Today we celebrate the day of free software (each year, a saturday around mid-September) More info at softwarefreedomday.org
There are no public events in Madrid, but I’m going to try to hack and write a bit more this weekend, as my personal celebration.
In this blog post you can find some of my very very recent activities on free software, and my plans for this weekend of celebration!
Debian
Children distros aka Derivatives
I had the translation/update of the page www.debian.org/misc/children-distros pending since long time. It’s a long page, and I was not sure what was better: if picking up the too-outdated last translation, and review it carefully in order to update it, or starting from scratch. I decided to reuse the last translation (thanks Luis Uribe!) and after some days dedicating my commuting time on it, finally, yesterday evening I finished it at home. Now it’s in the review queue, and I hope in 10 days or so it will be uploaded.
In the meantime, I have learned a bit about the Debian Derivatives subproject and census, I have watched the Derivatives Panel at DebConf13, and had a look at the bug #723069 about keeping the children-distros page up to date.
So now that I’m liberated about this translation, I’m going to put some time in keeping up to date the original English page (I’m part of the www and publicity team, so I think it makes sense). My goal is to review at least one Debian derivative each two days, and when I finish the list, start again. I can update the wiki myself, and for the www, I’ll send patches against #723069, unless I’m told to do it other way.
BTW, wouldn’t be nice to mark web/wiki pages as “RFH” the same as packages?, so other people can easily decide to put some time on them, and make http://www.debian.org even more awesome! Or make them appear in the how-can-i-help reminders 🙂 Mmm maybe it’s just a matter of filing a bug and tagging it as “gift”? I think no, because nobody has the package “www.debian.org” installed in their system… I’ll talk with the maintainer about this.
New Member process
I promised myself to try to work a bit more in Debian during the summer and September, and if everything goes well, try to apply to the new member process in October.
I wanted to read all the documentation first, and one challenge is to review/update the translations of www.debian.org/devel/join folder. This way, both myself and the Spanish speaking community benefit from the effort. Yesterday I translated one of those pending pages and I hope during the weekend I can translate/update the rest. When I finish that, I’ll keep reading the other documentation.
DebConf15
This summer I was invited to join the DebConf15 organization team and pick up tasks in the publicity area. I was very happy to join, I’m not sure at all that I can go to DebConf15 in Heidelberg (Germany), in fact I’m quite sure I will not go since mid-August is the only opportunity to visit family who lives far away, but anyway, there are things that we can do before DebConf15 and I can contribute.
For now, I attended last Monday to the meeting at IRC, and I’m finishing a short blogpost about the DebConf14 talk presenting DebConf15, that will be published in the DebConf15 blog.
Android, F-Droid
I keep on trying to spread the word about F-Droid and the free software available for Android, last week some of my friends updated Kontalk to the 3.0.b1 version (I had updated at the beginning of September) and they liked that now, the images are sent encrypted as well as the text messages 🙂
Some friends also liked the 2048 game, since it can be played offline, without ads, and so.
I decided to spend some time this weekend contributing translations to the Android apps that I use.
A long pending issue is to try to put workforce in the F-Droid project itself so apps descriptions are internationalized (the program is fully translatable, but the categories of apps and the descriptions themselves, are not). This is a complicated issue, it requires to take some design decisions, and later, of course, the implementation. I cannot do it alone, and I cannot do it in the short time. But today I have filed a bug report (#35) so maybe I find other people able to help.
Jabber/XMPP and the “RedesLibres” chatroom
Since several months I’ve been using more often my Jabber/XMPP account to join the chatroom redeslibres@salas.mijabber.es
I meet there some people that I follow in Pump.io (for example, the people that write in the Comunícate Libremente or Lignux blogs) and we talk about pump.io, free software, free services, and other things. I feel very comfortable there, it’s nice to have a Spanish speaking group inside the Free Software community, and I’m also learning a bit about XMPP (I’ve tried a lot of desktop and Android clients, just for fun!), free networks, and so.
So today I wanted to publicly thank you everybody in that chatroom, that welcomed me so well 🙂
Thank you, free software friends
And, by extension, I want to thank you all the people that work and have fun in the Free Software communities, in the projects where I contribute or others. They (we) hack to make the world better, and to allow others join to this beautiful challenge that is making machines do what their (final) users wants.
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