Last week, my good colleague Gerv gently took me to task about requiring that videos submitted to the Mozilla Net Effects video program be licensed under the Creative Common NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (instead of an actual Free Culture licensed like Creative Common ShareAlike license or Creative Common Attribution license) . I thought about this for a while and got to wondering why I’d ever let fear of misuse overcome my experience and common sense.

Licensing and contract choices are often driven by fear and greed. We work, play, love and give in an …

Gerv, Frank, Mark and I have been discussing ideas around how people can turn open source experience into an asset for their resume. We’ve got some of our own ideas, but we want yours as well. Please blog, comment, email or ‘dent any one of us, or catch up with Gerv and Mark at FOSDEM.

My top three tips for making the best of your open source participation are:

1. Free your work and free yourself. Turn software into a platform for your career by contributing to free and open projects and by releasing your own work under free software and open source licenses. In addition to the well-understood collaborative benefits, you get to keep using …

I want you to tell me the story of how you got started with the Net.

Tell me how your passion was sparked and why it keeps coming to full flame.

Tell me why the Net matters to you, even after all of the long days, short nights and wrecked weekends.

I’ve been writing my story because I need to understand why I care deeply for what the Net is and what it means.

I want to read your story for the same reason.

Don’t hold out on me now. I can see your data trails in my server logs: a few hundred of you trudging in from RSS subscriptions, the PHP, Mozilla and MySQL planets, Boris’ …

In 2002, a short while after I started at MySQL, I saw Lawrence Lessig present at OSCON. The presentation was extraordinarily good and Lessig is a tremendously passionate, genuine and compelling orator.

I immediately revised my presentation style. I stole what ideas and style I could. While I was mostly presenting about MySQL and PHP at the time, the ideas served me well (though the style has at times fit me about as well as a young child fits their parent’s clothes.)

Five years have passed since then, and I have given a hundred or more presentations. Never have I presented as well as Lessig that night, but I still keep trying. In a few days, I am going to have to try a lot harder.
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I’ll be attending the Openmind conference from October 2nd to 3rd and will be giving a keynote at the event.

Openmind is being organized by COSS, an interesting Finnish Free Software and Open Source development agency that helps Finnish and Scandinavian businesses and projects use and develop FLOSS.

Other keynote presenters at the event (that readers of this blog may know) include Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems AS and FLOSS researcher Rishab Aiyer Gosh.

I also hoping that since Monty is in the area, he will also be able to attend.

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I just received word that my proposal (which was to present my Age of Literate Machines presentation) for FrOSCon has been accepted.

I’m pretty excited - the event should be fun and it will give me a good chance to see friends (including a good number of my German MySQL colleagues)

Ilan Rabinovitch let me know that the SCALE team is getting started on version 5x of the SoCal Linux Expo.

In past years, SCALE has been a great community event - the ratio of promoters to real Linux enthusiasts is low and the attendees are friendly. Also, like most other Linux conferences, attendees have a strong interest in many other FLOSS community issues and technologies, like BSD, Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Free Software licensing and so on. Hopefully I can attend this year (and can wear both my eZ hat and my Mozilla hat for the event).

The event will happen from February 10-11 and will be held at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Get more details at: …

The 3rd international conference on GPL v3 will take place in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd. The international GPLv3 conferences are part of a year-long public consultation process to update the GNU General Public License.

Speakers include Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, chairman at Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Georg Greve, President of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). Expert panelists from all parts of Europe, and from around the world will lead discussions on licence internationalisation, DRM, software patents, and adoption of the finished licence.

The current draft of the GPLv3 and resources explaining the background to the update are availble at http://gplv3.fsf.org/

The Conference’s schedule and further information will be published soon at
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At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway from June 24th to 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event.

Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event.

The event is meant to be as affordable as possible; registration is only 20 Euros, and simple food and a place to sleep are …