Brazil--4Linux Pre-fisl, fsl 8.0

The trip to São Paulo was uneventful and actually pleasant .Since Air Canada moved to its new terminal, and since I’ve been able to use the Maple Leave Lounge (due to my huge trove of accumulated miles), travel has gotten more pleasant. But I still can’t really sleep on planes. Fortunately, that usually doesn’t matter: giving speeches and trying to make them interesting and engaging to a crowd that can probably only understand a portion of what I say, is enough to wake anyone.

The 4Linux Pre-Fisl 8.0 event in São Paulo is one such. I gave a presentation on OpenOffice.org later on that day---an hour or so from when I first drafted this--to what seemed to be a packed room, of between 150 and 100 persons. The conference as a whole was booked. Evidently, the organizers had planned for no more than 200; 800 registered, some encouraged by their employer (IBM had a public blog on the subject). This level of interest, employer mandated or not, is encouraging, to put it mildly. It means that several key enterprises are recognizing that the only way to get a cadre of developers able to swim in free software waters is to encourage their development. As such, it’s probably not too different from any other professional development. Call it a coming of age ritual, to tell employees and would-be employees that knowing about free software, Linux, OOo, etc., is a real advantage, not just a gesture of personal (and possibly useful, but probably indifferent) accomplishment, but rather something that can lead directly to a job, middle-class things, security. Free software comes of age when the knowledge itself of how to use it is itself a commodity, something that can be exchanged, ultimately, for money.

But this is not new. Red Hat and other companies have been offering certification for Linux for some time; my observation is belated. But the same cannot quite be said of OpenOffice.org, which is still seen as the free alternative.

I guess I don’t see it quite like that, for that description strikes me always as defining MS Office as the “real” and OOo as the imitation, and it isn’t. It has it’s own powers, its own characteristics. Yes, both do the same things, but OOo can do so much more, virtue of its openness. Being closed is expensive, and some of that expense comes in the form of fighting an always already obsolescence. (Which raises an interesting question; If Apple gains more market share, will it lose its special monopoly status? will it open-source Aqua? There might be reason for it, as an operating system is different than a music player--look only to the iPhone issue and the strong control evidently exercised by Apple, and the consequent delay in release date for 10.5. Resource shortages bite, and bite all the harder for the proprietary. Open source helps resolve the resource bottleneck, though it does not axiomatically solve it; but it opens a window.)

But this entry is supposedly about Brazil. After 4Linux, I walked around the rich, policed, cosmopolitan and utterly modern centre and Jardines section of São Paulo, before settling at a restaurant that had free wi-fi (did they know that was one of the reasons I went in? It was also a pretty good restaurant and had the further virtue of having dark, isolated tables, the better to see my screen by.) Doing work in a café, or pleasant restaurant has its plusses. (Or is that just modern loneliness masquerading as doing work? I mean, I like going to cafes for work because it’s reassuring--fun?--to be in a crowd, to see others around me, to feel that I am part of this, although what “part” means is somewhat in dispute: think of Emerson.)

The great thing about 4Linux was that it was focused and intense and also popular. I got the feeling that things were accomplished, or at least were initiated. And because it was small, it had a different character. I suspect that in the next few years it will grow quickly, as a market is there for such events.

Witness this year’s amazing fisl 8.0. Gusatavo Pacheco, one of the organizers and a key member of BrOffice, the Brazilian OpenOffice.org distribution (sorry, guys, I kept referring to the group by its old name, BrOpenOffice), invited me early, and for the last few months I’ve been looking forward to the event. I had been before, in 2005, and recalled how good and very different the event was. I also believed then, and believe even more now, that fisl is the most important free software event of the year, for the future lies, in development and distribution and use, not with the developed nations but the developing; not with the rich whose wealth maintains the luxury of liberal copyright laws but with those who make that wealth possible.

it was held this year in a large convention centre outside the city, not in the university--not enough room. I don’t know how many thousands were there, but every day it was packed. In part, the impression of a crowd was created by making the exhibition space the central meeting space, and the Sun booth, where I hung out most (when I wasn’t being interviewed or in meetings), was probably the most popular. (Part of that was because great expresso and hot chocolate was offered for free there. Banco do Brasil, which also had a booth, offered the same from the same machine but it wasn’t nearly as popular, so it wasn’t just the pulchritude of the barristas nor the excllence of the coffee: it was the fact that the booth was a cool endroit, with really famous developers hanging out, answering questions and demoing Sun’s latest. People were quite seriously having a good time there.) But the specialness of the event had more to do with the balance of the crowd than anything else. There were students, government officials, businesses; no one faction dominated, and there was no sense, none at all, that the space was a market where people were being sold something. Missing was the awful thumping music that dominates Linux Worlds, the horrific fluorescent alienation we see there, too. Instead, students hung out, spoke passionately about the code and its social implications, and connected. I commented to Simon P.: this is paradise, and I meant that it was a social space devoid of unpleasantness and full, instead, of a sense of friendship and cooperation.

Well done Gustavo! and my thanks to your team.

The only drawback was that I was unable to attend more panels. Alas, I was stuck in meetings, interviews, and on the second day, at UFRGS (I am sure the name is wrong, but I write this offline), a graduate university, where Josh Berkus, Minya Lee, and I lectured/presented on our respective projects. My lecture was fast, to the point and energetic. i pointed out that the most important things we need to do now in OOo (by my lights) is refactor and also extract the ODF functionality, and that it’s not easy, but it is interesting. And that these students, all obviously capable, could do far worse things than dive in. I’m pretty sure it went over well--students, at least, were pretty enthusiastic afterward. But I need to work with their professors, for I want to integrate free software, especially OOo, in university coursework. This has been my agenda for several years now, and it’s finally paying off, with schools in Oregon and Toronto getting on board. (Both have worked with Mozilla, and Seneca has done the most, and it’s impressive.) The potential of this plan is not just to have more users (that will happen) but developers who are familiar both with the architecture and technology, as well as with open source techniques. And, it is also a strategic step for open access. Last thing anyone wants is for the work a student does to be impeded by closed licenses.

My presentation over well, but I was really happy that Erwin Tenhumberg’s on the ODF complemented what I said so well. For i didn’t focus that much on the ODF (it was not my topic, and besides, I did that last year, when I presented via ISDN/video). What I did find interesting is that most of the discussion outside of our lectures had to do with free software, not ODF. People recognized the importance of open standards but were open source was the subject.

This was especially so in the multi-hour BrOffice community meeting I sat in on (and during which I tried to ask questions in Portuguese: my apologies to the speakers of that beautiful language!). The meeting had several highlights, not least of which was Carlos De Menezes’ presentation on the Java-based grammar checker, CoGroo. It works, and is being translated to English, though as he explained, he needs native speakers who are also linguists to work on it. The potential of this checker should not go unstated. Think of Google Docs with a good grammar checker, or of the many mail clients with one. Other presenters (and I apologize for having lost the paper on which your names were recorded) spoke to case studies--Mina Gerais, etc. OOo is moving fast.

I write this last paragraph sitting in Terminal 1 of Gaurulhos Int’l. airport. It’s not a nice airport, though at least it is not steaming hot. But it has a ghastly oversupply of fluorescent lighting, very indifferent restaurants (including a giant McDonalds) and not enough space. I’d be in the executive lounge, if they’d let me in, but I can’t go there until I check in,and I can’t check in until 3 hours before my flight takes off. I still have an hour.