This is really a big community drive for all you users, supporters, and companies to donate money so that all us free and open source developers may get together to have a productive face to face meeting. The last two LGM’s have been invaluable to coordinate, consolidate and create the future in a free and open source way.

For the next 16 days, we want all the supporting projects to put a note about this pledge drive right on their front page of their website! You can use the badge below as well to help us raise money!

You can also help by spreading the url to our pledgie campaign: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/613

And, don’t forget to digg this story: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Support_the_Libre_Graphics_Meeting_2008

More from the Pledgie.com page:

What is the Libre Graphics Meeting?

The Libre Graphics Meeting brings together developers and users of free software graphics applications, such as the GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, Krita, the Open Clipart Library and more.

In its third edition, the organization needs your help! You can support your favorite graphics application, and ensure that the travel costs of as many volunteer developers as possible are paid to ensure that this edition of the conference is more successful that its predecessors.

Where will the money go?

We have kept costs associated with infrastructure to a minimum. Over 80% of the conference budget will be spent on subsidizing travel and accommodation costs for developers.

A non-profit organization

All donations will be made to the conference organizers via the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)3 tax exempt US-based non-profit, so donations will be tax deductible for US taxpayers. We would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for their support.

With the help of Hubert Figuiere, Nathan Yergler, Peter Miller, Scott Shawcroft, and Jason Kivlighn, I’m happy to finally announce a new version of liblicense. Summary: Now this is really worth using.

For those just joining us now, liblicense is a library to make it easy to add CC metadata support to desktop and server side software you write. The biggest reason to choose liblicense rather than handling CC metadata yourself is that we (huge thanks to Jason and Hubert) have written handlers for many file formats. We use Hubert’s Exempi library that is derived from Adobe’s Free/Open Source XMP library.

The two major driving factors on this release were making it crash less and providing a stable interface (API and ABI) for others to build upon. Earlier versions of liblicense would crash on invalid files. Also, crucially, this release has metadata inside the library, called “shared object versioning,” indicating what features the library supports.

As always, you can reuse this under the terms of the GNU LGPL. It’s interoperable with our metadata panel for Adobe applications, supports embedding into files ranging from JPEG to MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, and is available from SourceForge.net. It is written in C and comes with bindings for Python and Ruby. Finally, thanks to Venkatesh Srinivas for his tireless help.

I haven’t had as much time to blog about this project. I’m super proud of the work done by Scott, Jason, Asheesh, Nathan Y., Hubert, Peter Miller and many others! Thanks guys.

Now, onto the big business! Let’s get this library added to KDE 4.1, the Gnome desktop, and some other example apps like Eye of Gnome (EOG), Rhythmbox, Inkscape, etc. Is anyone interested in this? We need to get it plugged-in. Currently, KDE folks are planning on including in KDE 4.1, so I’d like to talk more with other about getting it into Gnome apps, and more specific apps to drive usage and development of this app. Also, we want to get liblicense integrated into OpenMoko, as liblicense creation happened in order to enable content license read/write on al our devices…ebooks, mp3s, etc, that have their licenses inside.

BTW, liblicense comes with an awesome command-line program called license. All it does is allow for getting and setting of license information on files on your desktop!!! It handles content right now, but there is no reason it can’t handle other things…like source code, etc…just need developers!!!

Most importantly, happy 1 year anniversary to Lu for being married for one year (to me)! Its taken a massive amount of engineering to get here right now and to have some degrees of freedom for our lives, so pretty happy about that overall!

Now its time for me, my mom, dad, Lu and I to take 24 hour train to Guangzhou…geez, I miss my 14 hour battery now

Time to get sentimental and see some amazing country-side while my real imagination comes true. Time to hack on OpenMoko and Open Clip Art Library while on the train

BTW, while waiting for my parents at the Beijing International Airport, I decided to break from that activity to find the atm. While walking towards it, out from the domestic terminal came the the worlds tallest man!!!

I stopped dead in my track and like the other Chinese folks around me, pulled out my phone and took a picture!

I will write more about this, but for now, I want everyone to know that myself and lu are spending the next few months (until end of May 2008) in China as our main base where I’ll continue to work for Creative Commons doing BizDev and Community Management, and will keep pushing on all my other projects. BTW, Lu and I still live in San Francisco. Our home-base is there, but we want to lock down our Chinese-base now

So, if you are in and around China: Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo and so on, please do shoot me an email and lets get things (more) cooking.

