GNU/Linux Matters blog

The most regular followers of GNU/Linux Matters‘ work will have noticed that publicly-visible activity has almost stalled over the month of October. There are important matters which keep us occupied behind the curtains.

As any activist or voluntary worker will surely know, one does not always have the resources to keep working at no cost forever. Of GLM’s two project leaders, one is combining non-profit work with international studies, and the other will formally leave the organization altogether within a handful of weeks, for personal and professional reasons.

This does not mean that GLM is shutting down tomorrow morning. First of all, development of our linking platform is well and progressing, and the translation community is still present and active. Secondly, we still have financial resources to keep the servers running for a comfortable amount of time.

We are, however, looking to pass the legal ownership of the websites over to another organization. This would not only free the only one of us living in France where the non-profit is legally registered, but most importantly, give the new eventual project leaders the full freedom and means to develop the project in the direction of their choice.

In the immediate weeks, we will likely be shutting down our advertizing service, nonbreakingspace, which has not contributed to the organization’s funding in a satisfactory way. Another suspended project is the T-shirt shop, this time purely due to lack of time. But in the meanwhile, all servers and development services remain up and running.

Again, this is neither an upcoming downtime notice, nor (yet) a formal goodbye. We are interested in any proposals from existing formal non-profit organizations who would be interested in taking over the project. You can contact us at committee at our domain name - we kindly ask for your understanding that we have extremely scarce time resources.

Thank you very much, and we shall keep everyone updated on how the situation evolves.

Olivier,
on behalf of the GNU/Linux Matters team.

In two weeks, we will be holding a booth at the Paris Capitale du Libre event in the French capital. The conference attracts a crowd of 3000 —in spite or because of its assertive name— including a number of prominent players in the French and International freedomware scene.

The event will also see the announcement of the laureates of the Lutèce d’Or awards, in which we hope to qualify as the best project for promoting free software.

We won’t be giving a talk this time, but we’ll be very busy staffing the booth and looking for corporate sponsors. Our new T-shirt is already in the making, the printing shop reported, and should make its debut at the Paris event.

We’d be delighted to meet and talk to anyone who passes by (the entrance is costless, but registration is required). Particiipants and translators, if you happen to be there, please stop by and we’ll get you a drink!

Granted — it is all in French, it wasn’t national television, and it didn’t last long enough to cover many details. But it is all still worth boasting about: here are two minutes and fifty seconds of GNU/Linux Matters fame. During the RMLL 2008 in Mont-de-Marsan where we held a booth, a camera crew from FreeNewsTV, a French web TV channel, stopped by and interviewed the only one of us who spoke French.

(The video is a 26 MB Ogg file, viewable with VLC or any other decent video player.)

Given the hurried pace, the continuously moving camera, some disarming questions, and the speaker who consistently mis-pronounced every name he could read, it wasn’t such a bad performance after all. We’ll try hard to be interviewed in English, next time.