“EU-funded Projects and Online Dissemination” inspired some reactions, also from one of the Future Networks projects: the SAIL project.
Johan Myrberger – Head of Multimedia Campus at Ericsson – replied to my suggestions with a blog entry around Online Dissemination, an interesting opportunity to talk more about FP7 dissemination do’s and don’ts.
Michael Meeks, famous hacker and LibreOffice advocate, replied to my earlier post giving his perspectives on many different subjects related to LibreOffice development.
Having read his views with great attention – and keeping in mind his long coding experience with OpenOffice.org, as well as his ability to dig deep into complex subjects like copyright assignment – I want to take a chance to go deeper into some points.
Upstream compatibility is no issue when you are the font.
Only if this is the case, from now on.
Consip – the Italian public stock company owned by the Ministry of the Economy and Finance and responsible for the rationalization of Public Purchases – is hosting an event about electronic purchase of open source services.
The event, that is part of the Open Source Focus Group for Public Administrations series, will be focuses on how the award-winning Italian Public Administration Electronic Marketplace (MEPA) can ease open source procurement processes.
I look forward to moderate the final round-table to stimulate a discussion about ongoing actions and perspectives.
The will be Document Foundation is out from a month, and it is now time to share some thoughts about past, present and future actions taken around subjects like copyright, the legal and governance structure and the code development process.
Mettila così: openoffice non stava andando da nessuna parte, da qualche anno a questa parte il tasso di innovazione, che in un software opensource dovrebbe doppiare il corrispondente commerciale, era pari a zero. In più Oracle sembra tutto tranne che os friendly.
Un cambiamento era necessario. Quelli di DF saranno anche dei casinisti ma almeno sono volenterosi.
Roberto said:
“How to contribute is well explained, but unfortunately some not-so-innocent requests for contributions are not without risks.”
No change is without risk. That been said, a clean code reduce the risk of changes. So these ‘cosmetic’ changes are in fine lowering the overall risk by removing unnecessary complexity, inconsistencies, that accumulated over time.
If you want an illustration of that phenomena, I invite you to browse some source files in the binfilter module. That illustrate how unloved decade-old code end-up looking like. and a lot of it is indeed cosmetic, but cosmetic matter when one try to parse a multi-millions-line code-base to figure out how to fix a multi-year old bug…
Roberto said:
“Discussing and elaborating development guidelines should be a priority, probably more important than enabling people to make cosmetic changes.”
One doesn’t preclude the other.
And bear in mind that these ‘cosmetics’ change:
1/ Are low-risk and accessible way for new people to get used to the process
2/ Are an excellent way to gain some familiarity with the code, it’s structure, it’s quirks
3/ Allow the more senior developer to benefit from the clean-up without having to spend the significant amount of man-power that some of these clean-up require (that is why most of these haven’t been done. not because they are not important, but because the cost/benefit ratio was not perceived to be high enough to percolate on the top of the priority list, and because quite a few of these changes are dull hard work that more senior dev can escape by finding more technically challenging things to do)
4/ Allow the project to detect and groom new contributors…
Roberto said:
“While individuals may prefer to avoid the burden of copyright agreements, corporations and companies tend to like them more.”
Of course they do. Copyright assignment is a way for corporation to turn ‘volunteers’ work’ into ‘developers’ work for free’. In other words converting ‘free as in freedom’ into ‘free as in beer’.
And – as far as I am concerned – it is not a problem of ‘burden of assignment’, it is a matter of principle: I will share my work, but if you want to own it, you need to pay for it.
And finally an editorial detail:
Roberto said:
“Other decisions are considered even riskier by expert developers,”
Blind quotes are not very productive. Unnamed experts referencing unspecified risks is indeed very hard to address or refute.
Hi Norbert,
thank you to join the conversation. As I clarified later cutting bridges with the upstream project is a very sensitive decisions, something in my opinion should be discussed and agreed by stakeholders before it is implemented. That’s why I called it a priority.
In fact these non functional changes are not a way to get people acquainted with the code – that is something that require time and dedication – but maybe a way to make more complex integrating upstream contributions.
About copyright there are many different opinions among LibreOffice developers, and I firmly believe that potential corporate sponsors may have an opinion on this. Taking similar decision without a public and transparent process (Ã la GPLv3) is a choice, only time will tell if it was the right one, though.
About your editorial notes, if you followed all the links you know I have been pointing to few existing public sources, everytime it was appliable. As soon as I’ll get a public reference for that I’ll be happy to share it.
Hi Norbert,
a very short comment:
Norbert said:
”
And finally an editorial detail:
Roberto said:
‘Other decisions are considered even riskier by expert developers,’
Blind quotes are not very productive. Unnamed experts referencing unspecified risks is indeed very hard to address or refute.
”
It was me that around the middle of October, in a private mail, exchanged some thoughts with Roberto on the matter.
At that time I noted that changing the code will end in some difficulty in keeping it in sync with OOo that at the
time I thought of as a sort of “upstream”.