For now, I’m going on vacation until right after the new year and will emerge and first off head to Workshop on Asia and Commons in Taiwan January 17. If you are in the region, it will be a brilliant meeting that will entail OpenMoko folks, Sony folks, Mike Linksvayer, and so many more people working on building the commons.

In the meantime, check out this great video made by a famous hiphop artist in Korea with video made by an artist in the community to explain Creative Commons to others:

In other news, OpenMoko is getting lots of developer love now with a well working phone dialer and more.

I wonder if OpenMoko was approached by the Google Androids, and how this is seen to shake out? I notice on the list that HTC is listed as a member of the Open Handset Alliance, and is a direct competitor to OpenMoko’s backer, FIC.

Similar to the OpenSocial announcement, I hope that there is room for open standardization between the large players so that users and developers don’t get crunched in the business warfare

UPDATE: Also, its important to not be naive with either. Here is a nice quote from Tim O’Reilly about how Google’s OpenSocial initiative doesn’t go far enough:

While I like the direction of Google OpenSocial, not only may Google be too late, as Mark argues, I don’t think they go far enough. A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building “social applications” misses the point. We don’t want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn’t about a social UI. It’s about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application. Some of those applications may have a minimal UI, like Google’s breakthrough search app. OpenSocial doesn’t give us any of that. Ajax widgets are a halfway house, an attempt to sandbox the kinds of applications that can be created. And that will be the downfall of OpenSocial. If all you can build are Facebook-like applications, Facebook wins.

And a littler further on…

So, no, it isn’t too late for OpenSocial. But it is too late if Google frames the problem too narrowly. Imagine a desktop “operating system” where the only APIs were those that allowed you to build desktop UI components, and gave you no access to deeper levels of the system. No one would take such a platform seriously. You couldn’t develop real applications. Yet Google (and others) have been pushing the idea that APIs to Javascript widgets are sufficient. Google made a major wrong turn when they withdrew their SOAP APIs in favor of the gadget approach.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the lightweight accessibility of gadgets. But it’s clear that Google has fallen into the Microsoft trap once referred to as “the strategy tax.” Google wants to keep too much control over what their developers can do. And that’s the beginning of the end for them.

UPDDDDATE: And finally, check out Dare Obasanjo’s assessment of Google’s OpenSocial vs. Facebook.

ASIDE: In the end, I’m mega-happy that T-mobile has joined on. Hey Deutsche Telekom (with a K), when are you going to get 3G+ in the USA? Did you forget that everyone else has had it for 1+ years now!

So, I flashed and updated my kernel, rootfs and u-boot to the latest and greatest. All works except the interface is squished into an approximately 200 x 100 pixel window with the UI Starting image below all of this. Of course, I filed a bug and hope this gets resolved. In the meantime, I’ll just re-flash the thing every weekend now that I got my openmoko hacking workflow figured out and try to do my part by filing bugs and so forth to keep on things…sooooo soon I will have my open phone and chuck this POS phone I have now.

Regardless, I got my OpenMoko to dial out and left I nice message on some phones That is cool

I’ve spent some time helping to advocate OpenMoko, pushing on some various projects like liblicense at Creative Commons, which is to help get licensing into the desktop for devices like the OLPC and OpenMoko, and believe it or not, I’ve stayed out of the down-n-dirty software hacking of either OLPC or OpenMoko. Today though I got an itch to burn some time (that I don’t have) on getting my OpenMoko up to date…I’ve had it with my crappy T-Mobile Dash!!!

First thing is I went to the OpenMoko wikit and first ran into the nastay web of information, and got stuck there first to clean up the main wiki page with a nice clean table approach that Ryan Lerch has done on Open Clip Art Library and Inkscape, and I have copied lots of places since.

I next went to the Getting Started page, which led me to where I needed to be, the USB Networking page. From here, I found that I needed to setup iptables on my gentoo box (I call it futurebox…) and just use ScaredyCat’s gta01 connection script. So, that is simple and everything. After all this, I can now just run ./gta01 on my system, then boot up the OpenMoko (GTA01B_V4), and then ssh root@192.168.0.202 and just hit enter once the password is asked, since there is none!

