I have just come back from Caceres (Extremadura) from the 10th edition of the HispaLinux conference. It has been good to be there, I have had the change of hanging out with old friends, to meet the new directors board, to give a talk on OpenSolaris and to participate in a couple of rounds tables on F/OSS developing and enterprises. It has definitely worth attending.

This edition has improved a lot from the previous one, actually. Here you have a group picture of the guess speakers with the conference organizers. I am glad to see the event growing and attacking people again. :-)

Yesterday I came back from Bogota - Colombia; I am glad to be back home! Of course it does not mean I didn't enjoy attending the conference in Colombia, but it is always cosy to be home, don't you think? :-)

The conference went alright. I gave a couple of talks: the first on how and why Sun is liberating software like OpenSolaris and Java (OpenJDK), and the second one on the Cherokee project. I know that I usually repeat myself when I am speaking about one of these conferences but I do think people liked the talks. In fact, we had quite a few very interesting discussions afterwards on what a F/OSS community is and how it ought to work.

So a few hours ago I uploaded a few of the pictures I took at the conference and during the time I could spent visiting Bogota - which is a very nice city, by the way.

I know that it is silly, but this image has made me laugh out loud. Check it out: "The power of Penguins" :-)

Seen at ffffound.

The first couple of days in Bogota have been great. The conference has been quite good so far: it has been very interesting to meet Alexandre Oliva for the Free Software Foundation Latin America, for instance. In fact, when I finished my talk on F/OSS and OpenSolaris he came up with a couple of very clever questions.

Besides, it is been quite enjoyable to visit the city (I haven't had much time for this though). There are a million things that are uncommon to me: food, many "weird" fruits and, as usual, many differences between our different Spanish word registers.

By the way, it is not the first time I eat something that I couldn't even imagine that could be eaten (for instance, grasshoppers in Mexico or Cuy - some sort of rat - in Peru), but eating ants here in Colombia have been a really unforgettable experience. In fact, it was quite shocking when I took the first one, they were much bigger than what I expected. Check how the ants look!

The Free Software Festival 2007 ended a couple of days ago - a fine event held in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - right after which I headed to the World Forum on Free Knowledge. It is a huge event held in Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela.

Today, the conference sessions have begun. So far the talk room have been pretty crowed, so everything seems to be working as expected. Tomorrow I will be giving my talk on "Software Liberation" (using OpenSolaris and OpenJDK as examples). I hope people will like it. :-)

The first few hours at the FSL 2007 have been great. I arrived to Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) yesterday late at night, so I could have just a few hours of sleeping before heading to the conference place.

By the way, when I was waiting in the Santiago the Chile airport to take my flight to Mexico I felt the earthquake that hit the city. Woww! It could be because I am not used to that kind of events, but I have to admit that it was pretty scary, actually.

So far, the most interesting thing about the conference has been to meet Chris Hofmann (Mozilla engineering director) and Robin Miller (from SourceForge). Both of them are very interesting people.. in very different ways.

By the way, today Chris gave his talk and I helped him with the translation. It was the first time I was doing something like that, and I have to say that it is not as easy as you could imagine. Actually, it is not because the language but because you need to remember all the speech for a minute or two and then repeat it trying not to forget anything. I guess that my golden fish memory has something to do with that! :-)

In my previous post I wrote about the Latin America Tour I have done these days and I said that I would talk about F/OSS and communities, and why I understand it is so important to allow the community to drive the organization of the events, whatever it could mean.

During the tour we have been giving a number of talks on Free Software, community work, OpenSolaris, Java - OpenJDK and NetBeans. But, besides that teaching I have learned a few things (which is something great). The most important of them is how important is to get the community involved in this sort of events and the huge difference that it makes.

Bruno and me were who had more experience working with open communities (Bruno is well known as the "Brazil's JavaMan"), so - even if the communities we have worked with have been different for quite a while - both of us understand its huge value and importance, and therefore we try to create a healthy community around the technologies we develop.

The Tour has visited Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, and right now it is heading back to Brazil. From my point of view it has been a very good experience: we have made many interesting contacts while we have instructed a good number of developers and students about open technologies. I would summarize it with a "Well done: Objective accomplished.".

However, as most of the times, there is room for improvement; that is not something negative though, because we have seen what the weak points were, so for the next time we will take good care to focus on those weaknesses and improve the overall result.

In my understanding, the community involvement is the point in which we will have to focus the most from now on. In this case (the Latin America Tour), the biggest effort would be focussed on the Spanish speaking countries, because AFAIK the part of the tour held in Brazil had a bigger community involvement.

Both Argentina and Chile were countries in which we didn't get the community as involved on the events as we should had to. That is something that happened not because we did not want to, but because the local organizers were did not think that it was so important.

Not all the events we organize make this mistake, though. For instance, the OpenSolaris Day is an event that will be held in Madrid that began its organization a couple of days ago with the best approach. It is basically a community driven even with which we - the community - can do whatever we want to, and Sun will support and found it. It is up to the organization team when, what and who. Isn't that great? So, even if the previous edition worked pretty well, I bet that this year it is going to grow quite a lot.. and that will raise my point.

