Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 14:59:56 -0700
From: Chris DiBona <cdibona from google.com>
Subject: Great Article!
To: jimregan@o2.ie
See subject. Well done. Makes me wantto throw you into our interview system
Chris
--
Open Source Program Manager, Google Inc.
Google's Open Source program can be found at http://code.google.com
Personal Weblog: http://dibona.com
Usually I leave sig blocks out, but I think if anyone thought it was to change Google's mind about "doing cool stuff" this would be the man who'd know.
You article about Google Summer of Code.
Tue, 04 Oct 2005 08:56:05 +0100
Noemi Tozjan (gjr from stcable.co.yu)
Answered by Jimmy O'Regan
Hello,
I find your article very offending, and I think you should modify it
in order to reflect the reality, and here is why:
Before I even look at the rest, allow me to apologise in advance: the
article has been published, and will not be changed.
Can I have your permission to forward your mail for publication next month?
Only if I have permission to publish your e-mail aswell.
Of course.
1) multiple people working on the installer/updater
Yes, it is true that WinLibre had more than just one people working
on that. But! If you look at the project listings from other mentoring
organizations, you can see that the same thing is present in the
following mentoring organizations too: Python, Nmap, Internet 2, Drupal
and possibly more... Why does it bothers you only at the winlibre project?
The impression I got is that these were separate implementations of the
same thing. With the other projects you mentioned, it was clear that
these students were working on different aspects of the same project.
Well, it's partially true for the both cases. As for WinLibre, we had 2
students working on separate implementations of the same thing, while the
others were working on different aspects. As for the others, I know (source
SoC students themselves) that in some cases 2 or more students were working
on separate implementations of the same thing aswell. The reason why it is
ok, is that the mentoring organizations had no way to know if a student will
finish his/her project or not. The number of finished projects is less than
90%, and even this percentage is way above the expectations (66.67%) on the
beginning of SoC. So it was fairly reasonable for some mentoring
organizations to have 2 students working on the different implementations of
the same thing in case the thing was high priority for the mentoring
organization.
If this installer is really a single installer with several people
working on different aspects, as with the other projects, then please
accept my unreserved apologies, and my promise that a correction will be
published next month.
To compleatly clear it out, here is the correct list of the WinLibre
projects:
Finished projects:
- installer (2 students)
- updater (1 student)
- control centre (1 student)
- MacLibre (1 student)
- 3 -original- games (3 students, 1 per game)
- Final Touch /or Image Manipulation Tool/ (1 student)
Failed projects:
- CDRoast GUI (1 student)
2) Michael Rybak's "Sneaky Snakes"
Your text about this project is a complete missinformation. First:
please take a look at it before you call it a "snake clone", because it
has a totally unique concept, and it is not even similar to the snake
game in any aspect. Also, you've used the words: "One project that has
been singled out as a waste of funding". Ok, yes it was singled out, but
by -one- single person, Uros Trebec, while all the other people on that
thread in summer-discuss (which is undoubtable your source) supported
the project. Also you should check out Uros's previous posts on
summer-discuss, and you will find out that your only source is a person
that was planning to cheat in SoC, but got rejected.
I will admit that that message was a source for that opinion, I will
also admit the possibility that it was the source for the other places I
saw that opinion voiced, but it was not the only source of that or
similar opinions.
Can you -please- point out the other sources?
Hmm. Can't find anything at the moment, and I'm starting to suspect that
there was only one other source, and it was in comments on Slashdot.
I'll get back to you if I find anything.
Have you actually downloaded it?
No.
Snake clone:
- you have one (or in some cases 2 or more) snake that collects pieces
on the playground and gets larger for each collected piece, if the snake
touches itself (or the other snakes), the player loses.
Sneaky Snakes:
- 2 snakes are fighting each other by shooting their parts, they don't
collects pieces and if the snakes touches themselves or the other snake they
don't lose.
That said, thank you for correcting me about the game: to my eyes, it
looked like a snake clone -- a more modern snake clone, but a snake
clone none the less.
Also, because it seems to have been unclear, I did not share that
opinion. I thought that my contrasting the game with the installers made
that clear, I'm sorry if it didn't.
