freedom bits

Last weekend, many of FSFE's teams descended upon Brussels, Belgium for the 2007 FOSDEM meeting to spend two days between computers, talks and Belgium beer.

There must have been around 20 people from FSFE alone, and we came well-prepared: FSFLA board member and FSFE Fellow Fernanda Weiden had the idea to put the Fellowship mascot on her nails, adding another entry to the "Fellowship everywhere" section:

There were quite a bit of interesting talks during FOSDEM this year, and FSFE's were among them. Shane Coughlan gave a lightning talk about the Freedom Task Force and I was given the chance to hold the closing keynote, which is also available as video download (327m). Let's see whether my closing prediction will come out more true than some of the others I referenced:

"Sandwiched between Vista problems, antitrust issues and the global push for Open Standards, Microsoft will increasingly lose the initiative. Free Software will start to cut into the desktop monopoly from which Microsoft has previously excerted force to conquer neighboring markets. Eventually Microsoft will be forced to fundamentally rethink its business model in favor of Free Software."
-- Georg Greve, keynote@FOSDEM 2007

Other talks can be found on FOSDEM's media page. There are also several FOSDEM 2007 pictures that have been uploaded by various people to Flickr.

And finally I'd like to say a word to all the people from FSFE and the FOSDEM team: Thank you very much, you made this an extraordinary event!

Stefano has been rather curious about Second Life (SL) in his blog, and much of the press seemed to be buzzing about how SL was going to be an economy of its own and how there were millionaires in the making.

Based on my experience of IT as a hype-driven industry of sorts, I was somewhat sceptical about all the promises of Second Life. Seems I wasn't the only one. The Register now has an article "The phony economics of Second Life" in which the claim of 3.1 million residents is examined with some healthy scepticism:

Typically, there are only around 15,000 clients logged in to Second Life at any one time. In other words, this economy has a population about the size of Ilkeston, Derbyshire, or Troutdale, Oregon. And each business has the prospect of a market of no more than 100 people in one place - a number easily accommodated by a church hall. [...] So, from the three million residents who, we are told, are living the dream of a virtual economy, we arrive at a figure of around 3,000 economically active users at any one time - most of whom are turning over only a token sum.

This sounds much more realistic to me, and if anyone was hoping to get rich quick in that Second Life, heed the following statement by Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life:

"Linden Dollars are not money, they are neither funds nor credit for funds. Linden Dollars represent a limited license right to use a feature of the simulated environment. Linden Lab does not offer any right of redemption for any sum of money, or any other guarantee of monetary value, for Linden Dollars."

The shocking conclusion: Second Life is a game, and a game that some people would even describe as stupendously boring. Which is probably why most people still seem to prefer their "First Life" (FL).