Certainly not the first. China, Iran, North Korea, Singapore, Turkey, Vietnam comes to mind. Though in these countries, there's no opt-out option. And I'm sure I forgot many other countries though.
I do agree with all of your points, and the fact that Beijing would have been a much better place, but I don't agree that plane ticket price is the blocker. There's also the high speed train from Beijing to Guanzhou as an option btw.
Of course that will not work. Very few people who live and work in Beijing are going to fly down to Hong Kong to attend some stupid Summit. Hold the Summit in Beijing and you might have some impact and get some participation. Hold the summit in Hong Kong and you cut that to 1/10.
Ah, finally, a good post. Mod this up!!!
It's a 3 hour flight down and a 3 hour flight back, air tickets cost about 2 weeks worth of wages for the average IT guy.
There, you got it very wrong. The cheapest flight I can find on english.ctrip.com is about 2700 RMB (including air port taxes, one way). If you decide to go through Shengzhen (which is next to HongKong, connected with a very cheap train), it drops to 1300 RMB. A decent salary in the IT, and especially if you are able to work on Openstack, would be about 10 times this amount. So, that's probably half a week of work that we are talking about. That's affordable. Plus a lot of the Chinese OpenStack community is in Guanzhou. I agree it should have been in mainland for other reasons which you stated below (and facilities for such an event, in both Beijing and Shanghai, are much better as well)
And you need a special travel document which most people in China don't have, so they'll have to apply for it. And if you don't have a Beijing ID then Chinese people need a visa to travel to Hong Kong. And the hotels in Hong Kong are $100 minimum per night. Hotels in Beijing are as cheap as $25 per night.
I wonder how you heard about this WiFi story. Everyone uses pretty standard WPA2 over there. This might have been yet another thing that the government failed to impose.
As for the fragmentation, well, I don't believe this will happen. People in China just need to get their hands on OpenStack, and that's far from done. Yet, being able to fork is beyond what I think is possible.
What both HP and Rackspace have experienced shows the exact opposite thing: getting out of the safe path of the trunk can be a very costly choice that you are going to regret later on. They both reported on this fact.
RedHat just announced their own OpenStack distribution, and several others like Canonical (Ubuntu), Nebula, StackOps, Piston, Rackspace, etc, they all have their own distributions of OpenStack.
You forgot about Debian. As the maintainer of the packages (working full time on them), I would really appreciate if you try to remember me!:)
They are all trying to make "easy" the installation and customization process.
...especially since I consider my packages the most easy ones to install (thanks to debconf things)!
I'm getting a little bit tired of this anti-Chinese constant racism when we have to deal with online stuff. Most of the SPAM is sent from USA, though there's always someone to claim it's coming mainly from China (which is completely false these days, China only ranks nine on the top 10 spammers). Here, we're seeing the same thing. USA is the country with the biggest government sponsored hacks, and by far. Also, it's well known to all Chinese that the government is spying on its people. The government doesn't even claim not to do it. In USA, even when the gov. is caught with the hand in the basket, they still claim the basket doesn't exist. It's been really disgusting to see major companies doing a deception campaign claiming that the NSA doesn't have "direct access to our servers" when the PRISM program isn't about that (it's about tapping on the major peering of the Internet and listening what goes through the wire).
Yeah, exactly. Mozilla asking for approval for every single patch is a violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines paragraph 3 as seen here: http://www.debian.org/social_contract and which every DD has signed off. Mozilla is evil here, not Debian.
Gitorious may be nice, but it's really painful to install. It has so many components. Until it is available directly from a distribution (like Debian, since I know there's some ongoing efforts for that...), then I'd advise to stay away from it.
Nobody forced him to change the name. The DPL asked him to stop confusing his users into believing that donations would go to the Debian project. That's very different. And then he twisted it, and changed his domain name, so he wouldn't be bothered. I'm quite sure users will still get confused. Probably that's what he wants.
People use his services to solve a problem with the core Debian distro, and apparently he runs his service well enough that people continue to rely on his stuff. The only way to "get rid of him" is to offer a better solution to the underlying problem, not to play games with names.
Such a better solution (which would be: work more with the Debian Multimedia team, and make his repository not needed anymore, with everything directly available in Debian) have been attempted multiple times. Though he didn't seem to care doing that. Please don't blame Debian here.
I think the fight over the name, which caused the name change, was a mistake with consequences that could have been predicted.
Absolutely not. All Debian Developers were aware of what was going on, and none thought it would end this way.