IMHO, that is exactly how we ought to work for the rest of the events. For the next tour, the local communities should organize everything, and the Sun ambassadors should be part of those communities and help them out with the founding and infrastructure.

Does it make pretty good sense? If we can write a complex engineering project together, why couldn't we organize a conference together? In fact, doing so we could take advantage of the benefits of the community work, and we are supposed to have learned that lesson quite some time ago, haven't we? :-)

Today we had nothing scheduled as part of the Latin America Tour, so we went to visit the Cordoba city (Argentina) for a few hours. It is a nice city, we really enjoyed the walk through the city center.

In fact, it was specially funny because Bruno brought his puppets. Do you remember "Inside Jack"? It was a marketing campaign that Sun created a few years ago. Jack is a smart engineer with brilliant ideas who has to work with a marketing team, and.. well, it is going to be better if you watch it. Here you have the flash files I have been able to rescue: Inside Jack Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 4. :-)

So, one of the puppets we brought was Jack. We took many good pictures with him while we were walking Cordoba's city center. We had lot of fun, actually: there were kits who played with Jack and even kissed him. He visited a church, cooked empanadas and he even surprised us hitting on a girl. What a cool dummy! ;-)

   

My first day in Montevideo as part of the Latin America Tour has been great. Early in the morning, we went to ORT - a university in the city center - where we Bruno spoke about Open Source and Tim gave a talk on Netbeans and Java related technology.

Then, we went to El Mercado del Puerto to have lunch. I have to say that food is great over here; when they said that meat was good, I didn't think it was that good. :-)

And in the afternoon, we headed to the Faculty of Engineering at the Universidad de la República, where Tim and me shared about 5 hours talking about OpenSolaris and the Developer Tools (Sun Studio and the compilers). As far as people have told me, they liked the talk, but some of then expected something slightly more technical (I am thinking of adding a few technical bits for the hardcore developers in the next talk - tomorrow in Argentina).

And at night, we had some fun as well.. although I am quite sure we did not do any of the thing that you may be thinking we did. Here are some pictures: Montevideo, Nov 2007.

After less than a week in Madrid, here I am packing again. I will be heading to Montevideo (Uruguay) within a few hours.

It is going to be the first time I am in the city, so after my talks (on OpenSolaris related technology) I hope to have at least a few hours to hang out with my Uruguayan friends.

It is he first stop of what is going to be a month long tour through Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela; so even if I do know that it is going to be exhausting I bet it's going to be fun as well! :-)

A friend of mine just pointed me to a note in El Imparcial newspaper on the conference I gave at SmartDay 2007.

I am delighted to read that it had such a good reception!! :-)

The SmartDay 2007 has been a one day long Open Source focused event held in Guaymas, Sonora - Mexico. It has been one of the congresses I have attended these days (I have to write about the rest soon).

When I arrived to the congress early in the morning, I participated in a round table on Free and Open Source development model. It lasted about two hours, and I think people quite liked the discussion.

In the evening I gave my talk: "The Free Knowledge Era" in front of a crowed theater. It is a talk on the F/OSS basis, how the Internet has supported its development and the reasons why it is something important for people's personal lives and professional careers.

After the talk I took a ton of pictures with some of the attendees (it is amazing how friendly were people!), right after which we headed to have dinner: a few tasty homemade tacos. Yummy!

By the way, Guaymas is an amazing place. It is one of those really beautiful and quiet coast towns surrounded by mountains in which time goes by so slowly you can feel yourself moving in slow motion. :-)

Another successful congress ended in Puebla (Mexico) a couple of days ago: ENLi 2007: "The National Linux and Free Software Encounter".

There were around 600 to 700 people attending the talks, so even if the auditorium was quite big it was crowded during the talks. I am quite happy about having attended it, actually.

As far as I know, people liked the talk on F/OSS that I gave for the closure of the congress. That is sweet! Though, I am a little bit disappointed because they didn't laugh when I told them the best joke ever!! ;-) (which I cannot tell here because it has no translation to English).

Anyway, it has been a good conference that I have quite enjoyed. I will try to upload the picture here within a couple of days over here: ENLi 2007 album.

The first day of the OpenSolaris Developer Summit has been really interesting; there have been - literally - hundreds of interesting discussion taking place, most of them focused on the Indiana Project, Solaris modernization and IPS: the new package system.

We are many people attending the summit, so I thought it would be useful both for the attendees and the OpenSolaris contributor who couldn't come, to take a picture of everybody. In this way, it will be easier to link names and faces. Here you have the mugshots! :-)

Here I go again, heading to the OpenSolaris.org Developer Summit. It's going to be held at University of California, Santa Cruz on Saturday 13th & Sunday 14th October 2007.

Basically, it is going to be a two days long working session in which we will plan the next release of the Indiana Project. I am pretty sure we will have many interesting discussions on both the technical side (ZFS as root, partition sizes, packaging, desktop, etc) and the community side. I'm looking forward to it. :-)