Web2.0 workshop ahead in Rennes in early July

I’ll be visiting Rennes (France) in early July for the « Les étés TIC de Bretagne » conference/workshop, which promise 3 days of gathering around Internet and Web2.0 usages in Britanny.

This will be an oportunity for our Contrib 2.0 project to have a workshop, and advance a bit more our research agenda.

In between, I’ll have xen setup to demonstrate some novelties of PicoForge, I hope.

Report from FOSTEL 2007

I’ve had the chance to attend the FOSTEL (Free Software/Open Source Telephony) summit last week.

It was a very interesting conference, gathering lots of different projects.

There were people involved in VOIP, protocols, PBx, IM, collaborative applications, porting Linux to various devices (including phones/smarphones, PDAs).

I can’t remember everything, but here are some bits for the record :

Some of the interesting talks I remember is the one of Sean Moss-Pulz from FIC about OpenMoko and the FIC Neo1973. Very interesting ideas like some viral transmission/flashing of phones OS via some phone holding images 😉 Besides the joke, he explained that many companies seem interested in managing the software stack deployed on a fleet of mobile devices inside the company, kinda custom distro for employees phones ? That may make sense, and explain interest of some for libre software phone stacks. All components in OpenMoko will be libre software, and the only part left proprietary should be the GSM driver stuff : guess what, operators/carriers don’t seem to want you and mess with the GSM protocols 😉

Interesting info : the Telenor operator and partners (including Trolltech) apparently want to provide free/gratis access to their GSM network for libre software developers ! Very valuable contribution indeed. More details at the places mentioned in Knut Yrvin’s slides.

We’ve been discussing new user interfaces in a BOF, also, which gave me the oportunity to talk about Internet rabbits (nabaztag/tag) as new kind of devices using new user interface models (RFID tags, voice recognition, etc.). Funny that these folks were not really aware of that wonderful toy.

I will try and update this post when I get pointers to new interesting presentation slides.

Study on improvements to GForge, and implementation, made in the Morfeo project

The Morfeo project in Spain has produced a study report on the improvement of GForge, which compares GForge and other software forges. The document, in english Study of Improvements and New Functionalities for Gforge, is quite interesting to read. It is completed by Improvements in Gforge (copy in PDF), which lists the implementations that have been made accordingly in Morfeo.

The initial version was issued in Spanish as Estudio de Mejoras y nuevas Funcionalidades para G-Forge (attached to the bottom of that page) under GNU FDL, and has been translated for the QualiPSo project.

I should note also that we’ve been informed of this document by discussing with other french speaking people interested by forges on the “forges” list created with the “Overcrowded” project people. I hope that through this open collaboration forum, developpers of GForge will have had the chance to know about the document.