We’ve decided to organize the very first Fedora Activity Day in the Czech Republic – FAD Prague 2013. It will be co-located with LinuxDays 2013. The goals are Czech- specific. We’d like to work on a small handbook we can print and give away to users who’d like to start with Fedora. It should cover basics such as what is Fedora, why to use it, where to get it, how to install it, how to work with the system etc. In spare time, we’d also like to work on improving and updating our online Czech Fedora user handbook which is wiki-based, but can be converted to a PDF. It’s already pretty long, over 250 pages. On the second day, we’d like to work on Czech translations. Not only translations of Fedora-specific software, but also translations of upstream software which is included in Fedora. Czech upstream translators are going to have a meetup at LinuxDays and this could definitely be common ground.
The whole event is meant to be for participants with different level of knowledge and experience. Newbies are especially welcome because the FAd is a great opportunity to start contributing to Fedora. There will be experienced Fedora contributors around who can help them and point them to the right directions.
Wanna learn how to create an RPM package and what to do to get it in the Fedora repositories? We’re organizing another Fedora packaging workshop. It’s going to take place in Brno office of Red Hat on October 9th. It’s a one-day workshop that starts at 10am and ends at 6pm. The workshop mentors are one of the most experienced Fedora/RHEL packagers – Stano Ochotnický, Miroslav Suchý, Ondřej Vašík, and Jaroslav Řezník. So don’t hesitate and sign up, the capacity is only 20 participants! 😉
Date: Wednesday, October 9th, 2013 Time: 10am to 6pm Venue: Brno office of Red Hat, Purkynova 99/71, Brno, Czech Republic Capacity: 20 participants Registration: please fill out this form Language: either Czech or English (will be decided at the beginning of the workshop. It depends if there will be any foreign participants) Admission: Free Requirements: a laptop with either Fedora or RHEL Previous experience: no experience with packaging required
The the second quarter of the fiscal year is over and my job is to hunt down all expenses made in EMEA and close the quarterly account. There is still one payment left, but it’s not so significant, so I think I can safely sum up the quarter. It’s been easy this time because Q2 was quite boring in terms of expenses. We produced Fedora 19 media where we achieved even a lower price than before. We paid just $1668 for 4000 dual-layer DVDs which is only $.41 for one. I remember we paid twice or three times more to the old vendor.
We also paid much less than expected for shipping. We had pretty high shipping costs and after the budget cuts I had to look for a cheaper solution. Now, we ship packages with Czech Post which is a standard postal service. I shipped a lot of packages all around EMEA (quite a few outside EU) and the total cost was $701. There are also some disadvantages. Delivery times are longer than with Fedex or DHL we used before. It’s just a few days within EU, but it could be a couple of weeks if you ship to Africa. We also can’t track packages all the way to the final destination. Postal services outside EU either don’t have tracking or don’t share it with Czech Post. And packages more likely end up stuck at customs. On the other hand, DHL and Fedex were completely out of our budget possibilities.
Due to these savings, we’re on track with our annual budget. We’ve spent $13,208 in the first two quarters and there is $8,892 left in the annual budget and planned expenses are $9,463 which is just slightly more.
In the next several weeks, I’d like to arrange a quarterly budget meeting where all regional treasurers and the Fedora budget owner get together and discuss the budget situation in all regions. We have to make sure that spending in all regions is on track and we don’t spend too much or too little.
Last year, I published stats of what desktop environments Czech Fedora users are using. The data came from a survey which was done by the most popular Czech Linux magazine Root.cz. They did the survey again this year and made all the data available. By running queries on this data, you can actually do interesting statistics. But first the most important outcome of the survey: popularities of Linux distributions among Czech desktop users:
Last year (2012): Ubuntu 53%, Debian 17%, Fedora 12%, Mint 10%, Arch 9.5%, opensuse 9.5%, Gentoo 6.7%, Mandriva 1.8%,…
Source: root.cz
As you can see, Fedora remains the third most popular distribution after Ubuntu and Debian. The first four distributions have gained, but partly only optically because users could choose more distributions and apparently they were a bit more “promiscuous” than in the last year. For example, Ubuntu got 58.1% which is more than the last year, but it’s just 35% of the sum of all shares while it was 44% last year. DEB vs RPM is 101.2% vs 36.5% which is a better ratio than the last year’s: 80 vs 22.4%.
