 What we basically do, I think, is support different open source and free software initiatives. We, among other things, support the localization teams of NOM and KDE, regularly organized localization sessions and commutating meetings to synchronize the word database and basically ensure the utmost quality we can get on finished localization of free software. We also organized various smaller scale events on NOM and free software. The most recent one we had this spring in Turku was called Turuksi. So basically, this is how we became to support DEFGUN this year as a dealable point of contact organizer. And on behalf of NOM and KDEFGUN, we would like to, you know, to DEFGUN and to Divya today, I will now invite Andreas Schulde with our key organizer of DEFGUN to say a few words. I do would like to welcome you and thank you very much for coming. I'm Andreas Schulde. I'm one of the organizers of the DEFGUN. This Divya Day is an attempt to communicate to people who are not totally involved in Divya what Divya is about, how it works, but also how we feel and what makes us think. And just yesterday when people arrived, a whole bunch of them, and they were very happy to meet each other perhaps from the first time after working online and over the internet for a long time together, and you could feel this kind of happiness and enthusiasm of working together and meeting each other finally. And I would like, I hope that we managed to communicate this today too, besides the drive-thanks. Thank you very much. I would like to introduce Brandon Robertson, our project leader, who will now explain and welcome you to, thank you very much. This work, can I use it? Okay, great. We'll run out of cable here. Hi, I'm Brandon Robinson. And first of all, I'd like to thank Martin Eric and Andreas for the organizing and sponsorship work that they've done, respectively for getting this together and making it all possible. It's great. DEFGUN moves all over the place. It goes from place to place every year. Last year it was in Brazil. The year before that it was Oslo. The year before that it was in Toronto, Canada. So it's always exciting to see a new place and find a new place where there's already this well-spring of Debian support. It's a real pleasure. So I'd like to give them a bit of applause real quick. So I'm going to eat up a good 15 minutes or so here, talking a little bit about Debian. I'm the project leader this year. That's an elected position. So we'll see if next year, if I'm worthy of retention. But at any rate, Debian is an all-volunteer organization. We're global in scope. We have developers from several continents. A few continents, if you say several. We don't have any Antarctica. We're working on it. But we do have Debian fans in Antarctica, I'm told. There are computers running Debian there. So we have people all over the world. And there are a few words that are often used in marketing literature to promote some new business initiative. And those three words are distribution, decentralization, and openness. And I don't know what these words mean to a lot of marketing people, but I do know what they mean for Debian. So I want to talk a little bit about those. Distribution is simply a consequence, as I said, of our global reach. We have developers all over the world, many in Europe, many in North America, many in Brazil, South America, Central America, none in the Middle East right now, I don't think. But before the internet, it was very difficult to coordinate this quantity of people. And Debian's decentralized distribution has, in large part, been enabled by, of course, the phenomenon of the internet. And all our infrastructural technologies are essentially built on top of the net. We're not a business, but many of the things we have to do are similar to things that a business needs to operate. And all of these are built upon the fact that we don't have any geographic center. There's no one place where people operate out of, like a traditional business structure. It's a consequence, in large part, of being distributed that were also decentralized in many respects. There are a couple of ways in which we're not. I can talk a little bit more about those later. But generally, responsibility for various tasks in the Debian project is diffuse. It's spread among many people. For example, the packages, the software packages that comprise our operating system, our computing environment, we have well over 10,000 source packages and many more binaries. The source package is the essential unit of management. It is the source code that is then used to generate binaries or executables or installable documentation or what have you. This is spread among all kinds of people everywhere. In fact, most people who are in the Debian project and their developers have that status because they maintain Debian packages. The next consequence of being a distributed project, I think, it's not necessarily the case, but it is for us, is the fact that we're open. Just about everything we do is in public view. Our bug tracking system, which is used not just to handle defect reports, but wish list items, requests for changes to software that aren't bugs, requests for new features to even conversations about changes in policy or technical policy and the operation of our web server, for example, www.debian.org. People talk about there about changes they'd like to see in the site. So it's not just about reporting defects in software. It's a lot of administrative issues that are dealt with that way as well. There are aspects of the project that are not open. We do have a private list where we discuss various things, mostly people talking about going on vacation. They're going to be away. They don't want to tell the whole world that their