That was the ‘risk’ I thought about.
Then I was referring to this change as an example:
But now, after three weeks, I believe OOo will be no longer the “upstream” version of LibO, it’s just a starting point.
So, in the future, merging OOo code into LibO will matter less, being LibO something different.
Thank you Giuseppe for having joined this conversation. You are the second person here talking about LibO as something different, wondering if it is sustainable to consider merging OOo code into LibO a minor issue, though. Apparently 90 code hackers already joined Libo, let’s see in six months from now what this would mean to end users.
Roberto Galoppini and 
Johan are discussing. 
A. Rebentisch, and 
Johan 4:45 pm on November 15, 2010 Permalink
Thanks for the follow up!
I agree to what you state above in general, and as usual there’s always a balance between different options…
Some (personal) comments to the blog post:
– Indeed the domain name itself has an impact on the SEO ranking, although I don’t have a clear picture of to what extent.
You should also remember that the domain name is not only important from a SEO point-of-view, but also to which extent it is easy to remember once you’ve seen it or heard it.
From that perspective I think http://sail-project.eu is “OK”, as it bears the branding of the project (as I mentioned earlier I personally might have excluded the “-” though.
(And yes, from a branding/SEO perspective the usage of such a common word as SAIL could be discussed.)
From the perspective “few will search for SAIL” – partly right. Some of the potential audience will have picked up the name SAIL and are looking for more information. Of course there’s also a large audience interested in the topics as such (future internet etc), but I still believe there’s a high value in having a domain that ties into the project name.
Multiple domain names is of course an option, but at the moment we will stick with one.
As for other other Social Media channels, we will continue to explore them (watch for future blog posts at http://sail-project.eu/sailorsinn ).
And finally – transparency. Yes, it matters (and I am a big fan..), but again, there’s always a balance among several stakeholders. I do believe that the blog and other activities will remove some of the opaqueness though.
Roberto Galoppini 11:17 am on November 19, 2010 Permalink
Hi Jo
ahan,it is an interesting conversation, here some feedback.
All in all Social Media Monitoring tools would hardly be of help to monitor a common word like “sail”. Some examples of domain names you might add: futureinternetworld and futurenetworksworld are all (*.net, *.com, *.org, etc) available.
About transparency. It seems like if for many EU-financed research projects the idea of transparency is a sort of “nice to have”, while actually to me it is more of a “must have”. I will lobby in the future around this and other issues that should be taken much more seriously by public-funded research projects.
Johan 1:27 pm on December 8, 2010 Permalink
Hi Roberto, time for a long overdue reply…
For the domain name discussion – I do feel a bit confused.
You seem to mix two aspects:
Originally I took your suggestion as “use additional domains to increase visibility”. From that perspective:
– Are you suggesting that the additional domains would have the same content as the “main” or original domain? If so, I believe that there a risk in terms of search engine ranking to deploy multiple copies of the same content.
– One argument (for multiple domains) might be that each domain can “support” the visibility of the others by links. Besides that this is a bit of a grey zone (don’t want to host a link farm..) we actively decided to host the blog on the same domain as the “main” web site – and I still think this is a valid decision.
– Another argument would be that multiple domains might help you occupy more of the search results (as in some cases only one or a few results from each domain is displayed). Might be true, but such techniques might be more relevant for more commercial web sites – I do not see a value to apply this to SAIL.
Then you introduce the notion of how “traceable” it would be in eg Social Media. True, a “truly unique” term might be good from that perspective, but I do not see that another “more generic” term or domain (such as futureinternetworld) would add any value.
To sum up where we currently are in SAIL:
– Despite the “common” term SAIL we rank fairly high on relevant searches already (and this is the type of searches we see drives a large part of the visits) (Note – we don’t rank “high enough” on searches of “sail” alone, but a number of relevant combinations (sail project, sail eu, sail fp7 etc) puts us high up in the results. And we see that people actually use such terms to find us)
– In terms of monitoring mentions in Social Media we do have some additional work to do (besides eg simply tracking in-links etc) – I do not see the term “sail” as an issue though.
(As this will be more relevant when we take the next step to activate some “social media channels” I’m sure we’ll get back to this topic.)
And finally, transparency…
I noticed that you made another blog post on this topic. Will probably post something around this on our blog, as it is an important and partly tricky area.
One question/comment though – I think that the terms “transparency” and “visibility” are tightly connected, but still are different terms. Would you agree on that?
Roberto Galoppini 2:32 pm on December 9, 2010 Permalink
Good to see you again Johan.
Multiple domains pointing to the very same website badly affect search engine ranking indeed, but you can use 301 redirections. In your specific case a similar approach could be of help if you change your mind about your domain name.
You’re right saying that your google positioning is good if you look for “sail project”, but only a tiny fraction of the internet population interested in future networks would ever google for SAIL related keywords, though.
Track social media maybe not an issue, unless you want to promote a specific product/service and measure results.
EU-funded Projects: Transparency and Beyond entry makes clearer what I meant, stay tuned for more on this subject.