Then, I expected to get my OpenMoko all up to speed, since I met a nice OpenMoko dev in Taiwan who flashed my phone to a semi-new OpenMoko image. I ran:

ipkg update && ipkg upgrade

And, rebooted the device and bam, looks ike the distro dies on starting up matchbox on the neo daemon and some other problems with the recent package updates

So, I hopped over into the #openmoko chat channel and asked around for some questions, which Rod Whitby so graciously answered. While it seems that the OpenMoko-specific code in the distribution, Angstrom, has some broken code committed to it, from the likes of my update, I’m not convinced of this (and didn’t look deep enough to talk about this affirmatively).

Regardless, the status update of how to get your OpenMoko working as a phone with the latest builds, seems to be these steps outlined by Rod Whitby:

Here’s my recipe for current image boot and gsm registration success:

1) Get into u-boot console by stopping the bootloader with the AUX
button and using ttyACM0 on the host. Remove “console=ttyACM0,115200″
from bootargs_base

(This tip from Harald in http ://bugzilla.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=788#c10)

2) ipkg upgrade from buildhost to the latest versions of all packages.
(You might need to ipkg remove -force-depends libmokojournal2 and ipkg
install libmokojournal2-0 if your starting from a very old rootfs)

3) Build and install from SVN revision 2946 for openmoko-dialer2 (this
revision fixes a bug which stops you from being able to dial).

4) Restart gsmd in /etc/matchbox/session

5) You can also comment out the “load-sample startup” line from
/etc/pulse/session if you need to not have the reboot wake up your 2yr
old daughter …

Yes, that’s the current state of the GTA01 software - you have to go
through all these hoops just to be able to reliably make a phone call
after boot.

– Rod

I’m not writing this to complain, but am hopeful that the OpenMoko team and any contributors have their sites locked on these key ideas:

• Never commit broken code to the development tree, esp. don’t pull this into a distribution. Make this the law.
• Get the key goal of your project accomplished as fast as possible. For OpenMoko I would say this is to make a phone call (Yes, could argue that just getting ssh access is key, but I think getting this thing to be a useful phone is key to integrating into all developers and peoples lives…the more people using it as a phone, the more people who will hack on it)

Ok, I didn’t have enough time to do Rod’s method to get my Moko working, so that means I’m back up to my neck in more CC work and not more time on all my other projects for a few. Hopefully though when I come up for air again, I’ll get my OpenMoko working as a phone and chuck all these other junk phones out the window.

OpenMoko, the world’s first integrated open source mobile platform, released the artwork for their phone interface under a CC BY-SA 3.0. It is important to note that the software stack on the OpenMoko tries to completely run on Free Software, so that an owner has the freedom to do what they like with their OpenMoko hardware. Sean Moss-Pultz, project lead states this about the OpenMoko mobile interface:

Personally, I feel that one of the most important areas for this project
is the development and exploration of the mobile user interface. The
human-machine interface is the intersection of art and technology. Great
interfaces blend the visual with the technical. They balance simplicity
with complexity. Often times, I feel, really great new interfaces are
not immediately intuitive. They are not instantly natural. In fact, I
would even argue this can be detrimental to improving interface design.
If an interface is to be superior it must be different. Therefore it
can’t be intuitive, that is, familiar. A better metric, perhaps, is the
learning time it takes until the interface feel’s natural and intuitive.

Now that we have freed phones, everyone can contribute to an improved
baseline interface. This is our collective challenge. Can we create
something truly different? Can we lead this incredibly important field?

This is super cool and underlines some other projects Creative Commons has been working on this summer, such as liblicense, a software library for handling content licensing on various desktops (gnome, kde, olpc’s sugar, etc). One of the considerations for liblicense, in addition to adding licensing to the OLPC, is for the OpenMoko.

While Creative Commons is focused on providing the world with free content licenses, we also spend a good deal of time developing tools to support this endeavour. Stop for a minute and consider what a device like OpenMoko or OLPC would be if you can’t get access to great content, the archives of human knowledge, free and open content? Also, what about how these devices are also content recorders now? One should also be able to put this content up on a site like flickr or blip.tv simply and easily. LibLicense helps with this goal. It is a great project that you will hear more about in the ongoing days.

