Radio Tux has published my interview with the core developers and contributors to the Lumiera project now. I conducted the interview at FROSCON 2009 a couple of weeks ago. Lumiera is a Free and Open Source video editing application project for GNU/Linux developed originally by the CinelerraCV community. It was born as a rewrite of the Cinelerra codebase called Cinelerra3 but it is now an independent project with its own name.

Poster of ideas in the Lumiera logo contest

The lumiera project is insofar an amazing project, as it involves a lot of artists and videomakers. Also there seem to be quite a few women involved. So we do see the free and open source community evolving and including different people with various backgrounds. What a great news! Lumiera shows that people do not want to be limited by proprietary video editing software. I am looking myself for a good open source video suite for years and I believe Lumiera can be a good alternative in the future. Actually there is not a version to test yet. There have been code aditions to other projects.

Why I do think Lumiera will be successful, is because the project lead focuses on building a broad community of contributors and they do not focus on short-term success, but rather long-term goals. When they had to decide what logo they should use for lumiera, they put up a forum, a wiki page and a voting system and let the community decide as a whole. And I like what came out. Cool way to do it.

Lumiera Logo after community contest

The interview is pretty interesting. It is a bit more than half an hour. I was also very happy to hear that Lumiera will focus on speed and usability for people with less powerful and expensive hardware. These are exactly the goals of LXDE and Freifunk, which I am happy to support as well. Lumiera folks just incorporate the idea of empowering people. I am looking forward to what comes out of this exciting project.

Die Nicht-Lineare Videoschnittsoftware Lumiera ist gewissermaßen ein Fork von Cinerella. Warum es zu diesem Fork kam, wie der Name und das Logo für das Projekt entstand und warum die Community, die sich mittels Wiki und Mailinglisten organisiert, jetzt schon eine große ist, obwohl die Software noch nicht veröffentlich ist versucht unser Moderator Mario Behling im Gespräch mit Developern und anderen am Projekt beteiligten Leuten zu klären. (http://blog.radiotux.de/2009/09/02/interview-ueber-lumiera/)

Special thanks to Sirko and Thomas “der genial vom Thema abschweifende” Steinbrecher for giving me the opportunity to conduct the interview and for always keeping us up to date about the FOSS community over the years with radio tux!

Links

* Lumiera project http://lumiera.org
* Lumiera wiki http://pipapo.org/pipawiki/Lumiera
* On Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinelerra#Lumiera_rewrite
* Radio Tux http://blog.radiotux.de

In den letzten Wochen ergab sich bei mir ein reger Austausch mit Politikern verschiedener Parteien. Zudem gab es in der Freifunk-Community zahlreiche Anfragen von Journalisten zu Freifunk und freien Infrastrukturen. Gerne mache ich hier meine Positionen öffentlich.

Jeder Bürger hat das Recht auf ein menschenwürdiges, selbstbestimmtes Leben in Freiheit. Dies kann nur in einer Gesellschaft geschehen, die Bürgern, Orte für die Entfaltung der Persönlichkeit und ein menschengerechtes Leben zur Verfügung stellt, unabhängig von Einkommen und Status. Der freie Zugang zu Wasser, Luft, Strom, öffentlichen Straßen und Plätzen, Schulen und Universitäten muss genauso gesichert sein, wie der ungehinderte Zugang zu freien digitalen Netzen als Orte der Öffentlichkeit im neuen digitalen Raum. Um diese Orte zu ermöglichen und effiziente lokale Netze und Breitbandinternet für alle im städtischen und ländlichem Raum aufzubauen, muss das offene Spektrum neben gegenwärtigen WLAN-Frequenzen ausgeweitet werden. Ein demokratischer Diskurs kann nur gesichert sein, wenn öffentliche Orte hierfür existieren. Offene Infrastrukuren wie Vekehrswege, Telekommunikationsnetze, Energie- und Wasserversorgung sind nicht nur eine Basis für wirtschaftliche Aktivitäten, sondern grundlegend notwendig für das gleichberechtigte Miteinander der Menschen in der Gesellschaft. Sie entscheiden als das zentrale Element, wer aktiv an der Demokratie, in der Wirtschaft und dem kulturellen Leben teilhat. Zugänge zu Infrastrukturen müssen daher frei und ungehindert sein. Der Betrieb von Infrastrukturen ist eine Gemeinschaftsaufgabe. Offene Betriebsmodelle des Teilens von Ressourcen und Arbeit, wie bei freien Bürgernetzen, müssen deshalb gewinnorientierten Geschäftsmodellen gleichgestellt werden. Infrastrukturen dienen zu allererst dem Gemeinwohl.