You might be aware that there are other sites using the word "debian" in the URL. For example www.debian-administration.org. Though we don't care much about them. But here, we had someone working against Debian, and the way he acted shows the DPL did the right thing, especially seeing how much the owner of the site didn't care for its users.
Even if it's the fault of the sysadmins who messed with their systems, finding a non-intrusive way to help them from getting nailed is in everybody's long term interest (except maybe Microsoft or other non-Linux vendors... and even they want a health Internet). In the worst-case scenario that this domains gets acquired by bad people and users get burned by this, it will make UNIX/Deb look bad, cause harm to various individuals, and potentially even lead to more spam or malware.
Would you hold Microsoft liable for any software that a user downloads from any random site? I'm sure you wouldn't. So why in this case, Debian would be? This makes no sense.
I don't understand. "Package duplication" should not be a problem for any decent package manager, and it's not. Apt pinning allows you to choose which repository you get your packages from.
That would be right if the d-m.o repository was configured correctly (but it was not), and respecting the version numbering of Debian so you could upgrade correctly (but it did not).
And the second amounts to nothing more than weaselly lawyering up. Quick poll, everyone who loves FOSS at least in part to avoid that pro-corporate "protect our IP at all costs" bullshit, raise your hand? Yeah, thought so.
The issue wasn't only trademark. It was mainly that Debian users are fooled into believing that this was part of Debian, when it was not, and that this repository was breaking things badly.
Slashdot Mirror
Without reading any of the previous comments
Yeah, right... You are only the 32497234th person to do that joke because of not reading previous comments...
It's funding the advertising campaign on slashdot.
Certainly not the first. China, Iran, North Korea, Singapore, Turkey, Vietnam comes to mind. Though in these countries, there's no opt-out option. And I'm sure I forgot many other countries though.
I do agree with all of your points, and the fact that Beijing would have been a much better place, but I don't agree that plane ticket price is the blocker. There's also the high speed train from Beijing to Guanzhou as an option btw.
Of course that will not work. Very few people who live and work in Beijing are going to fly down to Hong Kong to attend some stupid Summit. Hold the Summit in Beijing and you might have some impact and get some participation. Hold the summit in Hong Kong and you cut that to 1/10.
Ah, finally, a good post. Mod this up!!!
It's a 3 hour flight down and a 3 hour flight back, air tickets cost about 2 weeks worth of wages for the average IT guy.
There, you got it very wrong. The cheapest flight I can find on english.ctrip.com is about 2700 RMB (including air port taxes, one way). If you decide to go through Shengzhen (which is next to HongKong, connected with a very cheap train), it drops to 1300 RMB. A decent salary in the IT, and especially if you are able to work on Openstack, would be about 10 times this amount. So, that's probably half a week of work that we are talking about. That's affordable. Plus a lot of the Chinese OpenStack community is in Guanzhou. I agree it should have been in mainland for other reasons which you stated below (and facilities for such an event, in both Beijing and Shanghai, are much better as well)
And you need a special travel document which most people in China don't have, so they'll have to apply for it. And if you don't have a Beijing ID then Chinese people need a visa to travel to Hong Kong. And the hotels in Hong Kong are $100 minimum per night. Hotels in Beijing are as cheap as $25 per night.
Who planned this?
As if the Chinese gov. was able to fork such a project as OpenStack. Lots of laughs reading this over here reading this.
I wonder how you heard about this WiFi story. Everyone uses pretty standard WPA2 over there. This might have been yet another thing that the government failed to impose.
As for the fragmentation, well, I don't believe this will happen. People in China just need to get their hands on OpenStack, and that's far from done. Yet, being able to fork is beyond what I think is possible.
What both HP and Rackspace have experienced shows the exact opposite thing: getting out of the safe path of the trunk can be a very costly choice that you are going to regret later on. They both reported on this fact.
RedHat just announced their own OpenStack distribution, and several others like Canonical (Ubuntu), Nebula, StackOps, Piston, Rackspace, etc, they all have their own distributions of OpenStack.
You forgot about Debian. As the maintainer of the packages (working full time on them), I would really appreciate if you try to remember me! :)
They are all trying to make "easy" the installation and customization process.
...especially since I consider my packages the most easy ones to install (thanks to debconf things)!
Quite not. French people use the English wording "Self-Service". Libre-service means that it's gratis.
Software freedom has nothing to do with convenience, I believe RMS broadcasts the message enough so that everyone should know.
