appointed between Dec. 2009 and Jan. 2010. Thus, we had only 6 months to rush into everything (CfP, venue location, logistics, proceedings, etc.). We decided that it was a good idea to search for synergies with another important conference celebrated every year: Wikimania 2010. Gdańsk was a very attractive city, and potential interactions between attendees to both events could be great. In the end, we packed a very interesting week, overlapping both events. However, the challenge was also to test if both communities would be able to find common points of interest. Besides this, WikiSym 2010 explicitly broadened the scope of the conference, to welcome  presentations on Open Collaboration in general, beyond the scope of wiki platforms. So, many things to discover!

Looking back at WikiSym 2010, one week after the closing session, I’m really satisfied. I will try to summarize the most important pros and cons from my notes. First, the positive points:

• Keynotes: Awesome! Really, believe me, they were great. Cliff Lampe’s opening keynote was both inspiring and timely. I want to remark both adjectives. The presentation style was really engaging for the audience (fresh comments, jokes). He really made my day, and I admit I had very high expectations about his performance, reading comments from past presentations (like CSCW 2010). At the same time the topic, the need to find solutions for social scientists and engineers to work together in interdisciplinary groups, is probably one of the top-priority issues in my research agenda. In turn, Andrew Lih’s presentation was also exceptional. Many people in the audience were not aware that Gdańsk article in the English Wikipedia triggered the creation of the 3-revert rule (3RR), one of its core editing guidelines today. After this, the audience was again engaged in a fascinating presentation about the process to create knowledge in virtual communication media, the role of content curators and predictions of new emerging applications for reference check and information validation.
• Open Space: Perhaps all I need to say about the Open Space this year is that virtually all available slots were taken just 20 minutes after the start! I had never seen such an active response from the audience in previous years (we usually needed the whole first day to fill in all gaps). This was the real core of interaction between wikisymers and wikimaniacs, with many, many fruitful discussions. For instance, in the slot to debate about the features and requirements to be satisfied by “the next perfect wiki platform” we were able to write 5 pages (A2 size) full of great ideas. After all these slots, I gathered and endless list of hints and insights for future work. I really like the vibe of WikiSym’s Open Space.
• Good mix of research topics: We had presentations covering virtually all interesting aspects of open collaboration platforms (though it is true that mainly focused on wikis): innovative tools, reports from practitioners, novel methodologies to analyze open collaborative platforms, enhanced interfaces for Human-Wiki Interaction… As you might expect, Wikipedia was again a hot research topic (presentations running  through the whole first day). I believe that we are still ahead of the curve as for presenting the cutting-edge advances in this area.

Now the downsides, though in fact they are more like a short list of things I think we can improve:

• Industry participation: This is not an exclusive phenomenon happening at WikiSym. Take a look at this good article on the evolution of CSCW conference series, by J. Grudin, and you will see that getting the attention from industry is becoming more and more difficult. In my view, we could achieve more industry participation if we find a way to offer what they are looking for: business opportunities and potential clients. I think this remains as one of the major challenges in the WikiSym series, and one we are going to tackle for next year, definitely. Furthermore, I think a significant proportion of industry audience still does not realize about the potential applications of many tools presented in WikiSym, for sure one of the most pragmatical conferences in terms of applicability of tools and methods presented in research tracks.
• Covering even more topics: So far, the steering committee of WikiSym has decided to maintain our original name. But we really want to stress our real focus, shifting from “just stuff about wikis” to “anything you do the wiki way“. That is, we also want to capture new rapidly evolving ways of communication and collaboration. What about presentations on Facebook? What about  Twitter and Identi.ca? Increased coverage of blogs? Collaborative journalism? Publication of books and multimedia content under open licenses? Collaborative editing of multimedia creations? And what about community making, leading and management?
• Merging different audiences: This year, WikiSym hosted a session leaded by socio-political scholars. We also had a workshop on open educational resources, and another  one about teaching with Wikipedia.  Following Cliff Lampe’s keynote, I’d really like to see even more researchers, scholars and practitioners from social sciences and humanities to join WikiSym, as well as other conferences highlighting the organization and evolution of virtual communities.

We also had two Best Paper awards: the first one for an interesting paper by Annalisa Pelizza,  opening new venues for the analysis of open collaborative projects, and the second one for a short paper by Erika Poole, categorizing different types of wiki platforms found in the industry. Both represent the rich and healthy community developed around WikiSym over the past 6 years.