And now to the desktop stats. Popularity of desktop environments among Fedora users has always been a hot topic. We don’t really track what packages users are using, so no one really knows. The data from the survey surely don’t reflect the reality 100%. The survey was done among Czech users and doesn’t cover users “who don’t care” (like our moms, dads, grandparents who use Linux, but don’t read any Linux magazines or participate in surveys). On the other hand, users “who care” are interesting the most to us and 4745 users participated which is a large statistical sample. The stats from the last year can be found here. Unfortunately, they’re not very comparable with this year’s numbers because this year users could choose more than one desktop, last year they couldn’t.
The chart above shows popularities among all Fedora users including those who indicated that they were using other distributions, too. That’s why Unity has a significant share although it’s not even available for Fedora. It’s interesting to compare it with answers that come from users who use just Fedora, not any other distribution (die hards 🙂 ). They were approx. 1/3 of all Fedora users.
Like last year, I compared it with Ubuntu numbers (also users who only use Ubuntu). As you can see, GNOME 3 stands out even more and achieve a number that is close to the share from the last year when users could only choose one desktop. KDE 4 is around 25%. Xfce has apparently gained some share among both broader and core Fedora user base. GNOME 2/MATE still has its user base, somewhere below 10% (similar to the last year’s numbers). LXDE has also gained a bit, but it’s apparently much more popular on Ubuntu than on Fedora. As you can see, Unity got completely filtered out which makes sense because if it’s not available for Fedora it can be hardly used by Fedora-only users. Cinnamon is also significantly more popular among users who use Fedora just as one of their distributions. Apparently, who wants Cinnamon, goes for Linux Mint because it doesn’t have a large share among Ubuntu users as well (BTW it has a 59% share among Mint-only users).
I will bring some more stats when I find time again. For example how Fedora market share changes with the age of users or their experience.
In the last few days, I attended Flock 2013 which was held in Charleston, South Carolina. It was busy first two weeks of August for me. GUADEC kept me on my toes from 8am to midnight for a week. I had to leave GUADEC on the 7th to get to Prague because my flight was leaving early in the morning on the 8th. The journey to Charleston went really smooth. I flew with Sirko from Prague, met Gergely and Patrick in Amsterdam, and Gianluca and Robert in Atlanta. So we arrived to Charleston as a quite large group.
I had a talk on the state of Fedora Ambassadors project. I guess many expected something like evaluating the state of our ambassadors. But I rather focused on explaining what FAmSCo has been doing in the last months and what we’re planning for the near future. In the last part of the talk, I brought up several ideas for the future to discuss. This started a quite interesting discussion. Too bad that my talk was attended just by 7 ppl.
The most interesting part of Flock was the morning track on the third day when we had three ambassador talks and we discussed several hot topics. One of them was inactive ambassadors which is coming up again and again. We always refused to do anything about inactive ambassadors. Because unlike packager’s job, ambassador’s job is hard to measure. An ambassador doesn’t necessarily need to be active online, but can do a “field job” no one else knows about. On the other hand, ambassadors should stay active in the Fedora project in some way and the fact that this problem is brought up again and again indicates that it’s a problem. Especially for some countries where 30 out of 40 ambassadors in the list are inactive. I’m going to explore several ideas how to indicate inactive ambassadors and what to do with them. I’ve asked Patrick of the infra team to run queries to get a list of ambassadors who haven’t logged in to FAS (wiki, trac,…) in the last 12, 18, and 24 months. Then I’d like to compare the list with our observation who is active and who is not. The query which matches the observation the most might become a criteria. Another question is what to do with ambassadors who have been indicated as inactive. If they don’t log in to FAS for, say, 12 months, they may be marked as “inactive” in the list and receive a notification. If they don’t become active again in the next, say, 6 months, they will be removed from the ambassadors group. I think it’s a fair solution. As time goes on and we have more and more new ambassadors, the number of inactive ones will grow, too. And we have to find a way to remove them, so that we won’t become a project mostly consisted of inactive member.
Christoph also showed some stats they did back in 2007 to indicate health of the project. They inspired me to work on something similar. So on the last day of Flock, I was collecting data and making some stats to come up with cool charts 🙂 But seriously, it was interesting to see attendances of regional meetings in time because they pretty much correlate with overall activity in the region. Stay tuned.
Other stuff at Flock was also very interesting. I attended many technical talks and even the Fedora Women session because I think having more women in Fedora Project would definitely help the project. I saw the positive difference at GUADEC where over 20 percent of speakers were women. Conferences are also about socializing and I was very happy to meet other contributors in person.
