https://agateau.com/tags/canonical/feedPosts tagged canonical2013-10-29T16:54:12+01:00Aurélien Gâteaupython-feedgenhttps://agateau.com/2009/exciting-changeExciting change!2009-02-26T21:00:00+01:00<p>My professional career is about to change one more time... In two weeks I leave <a href="http://www.openwide.fr">Open Wide</a> for <a href="http://canonical.com">Canonical</a>, joining the Desktop Experience team as a KDE developer.</p>
<p>I spent some good time in the <a href="http://www.os4i.com">OS4I business unit</a> of Open Wide. In the jungle of consulting companies, Open Wide is a human-sized company and a nice place to work (especially if you like Japanese food!)</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I just could not ignore the opportunity of getting paid to work on what has become an important part of my life for quite some time now: KDE. And now that I live one hour from Paris, the possibility of working from home made the position even more enticing.</p>
<p>So, that's it, yet another job change. I am looking forward for the new challenges! <em>(hmm... who said "Notifications"?)</em></p>
2009-02-26T21:00:00+01:00https://agateau.com/2009/kde-at-solutions-linux-2009KDE at Solutions Linux 20092009-04-07T22:00:00+02:00<p>From the 31th of march to the 2nd of april, the yearly Solutions Linux trade show held in Paris. Of course, KDE was here.</p>
<h1>Day 1</h1>
<p>Sébastien Renard (KDE French translation coordinator) and I installed the KDE booth. It was a bit minimalist: one A2-sized KDE logo, two chairs, one table and two laptops, but at least we had a booth this year (last year we failed to book a booth in time and had to ask a friend booth for some area to hold our laptops...) We even had 150 Kubuntu 8.10 CDs to give (<a href="http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/990-A-Team-at-OpenExpo-2009,-Berne-Switzerland.html">Sorry Markey</a>, maybe I got all of them?).</p>
<p>Sébastien is a power user of the Kontact suite, so it is always impressive when he demonstrates Korganizer because he can show visitors an agenda packed with several years of real meetings. He can also demonstrate a KMail setup with 6 different mailboxes, some of them using ssh tunnels to fetch their content, all graphically configured from within KMail.</p>
<p>This year though, his Kontact presentation was a bit different when it comes to TODO lists. He often ended up demonstrating... <a href="http://yokadi.github.io">Yokadi</a> :). Not surprising, given that Sébastien is Yokadi most active contributor these days (I need to catch up, otherwise he will soon have more commits than me :) ). One of his tasks for the show was in fact "Convert as much people as possible to Yokadi"!</p>
<p>In the afternoon we received reinforcements as Gaël Beaudoin joined us to manage the KDE booth, helping us handling the crowd of curious users, charming them with KWin goodness and other 4.2 niceties.</p>
<p>On the bad side, I was supposed to spend half of my time on the Canonical booth, but completely failed at it and spent all day on the KDE booth...</p>
<h1>Day 2</h1>
<p>Kubuntu stickers were delivered for the KDE booth, yay for goodies!</p>
<p>Equiped with my brand new Canonical shirt, I managed to work on both booths this day (and the day after), spending 2 hours on each one. It was great to get to know some of my new colleagues. I had a nice chat with one of the sale managers, and discovered he is actually a KDE user. It seems KDE is popular among Canonical employees too!</p>
<p>I also had the occasion to try various netbooks running different versions of UNR, Ubuntu Netbook Remix. There is quite a few interesting things in it, I especially like how the title bar of maximized windows moves <em>inside</em> the GNOME menu, leaving more vertical space available for the application.</p>
<p>An interesting thing I realized while demonstrating UNR is that people are more opened to new user experiences on a netbook because they expect it to behave differently than a regular laptop or desktop. This means netbooks are really a platform where Plasma could be used to its full potential and provide attractive and innovative interfaces.</p>
<p>In the afternoon I joined the crowd following the crazy <a href="http://gcu.info">GCU guys (fr)</a> demonstrating against <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Hadopi">HADOPI law (fr)</a>. Lots of fun!</p>
<ul>
<li>Zombi butchers ready to cut your connection!
