( source flickr, copyright faerie)

Next weekend on Sunday, February 7, we'll have a full day of Drupal talks at the 10th edition of FOSDEM, Europe's biggest, free-est and open-est software conference.

FOSDEM, is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to share knowledge about Drupal.

The presentations schedule for the devroom was published a week ago on http://groups.drupal.org/fosdem. It features interesting speakers such as Robert Douglass, Károly Négyesi, Roel de Meester and Kristof van
Tomme and even more interesting subjects as mobile device design, AHAH, eID and Views 3. Everyone is invited to attend the presentations.

On Friday the giantesque beer event kicks off the conference. For Drupalistas there is a sprint on Saturday in Zaventem.

Please join, I have been to a couple of FOSDEM's and if you ever attended an Oreilly or Gartner con, you are in for a surprise :-)

FOSDEM takes place at ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Yesterday I tweeted something some might feel offended by on my account. Since it contains both a strong opinion and some strong language, I will not repeat it here. But I will explain my strong opinion. The point of the tweet was that Drupal is Drupal. It is an open source CMS, moving towards a "CMF". My definition of open source consist of three elements:

1. Code
2. Community
3. License

Without one of these items, you will not have a (successful) open source project. You need code, you need an open source license and.. you need a community! Of these 3 elements that make up open source, the "community" part is the one that is the hardest or even not to define. We are all parts of communities; in our families, our volunteer work, our church, our village. Everybody is daily part of a community. And as stated I can not define what a community is, but the closest thing I can come up with is people helping people, people caring for people and people loving people. And within a community there is mutual respect and benefits to help, care and love for free. Note that the word community is derived from Latin, a combination of "cum" (together) and "munus" (free gift).

When these three elements get together, great things can happen! As Drupal showed us for the last 8 years. The code is far ahead of the competition, proprietary or open source. The license is strict and thereby we do not suffer from "Joomladisation" and our community is real. Real people helping, caring, loving real people.

This does not mean that one can not make money with open source projects, people have been doing so for decades. This does not mean that people making money cannot be part of the community, companies have been active in the bigger open source ecosystem longer then the term "open source" exists.

I am not to sure I agree fully with Linus on Open source without commercial interests = crap but it is for sure that there is room in any community for commercial help, care ... and even love.
But just as there is not one company claiming our church, volunteer work, family or village, there is not one single company that can claim a (healthy!) open source project. Just as Redhat doesn't / can't claim GNU/Linux, no company can claim Drupal. And more important, there is not a company that claims the opensource project Drupal. Not even.. there goes the A word

Acquia with close ties to the Drupal community. In a good way. They have been sponsoring the Drupal project in money and time and maybe in the last two years more then any other company has in the previous 8. But Acqiua is not Drupal, they are a company with good ties to the community, helping, caring and loving other people (and their customers). But they are not Drupal.

And every time I read about "Acquia, the commercial arm of Drupal" my hair raises. Drupal is not MySQL or SugarCRM. Drupal is Drupal. And it does not have a commercial arm. It has many commercial arms, the list on http://drupal.org/drupal-services is just a very small part of that. There must be thousands of people contributing to Drupal core, modules, documentation and to lesser extend themes. Many of them making a living proving Drupal related services. And we do want to keep this healthy system of helping, caring and loving. And there is room to make money providing Drupal services. But there is no "Drupal INC".

Note that Acquia never claimed that position and I do not think they ever will. They made it clear what Acquia is, they reacted on my tweet and on the ZDnet story and make it clear in their press-releases. It is lazy journalist that -in this realtime web- want to have an easy digestible text for their readers. Meaning no room for nuances, no room for explaining and no room to tell the complete story.

So that is why I told the complete story, in a 140 characters tweet.

On googlesocialweb.blogspot you can read about a nice module that Google made for Drupal, Friendconnect.

Friendconnect is

"... an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications."

(Wiki)

More information about FriendConnect can be found on Google's site and a live demo can be found at globant.

Though this is a nice open standard and a nice module, there are two downers IMHO that show that Google doesn't really get the Drupal community or has another agenda:

1. They house the code on their own servers, with own issue queue at code.google.com. Sure they are free to do so but the strength of Drupal is that all modules are on one place, not all around the web.
2. They have licensed this code under the Apache license. All Drupal code and thereby all Drupal modules -and to some extend themes- are released under the GPLv2 or higher. Read this FAQ about the license on d.o for some background. The Apache License 2.0 is compatible with the GPL v3 (not 2!) and since you can accept version 3 of the GPL when downloading Drupal, legally they are in teh clear but it would have been best if they released this under GPLv2 IMHO

Still, nice work Google!

update
Heine Deelstra (hint: lead Drupal security team) warns NOT to use this module on production site at his blog. Something about the quality of code, tweetsource. See Google, if you would have used GPL and drupal.org we could have solved this issue via the proper channels. Now we have to use the public issue tracker of google.code.