house is not occupied. And, you know, sometimes we fight with each other in private lists, too. But most of the types of arguments we have, we have out in the open as well. And, you know, I think that's a plus and a minus. The plus is that people see just how the community actually works. And if they want to get involved by actually following our mailing lists, they can get a pretty good idea of what it takes to handle oneself in the rough and tumble environment of Debian. The downside, of course, to that is that sometimes people not familiar with Debian or sometimes the press, for example, will seize upon something on a mailing list or on a blog, for example. And so we have to do a little bit of damage control as something's blown out of proportion. But, you know, while that is sometimes unfortunate, I think the positives outweigh the downsides, the benefits we gain in terms of openness, the feeling of accountability that we have to our users, our community, to our stakeholders, anybody who's interested. Gives us a tremendous advantage over traditional closed organizations where you don't really know what's going on underneath the covers. So, another aspect of this openness and decentralization is that over the years, as Debian started out small, it was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdoch, so we're 12 years old now, was that we've had this steady evolution from an individual approach to a group team, our team-oriented approach, meaning that it used to be, if you maintained a package, there was one person to one package of that kind of relationship. A given person may be responsible for more than one package, but still you didn't go back the other way. It was a one-to-many relationship in database parlance. So, what we've seen over the years is that as the system has gotten larger and more complex, we've put teams in charge of many of the important pieces of infrastructure and many of our important packages, and this isn't something that was mandated from the top. And here again is my point about decentralization. This is just something that people saw was a good idea and it seemed to work well, so we copied it where it appeared to be needed. That's, I think, an important point. In traditional management structures, we're used to leadership from the top. We're used to pronouncements being made from on high and then everyone shall implement this. And in Debian, that's pretty uncommon. What more often happens is that our distributed decentralized open nature allows someone to innovate to get a new idea. Sometimes it fails, but when it's good, it's there for everyone to see and copy and emulate. And therefore we progress and achieve greater efficiency and greater quality through emulation of the good ideas that our peers have. So the next subject I wanted to talk about was how Debian is more than an operating system. The slogan on our website, I think, is the universal operating system. Some people complain about that slogan, but some of the criticism is justified in that if you look back at the Microsoft trial in the United States, for example, Microsoft was put on trial for antitrust violations due in part to the bundling of the browser with the OS. Well, Debian does that. We don't bundle just one browser, we bundle bunches of them, and we include all kinds of things. The Debian computing environment is much more complicated, is much larger, and much more powerful than a mere operating system in the computer science sense. You get a lot more with Debian than just something to run other programs. You get those other programs if you want them. It's your choice to install an office suite. We have at least two of them. We have K-Office, which is produced by the KDE project, and we have OpenOffice. And then there are GNOME-based applications like Abbey Word and GNU Merrick. So there's a lot more to Debian than just an operating system. There is also our community and I think that's a really important aspect. You know, we wouldn't be here in Helsinki if it weren't for that community aspect. So there's not a cloister of one person or a small group of people pushing this out. There's a back and a forth, and that has over time led to Debian growing and accreting like a snowball because somebody wanted to see something in Debian so they just decided to put it in. So they come out of the project and they say, wouldn't this be nice to have in it? And it doesn't have to be a piece of core operating system functionality. If it seems to be useful and if it's free software and somebody can take responsibility for it and keep it up to snuff in terms of quality, they're allowed to put it in. So this has enabled Debian to become much more than just an operating system, not just from the technical perspective at the software level, but in terms of building this accreting community. I said a minute ago that Debian is a complete computing environment and one of the ways in which I think we benefit from being a complete computing environment is that we provide a lot of user empowerment. Let me shift now from talking about Debian's developers to talking about Debian's users. A critical aspect, in my opinion, of the free software movement of which Debian is a part is the fact that the power to control one's life in an important respect, given that we're using computers for more and more, is that that power comes out of the boardroom of Microsoft or Adobe or Borland or what have you and is put in the hands of the user because of free software licensing and licenses like the GNU GPL, the copylift or the BSD or MIT licenses in which the source code is typically distributed with the software, and Debian commits itself to providing source code. The user, if they have the necessary expertise, is able to