It wasn't clear.
I would also like to inform you that every single SoC student I've
talked with finds your article very disappointing partially because of
the lack of objectivity and because some of the projects were left out
from the lists.
As for objectivity, well, the magazine is called Linux Gazette. I
can't and won't apologise for giving a better write up to the projects I
personally had interest in: the article simply would not have been
written otherwise.
Hmm... Especially because it's -Linux- Gazette... You want Linux to be
more popular, or not? Do you want to see the Average Joe using Linux or not?
Well, if you do, here is an interesting fact: The Average Joe uses Windows.
If you want to attract him to opensource, you must show him that it's good.
How can you show him that? You give him opensource for Windows as step one,
as a step two, he'll be more openminded about Linux...
I was coming from the PoV that if you show people the cool things they
can do with Linux that they can't do with Windows, they'll be more
likely to switch. The truth, I suspect, is somewhere between these views.
Projects were only omitted simply because I could find no information
about them. Please feel free to tell people to pass on information I
missed, either to me personally, or to tag@lists.linuxgazette.net (from
which we at Linux Gazette can publish them).
[Heather] The irony that Jimmy had trouble finding some projects sponsored by Google!
while others were easy to read about was not lost on us in the back room,
but it was his article to write.
Our nature as a magazine is to be by and for ordinary people; this
means that some things will be subjective by nature, while others will
go to the other extreme and try to cover a subject broadly to avoid
attaching themselves to one preference as if it's the only thing that
exists - a laudable objective, as well as being objective.
I have already received mail from one of the LiveJournal participants,
who provided me with information about several of those projects as well
as his own. I am interested in providing a complete list of projects,
without the article part. If you would like to help me to complete it,
well, thanks. If you would like to complete it yourself, the article is
under the terms of the OPL 1.0 -- you may freely modify it, etc. and
make your own list.
Well, here is what people wrote on our internal SoC mailing list:
Pradeep Padala:
Finally a list of projects
http://linuxgazette.net/119/oregan.html
Anil Ramnanan:
He missed my project, an Eclipse plugin for Apche Forrest.
Sorry about that. Apache was one of the most difficult organisations to
find any information about.
Ivan Barrera A.:
Mine too, but i didn't like his writting.
I also think he was offensive without the need.
What was this project?
Lev Olkhovich:
Codehaus also has 12 applicants with only two projects. It is
especially strange because the link in the article points to a page
with times more projects.
I tried to provide a link to the proposed projects for each mentoring
organisation, but only to list the projects that were accepted. The
projects listed were the only ones I could find information about.
Pradeep Padala:
I actually didn't look at the article closely. It was forward to me by
a friend. Looking closely, it shows SoC in a bad light, I agree.
Kai Blin:
Also, I think the author didn't really do his homework. I can only talk
about the wine projects, but he missed a couple of details there.
I realise that Kai's project has been added to CVS since I submitted the
article, but beyond that I don't see what details I missed.
Pradeep Padala:
However, I must say, not everything he said is not wrong either.
Best wishes,
Noemi Tojzan
Thanks for writing,
Jimmy O'Regan
Re: Your article about Google Summer of Code.
Wed, 05 Oct 2005 09:28:36 +0100
Hello,
I've forwarded your replies to the Google Summer of Code internal
mailinglist, so I guess people will contact you with their projects if they
want to. The attitude of most of them about the article is pretty negative
tough, so don't expect miracle.
Well, I guess that must have something to do with the way in which it
was presented, because the other mail I've received has been positive.
I'm not representing WinLibre in this issue, I'm writing only my
toughts, but I think it would be fair from your side if you'd publicly
apologize both to WinLibre and Google because of the unneeded negative
criticism presented in your article, especially because you stated that the
actual reason of this attack was the fact that the WinLibre is providing OSS
for the Windows platform. (note: we do it for MacOS too now, and the 3 games
are cross platform)
Erm... no, I don't see how you've come to that conclusion. That WinLibre
is (was) a Windows-specific project is the reason I didn't take a very
close look at the projects: hence, why I termed 'Sneaky Snakes' a snake
clone. I admit that was inaccurate; I should also admit that I have very
little interest in games in general: it's most likely that I would have
come to the same conclusion no matter how hard I looked at it, simply
for lack of a better comparison.
