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Back from FOSDEM 2007 : great conference, for sure

Some notes on the (professionally) most interesting things I’ve seen at the FOSDEM 2007 last week-end (see this post for less professionally-related report)

I’ve spent much time in the research room where there was mainly presentations made by the numerous projects which are funded by the European Commission under the FP6, and are conducting R&D around FLOSS.

Most presentations were very interesting, and the panel and Q&A were quite interesting. It’s been great to see again previous partners of the Calibre project (Jesus, Gregorio, Juanjo, Israel, Martin, etc. forgive me those I forgot to list ;), and discuss issues like best ways to interact between the academic communities and libre software developers/hackers communities.

One of my suggestion during the panel at the end was that maybe it would be a good idea to not have a research room next year at FOSDEM, since that would maximise the chance for us to go and present in other rooms were there would be higher chances to meet hackers… but of course that’s not so easy, and having a dedicated academic “workshop” helps convince of the importance of a participation to the FOSDEM, which in itself has not the casual academic conference profile… so I don’t know, but everybody more or less agrees that chances for collaboration must be maximized.

Also, I’ve stressed the need for some RSS aggregation (and of course publication) of most relevant publications, announcements, calls, which would possibly help disseminate and pass the word to target communities… and in this respect I’d like to see the Planet FLOSS Research (or similar service) become more known, used, and reknowned as a source of information on academic+FLOSS activities. Maybe we need to go a step further as some have suggested with a reference portal… but let’s keep it in the Web 2.0 decentralized way, maybe ? What do you think ?

Also, I think there were interesting comments and discussions about the many projects funded in the same programmes and working more or less on the same issues, and potential duplication of efforts, and the lack of easy path for reusable elements like state of the art, etc.
There’s the idea of some European effort to try and gather/consolidate some of these elements for better reuse… something in the academic community, on the European side that would be much like the opensource.mit.edu ? … some Coordination action to propose for FP7 ? … probably something comparable to the OSOR project setup by IDABC ? Time will tell. Comments welcome, of course 😉

Just some more elements on the great presentations…

I’ve been very interested by the presentations made respectively by Lucas Nussbaum and Radu Pop, on Use of Grid Computing for Debian Quality Assurance, and Snapshot on the EDOS distribution system. Both presented their experiments on using Grid 5000 to, respectively, build Debian distribution’s packages, and then test their installation/deinstallation to enhance Debian’s quality on CPU intensive processes, that a Grid can help complete faster, and on testing a P2P infrastructure for distributing packages of a distribution. Maybe both projects could join forces to use the same grid for both tests. Anyway, this research room made it possible to let such projects and people to talk to each other : great 🙂

Well, there’s probably lots I forget, but will blog later if it pops to the surface. Stay tuned.

Step by step development of Hello Word application for phpgroupware with hooks and database

I’d just like to emphasize (and help google find it 😉 that my collegue Christian Bac has written a tutorial about how to program a module/application in the phpGroupware framework.

If you’re interested, it’s available here : “Step by step development of Hello Word application for phpgroupware with hooks and database“.

Christian has used it for master’s courses, and is improving it from time to time, so stay tuned 😉

PicoForge is in RC state

PicoForge on which we’ve been working for the past months, the successor of the PicoLibre forge, has entered RC (Release Candidate) state.

It means that if you follow instructions on PicoForge install instructions on PicoLibre’s wiki, you should be able to install a working PicoForge forge on a debian etch dedicated machine.

Update 2007/03/10 : Corrected link, as PicoForge is now self-hosting. The wiki is now on Picoforge.int-evry.fr 😉

Structuring french R&D activity on libre software in France, and recent governmental policy changes ?

The french minister of industry, Thierry breton has recently received an official report (for abstract in english, and full version in french) on innovation policy and intengible goods, which gives hints of a new understanding of the challenges of value created in new regimes of IP. Among them, libre software (aka open source) is clearly identified as one of the strategic elements towards which the innovation and R&D policy should be targetted.

That’s a very promising evolution of public policy, if it becomes implemented in concrete actions. But I’m a bit doubtful, personnaly that a complete and coherent policy change can just occur now : France is now in presidential pre-campaign state and I think nobody expects much serious action until a new president is elected in May ’07, sadly ;), but it’s still worth noticing.

Anyway, the minister made a declaration which, among other elements, mentions his interest in seeing a coming “pole de compétitivité” on libre software, which means the establishment of a consortium of industrials and academics clustering on a focus point, in the jargon of the french R&D support agency.

And indeed, a lot of actors actively promoting libre software in France have been working for several month in initiatives targeting the creation of such a cluster. It seems one of the such initiatives managed to attract the biggest momentum, and is now responding officially to the expectations of the minister (see press coverage in english here).

I wish this initiative a good success, hoping that it will, among other european initiatives like Morfeo in Spain, be a new way to help promote actors engaged in R&D around libre software.

Update 2006/12/18 : the project now has a name (“Ouverture”) and a website : http://www.ouverture-paris-region.org/.

Report from the Hephaistos Conference

As you know from previous posts, I’ve attended much of the recently held Hephaistos Conference, and presented there our experience on developping PicoForge and using Shibboleth.

I was glad to see many interesting presentations and talking to all these people interested in Forges, either promoters of the use of forges for specific communities, or developers/maintainers of forge software.

I’d like to report on some of the bits I remember, hoping that others will provide their reports too.

First of all, I think that the organisers have organised a great conference, for a first edition, and the only criticism may be that I would have prefered to be able to talk to more people from Mandriva there, as the conf was held at Mandriva’s building. Too bad… maybe next time.

Several people were present from Public Administrations or institutions related to this sector, who try and promote the use of the libre software model for developments in the public administrations sector : folks from the Adullact’s forge, and Admisource (the official french administration’s one), or the forge of the Junta in Extremadura, and also someone from Sweden, and even a representative of the IDABC program.

Being able to discuss questions of interoperability was the main topic of interest for me. Some elements have been shown like the search facility between partner forges implemented in GForge, and used by the GForges relating to PA projects, for instance (Hephaestos project at Adullact). Recent activity was made around this topic like discussions in the frame of the Overcrowded initiative, and older bits like our proposals for CoopX.

I think we have discussed interesting ideas like using Web 2.0 techniques also in the forges, things like tagging / taxonomy for projects identification / categorisation, maybe.

Some presentations have provided us with interesting perspective on software development and integration basing on J2EE components, and in particular on ObjectWeb’s technology, like what the IRCAD did with xwiki and other tools. Also, using similar technologies were the elements proposed by the LibreSource project. I think they have developped a very interesting tool, which could be a solid basis for building forges of next generation, but whose paths for adoption by projects in the libre software communities remain to be confirmed.

There would be lots of other elements to note, but I must say I don’t remember that much at the present time, and let others contribute in the comments 😉

Last, we mentioned that we (at GET/INT) are hosting a mailing-list which was setup in the frame of the “overcrowded” project, which is meant for improving contacts between people involved in the field of forges, like maintainers of several forge applications. At the moment there are mostly french-speaking people, but we’re inviting all interested parties to join us… and maybe we can continue with discussions in english. You may contact me for more details.

Update 2006/12/09 : the proceedings are on-line : http://www.ethiqa.com/hephaistos/proceedings2006.html