Benjamin Kerensa

The Ramblings of a Beautiful Mind

Ubuntu

Update on Glucosio

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Glucosio is an open source project I founded recently. I blogged about the kick off here. I wanted to give an update as the project is moving forward better than I had imagined.


Development

We are currently aiming for our Glucosio for Android Alpha release this month with a tentative release date on September 20th, 2015. This being our Alpha and our first public release will be the base of the app. It will have basic functions but the more advance features on our roadmap will be distributed across subsequent releases and I’m sure we will keep coming up with innovative ideas as we research the needs of people with diabetes. Hat tip to Paolo, Ahmar, Satyajit and Elio who have been working tirelessly on this release.

 

Translations

I’m happy to report that Glucosio is already translated into 13 languages. More specifically: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Bengali (India), Breton, Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, German, Italian, Spanish, Spanish (Venezuela), and Spanish (Mexico). We plan to have Greek, Japanese, Vietnamese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi before launch. (Want to translate these for us? Check here.) Translations are really important to this project because every language we can offer is a population of people we can reach with our app seeing as diabetes is a global problem. The more people we reach worldwide, the more we can offer great tools to and the more opt-ins to share anonymous trends and demographic data with diabetes researchers we can get. Hat tip to Arturo who is leading our l10n efforts!

 

iOS

We are still actively looking for a lead iOS Developer or even two people contributing part-time on our Glucosio for iOS product. If you know someone, tell them to ping me!

HTML5 App (Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone and Tizen)

This is sitting in our backburner but it is definitely within the scope of our vision and will help us reach platforms like Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone and Tizen. We initially looked at doing cross-platform development but realized we could give a better experience if we built individual apps for Android and iOS.

 

Funding

Currently, this project has been very low cost thanks to some great supporters. Other than that, I have bootstrapped any costs, which again have been very small. We have decided from the start of this project that we do not want to monetize our apps because we feel it will dilute our vision and goals for the project. That being said, maybe the team will look into donations, crowdfunding or other options in the future if it becomes necessary. We are also looking into becoming a SPI (Software in the Public Interest) associated project so we will have a financial home and some resources available to us.

 

What’s next?

We are just going to be focusing for the next few weeks on getting this Alpha out the door. That includes wrapping up translations, doing some internal testing, and making sure we get out a crisp Alpha (that happens right?). Then we will sit down and discuss next things we want to prioritize and have a release post-mortem to improve our next cycle.

 

How you can help?

We have a really great team of people and would love to have more help. It has so far helped for us to have lots of hands in the pot and allowed us to scale as a project and get a lot of work done in a very short amount of time. If you are interested in contributing, hit us up at hello [AT] glucosio.org or ping us on Twitter at @GlucosioApp. We have contribution areas to include Development (iOS/Android/HTML5), l10n, Marketing, QA, and more. Hopefully by our Beta release, we will have some crisp documentation on our wiki on how to get started on all of these pathways!

 

 

Nóirín Plunkett: Remembering Them

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Nóirín Plunkett & Benjamin Kerensa
Nóirín and I

Today I learned of some of the worst kind of news, my friend and a valuable contributor to the great open source community Nóirín Plunkett passed away. They (this is their preferred pronoun per their twitter profile) was well regarded in the open source community for contributions.

I had known them for about four years now, having met them at OSCON and seen them regularly at other events. They were always great to have a discussion with and learn from and they always had a smile on their face.

It is very sad to lose them as they demonstrated an unmatchable passion and dedication to open source and community and surely many of us will spend many days, weeks and months reflecting on the sadness of this loss.

Other posts about them:

https://adainitiative.org/2015/07/remembering-noirin-plunkett/
http://www.apache.org/memorials/noirin.html
http://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2015/07/29/0

Ubuntu Trends: Part 1

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These graphs are based on data gleaned directly from launchpad overtime

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One thing to note about these graphs is 2015 is not yet complete so there can be change that will occur in 2015.  The statistics should not necessarily be considered to correlate to Ubuntu overall losing popularity. Data from Google Trends for instance overall shows a downtrend for other desktop operating systems which likely correlates to end users focusing and spending more time on mobile these days.