The criticism was aimed at the duplication of effort in the installers.
That I called it a "waste of effort" was an error in tact -- I had
intended on changing that sentence to read "unnecessary duplication of
effort", but it slipped my mind. Even that, though less so, is still
going to be offensive to some.
I apologise wholly and unreservedly for the unnecessarily offensive
wording of that phrase; however, I will not apologise for having and
expressing a negative opinion of the duplication of effort.
As a personal note: I don't understand why is it needed to have a
negative attitude about Google Summer of Code in any aspect, when Google
invested 2.000.000 USD in opensource. The entire OSS community should be
thankfull for this, no matter if there were glitches or not. The only thing
you can achieve by this attitude is to stop Google and potentially other
companies to make programs like SoC in future. Is really that what you want?
I think you're overreacting here. I made two critical comments of my own
in that article (the other was towards criticism made by an Ubuntu
representative), the rest was merely a reflection of the criticisms made
elsewhere: it would have been a bold-faced lie to say that everyone was
entirely happy about how SoC went.
As for Google discontinuing SoC because of some criticism? You must
realise how far-fetched that idea is. If Google was that thin-skinned as
a company, they wouldn't have survived long enough to have the first.
Regards,
Noemi Tojzan
Take care,
Jimmy
Correction for your Summer of Code article
Tue, 04 Oct 2005 10:06:58 +0100
Meredith L. Patterson (mlp from thesmartpolitenerd.com)
Forwarded by Jimmy O'Regan
Mirrors who poll least often, take note.
-Heather
OK, I sent the actual correction to the editor gang already, but just in case:
<li><a href="http://austin.cs.uiowa.edu/charun">Charun</a>: more
"natural" queries in PostgreSQL (<a
href="http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20050601.205033.7e74a30c.en.html">details</a>
</li>
</ul>
should be:
<li><a href="http://pgfoundry.org/projects/qbe">Query by Example</a>:
more "natural" queries in PostgreSQL (<a
href="http://archives.free.net.ph/message/20050601.205033.7e74a30c.en.html">details</a>
</li>
</ul>
Subject: Re: Correction for your Summer of Code article
Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2005 09:27:41 +0100
Meredith L. Patterson wrote:
Hi Jimmy,
Just read your Linux Gazette article on the Summer of Code, and I'd like
to submit a correction if at all possible. I was one of the students who
worked for Google, and you've got my project listed as Charun, which
isn't quite right. Charun was sort of a stunted proof-of-concept that I
put together for my qualifying exams, and while it's certainly the
intellectual ancestor of Query by Example (my actual project), QBE is
(1) far more robust, and (2) actually integrated into PostgreSQL (as in,
it modifies the SQL language itself, rather than being an after-the-fact
add-on).
You can find QBE at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/qbe, with source code
and (sparse) documentation. If it's possible to correct the link in the
article, I'd really appreciate it.
I'll pass this on to my editor, who gets final say on what does and does
not get corrected.
Can I also have your permission to pass this on to our mailbag for
publication next month? (Some of our mirrors are slow to update, and the
correction will go unnoticed by anyone who has already read the article).
Absolutely. Thanks very much!
Cheers,
Meredith
[Ben]
Done and repubbed.
We (LG's editors) are thinking about deleting or changing the Site Map page,
and would like to get readers' input on it. The
Site Map is basically
a concatenation of the monthly TOCs, a kind of poor man's search engine.
It was really useful when it was made, but now has become so huge (309 KB)
that it's inconvenient to use, and will only get bigger. Also, our search
engine at the time alternated between being broken, anemic, and
nonexistent. Now we have a Google-powered search, and
author pages linking to all
articles by each author. So the only other use for the Site Map seems to
be offline searching, for people who don't have immediate access to the
Internet. Are people using the Site Map page? Does it have any other
uses we've missed?
Hello,Gang.
I am reading Mailbag from current Gazette,and it seems that a
file is missing from lg-118 tarball.It's
lg/current/misc/wanted/philip_obrien.grub.conf.txt.
