Many reasons to use Libre Software

These last days I had the opportunity to attend to many talks about Libre Software.

Last week, in the Master of Free Software, we had two exceptional guests: Alberto Abella and Marcelo Branco, you can see a summarize of their talks here.
Besides, these days gpul is organizing its VIII Xornadas Software Libre and yesterday I attended to one talk that my classmate Pedro did about the process of making free gisEIEL, a proyect between Deputación da Coruña and University of Coruña.

These three talks have in common one idea: the advantage of using Libre Software, but from different points of view.

In the first one, Alberto Abella tell us with statics and data how Libre Software is better than Privative.

In the second one, Marcelo Branco tell us about his experience in Libre Software and public administrations. Marcelo is pure passion talking about Libre Software but his arguments are true. Countries should not use Privative Software in their public administrations because on the one hand, they are putting economics resources out of the country and they cannot be sure about the integraty of the public data because they cannot really what the privative software do without seeing the source code.

Finally, in the gisEIEL talk, the reasons are technical. They started the project using Privative Software but they realize that was depending on the one company exclusively. They could not make their own applications to access to the database. The data was storing in binary way so they could not get them without using the privative applications... so they make up their minds to migrate the project to Libre Software because it was better from technical point of view.

Therefore we can deduce that Libre Software is not only for 'frikis'. It is a real inovation in the computer world. The world is changing. Do not stay in the dark!

Libre Software in Galicia

This week has just published the new number of Codigocero, a very important galician magazine about technology. This number is special for me because there is an interview to Roberto Vieito, one of my classmates in the Master of Free Software. Roberto made a study about the situation of the Libre Software in Galicia which you can see here (in English).
You can also read the interview here (in Galician).

Well done Roberto!

Gtranslator in Wikipedia

I have just added a new article for gtranslator in the Wikipedia.
Just a description for now but I'll try to do a complete article.
You can edit it and to contribute, of course ;-)

Be the wikipedia my friend!

Testing Ubuntu 8.04

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my ubuntu to the new version 8.04. According to the release schedule this is the Alpha5 so all new features are included. Despite being a alpha version I didn't have any problem during the upgrade process and everything seems to work fine. Now it is time to test it.
In order to do this, a new feature seems to be very useful, the automatic bugs report. As in Gnome, now when you get a crash in an application you can send a bug report in automatic way to ubuntu.

Another interesting feature is PolicyKit. Now you can run administrative applications as normal user and click in unlock button if you need to do an action that require root privileges.


Besides, Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 include a beta of the new Gnome 2.22 and a beta of Firefox 3.0 as default browser.
You can also install Firefox 2 from Add/Remove programs and to have both versions installed. This is very useful because for example, the Add-ons that I use normally don't work in Firefox 3.0 yet.

FOSDEM 2008

Last weekend I attended to my first FOSDEM. It was a really good experience. Lots of people, lots of talks, lots of new ideas... in short time.

My classmates of the Master on Free Software and me presented a paper about Quality and Libre Software. As first experience I think was great. People showed enough interested on it.

I attended to many talks about different projects (Mozilla, Gnome, OpenOffice, Embedded devices, Freedesktop...) all of them were very interesting.

I found specially interesting a talk about integrating the Web into GTK+ applications with WebKit. I didn't anything about this and really fascinated me. I'll try to learn more about WebKit and who knows, maybe it could be used in gtranslator someday.

My First Post

Hello World! Here I am

This is my first blog and of course my first post.

I am a newbie in the free software world. I collaborate with Gnome project, most specifically in gtranslator.

Now, after the insistence of my friend Andrés, I think it is time to share my experiences.

Stay tuned!