Now, it’s time for planning ahead. WikiSym 2011 must answer the challenge: to keep up with the superb work done so far and leverage the series to a new level, addressing the expectations and interests of a larger audience confronted to the ever-changing reality of open collaboration in the cyberspace. As the new Symposium Chair for WikiSym 2011, together with the invaluable support of our new Program Chair Andrea Forte, we will do our best to complete this mission.

Stay tunned! A new year of excitement is coming!

Adriaan de Groot (KDE Quality)

A bit of Postfix and Darcs

Somehow the official Postfix documentation continues to be intractable for me. The whole reason for getting Postfix up and running on my local machine was because of Darcs. Darcs — one of many distributed version control systems, but possibly the only one written in Haskell and intrusively interactive — likes to send patches by email. It just uses the local MTA for that, so I needed one. Setup is slightly complicated by the situation my home workstation is in: while I have a domain I’d like to use for email going out of my house, I’m on a DSL line with outgoing SMTP blocked except to the DSL provider, and my local usernames don’t match the email addresses I’ve created.

So, basically I want to send all locally submitted mail to my DSL provider’s SMTP server, with the right domain attached, without my hostname, and I want to re-map my usernames. I didn’t manage to distill this from the actual Postfix Standard Configuration Examples, but Ralf Hildebrandt’s configuration examples do have the right stuff. The only change I had to make was for the username re-writing; instead of virtual_maps (since superceded by virtual_alias_maps), I used canonical_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/canonical, which maps user and user@localhost and user@domain to email.address@domain (3 lines per user login).

Now darcs send does what it should. I can also point KMail to use local sendmail and that gets the job done, too. KMail is actually simpler, because it sets up the outgoing From and envelope addresses based on the identity in use, so it doesn’t need the rewriting at all.

I’m starting to find Darcs a little bit interesting; the idea that every patch is a branch based on what it actually needs is intriguing. Or to put it in other words: if I have one patch to file A and one patch to file B then I’ve created two branches; there’s no need to consider the two together. If I make another patch to B then that branch grows longer. My working copy displays all the changes from the branches I’m working with, that is the merge of all my branches. If I were to add a patch that changes both file A and B then the two branches merge there. Darcs uses tags to slam a line across all the files and all the patches and to merge all the open branches, which prevents a gigantic proliferation of possible branches.

The upshot is that when I do ‘darcs send’ I have the option of sending any branches I have open — and any sensible sequence of patches within the branch — so that I can very carefully upstream patches while keeping them all visible locally.

What I really miss in Darcs is some of the Mercurial workflow: seeing a graphical representation of the current branching structure (hg glog) and being able to quickly merge multiple commits into a single one for upstreaming (hg qfold). On the other hand, the darcs behavior on commit (darcs record) to ask you about every changed hunk is really nice (sometimes, at least) because it helps avoid accidentally committing debug bits or whitespace changes that you didn’t intend to do.

[[ ObKDE: and somewhere underlying this all is my need to get a Python application to talk to KWallet; why oh why didn't I have enough lunches with Richard Dale in Finland? ]]

Adriaan de Groot (KDE Quality)

Home from Akademy

I snuck away from Akademy on Friday morning. My intention was to sign some legal documents (part of a resolution of the AGM of the KDE e.V.) and say good byes to all and sundry, but that got terribly sidetracked. The usual experience of walking into Demola is people saying “Hey, [ade], I need to talk to you.” I don’t imagine this is unique to me — there’s so much coordination that goes on at Akademy when you finally have every sub-project on hand to chat with. So I ended up with a long talk with Elias about truth in advertising, and then I tried to print and sign and scan the document at hand. Kaare, a guy I’d exhanged some banter during the day trip, wandered over. It turned out that Kaare is the Skanlite dude, so I took the opportunity to thank him for his work.

Then rushed goodbyes — I skipped the whole of floor 4 with the BoFs — and off to the bus. Milian, Niels, Richard and Lubos were on the same flight, and everyone who flew onwards from Helsinki to Amsterdam had their luggage left behind. So it was 9pm before I got home, sans backpack. Like Harri said, it’s not so bad on the way back. My luggage was finally delivered at home at quarter past eleven in the night (darkness!) in a violent thunderstorm.

So, yeah. Akademy rocked. The Mexican has pictures that give a good impression of the atmosphere there.