During this trip, I arrived to an interesting conclussion,
nothing really new, but it finally "clicked" for me. It is
interesting to note that different groups of people have very
different reasons for adopting free software/open source
software. Not everyone agrees on the needs for it.
For instance, recently we learned that the US administration is
interested mostly in free software for its reliability and
security. Third world countries and US corporations want to
reduce their licensing costs. Other countries consider the
use for free software a matter of national security; others a
matter of technological independence.
Some groups want to have the four freedoms promoted by the free
software foundation; some others only care about the particular
technical benefits, others want to use it as a vehicle to
distribute their software.
We all converge on the licensing and the basic guidelines for
what constitutes free software/open source software and we
agree to cooperate, because open source/free software has the
pieces required to have multiple parties participate. But the
different parties might not necessarily agree on the
objectives.
And I do bring this up, because I was asked a few times whether
I was an `Open Source' person or a `Free Software' person and
what was mi position on the debate.
I personally think that the distinction is silly and a complete
waste of time. I do have many different reasons for using and
developing Linux, Gnome and Mono, and they are not the same as
everyone else. Sometimes I care about freedom, sometimes about
security, sometimes about innovation, sometimes about the
gadget factor, sometimes it is nice to be part of a community.
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A group of Ximian users greeted me at the entrance of the
conference.
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The next step in the Gnome en el Sur was Montevideo. To go
from Lima to Montevideo I had to take a number of planes: Lima
to Santiago de Chile (2am); Santiago de Chile to Buenos Aires
(5am) and then Buenos Aires to Montevideo.
I did not get a lot of sleep that night, but being very tired
from the activities in Lima helped me get to sleep for a few
hours.
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I traveled with
Enrique's wife which happened to be heading to Buenos Aires on
the first two airplanes. She researches Asian cultures. Since
I had been reading Saramago's Gospel
according to Jesus Christ and pondering who exactly are the
Palestinians in Israel, I had developed a theory of mine: the
Palestinians are the same people that populated the area two
thousand years ago, but have switched religions as invasions
came and went.
She confirmed my theory: both palestinians and israeli
decendants are semites (surprise!) and gave me some details on
the origins of words that both populations use. Very
interesting.
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| jun-25 |
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I arrived to Buenos Aires from Santiago de Chile early in the
morning with very little sleep. But turns out that even if
American Airlines and Lan Chile are partners of the One World
alliance, American Airlines forces you to go through
immigration and customs even if you are a passenger in
transit.
Forms had to be filled, immigration cleared, and customs
cleared. Only to find out that I lost my airplane by five
minutes. Thank you American Airlines.
Loosing this plane was particularly annoying, because there
are no more flights from the Buenos Aires international
airport to Montevideo that day. I had to go to the Aeroparque
airport (40 minutes away) to catch a different airplane.
Cultural note: when you make changes to your airline tickets,
airlines feel the need to charge you a hundred dollars for the
change. This is a pressing need that they can not avoid, but
when it is the airlines fault (like, say, this time), they do
not reimburse you anything, or give you a hundred dollars.
Of course the employees that you deal with are not the ones to
blame for the company policies, but I wish I was not
completely at mercy of the airlines will. Worth reading:
`Plane Insanity'.
If I had known that I would be for so long in Buenos Aires, I
would have set something up with the local users group.
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The one good thing about missing the airplane was a small
restaurant in the airport that was cooking `Lomitos' in
the airport. I ordered a `Lomito Completo' which is a
sandwitch with two steaks of Lomito, ham, cheese, and a
egg on top with french fries on the side.
It is not only the best food I ever had in an airport,
but one of the most delicious sandwitches ever.
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I could not believe an airport could have such delicious
food. The restaurant also had wine, which I did not want to
have to avoid further dehydration.
Rodolfo and Haroldo picked me up at the Carrasco airport
in Montevideo, Uruguay. I was at this point completely
exhausted by the lack of sleep from the trip from Lima.
I had a meeting with the founders of a company called Genexus and I got to see
their product.
They produce software to ease the development of database
applications. A developer only defines the schema of the
database, and hooks up the rules, the user interface and the
reports they want. What is particularly interesting about
this tool, its that it provides an evolution path to evolve
the databases: as you make changes and introduce new
relationships the software moves the information from the
existing tables to new tables and creates and populates them
for you.
The software is a multi-plaform software, it is not free
software, but it is genuinely interesting.
I did a presentation of GNOME 2 in the University in Uruguay
shortly after the previous meeting, this was in what used to
be an old church inside a convent. The talk was well
attended and we discussed issues of free software, Gnome, and
Mono. If people are interested in my OpenOffice slides, I can
mail those.