What the Ubuntu IP Announcement means

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The announcement by the FSF and Software Freedom Conservancy has a lot of jargon in it so to help people better understand I am going to do an analysis. Mind you, back in 2012, I reached out to the FSF on these very licensing concerns which no doubt combined with other developers contacts set in motion these discussions.

 

In July 2013, the FSF, after receiving numerous complaints from the free software community, brought serious problems with the policy to Canonical’s attention. Since then, on behalf of the FSF, the GNU Project, and a coalition of other concerned free software activists, we have engaged in many conversations with Canonical’s management and legal team proposing and analyzing significant revisions of the overall text. We have worked closely throughout this process with the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides their expert analysis in a statement published today.

 

So this is about a year after the time I exchanged emails with Dr. Richard Stallman not only about privacy issues that Canonical was trying to wave off but also these licensing issues. We (myself and other Ubuntu Developers) had been hearing that other distros had been essentially bullied into signing contracts and licenses pursuant to Canonical’s IP Policy for Ubuntu at the time.

 

While the FSF acknowledges that the first update emerging from that process solves the most pressing issue with the policy — its interference with users’ rights under the GNU GPL and potentially other copyleft licenses covering individual works within Ubuntu — the policy remains problematic in ways that prevent us from endorsing it as a model for others. The FSF will continue to provide feedback to Canonical in the days ahead, and urge them to make additional changes.

 

In a nutshell, the FSF is making it clear while some progress was made that the Ubuntu IP Policy is still not a good example of a policy that protects the freedoms you have to using code under the licenses of software Ubuntu bundles into the distro we use and love. This is concerning because Canonical has essentially made some concessions but put its foot down and not made as much change as it needs to.

 

Today’s “trump clause” makes clear that, for example, Canonical’s requirement that users recompile Ubuntu packages from source code before redistributing them is not intended to and does not override the GPL’s explicit permission for users to redistribute covered packages in binary form (with no recompilation requirement) as long as they also provide the corresponding source.

 

As an example, Canonical was through its legal team asking some distros including Mint that they needed a license to redistribute Ubuntu but this is not true because the underlying licenses already set the rights individuals and groups have in redistributing code.

 

While this change handles the situation for works covered by the GPL, it does not help works covered by lax permissive licenses (such as the X11 license) that do allow such additional restrictions. With that in mind, the FSF has urged Canonical to not only respect the GPL but to also change its terms to remove restrictions on any of the free works it distributes, no matter which license covers that software. In the meantime, this is a useful reminder that developers are nearly always better off choosing copyleft licenses like the GPL in order to prevent others from imposing arbitrary restrictions on users.

 

It is clear since the FSF with its ally, the Software Freedom Conservancy in tow, was only able to achieve some success on the GPL front. The FSF being a good steward of the greater open source community realizes this and notes that the policy still has restrictions on freedoms other licenses entitled to you. As such, the FSF is calling on Canonical to do more and do the right thing and not just make concessions but follow all the licenses of software it uses.

 

Further, the patent language in the current policy should be replaced with a real pledge to only make defensive use of patents and to not initiate litigation against other free software developers. The trademark policy should be revised to provide better guidance to downstream distributors so that they can be confident they know exactly where and when trademarks need to be removed in order to comply with the policy.

 

This is a very important bit because it protects open source developers and ironically if you read the IP Policy it has some foolish statement like “Canonical has made a significant investment in the Open Invention Network, defending Linux, for the benefit of the open source ecosystem.” which is laughable because here the FSF and Software Freedom Conservancy is having to ask Canonical to respect the licenses of not only Linux but thousands of other pieces of open source software it claims it invests in defending.

