I have spent the last few days in the World Forum on Free Knowledge - a very interesting event held in Venezuela - in which I have met many old friends from all over the world. I am very glad they invited me again this year. It is always good to hang out with interesting people. :-)

This year we have dedicated a whole lot of time to discuss about communities, emerging Free Software trends and cooperative P2P technologies. One of the best things of this forum is the variety of people attending to it (developers, government employees, researchers and even students) and therefore the diversity of points of view. It is kind of surprising how many different reasons people have for supporting F/OSS (In fact, I have even found people who support it for reason I cannot agree with!).

I gave my talk on the OpenSolaris project: its community, development and technologies. Most of the people already knew it and many of them had even installed it or run one of the live CDs, so some of them asked a few interesting questions after the presentation - mainly focused on the licensing and business model.

Besides, I gave away a bunch of OpenSolaris starter kits (DVDs with 'live' distributions, SXCE and documentation), and frankly, I had a very good time doing so. Check it out: OpenSolaris at the World Forum on Free Knowledge. :-)

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? :-)

Santiago de Chile has been my last stop in the Latin America Tour. My original plans included Florianopolis (Brazil) as part of my route, but I have had to skip it in order to make it for the FSL 2007. It is a pity, I would have loved to visit Florianopolis!

The session in Santiago worked alright. It was slightly better than the sessions in Argentina in terms of the number of attendees, so it is an improvement from that point for view (I will write about it in my next post).

As in Cordoba, Bruno also brought his puppets, and we had lot of fun. People just love them! :-)

And we also had a morning free for a really quick visit to Santiago de Chile. It is nice city, I quite liked it. However, I have to confess it was not the kind of city that I expected: from my point of view, it is the most European city in Central/South America I have ever visited.

BTW, there are a few curious things about it: First of all, there are a million drug stores - at least three or four per block; there is a whole lot of dogs within the university campus; and finally, it seems that there are places called Coffee with legs which are some kind of mix between Hooters and a cafeteria.

I have been using OS X for a couple of weeks so far, and I have come to kind of like it. However, today I have discovered something that seems to be pretty broken to my understanding. Check out this screen-shot:

Under /Library/Printers it is got 3.7Gb of printer drivers!! Isn't that madness? It is about 1.4Gb for Epson drivers, 755Mb for Xerox, 688Mb for HP, 480Mb for Canon, and so on. Of course it is neat to have a bunch of pre-installed drivers, although to spend around of 4Gb only for printers drivers may be (cough!) too much. :-)

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! ;-)

   

The Latin America Tour goes on, and yesterday we spent the whole day giving a few talks in UAI and UTN Medrano, a couple of universities in Buenos Aires (Argentina). So far, this non-stop tour is being extremely interesting (but quite tiring as well).

Today shouldn't as stressing as yesterday. We will be heading to Cordoba (Argentina); although there is a little problem that is worrying me quite a little bit: it seems that the something is going on with the plane pilots here in Argentina and many of the scheduled flights are being canceled, so we might need to find another last minute way of getting to Cordoba if something happens with out reservations.

By the way, it has been very interesting to meet Gustavo (ghreyes) at my talk. He is one the most active contributors to the Spanish speaking community of OpenSolaris in Argentina, and even if we talked a million times by IRC, I could not put him a face. :-)

As usual, the pictures I took are available: Latin America Tour: Buenos Aires, and a few pictures of Buenos Aires.

I have just arrived in Buenos Aires (Argentina) after a couple of days in Montevideo (Uruguay). There have been many things going on, so before more things happen I would like to tell you about something that happened in the airport when I arrived to Uruguay.

Everything began when I was leaving Madrid three or four days ago. Right before leaving home I realized that I didn't have the address of the hotel in Montevideo and I was already late to take the plane, so I definitely did not have the time to try to find it out.

The best thing I could think of was to drop a line to two of my colleagues - who were already giving some talks in Brazil - asking them for the hotel address, so when I landed in Montevideo I could just check my mail and head to the hotel.

The funny thing is that when I arrived to Montevideo after a 13 hours flight, I tried to find a wireless hot spot, but there was no one functional. I tried in different parts of the airport, but either there was no WiFi, or the Internet connectivity simply didn't work.

At that point, I was in Montevideo's airport with no way of checking where my hotel was. Damn! I felt so silly :-) The best choice seemed to be to ring some of my colleagues so they could tell me the address of the hotel, but they were flying for Brazil at that moment and I couldn't reach any of them.

My last choice was to go to the Information Desk and ask them about where could I get Internet access to download my mail (I needed either SSH or IMAP), and here is where my luck changed and everything started to improve. The three girls who were working in the Information desk were extremely friendly with me. Seriously, they saved my day!

At the beginning they tried to get me access to one of the closed WiFi networks, but it didn't work. So after a while, they allowed me to get inside the booth and borrow one of their Ethernet cables, but it didn't work either, everything was filtered.

I suppose that, at that point (around 11pm), they realized that an increasing desperation feeling was invading me, so they changed the general strategy and started ringing all the hotels in Montevideo downtown trying to figure out where my reservation was made!!

Finally after 15 calls or so asking for a reservation on my name, they founded where my hotel was. I could not believe it!

So, today, we headed back to the airport to take a flight to Argentina, and I met them again, so I thanked them for everything they did for me. I know that there are not many people who would have worried so much for helping out a guy who forgot his hotel booking, and I am really thankful for that.

At the end, right before boarding the plane to Buenos Aires, we took this picture. It will be a nice memory about when I was lost in Uruguay but a few amazingly friendly girls saved me. :-)

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! :-)