Jornadas abiertas del Master en Software Libre

Hace un par de semanas tuvieron lugar  en el máster de software libre, organizado por Igalia y la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos I,  unas jornadas abiertas en las que varios ex-alumnos pudimos contar nuestras experiencias alrededor del Sofware Libre. Mi participación consistió en una charla sobre la relación de iCarto, empresa de la que soy socio fundador, y el proyecto gvSIG.

Cuando me propusieron la posibilidad de participar en las jornadas para hablar de esta relación empresa-proyecto de Software Libre, tuve bastantes dudas sobre como enfocarlo. Recuerdo que en la primera edición del máster, la que yo cursé, en diferentes momentos surgió la pregunta de cómo ganar dinero con el Software Libre. El movimiento del Software Libre, tiene una componente filosófica muy grande detrás, la mayoría de los que estamos metidos en él es por convicción, porque nos gusta esta filosofía, el compartir nuestro conocimiento y aprender del de los demás. Sin embargo, mientras el mundo no cambie, todos necesitamos dinero para vivir. Conseguir que una filosofía, un modo diferente de ver las cosas, además te de dinero, parece a priori bastante complicado.

Durante el máster, estudiamos la famosa clasificación de Hecker que intenta dar respuesta a qué modelos de negocio se pueden utilizar en el Software Libre. Sin embargo, todo esto se quedaba en la teoría, necesitábamos ver como se lleva realmente esto a la práctica. Recuerdo que incluso se había organizado una mesa redonda, que no estaba prevista, para tratar de satisfacer nuestra gran curiosidad en este punto. Con esto en mente, se me ocurrió tratar de enfocar la charla hacia esto y tratar de transmitir, sobre todo a los alumnos de esta edición, mi experiencia en iCarto y todo el valor que generamos en nuestros proyectos en base al Software Libre.

De todo esto salió la presentación que os dejo a continuación. En ella hablo de tres cosas: una tecnología, los sistemas de información geográfica (SIG), una comunidad, la que se generó alrededor del proyecto gvSIG, y una empresa, iCarto, y como se puede conseguir generar valor a través de la relación empresa-proyecto de Software Libre.

Testing Intrepid Ibex with QEMU

In one of the first posts I told about testing the new version of Ubuntu. In that post I had just upgraded muy ubuntu 7.10 to ubuntu 8.04 Heard5, that was, one month before ubuntu 8.04 becomes stable. I didn’t have any several problem but to be honest I had lots of lucky.

Now I am going to test the next ubuntu release, this is ubuntu 8.10 or if you prefer Intrepid Ibex.
According to the ubuntu release schedule the last version to test if the Alpha 4. Two months left for the release.

This time I am not going to trush on luck. In one of the last sessions of the Master on Free Software, Berto told us about Virtualization. Among the virtualization systems about Berto told us I liked specially QEMU, so I decided to use it in order to test ubuntu 8.10. These are the steps that I followed:

- First I downloaded the iso image of ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 from here.

- Installing QEMU:

- Then I created a qemu file image, this will be my virtual hard disk, doing:

- Now I could install ubuntu 8.10 in that virtual hard disk from the iso image just doing:

where 512 is the size of the RAM.

- Finally to run ubuntu 8.10 after installing it:

$qemu -hda ~/intrepid.img -m 512

Some tips:

- If you are using a 64 bits operative system you should use qemu-system-x86_64 as command instead of qemu.

- If you want the virtual system run faster you can install the qemu accelerator:

$sudo apt-get install kqemu-common

you will need to load the kernel module for the accelerator:

$sudo modprobe kqemu

then you can run qemu with the option –kernel-kqemu to use the accelerator.

Master on Free Software students talking about quality and Libre Software

As activity for one of the subjects in the Master on Free Software we made a paper entitled Quality and Libre Software: a theoretical and practical approach.

In that paper we tried to test the OpenBRR model. This is an attempt to meassure how much suitable a free software project is when we have a group of requirements. We chose as example in order to test the model in a real case which would be the most appropiate GNU/Linux distribution to an average user.

By means this example we could study the model and discover its strenghs and weakness. In the paper we suggest also some ideas in order to improve it.

Besides, thanks to Caixanova we could travel to Brussels in order to attend to Fosdem and present the paper into the Research Room.

Resources:

• Paper (pdf)
• Slides
• Video of the presentation

Very special thanks also to people from Libresoft and Igalia for their support and to my classmates for trusting on me as speaker. (You didn’t know what were doing)

Many reasons to use Libre Software

These last days I had the opportunity to attend to many talks about Libre Software.

Last week, in the Master of Free Software, we had two exceptional guests: Alberto Abella and Marcelo Branco, you can see a summarize of their talks here.
Besides, these days gpul is organizing its VIII Xornadas Software Libre and yesterday I attended to one talk that my classmate Pedro did about the process of making free gisEIEL, a proyect between Deputación da Coruña and University of Coruña.

These three talks have in common one idea: the advantage of using Libre Software, but from different points of view.

In the first one, Alberto Abella tell us with statics and data how Libre Software is better than Privative.

In the second one, Marcelo Branco tell us about his experience in Libre Software and public administrations. Marcelo is pure passion talking about Libre Software but his arguments are true. Countries should not use Privative Software in their public administrations because on the one hand, they are putting economics resources out of the country and they cannot be sure about the integraty of the public data because they cannot really what the privative software do without seeing the source code.

Finally, in the gisEIEL talk, the reasons are technical. They started the project using Privative Software but they realize that was depending on the one company exclusively. They could not make their own applications to access to the database. The data was storing in binary way so they could not get them without using the privative applications… so they make up their minds to migrate the project to Libre Software because it was better from technical point of view.

Therefore we can deduce that Libre Software is not only for ‘frikis’. It is a real inovation in the computer world. The world is changing. Do not stay in the dark!

Libre Software in Galicia

This week has just published the new number of Codigocero, a very important galician magazine about technology. This number is special for me because there is an interview to Roberto Vieito, one of my classmates in the Master of Free Software. Roberto made a study about the situation of the Libre Software in Galicia which you can see here (in English).
You can also read the interview here (in Galician).

Well done Roberto!

FOSDEM 2008

Last weekend I attended to my first FOSDEM. It was a really good experience. Lots of people, lots of talks, lots of new ideas… in short time.

My classmates of the Master on Free Software and me presented a paper about Quality and Libre Software. As first experience I think was great. People showed enough interested on it.

I attended to many talks about different projects (Mozilla, Gnome, OpenOffice, Embedded devices, Freedesktop…) all of them were very interesting.

I found specially interesting a talk about integrating the Web into GTK+ applications with WebKit. I didn’t anything about this and really fascinated me. I’ll try to learn more about WebKit and who knows, maybe it could be used in gtranslator someday.