Considering the little time Flock organizers had to organize the event, I think they did a great job! I’ve organized several international tech conferences and I know how much work you have to put behind it to make it happen. The conference was professionally organized and the social events were great. Especially the one in aquarium. For the next year, I’d change its focus more to a planning conference with less talks and more sessions and hackfests. I think there were too many options and 9 talks at the same time is simply too many for a conference of this size. But I think Charleston was a great start for Flock and hopefully we will see even better Flock next year. I’m really looking forward to bids and wonder where in Europe it will be organized in the end.
A conference duathlon is what I’m going to experience in the next two weeks. I’m one of the organizers of GUADEC 2013, a GNOME conference which is held in our beloved city of Brno. And it’s not an easy one to organize. You have to have a legal entity to sell stuff (tickets, t-shirts, lunch tickets,…), set an online paygate (this was a particularly tricky one), invoice sponsors, communicate with them to meet their expectations, sponsor chosen community members, organize several social events, produce tons of swag etc. etc. etc. So no wonder the whole GUADEC 2013 team has been busy in the last couple of weeks and I maintain all my Fedora duties on a basic level (still responsive, but can’t do anything extra).
GUADEC starts in two days and will keep me busy until Aug 8th when I have to quickly pack my stuff and leave for the Prague airport to fly to Flock 2013 which starts on the 9th. A request to submit slides of my Flock talk by Aug 1st was the last nail in the coffin of my sanity and free time. I usually work on them around 11pm when I finally catch my breach. But I’m apologizing to Flock organizers in advance: Sorry, I won’t be able to submit them in the final version.
Besides being really busy, I’m looking forward to Flock. Although all FAmSCo won’t meet there in person as I planned, 4 members will be there, so we still can discuss a lot. I would like to also include other ambassadors in a broader discussion about Fedora Ambassadors project. One of the projects I want to start working when I get less busy are Fedora fliers. I still hope I’ll be able to organize some session to get all parties (devels, marketing, designers) together and spin it off.
At the beginning of the year, FAmSCo ratified changes in budget, approval, and reimbursement processes. One of the benefits is that we have control over the money Red Hat has given us for regional support. One of the changes was to start proper budgeting and track all expenses we’re doing.
I’m a treasurer for EMEA which means I’m responsible for spending in the EMEA region. Yes, that’s the unpopular guy who always says we have to save money, can’t spend that much etc. 🙂
Today, I finally closed the first quarter of the fiscal year 2014. It means I’ve collected all expenses and closed the entries. And what are the results?
Events: $9350 (Planned) $8554 (Allocated – after cuts) $7782 (actually spent) SWAG production: $1500 $1500 $1413 Shipping: $500 $200 $0 Total: $11,350 $10,254 $9195 The complete budget is on Fedora wiki.
As you can see, we were able to save some money on events although there were two events which weren’t included in the original plan. SWAG spending was fairly close to the limit because it’s something you can plan and control the most easily. It’s also amazing what we were able to produce for $1413. It’s mainly due to a new vendor who produces quality stuff for incredible prices. We didn’t spend any money on shipping. That’s something very seasonal. We ship most packages after releases. Fedora is usually released at the end of Q1, but this year it landed in Q2. I’m pretty sure that what we saved on shipping in Q1 will come in handy in Q2 because I’ve already shipped many packages to many countries all over Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
We saved $1059 from the allocated money. It’s a reserve for the next quarters and it’s also a virtual reserve because the allocated budget is still about $3000 over the limit Red Hat gave us. Because the EMEA budget had to be painfully cut at the beginning of the fiscal year, I’m still steering the budget above the limit and hoping there will be some money saved in our budget or left in other budgets at the end of the fiscal year to meet the limit. But strictly speaking, by saving $1059 in Q1 we just met the limit and didn’t create any reserve.
The last meeting of FAmSCo in Fedora 19 term took place on Monday. Let me show you how we worked in the term through several statistics:
Time period: December 17th – June 24th
Total number of meetings: 27
Total duration of meetings: 29 hours and 14 minutes
Total number of discussed topics: 130
Number of meetings attended:
Alejandro Perez – 27 (iron man who didn’t miss a single meeting, my fedora off to you, Alejandro!)