<ul>
<li><a href="http://frlinux.net/pictures/sl09/slide_34.html">http://frlinux.net/pictures/sl09/slide_34.html</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li>The butchers hijacking a conference to spread the word:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://frlinux.net/pictures/sl09/slide_35.html">http://frlinux.net/pictures/sl09/slide_35.html</a></li>
<li><a href="http://frlinux.net/pictures/sl09/slide_36.html">http://frlinux.net/pictures/sl09/slide_36.html</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>Videos: <a href="http://ghantoos.org/misctuff/boucherie-2009/">http://ghantoos.org/misctuff/boucherie-2009/</a></p>
<h1>Day 3</h1>
<p>Everybody felt a bit tired on day three, except visitors :)</p>
<p>While chatting a bit with C., Canonical booth responsible, our conversation went on GCU and I started to explain the subtleties of HADOPI as well as narrate the most memorable GCU actions from last years. When I told one year they visited all professional booths, hit alt-tab on exposed machines, and boo-ed the booth if they were running Windows, C. was surprised and asked me "But it's an open source trade-show, how comes they were running Windows?". This is coming from someone who is not from a technical service. If only everyone on the show had the same way of thinking...</p>
<p>Since our GNOME friends took advantage of a few minutes where we left the KDE booth empty to cover our table with GNOME stickers, we had to strike back today. Sebastien thus proceeded to stick Kubuntu stickers at various places of the booth including under the mouse... Yes, we are supposed to be grown-ups :). In the end we had fun <strike>trolling</strike> discussing both project release announcements, comparing GNOME Shell with Plasma and all kind of constructive dialogs you can expect from tired geeks...</p>
2009-04-07T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2009/back-from-all-hands-uds-karmicBack from All-hands + UDS Karmic2009-06-02T22:00:00+02:00<p>Except for some (now considered) <a href="http://agateau.com/2009/05/21/pissed-off-deeply-pissed-off/">minor issue</a>, All-hands and <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDSKarmic">UDS Karmic</a> were both amazing!</p>
<p>I came back exhausted, but I feel like I really know the company much better now. I am also very happy with the progress we made concerning the cooperation between Canonical Desktop Experience Team and the Kubuntu community. More on this soon hopefully...</p>
<p>Social events were great as well... my favorite moment is probably sebas, rgreening and me performing an interpretation of Barbie Girl at the karaoke... hopefully this was not recorded (I do not dare visiting youtube anymore)</p>
<p>I hacked a bit on some cool stuff too... First, I experimented with Solid to create a picture importer for Gwenview. You can find a proof of concept of this on <a href="http://github.com/agateau/gwenview-importer/tree/master">github</a>.</p>
<p>It's very simple: it asks you for an event name, and then proceed to import all pictures to <code>~/photos/<year>/<event>/</code>, renaming them according to the exif shoot date. When done it asks you whether you want to remove the pictures from the device. The final version will probably also give you the choice between importing all pictures or only a selection. This will be useful when you have pictures from multiple events.</p>
<p>It's written with PyKDE right now, but I will probably have to rewrite it in C++ before integrating it in KDE.</p>
<p>I also hacked on another tool, but I'll blog about this later...</p>
2009-06-02T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2010/a-week-in-portland-oregonA week in Portland, Oregon2010-02-16T21:00:00+01:00<p>I spent the first week of February in Portland, where I attended Canonical Platform Sprint for Ubuntu Lucid. We got some good work done on the DBusMenu front. You can read about it on <a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/02/10/kde-application-indicators-in-gnome/">Jono</a> and <a href="http://castrojo.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/application-indicator-update/">Jorge</a> blog posts.</p>
<a style="float:right;" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/4360962410/" title="Directions at Pioneer Square de Aurélien Gâteau, sur Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4052/4360962410_7932d029a6_m.jpg" alt="Directions at Pioneer Square" height="180" width="240"/></a>
<p>I was pleasantly surprised by this town and really enjoyed it. It is very different from Dallas where I went for Ubuntu Developer Summit: Buildings are not too tall, they have very good public transportation ($2.30 for a two hour tramway ticket!) and they are quite active at recycling.</p>
<p>What pleased me even more is that the town has a strong Japanese influence. I should have expected this, with it being on the west coast and one of her sister cities being <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapporo">Sapporo</a>, the 5th largest city of Japan. Almost every restaurant we went to had Nigiri, Maki, or Sashimi in their menu. I especially enjoyed the restaurant of the Paramount Hotel, which featured creative rolls with funny names like the Evil Thaï Roll or even the Ninja Turtle Roll! I ended up with a <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/4360200009/in/set-72157623318236795/">Catterpillar Roll</a>, which was really good.</p>
<p>We also went to <a href="http://groundkontrol.com/">Ground Kontrol</a>, a cool bar featuring classic arcade cabinets and chip tune music... It was nice to play Raiden 2, 720°, Marvel vs Capcom 2, 1943, House of the Dead or being lectured on Championship Sprint by my manager :). I heartily recommend this place!</p>
<p>I took a few pictures, you can find the semi decent ones <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/sets/72157623318236795/">on Flickr</a>. I only carried a small Sanyo Xacti CA6: its compact size makes it quite handy (I like to travel with only a single carry-on bag whenever possible), but it is not a very good still camera, especially with its hard-to-press shoot button, which makes it difficult to keep the orientation correct. I have an old Nikon Z3 at home, which is nicer but a bit bulkier, so I may buy a small camera for my next trip. Any model you would recommend?</p>
2010-02-16T21:00:00+01:00https://agateau.com/2012/into-the-blueInto the blue2012-04-11T22:00:00+02:00<p>Hot on the heels of <a href="http://blogs.kde.org/node/4565">Jonathan</a>, let me announce I am leaving Canonical at the end of the month, joining Blue Systems to work on KDE and Kubuntu.
