Openmind at Tampere

Openmind conference is again at Tampere, Finland today. The first keynote talk was from Quim Gil of Nokia, presenting N900 running Linux-based Maemo5. The talk mentioned a lot of openness thing, but I resisted my temptation to ask about ”how about loading the battery” when it was mentioned that you don't need to run Maemo on N900. Kudos again for the most open mass-market phone product on the market, despite there still being various serious shortcomings. Very far from Openmoko of course.

Video about using N900 as the presentation device as well at Youtube.


Openmind continues for today as a kind of prelude to the larger Mindtrek conference.

Update: here's one more photo of Teppo Sulonen, presenting ”City of Tampere IT solutions and Open Architecture”.

0.0% :P

timo@duuni:~$ vrms
Non-free packages installed on duuni

tangerine-icon-theme Tangerine Icon theme

1 non-free packages, 0.0% of 2418 installed packages.

CC-BY-SA used in tangerine-icon-theme is actually free according to RMS/FSF, just not that endorsed. I do know myself that CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are free, but not everyone does - FSF doesn't directly endorse Creative Commons licenses since they have also so severely non-free licenses with the non-commercial and no-derivatives requirements, and it's very easy to mix the non-free licenses with free licenses.

Anyway, it's non-free only according to Debian, since they have concerns about CC-BY-SA anti-drm portions. For me, CC-BY-SA 3.0 is fine enough (tangerine is 2.5) and Free by all means. I also think the (not uniform) anti-drm position within Debian is a bit two-edged. Not allowing drm so that users are not restricted should be ok in the same sense it's not allowed to make free, copyleft (eg. GPL) code non-free. I don't think anti-drm sections are always good, or that's always needed for all software (not all software needs to be copyleft either, it's just means to get freely usable software for the users). But done in the right way it's good to take into account these all kinds of things that can be done to restrict free software's free usage, including drm/patents/etc. GPLv3 got it quite well done, even though not all parties - wanting restrictions - can use it.

See Definition of Free Cultural Works for more about licenses for content.

Additionally to that one package I usually tend to have mplayer, apparently not now. But it's also free software, and it probably should be reworked so that it's in universe in Ubuntu too, since it's in main in Debian nowadays. It was originally put to multiverse because of the patent problems and even possible non-free code, but since a) potential patent problems don't make a software non-free right away (everything is potentially problematic in the current software patents world - it means more if some patent is actively enforced) and b) Debian has worked on the problematic parts, it would be beneficial not to mark mplayer non-free anymore in Ubuntu.

I use OpenJDK for Java without any problems, and Gnash for Flash with a little more problems ;) but I just don't want that Adobe trash on my machine.

FreeRunner as an audio player ++ (Intone)

Debian just got elementary library from E17. That means Intone is now compilable on Debian, which in turn means I have a lot easier time switching/adding songs than using my old gnome-mplayer when using Neo FreeRunner as a digital audio player! I can easily now browse the web or do other stuff without the audio skipping, as well, as Intone sets the process priorities nicely.

I like the separation of using finger-friendly applications for "basic" stuff and then using applications needing more accuracy (like mtpaint, pypennotes or just terminal) with a stylus.


It would be nice to see also Intone in Debian repositories at one point. Furthermore, I use tremor enabled MPlayer which is not the default and not available in Debian repositories in any form.