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I got to meet my
friend Pablo that I have met a few times at previous Usenix
events.
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After the talk, a group of people went for dinner to a
vegetarian restaurant. But being in Uruguay and eating
vegetarian food was not ideal, so we split off and went
to eat some traditional food from Uruguay. This
picture was taken late that night.
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| jun-26 |
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After catching up some sleep (very little) Haroldo and Rodolfo
showed up at my hotel with some Mate to drink and took me to
our next destination: Unesco.
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I met with Cláudio Menezes at the Unesco offices in Montevideo
which is a Regional Adviser in the
Communication and Information Sector.
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Before departing to the next city, we had
lunch at the downtown market. Here you can see some of the
delicious food we were about to have.
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My next destination was Puerto Alegre. Pretty tired at this
point after all these meetings, but I had a lot of fun.
Puerto Alegre was the last destination of my trip.
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At my next destination Marcelo would pick me up at the
airport. I almost do not make it into Porto Alegre, as there
was no time to get a visa for Brasil, but various guys in
Puerto Alegre managed to expedite my visa application.
Arturo had been in Puerto Alegre before, when he was working
on the Red Escolar project in México. The people from Procergs in Porto
Alegre had taken some of the ideas from Arturo's work and
continued it. One of the major changes from Arturo's project
to the one being deployed in Rio Grande do Sul is that they
have switched to Debian as the distribution for their own
Scholar Network project.
Marcelo had also arranged a pretty active agenda in Puerto
Alegre, but for now, it was time to sleep some.
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| jun-27 |
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As GNOME 2.0 was being announced in Ottawa, we did our own
introduction of Gnome at the UERGS. The
State University of Rio Grande do Sul. This university is
has deployed in all the desktops Gnome.
They want us to change the default in Gnumeric, Abiword and
OpenOffice to store the files in Office 95 format. This is
important because not everyone uses the same spreadsheet all
the time: some people prefer Gnumeric and Abiword for quick
documents, and some other prefer the larger OpenOffice
applications.
They are using a customized version of the Conectiva Linux
distribution that includes the Ximian Gnome.
 | I met with Vagner from Conectiva,
and hoped that Conectiva would include more support for
Gnome in their distribution. We are interested to work with
them. |
Marcelo had arranged a meeting with the vice-governor of Porto
Alegre to discuss the impact of free software and Gnome.
Marcelo reports directly to the vice governor office and he is
a liason with the UERGS.
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That afternoon I did a talk on Mono, and some bits about Gnome
at the Federal University. The talk went pretty well, it was
mostly a technical presentation on Mono: the history behind
it, and the reasons to develop it.
I was exhausted at this point.
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The last stop of the day was a meeting with Marcos Manzoni and
other representatives of Procergs the state
software development company. They have a very nice piece of
software called Direto
GNU which is a web-based groupware solution written in
Java.
The question of building a protocol handler for calendars to
Evolution came up. We have to research what is the status of
the CAP protocol, because the last time we looked at that at
Ximian, it was still a protocol either in flux or broken.
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Later that night, we went for a traditional dinner at a
churrasco restaurant. Here you can see me dressed as
a RS Gaucho
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| jun-28 |
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Today I was invited to do a talk to a group of people at one
of the banks in Porto Alegre, Banrisul. I did the same Gnome
presentation that I had done the day before. After the
presentation was over, I saw some of the work that the bank
has been doing with free software.
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The ATM machines that they started rolling out in 2000 are all
Linux-based systems, and I had a chance to see the ATM machine
boot: the traditional Linux boot sequence is shown, followed
by the X startup and finally the ATM application runs.
Not only is the bank rolling out ATM machines with Linux-based
systems and their own software, but the terminals that are
being deployed are running Linux systems as well.
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Marcelo and I later on went to meet with some of the Debian
developers from Porto Alegre in a Churrasquería, the food was
most excellent. First you begin by getting some salads from
the salad bar and some rice and beans, and then you wait for
your choice of meat to arrive. The waiters bring different
kinds of cuts to the table, and you pick the pieces you like
the most.
We created an interest group: Gnome-RS (Rio Grande do Sul) to
start developing and contributing to the Gnome effort.
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Yerba Mate in the central market in Porto Alegre.
Remembering Arturo, I ordered a Guaraná drink (people remember
Arturo fondly, not only for his passion for the Guaraná, but
also for his crazy pupilo-adventures in town).
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Porto Alegre is the home for the World Social
Forum. Whose motto is: "Another World is Possible". They
have taken this principle to practice with the
Participative Budget.
Basically, the people decide what the budget should be spent on
and the government just executes on the decisions from the
people (Unesco report)