customize the software that they use in any way they see fit. Debian people take this for granted, but it's an idea that has only slowly started to catch on in the corporate environment. It used to be De Regard. It used to be the standard back in the 1970s until Bill Gates started pushing the idea of what we should be able to copyright software. The notion of being able to copyright software was a pretty innovative one in 1978. Now we take it for granted. The good news is that Bill Gates' push to copyright software has led to good consequences like the GNU general public license, which enables us all to share with each other and to have remedies available to people who violate the norms of our community by taking things proprietary is the term that we use. So the consequence of empowerment, in my opinion, is that it helps to get people involved. A course of person can remain in their home or work environment and never share their changes with anyone else if they want to. They can work in a silo, more or less. But what typically happens is that people find others like themselves and build a community or they join an existing one. So the so-called network effect, which is talked about in much literature, is very easily seen in the consequences of being able to share your changes to the software. There are community centered around distribution of patches to games back in the old days of, say, Doom, for example. You would have proprietary games and people would come up with customized patches and they'd build communities that way. But it was always a little bit shadowy and on the side. What the free software movement has helped people do is realize that with the openness of licensing and the complete blessing to modify the way your computer works and share your knowledge of how you changed it with others, is you can really effectively build a community that's completely legitimate in everyone's eyes and doesn't have to run around or do a lot of hand waving to say, well, we're not exactly legal but we're harmless so please don't sue us. That sense of user empowerment is very important in another respect in that, as I'm sure all of you know, just last, was it earlier this week or last week? I've been on a plane so I'm confused about time. But the European Union rejected software patents. Again, hopefully it doesn't have to keep being rejected before people get the message but the fight continues. And software patents are very hazardous to the types of communities that I'm talking about because patents don't protect the code, they protect the concepts. So it doesn't matter if you're not taking someone else's code literally and changing it. What a software patent keeps you from doing is implementing a particular idea at all. Of course, the exact details of how this is prevented depend on the vagaries of patent law and often whether or not you can afford to hire a lawyer. So I personally find software patents to be pretty corrosive to the notion of community which is why I'm very happy to see that the EU parliament rejected it and I hope they continue to take that stance and maybe one of these days, I'm from the US, maybe one of these days we can get a little more clues in the US Congress but I won't count too much on that. The next thing, as I'm running out of time here, the next item I wanted to talk about was longevity and community. Another reason that Debian is exciting is because it's proven. As I mentioned before, we were founded in 1993 and so we've been around a little while and it's amazing sometimes. Before long, we are going to have been around longer than some of our developers. There are people as young as 14 who have been known to contribute to the Debian project and even become developers. So we're coming up on a point where Debian is going to be kind of a historical thing for some of our developers. The fact that we've been around for so long gives us an inherent legitimacy in many eyes. It makes us appealing we're not a flash in the pan, we're not some new thing that might or might not succeed. And another consequence of that longevity is that we have many people in our community who have deep roots and go way back. One of the people who can't be here today unfortunately is Manoj Srivastava. He lives in Tennessee now, he used to live in Georgia and he's been with the project for a very long time and we often tease him about being one of our old curmudgeons. But that's important for a sense of continuity and especially given the early days when we were finding our way through and unfortunate things sometimes happened like the deletion of our list archives in the very early days. It's important to have that continuity with people who've been around a while. Many developers who've been with the project have been with us for many years and that is another aspect of community. You have this generational passing of knowledge. So the longevity aspect I think reinforces community. There are new things popping up all the time. Ubuntu, the phenomenon of Ubuntu Linux and canonical software has been an interesting and challenging one for the Debian project and I think Ubuntu is continuing to evolve. They just started a foundation, for example. And it remains to be seen how Debian will learn from, absorb some of the lessons from Ubuntu or compete with it in some ways. And it is not for me to say how exactly that will play out. It is for me to try to accomplish as leader to ensure the fact that Debian remains vibrant and successful and to do everything I can to help Debian build upon its many good traits and continue to be a force to be reckoned with in the larger free software community. So with that, I think I will let you go. I'll stop babbling and we can get on to some more interesting talks.