Jiri Eischmann – 23
Christoph Wickert – 19
Truong Anh Tuan – 19
Clint Savage – 16
Nick Bebout – 15
Buddhika Chandradeepa Kurera – 12
Number of messages written:
Jiri Eischmann – 1682
Christoph Wickert – 1416
Truong Anh Tuan – 803
Alejandro Perez – 679
Clint Savage – 498
Buddhika Chandradeepa Kurera – 276
Nick Bebout – 127
Yes, it’s just stats. I also will try to blog more about problems FAmSCo is fighting. And you can come to my talk “Fedora Ambassadors: State of the Union” which has been accepted to Flock. I will talk about it there, too.
As many other open source believers, I was naive enough to believe that Google was somewhat better than other software giants. They have a quite loose relationship to open source. Many of their products are closed source and many have published source code, but are not really open (Android,…). But I believed that at least open standards and interoperability were important things to them. But after announcing that they’re going to kill XMPP support in their instant messaging service and especially removing federation (ability to communicate with other Jabber servers), they’ve lost my trust. And because they seem to back off from support of other open standards, too (changes in LDAP,…), I’m looking for alternatives to replace Google services I’m currently using.
What’s the most urgent is Jabber because Google will shut it down soon. I’m currently using Google Apps on my domain which is really good because my address is not tied to Google (or any other provider). I can easily come back to my previous mail and Jabber provider who offers Jabber on custom domains, too. It’s just matter of changing DNS records. What’s nice about it is that I can still use my domain for Google accounts since Google Hangouts are now closed to other Jabber servers and DNS should not be needed for routing messages to others users within Hangouts.
When I was thinking about possible Jabber solutions, I came to a conclusion that it’d be really nice to have a Fedora Jabber server and provide our users with an open IM service which is going to stay open. All FAS accounts already get fedoraproject.org mail addresses. Why not to have the same Jabber accounts, too? Having support for FAS in online accounts which would add the Jabber account to Empathy sounds like a great service. It could also be a unified platform for IM among Fedora contributors. I know we have IRC and Freenode, but it is not the same.
Anyway, I’ve once again learned an important lesson:
It’s very convenient to have tightly integrated services, but vendor lock-in is a damn bad thing.
I haven’t written a blogpost for a while. It was mainly because I was too busy with all the events I organized or attended in the last three months. So here is a little recap:
Feb 23-24 – DevConf.cz 2013 – this is an event that took weeks of my life. I was the head of the organizing team and we went really large this year. There were almost 100 talks, workshops and sessions. We counted around 700 attendees and we haven’t had any significant problems, so success.
March 2-3 – InstallFest 2013 – this is a traditional Linux event at Strahov campus of CVUT. Strahov has always played an important role in the Czech Internet and it’s called Silicon Hill. It has a strong Linux community. I delivered a talk on where Fedora is heading.
April 10 – Afternoon with Red Hat in Bratislava – a set of talks introducing Red Hat and its open source projects and technologies to university students. We talked on Fedora, ABRT, openJDK, and MRG.
April 15 – Afternoon with Red Hat in Prague – the same event as in Bratislava, just talks were different: Fedora QA, Ceylon language, and QML.
April 17 – Red Hat Open House – another “day of open doors” in Brno offices of Red Hat. There were a lot of talks, programming contests, we held a F19 power management test day whose room was full all the time. I delivered two talks on RHT programs for students, community activities etc.
April 22 – Afternoon with Red Hat in Ceske Budejovice – it was our first time in this city and we were surprised how many students came and how interested they were. We talked on Fedora, Fedora on ARM, JBoss, OpenShift, and Modern Linux Desktop. It was probably the only Czech university which has a lecture room with RHEL (not CentOS).
April 23 – Presentation of Red Hat Thesis Topics at FIT BUT – we prepared another set of thesis topics for the next school year. Students can work on open source projects with us. At this event, we showed student what they could work on and tried to answer all their questions. BTW we have a new thesis management system, check it out 😉
April 24 – Presentation of Red Hat Thesis Topics at FI MUNI – the same event, just different Brno university.
April 25 – Red Hat Presentation in Bratislava – another event in Bratislava, in fact just one building away, a different faculty. I talked on RHT programs for students and community activities.
May 7 – Day of Industrial Partners at FI MUNI – career fair kind of event, we had a short presentation of Red Hat and then we were answering students’ questions about Red Hat.
And it’s not the end. On Monday, I’m going to EurOpen to talk on the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. And on May 21st, I’m going to LinuxTag 2013, probably the biggest Linux event in Europe. Life never stops 🙂
Brno hat 