Hi, I’m Scott Shawcroft a Creative Commons technical intern and a student at the University of Washington. I’d like to tell you about my project but will start with a bit of a preface. Sorry its long, I’m excited. I’ve been a fan of Creative Commons for a few years now. I watched the original Get Creative video in awe. A few months earlier I discovered GNU/Linux. Having a free (in both senses in my mind) operating system at my disposal felt immensely empowering. The collaboration of people around the world enabled by the Internet. Wow. I was introduced to a new world by broadband internet. (CD isos are huge in dial-up times.) To top my discovery of free software I discovered Free Culture. People collaborating across borders in hopes of expressing ideas in an endless variety of ways. Audio, video, photography, poetry and scientific research all released with ’some rights reserved’. Again, wow. The web was blossoming with license data, the GNU GPL and others on Sourceforge and Creative Commons licenses on Flickr. The web was going somewhere. The desktop was going… nowhere.

While the web had a way of denoting and acknowledging an author’s intention, the desktop had no such thing. No easy way to say, “This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.” There was no easy way to ask, “How can I use this file? What does the creator allow me to do?” Once off of the web, the files were on their own. Away from all of the comforts of the creator’s website in the big mess of files we call a desktop computer. When would this all change? When will a license be as ubiquitous as a last modified date?

Both the original Get Creative video and in the newer Wanna Work Together video emphasize the fact that upon the fixation of an idea in a tangible form its author gains a bundle of exclusive rights formally known as copyright. Each and every file on each and every computer created by someone has rights associated with it. Upon creation of those files, the user has a copyright for each one. To counter this automatic copyright, a desktop-centric fundamental way to release those given rights is needed.

I’m happy to announce that this is about to change. With great thanks to Jason Kivlighn, Jon Phillips, Nathan Yergler and every license author I’d like to point you to liblicense, the first small and shaky step towards universal license tracking on the desktop. What we’ve created is a library to assist in tracking and tagging file’s licenses. Our intention is not to create the means for rights restriction but to ease the process of informing users about the rights granted by the author of a particular file. We’re not in the restriction business. We’re in the information business.

However, this is a very small step and there are many more steps to go. Liblicense is in need of much love. Kind of like the teenage years; it still has some things to get sorted out before it matures. Also, its a bit lonely. There are many cool companions to it which have yet to be written. As I wrote earlier, we’re planning on venturing into the world of Sugar for the One Laptop Per Child project. That still leaves much unexplored. What about applications? Sure, the desktop will know about licenses. But what about music players, feed readers, desktop publishers and text editors? All of those applications are in the business of ideas. Shouldn’t they display the rights to the information they are dealing with? Imagine finding a song you love using Amarok and finding out you can share it with your friends. Or imagine finding a brilliant poem on a blog through Liferea you can base a video or song off of. Cool. I’m excited.

One last thing, liblicense is, well, kind of skinny. To continue the teenage analogy you are probably sick of, liblicense is the skinny kid who could use some bulking up. While Jason (my esteemed colleague, former roommate and great friend) and I are trying our best to get liblicense to bulk up, we could use your help. We’d like liblicense to support embedding license information into all of the file types known to man. I’m serious. All applications and even the kernel of the operating system should have license information embedded in them. While some formats have semi-standard ( and I say semi due to the lack of application of said standard ) methods for embedding license, others just plain don’t. Those issues need to get resolved before we can support every file format known to man. I know what you are thinking, “It can’t be done. He’s intentionally exaggerating.” Well, you are wrong. Again, I’m serious. Every file format can be supported, its just an issue of how. And an issue of how can be solved. We just need your help. The power of collaboration knows no bounds.

For more information about liblicense visit the project page at http://www.creativecommons.org/project/Liblicense. If you are running Linux (other platforms planned) and would like to try it get it here. If you would like to help develop liblicense or talk with/get help from the developers join us on irc.freenode.net/#cc or the mailing list cc-devel@lists.ibiblio.org. Thanks.

I haven’t really blogged much about the development work I’ve been pushing at Creative Commons, but suffice to say, setting the default and per-item license for content on the phone should be simple.