Λοιπόν, μετά από καθυστέρηση κάποιων ημερών λόγω υψηλού φόρτου, κατάφερα και έκλεψα μερικές ώρες για να ετοιμάσω κάποια reports. Κυρίως για σκοπούς απολογισμού, τί κάναμε, τί επιτεύχθηκε, τι μένει ακόμη, κλπ. Το 1ο είναι στα ελληνικά και το 2ο στα Αγγλικά (για να το ανεβάσουμε στο www.ellak.gr και να δημοσιεύσουμε το άρθρο στο slashdot :-) Στείλτε σχόλια, αν είναι να το ανεβάσουμε σύντομα. Εγώ θα λείπω μέχρι Πέμπτη απόγευμα, οπότε αν θέλει κάποιος να ανεβάσει το κείμενο σε κάποιο wiki και να διορθωθεί εκεί feel free. Όμως please, μην ανεβάσετε ακόμη τίποτε μόνοι σας σε κάποιο άλλο ξένο site, γιατί περιμένω κάποια σχόλια από τη Siemens για το πώς/αν θα φανεί στο report. (Αγγλικά) 1st Developer Workshop in Greece. The last weekend (July 17-18) was an important one for Open Source and Free Software in Greece. The 1st Developer Workshop took place in Athens at the OPA (english = Financial University of Athens????) labs. The purpose of this workshop was not just to present the benefits of Free Software to the uninitiated, but much more importantly to actually gather together the people involved in the advancement of FS/OSS in this country and help them communicate, exchange ideas, create new projects, help with translations and localization issues, etc. Initially, the expected number of attendees was around 20 as the event was thought to be of small interest except to very few people. But the organizers were in for a very pleasant surprise that surpassed their wildest expectations with the actual number of attendees reaching even 90 people for the first day. Apparently, the Greek FS/OSS community in Greece needed exactly this sort of event to happen. The mood was very nice and friendly and everyone was very excited to be part of the first event of this kind in Greece. People from all over Greece came to this event and funding for their transportation cost was offered by Siemens, while catering and administrative/technical support was funded by GRNET. Some talks were given about a wide range of subjects, but more importantly the participants were split in groups that each tackled a specific task throughout the day. A lot of photographs were taken in this event and a lot of video material also. The photographs are available in the website of GRNET [1]. The video will be available when converted to some form that is easy to download (which might take some time, since there are a lot of DV tapes to convert). The following talks and tasks took place in this event: 1. The event started with an presentation of the issue and the future of Software Patents in Europe by Dimitris Glezos. This is a very hot issue in this period and educating the people about its implications is of extreme importance. 2. A talk for encodings and fonts by Alexios. Zavras, how the greek language is supported, by which encodings (ELOT 928, ISO-8859-7, UTF-8, etc). What Greek fonts are available freely and what is their future. Discussion about OpenType and the new font technologies. 3. Presentation about Fonts design and its history by Michael Semoglou. Presentation of the custom designed font to be soon published with an open source compatible license. This new font will cover Latin (of course), Greek (both simple and polytonic) format and it is to our knowledge the first known project to have been designed from scratch by a professional font designer to be distributed as open source. 4. Greek support of OpenOffice.org by Dimitris Korbetis. Mr. Korbetis discussed how Greek in OpenOffice.org can be made better and gathered volunteers in this direction. 5. Manolis Galatoulas showed a presentation of the tools CVS and Subversion (SVN), how they are used in big projects (like the debian-installer) and what are their differences and benefits. 6. An important task started in this workshop, that of adding input support for UTF-8 encoding in the groff program. A large number of developers coordinated by Alexios Zavras and Konstantinos Margaritis tried to distribute the effort of adding the much needed support. The rationale was that as the default locale entry for Greek in Debian is now UTF-8 based, unless groff supports input in UTF-8, it will be very difficult to view and process Greek man pages in this OS. Some very good head start was made, but of course the task still has a lot of work to do. 7. Greek support added for Scribus. Coordinated by Alexios Zavras, a number of developers tackled this software and tested Greek support, and started localizing this software. 8. Konstantinos Margairtis presented an live introductory tutorial of Kdevelop, programming an application with localization in mind (using glib's gettext C++ interface) and using Kbabel afterwards to create the localized messages. Petros Velonis show the use of poEdit in a similar manner. 9. Alexios Zavras gave some very interesting tutorials on GNU Make and Tcl scripting, which were very welcome by the viewers. 10. Translation issues. Greek is a very difficult language to translate to, and it has to be very carefully done. One important issue is the translation of technical terms and jargon. This event hosted a fruitful discussion regarding difficult terms, that is, terms that pose problems for Greek translators, and many decisions were made in this respect. 11. Testing the localized Debian Installer, coordinated by Manolis Galatoulas. Almost every attendee was interested in testing and helping the Greek translation of the new Debian Installer (sarge). A very useful task on its own, as many spelling issues were made 12. Recruiting Greek Debian Helpers/Developers. So far the number of Greek DDs was regretably small (just two). In this event there was a surge of people interested in joining and helping Debian support the Greek language in every way they can, like documentation, testing localization issues, but also plain coding and development and Q&A testing. 13. Dimitris Glezos advocated the idea of creating a slashdot-type web site for Greek users. A lot of discussion took place about this subject and it appears that there are many people in favour of such an initiative. 14. New Open Source Project started: A real time poll/voting software. More details on that as they are made available :-) 15. Keysigning party: Strengthening the local Web of Trust in Greece. No comments about that :-) Yes, we actually did all that stuff! It may seem much, but everyone like this event so much that we actually wanted to have more time and more tasks. Everyone was really sorry that it ended so soon, but we made a promise to host such an event every 3 months or so. The next one will take place at Thessaloniki in mid-October, close to the date of the international IT event, Infosystem. Thanks to everyone for attending this event and we hope to seeing you in the next one! The organizers Konstantinos Margaritis Alexios Zavras GRNET (? who else ?) (Ελληνικά) Δεν προλαβαίνω να το κάνω, μπορεί να το αναλάβει κάποιος;