apt-get install debian-wizard

Social Micropayment Can Foster Free Software, Discover Flattr

July 15, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Social Micropayment

A social micropayment system allows you to donate a small amount of money (a few pennies/cents) to thank someone else for a good blog post, piece of music, … or for a free software that you enjoy. That’s what Flattr is all about.

How Flattr works

With Flattr, donating is as easy as a single click on a Flattr button that content providers (read “free software developers”) embed on their websites. A Flattr button is very similar to a “Digg” button or other social buttons (you can look at the end of this blog post for a sample).

The amount donated per flattr varies from month to month because you define a fixed amount of money to spend each month (minimum 2€) and it’s split evenly between all the things that you appreciated. You can flattr as much as you want, it won’t cost you more.

Support Free Software with Flattr

Free Software lacks a good business model to fund the creation of software, yet someone has to pay the time spent in writing the code. Many projects have tried to ask for donations but the amount collected rarely covers more than the expenses for the website hosting.

Flattr makes it so easy to donate that this is possibly about to change. Flattr users have to spend their monthly amount each month, otherwise it gets donated to charity. Thus if it takes off, most Flattr users will grow the habit of doing regular donations to projects that they use and appreciate.

Bootstrapping the Process

Flattr is a new service, not many projects are using it to accept donations and not many users are participating yet. But it’s growing quickly on both sides.

In order to help users who want to support Free Software with Flattr, I have started the Flattr Free and Open Source Software project. You can subscribe to a newsletter to receive a monthly reminder with recommendations of Free Software to Flattr. If you have more time, you can also browse public directories listing various Free Software projects using Flattr so that you can manually pick your favorites.

To learn more about the Flattr FOSS project, click here.

I also invite Free Software developers to setup Flattr on their websites, blogs, … and to register those sites so that Flattr users can easily find them. To learn more about this, check out the Earn a Living With Free Software page.

Share the News

Flattr can change the situation of many small but popular free software projects struggling with a single developer who started it as a hobby and who can’t afford to spend more free time on it.

But this can only happen if lots of users start using Flattr to support the Free Software that they benefit from. So share the news, tell the friends, join Flattr FOSS and give some Flattr-love every month.

Get Your Free Flattr Invite!

Flattr is still in beta, but they like Free Software a lot and have offered 30 invites for the launch of Flattr FOSS. You can get yours by subscribing either to my main newsletter or to the Flattr FOSS one. Just reply to the welcome email you get after having subscribed and ask for your invite.

Joining Ubuntu as a Debian developer

July 7, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

I’m a Debian developer since 1998 and have been fostering cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu since its inception with various levels of success.

I recently decided to go one step further and join Ubuntu as an official member. I wanted to be able to vote and to promote best cooperation practices from the Ubuntu side as well (and not only in Debian). Joining as a Debian developer should be relatively easy, it is well known in the Debian community that Mark Shuttleworth once said:

Every Debian developer is also an Ubuntu developer, because one way to contribute to Ubuntu is to contribute to Debian.

So I sought to verify that too! Here’s the result.

I prepared my application page collecting 2 testimonials from Lucas Nussbaum and Colin Watson, I registered for the next EMEA membership meeting (which happened yesterday, irc logs here), and I attended. (I just followed the instructions on the wiki)

During the meeting, when it was my turn, I pasted my short introduction and got immediately +1 votes from several board members, they didn’t even want to hear from me, they were already convinced. 🙂 I still responded to a few questions and elaborated on my goals and was promptly accepted even if I made it clear that my technical contributions will continue to be done within Debian.

A few minutes later I was added to the ubuntumembers launchpad group and this morning I followed the instructions to add my feed to Planet Ubuntu and here I am…

The whole process has been very smooth and the meeting shows a very welcoming attitude. Even someone who was denied the Ubuntu member status was cheered for his work and encouraged to try again when he can present some testimonials from other members.

Hello Planet Ubuntu!

Reorganization of my blog, please update your feeds

June 25, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Up to now I had a single blog hosted on ouaza.com, I used to blog in French and in English on many topics, even though free software and Debian was the main topic. Sometimes I avoided blogging on something because it would not really match the expectations of my readers (and of the various planets syndicating my blog). And I have always been annoyed by the fact that English readers were second-class on my blog because everything was configured in French.

So I decided to fix this once for all, I have created two new blogs in addition to ouaza.com. The latter is now my private blog (in French) with everything that is not free software related. And free software will be the topic of my 2 new blogs :

RaphaelHertzog.com is the English one (RSS feed) ;
RaphaelHertzog.fr is the French one (RSS feed).

I have setup some HTTP redirections on various feed URLs but if you were subscribed to my main feed, you’re now redirected to the new English feed and you might want to subscribe to the French one to continue reading my articles in French. In any case, you might want to update the feed URL that you used.

I also profited from this reorganization to switch to WordPress 3.0 and the 3 blogs are hosted on the same installation thanks to the new multisite feature and to the domain mapping plugin. The main regression in those changes is that I’m back to the (new) default theme of WordPress with the standard header image. I would like to personalize them but I have no graphics skills… but if you do and would like to work on this for me, please get in touch. I’ll make sure you get your pony in return. 🙂

More changes concerning those blogs are in the pipe but that will be the topic of other posts. Thanks for following !

About the Debian Community Poll

June 11, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

While I find the idea interesting, several of the questions can’t be correctly answered because the proposed choices are not realistic or too limited.

On the question of the usage of money, I believe we should spend money to fund important projects but I don’t want to fund “people having important positions in Debian and doing important work”. What should I reply? (Granted, there’s the other item but that doesn’t help getting a clear picture of the answers)

On the question “Do you prefer time based releases instead of the «it’s ready when it’s ready» releases?”, it is putting two concepts in opposition when the release managers recently proposed a third way that combines both: “time based freezes and release when it’s ready”. This is what I want and I can’t adequately express it either in the current poll.