 

Canonical, in our conversations, repeatedly expressed that it is their full intention to liberally allow use of their trademarks and patents by community projects, and not to interfere with the exercise of rights under any copyleft license covering works within Ubuntu. While we appreciate today’s development and do see it as a big step in that direction, we hope they will further revise the policy so that users, to the greatest extent possible, know their rights in advance rather than having to inquire about them or negotiate them. To this end, it will be important to choose language and terms that emphasize freedom over power and avoid terms like intellectual property, which spread bias and confusion.

 

This is perhaps the most important part because basically the FSF is making it clear the IP Policy still continues to confuse some users and that confusion may chill users into not exercising the freedoms they have to use the software that is freely licensed. Also it is concerning because the IP Policy as it stands violates the community values of the Ubuntu project.

In closing, Canonical should be thanked for making some concessions after so many years but should also, on the same token, be encouraged to fix the document entirely and protect the rights and freedoms of users and respect the licenses of the software Ubuntu ships. Additionally, this makes it clear that Jonathan Ridell, another Ubuntu Community Member who advocated time and time again on this matter and was shut down by the Ubuntu Community Council, really deserves at the very least a formal apology from the Ubuntu Community Council. When individuals ability to speak freely on important issues of advocacy are chilled in Open Source projects, it creates an unwelcoming environment. Jonathan Ridell is by no means the first person to be shut down by leaders in the community or Canonical itself. Over the past few years, there has been a trickle of departures because of people being silenced. In fact, Ubuntu Contributors and LoCo participation is at an all time low, as is participation in the Ubuntu Developer Summit which can only be linked to these attacks on advocates over the years.

FSF Statement / SFC Statement / Jonathan Ridell Blog Post / Matthew Garrett’s Blog Post

Canonical has yet to release any statement in their press centre and neither has the Ubuntu Community Council which said it would wait until
it learned of the outcome of the FSF and SFC asking Canonical to adjust its infringing IP Policy.

 

The Glucosio Project

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Glucosio Project
Nobody was doing pink so we settled on it 😉

I have come up with a new phrase and I am going to keep saying it and it is “The most important open source software has not yet been made.” But why is this phrase true? Simply put we have a lot of great open source software out there but the most important open source software is the one that’s not been written because of some barrier or challenge.

For every person, different software has different levels of importance right? So what is the most important unwritten open source software for me? Well it is health tech software that enables people to better understand how their health is and how their choices can impact it positively and negatively.

I was recently diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes and I have from the get-go tried to use technology and software to help me manage it. From graphing my glucose levels so I know how different foods impact me to tracking medication and other important metrics. But one thing stuck out when I was looking at available tools is that there are not many open source health tech applications and tools available and those that did exist were inferior to the proprietary ones.

So why is it important to have these tools be open source if the proprietary ones work well? Simply put, if you have the source code you can trust your data is kept private and safe but also you can build off the tools and integrate them with other services and tools that work specifically for you.

That being said, I came up with the idea of launching a Open Source Project and have formed a team of amazing individuals who share my vision of creating tools to help the millions of people worldwide suffering from both Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes. We are moving forward with that and are right now in the planning stage of launching the Glucosio Project (Italian for Glucose). The project will initially launch an Android app, then iOS and finally a web app (Think Tizen, Ubuntu Phone, Firefox OS) to allow diabetics to track their glucose and connect with third party services (IFTT, Phillips Hue, Pushbullet, Pushover etc), share the data and better understand the impact of their choices. We very well may expand as the project and contributor base but this is what we have envisioned so far.

I would like to thank Elio Qoshi, Satyajit Sahoo, Paolo Rotolo, Georgi Karavasilev, Priyanka Nag, Joshua Fogg, Viking Karwur, Stefan Angelov, Rahul Kondi and Ahmar Siddiqui for sharing this vision with me and joining as initial project contributors and the core team that will be behind the Glucosio Project.

We still have room for more (Dev, Doc, Creative, l10n etc) and if you are interested in contributing to this project please get in touch with us at hello [at] glucosio.org or follow the project on Github. We hope to make a big difference in many people’s lives with the apps we are working on and hope you will join us!