Since a couple of weeks I have a nice Mac Mini (unboxing) hooked up with EyeTV to my telly so I can record, timeshift, commercial skipping and do all the other PVR stuff from my chair. Yes, I have been using MythTV the couple of years, but the box was more under maintenance then in production. So I went the easy way and went Apple, like I will do for all my client computers (still using Linux for servers!). The Mac mini is cool and I use other standard apps as well, especially Plex. I like easy and it integrates with my iPhone so I can watch recorded and live shows on my iPhone as well (picture).

Plex, iTunes, iPhoto and EyeTV make up 99% of the programs I use on my mini. And in fact, since iTunes can be access from Plex, as well as iPhoto can, I should only use EyeTV and Plex. If you do not know about Plex as a Apple user, shame on you. It is the best thing since sliced bread, including an appstore, modules, themes and a /beautiful/ user interface. And free as in open source as well.

Still, watching TV and switching between applications does not give the right usability to my girly (and to lesser extend :-), my kids). So I would really like to see EyeTV and Plex integrated. There has been lots of talk about integration, for over a year or so. But no code was ever made available. Up to a couple of weeks ago!

Yes, there is actual Open Source code that you can use to access your EyeTV recording and live TV within Plex! Read this thread at the plexapp forums!

Not that the code is very alpha and does not have any EPG integration yet. But still, this is so cool!

Here is a short install howto from the forum pages (not complete

1) Ensure Snow leopard is up-to-date - 10.6.2

2) Ensure Plex is up-to-date - 0.8.5

3) Ensure EyeTV is up-to-date - 3.3

4) Ensure Xcode is up to date -3.1

5) Ensure iPhone streaming is enabled under EyeTV>Preferences

6) Install MacPorts from http://www.macports.org/

7) Once Installed -normall diskimage- , run Terminal from Utilities>Terminal.app

8 ) At the prompt "sudo port install ffmpeg" (without quotes)

9) Typ your password

10) ffmpeg takes long to install about 30 minutes to d/l and install each component.

11) Install Imagemagick from Macports using similar command in the same Terminal "sudo port install imagemagick" (without quotes)

12) This can take another 15 minutes to install after supplying system password

13) Installed the EyeTV/Plex Plugin 0.2 (se link above) OR LATER!

14) when the plugin is installed, a cytv.app(a modification) should be opened together with eyetv. in the dock click on cytv to have this app active. then in menubar click on "EyeTV - CyTV-Install Plugin".

15) Right click (ctrl+click) on cytv in the dock, and choose "show in finder". then right click on the app and choose "Show Package Contents". navigate to Contents - Resources and rename ffmepg_custom to ffmpeg_custom_old and ffmpeg_custom_0.5 to ffmpeg_custom.

16) Unable to rename these files? Pressed Apple+I, in the Info screen at the bottom of this window is the Permissions option, change the permissions of my user on these files to read+write, I was then able to rename both files.

17) change rights with the following 2 lines in terminal (use your username instead of $USER):

chmod a+x /Users/$USER/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-ins/EyeTV.bundle/Contents/Helpers/*

chmod a+x /Users/$USER/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Plug-ins/EyeTV.bundle/Contents/Helpers/CyTV.app/Contents/MacOS/*

This should do the trick. But if you are not that good with Unix best to wait until this is beta or production code. All I need now is an asterisk integration and I will never leave my TV :-)

(source)

Sad to see that there are no woman on the list, but still a nice list: Most Influential People In Open Source.

As part of MindTouch’s 2009 open source best practices research, we asked C and VP level Open Source Executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. Over 50 votes from Executives in Europe and North America were cast to determine the 2009 edition (note: they could not vote for anyone in their own company). What makes this list remarkable is that industry insiders were the judges.

And on number 5 we have Dries: Dries Buytaert created Drupal in 2001 and has led the software project ever since. He has guided it through rapid growth and to widespread acclaim. Dries is able to motivate the burgeoning community of users and developers by communicating ‘the big picture’ while paying careful and measured attention to the technical details essential to good software development. These two factors have been crucial to Drupal’s popularity and success to date.

While I do think that this list -like any other list- is debatable and biased to end users applications (with MySQL as an exception) and is missing people (Mark Shuttleworth should be on the first spot), it is good for Dries ego but far more important, good for Drupal.

How do you spell momentum?