I am quite excited by this new adventure, and looking forward to the beginning of next month.</p>
<p>Since I will be working 5 days a week on KDE and Kubuntu, I am going to stop asking for donations. Thanks a lot to all of you who supported my work during this period.
</p>
2012-04-11T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2013/my-stance-on-claMy stance on Canonical CLA2013-10-29T16:54:12+01:00<p>When Canonical announced contributors to its projects had to transfer their
copyright to the company to get their code in, it created a major backlash.</p>
<p>Back then, the document to sign was called "<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110708114351/http://www.canonical.com/contributors">Canonical Contributor
Agreement</a>" (<a href="https://agateau.com/2013/my-stance-on-cla/Canonical%20Contributor%20Agreement%2C%20ver%202.5.pdf">local version</a>). It asked the contributor to assign
his copyright to Canonical in exchange for a royalty-free and perpetual right to
do whatever the contributor wanted with the contributed code. It had several
problems, in particular it made it possible for Canonical to extend which
contributions were covered by editing a page from their web site.</p>
<p>I wasn't very happy with it, but at that time I was working for Canonical so I
didn't have to ask myself whether I should sign it or not. I did however had to
enforce it, and was not very successful at that task, to say the least.</p>
<h2>The CLA</h2>
<p>In July 2011, Canonical started asking contributors to sign a different
document: the "Contributor License Agreement" or CLA. This document shares very
little with the previous one. For starters, you retain your copyright and grant
Canonical a license to sublicense your work. It also defines more precisely the
perimeter of the contribution:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Contribution” means any work of authorship that is Submitted by You to Us in
which You own or assert ownership of the Copyright.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Canonical CLA is rather similar to the CLA which Digia asks contributors to sign
to get their code into Qt. Here are some handy links to compare them (with local
versions in case they go away in the future):</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="http://www.canonical.com/sites/default/files/active/images/Canonical-HA-CLA-ANY-I.pdf">Canonical Individual CLA</a> (<a href="https://agateau.com/2013/my-stance-on-cla/Canonical-HA-CLA-ANY-I.pdf">local version</a>),
source: <a href="http://www.canonical.com/contributors">http://www.canonical.com/contributors</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://qt-project.org/legal/QtContributionLicenseAgreement.pdf">Qt-Project CLA</a> (<a href="https://agateau.com/2013/my-stance-on-cla/QtContributionLicenseAgreement.pdf">local version</a>),
source: <a href="http://qt-project.org/legal.html">http://qt-project.org/legal.html</a>.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The major difference I found is Digia agreement provides a non-retroactive
termination clause. Canonical agreement does not provide such a clause, but I
think it is harmless since it is up to you to decide if you supply a
contribution under the CLA. Should you decide you don't like Canonical CLA
anymore, you just stop contributing.</p>
<p>The worst feature of Canonical CLA as it stands now is that it is god-send ammo
for haters. It precludes any technical discussion: "That project uses CLA, it is
the devil!" (I am not referring to Mir here, but rather to projects like LightDM)</p>
<p>I am personally fine with Canonical CLA, so I signed it. It is actually much
less demanding than FSF requirements to either assign your copyright to them, or
place your contribution under the public domain (see <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html">here</a> and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legal-Matters">here</a>)</p>
<p><em>Update: The FSF only asks you to assign copyright to them for projects they own.
Many GNU projects are not owned by the FSF and thus do not have those
requirements.</em></p>
<h2>Will you get my code in?</h2>
<p>I sometimes get asked by people to get their code in projects because they do
not want to sign Canonical CLA. Please don't: if it is against your principles
to sign the CLA, then do not ask me to pretend I wrote code you authored: it is
against my principles to lie. What you can do is:</p>
<ul>
<li>File a bug against the project, talk with the maintainers to get it fixed.</li>
<li>Describe your problem and convince me to fix it (bribing with cookies can
work)</li>
<li>Fork the project (but consider if it is really worth the price)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Final words</h2>
<p>I hope this helps clarify my position on this topic, and maybe get some of you
to think about Canonical CLA with a different state of mind.</p>
<p>Of course, you can certainly refuse to sign such a CLA not because of its
content but because you don't like the company behind it. For example if you are
convinced Canonical is using contributions to build a machine to eradicate all
the kittens on Earth, do not sign the CLA! Think about the kittens!</p>
<p>Finally, remember this is not legal advice: I am not a lawyer, I just sometimes
play one on IRC.</p>2013-10-29T16:54:12+01:00