Free as in speech

As of 09:53am CEST today, I am officially available for hire starting mid-August, and looking for a job.

I’m going to enjoy some time off in the nice, sunny weather we’ve got here these days and I’ll have some time again to try and add proper support for the Intel Macs to d-i. Not that bad after all.

As some of you may know, I’ve been working with Linbox for the past 3 years, on and off, part time and full time, depending on the time of the year.

I won’t be working with Linbox anymore after Mandriva, which has bought Linbox back in June, decided Linbox wouldn’t go ahead in the Enterprise VoIP business.

I have been, for the past 2 years, the architect of Linbox’ VoIP solution.

This unfortunate and ill-advised decision of stopping the development of a successful product at its beginning will effectively leave the current customers out in the cold, as technical support will probably be erratic at best.

Looking back in the mirror, I’ve done a lot of things, small and big, during these 3 years:

• [2004] Developed a web-managed multi-service turn-key solution for SMBs, of which the web interface served as a prototype for the Linbox Management Console (a web-based server management framework);
• [2004] Developed the product deployment system based on FAI; still in use today, obviously updated since then;
• [2004] Wrote an AD to LDAP account (including password) sync script (customer with a special need); that resulted in me hacking OpenLDAP to port the lanman password hash support to gcrypt (Debian #245341);
• [2004] Started the hosting business;
• [2005] Started the development of the Linbox IP Telephony Solution (LIPS), based on AMPortal (now called FreePBX); ended up forking AMPortal to fix the gazillion bugs and bring it to a more usable state;
• [2005] Hacked up OpenXchange to add a click’n'dial feature to the addressbook; eventually we decided to dump OpenXchange, mainly for being an underdocumented pile of crap full of security holes (nice SQL injections, eh) and, over all, a false free software (no upgrade path, no doc, some components not released, GPL patches added to the non-free version without agreement, among other things);
• [2006] Prototyped the cluster version of the VoIP solution; this cluster version meant the solution could scale up to support thousands of users on multiple sites with redundancy and failover;
• [2006] Wrote a migration tool to migrate mails away from a FirstClass groupware to anything IMAPv4-compliant, straight out of the on-disk FirstClass storage database;
• [2007] Integrated the VoIP solution into the Linbox Management Console; after 2 years of consolidating the AMPortal web interface, I’ve finally got rid of that horrible thing;
• [2007] Integrated the cluster support infrastructure into the solution;
• [2007] Added proper faxing (over PSTN) support, at last.

And, more importantly:

• [2007] Deployed client sites without any interruption in telephone service.

I’m especially proud of that; the solution was ready for that moment, and my deployment plan proved to be the right one and flexible enough to account for everything that wasn’t ready in time (missing network infrastructure, things that had been forgotten on the client side, things that didn’t go as planned and last minute changes to accommodate users’ needs). The customers were very happy and enthusiastic with regard to their new VoIP infrastructure - so much that there was more to come.

And more to come means more business for a company that definitely needs it, and is now turning that business down.

So it’s all over now, and overall I’ve had a good time working there with the technical team. They’re all very talented, and we were 3 DDs working there - that figure is now down to 1 (yes, one, as in 3 - 2 = 1).

I’ve been able to produce a really great free (as in speech) Enterprise VoIP solution that I liked quite a lot. I had great plans for the LIPS, but couldn’t carry out much of that until it was integrated into the Linbox Management Console. In the last weeks, I’ve had confirmation that my plans were right and I was going the right way.

That’s history now, and I’m looking at what I’ll be doing next.

It’s good because I can look for a job that either involves VoIP or not; it’s good to change after a while. It sucks because looking for a job sucks.

$TITLE is what I can now officially say; I’ve just received the papers that make it official. That’s a Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering for those who aren’t familiar with this very french thing that is the Diplôme d’Ingénieur.

INSA Lyon stands for the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, which is one of the top French engineering universities, as they put in on their website.

Now I can live my life. At last.

(For the non-french readers, yes, there is an obvious grammatical error in the title of this post. This is a reference to a news story that happened years ago. Bubulle is Christian Perrier’s nickname, btw.)

So, here it is, I am rethinking my involvement in the Debian Project. And it’s all Bubulle’s fault.

I am not leaving the Project, because Debian is far more important to me than some rude bashing from Bubulle.

It is a fact that Bubulle and me have agreed to disagree on a number of topics, it’s also a fact that we are both committed to Debian. In the past few weeks, a number of things happened, and we both said things we probably regret (at least I do).

I do not like this paternalistic tone he sometimes demonstrate in mailing-list postings. I totally hate that, to be frank. But I can pretty much deal with it as long as it’s not aimed at me.

He tagged one of his debconf-notes-are-evil-and-useless-crap-please-remove-it filed against one of my packages as “not-fixed” even when I explained that it is not a bug and the note really is what I want. It implies that I am not fixing bugs, which is something I cannot accept. Debian bug reports tend to have the very first priority in my todo list.

So far, I can deal with that.

But what I cannot deal with, is this mail from Christian to Paul Rouget (the moron who first posted the photos of the Firefox/Iceweasel posters from the JDLL last saturday, vomitting on us, and the comments were even worse). Sorry, the mail is in french, I don’t know how well Google Translate performs on this one but you should give it a try.

This is purely insulting. Christian did not even contact me, he did not even try to get the facts straight, and it looks like my last post, in which I explain what happened during the JDLL, was totally useless.

So, congratulations Christian. I’m perhaps not the most active DD, but I’m quite active nonetheless. Well, that is, I was quite active and reactive. This is likely to change starting today.

I’m not going to drop any packages. I’m not going to disappear. I’m not going to let Debian France down. I’m not going to let my packages rot in the archive. But I’m going to be noticeably less active and reactive.

Next time you talk to me, it’d better be to apologize for this mail you sent to Paul Rouget.

I /quit from both Freenode and OFTC on monday evening. I probably won’t come back. I feel way better already without being on these two networks, without reading Raphaël Hertzog blatantly lie about dunc-tank, without reading a whole lot of other crap.

I’m taking a much-needed break. Fuck you.

Pierre Habouzit, Josselin Mouette, Denis Barbier, Sam Hocevar, and others (you all know who you are): thank you, you guys rock. And GO GO GO dunc-bank !

Five years ago, the first mail I read was from James Troup and contained my encrypted Debian password.

If only I didn’t loose 2 years of my mail archives :-(

As it happens, today is also my birthday.

So, here we are, the European Parliament finally rejected the Software Patents. At last.

With 648 votes against the proposal out of 680 total votes, it’s quite a strong signal towards the European Commission. Hope they’ll learn something from that event.

Thanks to all the folks who worked for that day to happen, especially the FFII and Michel Rocard.

Now, let’s get back to Free Software. We’ve got a C++ transition to do.

Title says it all. I finally installed WordPress (which leaves me totally unimpressed, btw), and we’ll see how it’ll go.

There are still a couple of things which need polishing, but I do not have the time to play with WordPress right now.

As for the content of this blog, Debian-related topics and more generally Free Software should account for most of the traffic here.

No comments allowed, sorry, but I get enough spam already and I just don’t want to fight with yet another kind of spammers.