Here is the list of papers (with abstracts, in random order) we have accepted for the International track of the forecoming Workshop on Libre Software during the FISL in Porto Alegre (Brazil), betw. 19th and 2st of april.Congratulations to the authors.
Update : The schedule is available on-line on FISL’s site : http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/7.0/www/?q=node/158
27/03/2006
Accepted papers for International track of WFS 2006 in Porto Alegre
12/03/2006
Share your keyboard and mouse between several computers : synergy
I just wanted to signal one very cool tool : synergy. It will allow you to share your mouse and keyboard between two computers. For example, I have a desktop and a laptop. Sometimes I have to work on the laptop and would like to use the desktop’s keyboard (much nicer for typing) and its mouse (instead of the touchpad of the laptop : less errorprone). Synergy allows me to switch from one screen to the other just by moving the mouse out of the bottom or top sides of the screens, without effort.
Really a cool tool. Thanks to Denis for letting me know of this tool. Eh, why don’t you give it a try ?
There are alternatives to this setup, like using VNC, but synergy can be very handful, and is pretty simple to setup. Hope this helps.
11/03/2006
Wiki Picolibre de retour sur la toile
Le wiki de Picolibre a subi une panne indépendante de sa volonté. Il est de retour (en lecture seule pour les non-membres du projet) sur http://proget.int-evry.fr/portail/TwikiPage&wikiweb=Pftcr.Picolibre&wikipage=WebHome, hébergé sur la plate-forme ProGET (laquelle représente un point de référence actuel pour le futur de PicoLibre). Bonne consultation (oui, c’est très lent 
)
10/03/2006
Motivation for contribution to libre software projects instead of free-riding
We have tried and emphasize the strategy that organisations can adopt with respect to the maintainability of the in-house applications based on libre software, in a previous paper. We profess that contribution is in no way mandatory, and free-riding is definitely possible for users of libre software. But at the same time, contribution to upstream projects may be one best way to ensure parts of the maintainance effort can be “outsourced” upstream. Still, it may not be an easy task anyway. For instance, it can be difficult to weight on the decisions of upstream developers and have your modifications integrated in the codebase.
It seems that we’re not the only one to have published on this idea recently. Similar arguments are given by by Kris Ven, Herwig Mannaert and Jan Verelst of University of Antwerp (Belgium), according to the presentation they have made at Calibre’s FOSDEM room : Participation of Independent Software Vendors in free and open source software projects (they also published a paper on the same subject). They argue from the standpoint of ISVs instead of an organisation who wants to use libre software for in-house needs, which was our case. But actually I was not much convinced that this were not two similar situations actually. Even though they may have developped the product as an ISV, that seems to be somehow a very custom-made product, and not one product used by so many different and generic entities. Maybe other cases of ISVs publishing more generic products may be more interesting to add to their point. Still, I’m sure that’s a very good finding anyway. I’ll try to keep an eye on bibliography for such pleas for contribution.
9/03/2006
Quality Assurance on Debian : 2 interesting talks at FOSDEM
I’ve noticed two interesting talks made at the FOSDEM recently about QA on the Debian project (well, second one, not especially focused on Debian, but Martin speaks from experience with the Debian project of course), whose slides, I think, are really worth reading :
- Nobody expects the Finnish Inquisition, or: confessions of a Debian package torturer, by Lars Wirzenius,
- and Quality Issues in Free Software Projects, by Martin Michlmayr (University of Cambridge, UK)
First one is probably more humoristic, although more technical 
In any case, there is surely room for much improvement on systematic Quality Assurance in Libre projects.
Monitoring developper’s activity to draw figures for estimation of effort and developpers productivity
In his presentation “Measuring developer activity. Motivation and some approaches“, our collegue Juan José Amor from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos introduced an attempt to use some new tools to monitor Libre (or not) developper’s activity.
The goal is to be able to establish a good calibration of metrics allowing estimation of developpers activity and productivity. Indeed, developper’s activity counted only in numbers of commits made in CVS, or of lines written in these files committed, may not reflect reality. Sometimes, a commit of one single line may have necessited hours of debug…
I think that this approach is indeed interesting. I hope it can be pursued without too many problems with the privacy of individual developers.
Maybe some new tools like beagle, for instance may be helpful in observing developper’s activity… let’s see what will come out of this research. Maybe I’ll volunteer too for testing them, and estimating what kind of productivity I can measure on myself.
3/03/2006
A developper’s HOWTO for researchers surveying FLOSS
Here’s an interesting HOWTO Wouter Verhelst has written to give advices to researchers studying Libre Software.
I hope his guidelines don’t apply to research done by my collegues … anyway, I thought it was worth mentioning it in Planet Floss Research