Saverio from the Italian Ninux community has published a video interview Daniel Paufler and I conducted with them at the Wireless Community Weekend in Berlin. Thank you very much for the great montaggio! It is real fun to watch!

Direct Link: http://www.vimeo.com/1052320

In Berlin, at C-Base, people from wireless communities all around Europe meet to share ideas and experiences. See this interview by Mario Behling with free networks activists from Ninux.org and Freifunk.net

At the CeBIT I had the chance to talk to some fantastic folks of direct open embedded systems, a new Latvian company that is producing WLAN devices based on the GNU/Linux distributions like OpenWRT, OpenEmbedded and FlashSYS Linux.

In the video they present their devices and some show cases as well as FlashSYS, their own web based firmware for small router computers.

FlashSYS environment is a cross-operating system clent-server environment that allows developers to use existing web development skills (HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, Flash, SQLite, and Lua) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for an embedded system with a very small footprint. (http://openrb.com)

Most of the free and open source companies presented their products in hall 5, which was packed with crowds of people. You can get an idea when you hear the background noise in the video. The interest in free and open source technologies is amazing and ever increasing.

Some questions should be answered that could help to understand what free layers actually are.

1. What is the common idea behind free culture, free content, free software, free hardware, free infrastructures and a free economy?

2. What are working examples of free layered projects and why do they work and others did not?

3. Who are the people engaged in communities building free layers?
a) What do the people in these communities identify as the basis for their project? Political changes, technological changes, cultural changes?
b) What do people engaged in projects have in common, what not? - ideas, organizational structures, background.
c) What is the motivation of people to take part in these projects?
d) What are the difficulties of people engaged in projects and how do they solve problems?
e) What communication technologies do they use primarily?
f) What common cultural particularities can be identified?
g) Where do the people involved meet, work and communicate?

4. What difficulties a systems of free layers face in regards to international treaties, patents and copyright laws and censorship?

It is often stated that the Internet is the basis of the free communication and exchange of software and content – all kinds of information and knowledge. Yes, the Internet especially in the 1990’s could be regarded as a free infrastructure that enabled free exchange. This is changing rapidly throughout the world, as we see a trend to censoring of information all over the world and privately enforced censoring with the help of copyright and patent laws.

Flo Fleissig interviews Kloschi (Freifunk), Kurt Jansson (Wikimedia), Jürgen Neumann (Freifunk), Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (United Nations University), Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons) and Allison and Benoit (Montréal Wireless)

"Hello this is Flo!" .. from the free culture, free software, free infrastructure conference Wizards of OS in Berlin. "It is good stuff you can do here. There are excellent panels with excellent people from all over the world." And Flo is gonna go out to interview some of those excellent people. Watch how Flo talks with Kloschi, Freifunk activist and developer from Leipzig (Germany), finds out that Kurt Jansson, head of the Wikimedia association in Germany, uses the same Freifunk gateway as himself or learns about the early days of free infrastructures in Germany by talking to Jürgen Neumann one of the "founding fathers" of the Freifunk community. Further on Rishab Ghosh from the United Nations University in Maastricht explains how open content and open infrastructure are closely related, before he gets an overview of the development of the world’s biggest wireless network in Berlin by Flo … And of course he also gets to know where he finds Flo’s node in the network. Also, Lawrence Lessig from Stanford University and Creative Commons (and without name tag) describes the free network project in Berlin as “an extremely important project to liberate the physical layer right now.” Flo: “Thank you Larry … and here is your name tag, which I found.” Finally Allison and Benoit from free wireless community in Montréal explain about different models to share and give us a few insights into the chances and difficulties you face when you try to establish a free and open network.

Ein globaler Freifunk-Newswire ist jetzt unter http://global.freifunk.net zu erreichen. Hier gibt es zudem eine Übersicht über Freifunk-Initiativen weltweit. Bisher konnte ich 271 landesweite, regionale und lokale Freifunk-Projekte aus 33 Ländern identifizieren. Obwohl die Anzahl von Initiativen noch nichts über die tatsächliche Zahl der Teilnehmer aussagt, verdeutlicht die Vielzahl der Projekte bereits den weltweiten Trend zum Aufbau von freien Netzen.

Die Berliner Freifunker verzeichnen in diesem Sommer sehr gute Funkbedingen. Auch kleine entfernte Netze und Knoten (Freifunk-Router) bauen somit ohne Probleme Verbindungen in das große Berliner Netz auf. Bereits fast 400 einzelne Nodes verzeichnen eine Verbindung mit dem Router auf dem ND in Friedrichshain. Obwohl in einer Großstadt wie Berlin viel Funkverkehr läuft, starke Luftbewegungen herrschen und Häuser die Ausbreitung von Funkwellen beeinträchtigen, nehmen auch die „Long-Shots“ in letzter Zeit enorm zu.