And in fact: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000027678782
I don't know if he can write in English, but what is for sure, is that he can't read French. The decree only removes disconnection from people that didn't secure their lines, as per http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do;jsessionid=FCB2F144F0CB66EDF871AB7AD7F8932D.tpdjo14v_1?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006069414&idArticle=LEGIARTI000022393991&dateTexte=29990101&categorieLien=cid though file-sharers still can be sentenced to be disconnected.
Priority is nice, though mandatory would be even better.
At Google, data is most of the time stored in more than one continent.
Like on many occasion, the word cloud is missuses here. It really is software as a service (or SaaS) that we are talking about.
I'm getting a little bit tired of this anti-Chinese constant racism when we have to deal with online stuff. Most of the SPAM is sent from USA, though there's always someone to claim it's coming mainly from China (which is completely false these days, China only ranks nine on the top 10 spammers). Here, we're seeing the same thing. USA is the country with the biggest government sponsored hacks, and by far. Also, it's well known to all Chinese that the government is spying on its people. The government doesn't even claim not to do it. In USA, even when the gov. is caught with the hand in the basket, they still claim the basket doesn't exist. It's been really disgusting to see major companies doing a deception campaign claiming that the NSA doesn't have "direct access to our servers" when the PRISM program isn't about that (it's about tapping on the major peering of the Internet and listening what goes through the wire).
Probably not 1TB, but the whole of the python modules maintained in the team are stored using SVN. That's quite a lot. And Git wouldn't play well with that much. That's 520 packages currently: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=python-modules-team@lists.alioth.debian.org
That being said, the only reason why we still continue to run with SVN, is that nobody is willing to make the effort to switch everything to Git.
Yeah, exactly. Mozilla asking for approval for every single patch is a violation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines paragraph 3 as seen here: http://www.debian.org/social_contract and which every DD has signed off. Mozilla is evil here, not Debian.
Aside of GitLab, also consider Gitorious.
Gitorious may be nice, but it's really painful to install. It has so many components. Until it is available directly from a distribution (like Debian, since I know there's some ongoing efforts for that...), then I'd advise to stay away from it.
But then, the official repository does not carry lots of software that are prohibited by US laws... Well, not the entire world is subject to US laws.
Exactly what software are we talking about here? These days, there's pretty much everything you need from Debian main.
By forcing a name change
Nobody forced him to change the name. The DPL asked him to stop confusing his users into believing that donations would go to the Debian project. That's very different. And then he twisted it, and changed his domain name, so he wouldn't be bothered. I'm quite sure users will still get confused. Probably that's what he wants.
People use his services to solve a problem with the core Debian distro, and apparently he runs his service well enough that people continue to rely on his stuff. The only way to "get rid of him" is to offer a better solution to the underlying problem, not to play games with names.
Such a better solution (which would be: work more with the Debian Multimedia team, and make his repository not needed anymore, with everything directly available in Debian) have been attempted multiple times. Though he didn't seem to care doing that. Please don't blame Debian here.
I think the fight over the name, which caused the name change, was a mistake with consequences that could have been predicted.
Absolutely not. All Debian Developers were aware of what was going on, and none thought it would end this way.
You might be aware that there are other sites using the word "debian" in the URL. For example www.debian-administration.org. Though we don't care much about them. But here, we had someone working against Debian, and the way he acted shows the DPL did the right thing, especially seeing how much the owner of the site didn't care for its users.
Even if it's the fault of the sysadmins who messed with their systems, finding a non-intrusive way to help them from getting nailed is in everybody's long term interest (except maybe Microsoft or other non-Linux vendors... and even they want a health Internet). In the worst-case scenario that this domains gets acquired by bad people and users get burned by this, it will make UNIX/Deb look bad, cause harm to various individuals, and potentially even lead to more spam or malware.
Would you hold Microsoft liable for any software that a user downloads from any random site? I'm sure you wouldn't. So why in this case, Debian would be? This makes no sense.
I don't understand. "Package duplication" should not be a problem for any decent package manager, and it's not. Apt pinning allows you to choose which repository you get your packages from.
That would be right if the d-m.o repository was configured correctly (but it was not), and respecting the version numbering of Debian so you could upgrade correctly (but it did not).
And the second amounts to nothing more than weaselly lawyering up. Quick poll, everyone who loves FOSS at least in part to avoid that pro-corporate "protect our IP at all costs" bullshit, raise your hand? Yeah, thought so.
The issue wasn't only trademark. It was mainly that Debian users are fooled into believing that this was part of Debian, when it was not, and that this repository was breaking things badly.