a subversive act of playful cleverness

Sat, 06 Jan 2007

Seems that I manage to publish yearly news. Well this time I've many of them.

DebianPeru's event videos.
As promised, we've published the videos for our DíaDebian 2006 anual event. You can find the event videos and also the lightning talks videos.
I want to thank our sponsors and people involved on producing them. We are already working on our next event which is mainly focused on attract, teach and involve more people on directly contributing to Debian and free software.

Talking about Debian events and user-base growth, when I went to the place to make stickers for give out on our last event, I went with the swirl logo and said to the business owner: I want to print this. He said ok, and later he asked me: is it Debian right? I was like... yes!. Later we talked a bit more and he told me that he found Debian on the Internet while looking for alternatives to have his business run safely, since, as he related me looking worried, the police came to their place and seizure all the computers from other businesses claiming that they are running "pirated" software. So he found Linux and Debian. He told me that was having some issues with their devices, mostly his CD/DVD printers and scanners. We talked a bit more and I invited him to our local group and the event of course. It was a very cool incident, and I nominated him our official merchansiding supplier ;)

Debian gaining market share.
Last year was quite good for Debian in Peru, besides the growing user-base, some government agencies have explicitly named as the operating system or linux-flavour they want third party deploy for them. One of the most important cases, IMHO, is the PDT software, which is the program that every business should use to submit taxes information. Currently it's only available for Windows and it's written in Visual Basic. Although, mostly because it's lack of stability and extensibility by third party, some government agencies have been pushing for SUNAT open it's source code. It was, as with many other out of place subjects, source of lot of flames and irrelevant waste of time by the local linux-supporters. Anyway, they didn't open the software, but instead they called for software vendors to compete for the development of a new version which should be multi-platform and according the specs at least run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and on the Linux side they mentioned specifically that the program should be apt-get-able, thus vendor should provide a Debian package compliant with 3.0 or superior.

Microsoft loves Debian.
I was invited to, which was meant to be, the true and first Microsoft vs. free software debate in Peru, but was, as we in APESOL have experienced for years: Microsoft refusing to debate. So it was mostly APESOL being technical, as requested by orga, and Microsoft being funny. I was astonished that almost half of Microsoft speakers mentioned Debian at least 5 times in their talks and dedicated almost half of their time to talk about free software (open source), interoperability and technological neutrality. It was fun for me to see them helping us to get known. There are some pictures on my flickr page.

Personal life and Debian work.
Last year I've lost my two cats, both died in not a very good way, they are missed for sure. I'm sure I want a full white one, but not sure how soon. I've been really busy working on my business which led me to not being able to contribute as much as I wanted but I managed to do some stuff. In the other hand I've learned many important things that we, as free software community should seriously consider. Most of them have been already pointed out by some people on p.d.o already. Ok I believe this is enough, blame this to the not-blogging-for-long-time syndrome due the commies hidden over there locking my access to former hosting.

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