Kategorie: Freie Software

Complaining About A Bus Factor

I learned from work inside an open source project during the last years that many people are not willing to really support you, while you are doing the work. They show nearly no interest in your volunteer work up to the point when something didn’t went smoothly. During the periode everything went smoothly you won’t get an acclamation. But in the opposite you will see a lot of people always pointing on you. And maybe they pick on you. I got this experience. And there were nobody inside the project who stopped this.

At some point leading members of the project spoke about my volunteer work in public without discussing requests and issues first with the one who did the work (me). That was the last straw.

I stopped my contribution to the project immediately. I wanted to preserve my nerves and spent my spare time in a different way after 16 years.

There is no need to complain on a bus factor, if you are the source of it.

And I read that the project will spent more donation money on the creation of a new framework and administration. It seemed the current one was to cheap because of my contributions (volunteer time). Lesson learned: only expensive things seemed to be invaluable ;-(

LibreOffice Extensions Site: Why The Latest Software Isn’t In Use?

The LibreOffice extensions and templates website runs on Plone 5.0.x with some addons. I created this addons from scratch a time ago and improved them over the time. E.g. the current release number of the addon for the extension part of the site is 0.26. There is also a release 0.27 on TDF’s Github repository. The development version is currently 0.28.

The LibreOffice extensions site uses instead of the current version only the old version 0.25-dev, which is three releases behind the current development state. The reason behind this is that there is nobody in the TDF infrastructure team who takes care of the site and is able or willing to run the Plone buildout script to update the software that runs the site.

I had done this work for TDF in the past, but I felt from the way of communication from leading members of TDF that my volunteer work was no longer wanted. Thus I decided to spent my spare time for other tasks not releated to TDF, where I get much more positive feedback.

And a look at the latest published extensions confirmed that there is currently nobody taking a look into them, e.g. making a review. It seemed they  were only published.

Migration Of Plone Site Content

If you want to migrate content from or to a Plone site it is always the best use of ressources, if you ask volunteers to copy and paste the content items from one environment to another ;-(

But seriously: The Plone community created a tool for such tasks with a funny name: ‚Transmogrifier‘. You could find some information on this at https://docs.plone.org/external/collective.transmogrifier/docs/source/index.html#transmogrifier and a training session at https://training.plone.org/5/transmogrifier/.

But it is not that easy and fast to create pipelines and blueprints for a migration yourself. Thus I recommend to ask and pay a Plone professional service to do the migration. It would preserve your nerves and you get results very fast.

TDF Dashboard

I tried to have a look onto the TDF dashboard at https://dashboard.documentfoundation.org using an Internet Explorer 11, but with no success. The website didn’t render. I got only a retry of rendering actions. According to the browser stats at least 5.26 % of the internet user are not able to view the site (https://www.stetic.com/de/market-share/browser/).

And in addition for those who prefer webservices with ‚mobile first‘ implementation: it’s not for you ;-(

The site doesn’t render proper on smaller mobile devices. It’s not usable on such devices.

Worked Through The Plone Volto Training Documentation

I worked with the training documentation for the Plone Volto framework and played a bit with the different components. This helps to get some entry level knowledge of the framework that is based on the JavaScript React framework.

I expanded the buildout from the Volto Github repository with one of my former Plone addons: tdf.extensionuploadcenter and added a new default view for it inside my own Volto app. I use this new view to improve my knowledge on Volto.

Playing With New Plone UI Volto

I read about a new Plone UI named ‚Volto‘ and created a new instance from the Github repository: https://github.com/plone/volto

I had to install node.js and yarn on my notebook. I created a new volto package with ‚create-volto-app my-volto-app‘.  I could build my volto app with the command ’npm start‘. This build everything and the instance is available at port 3000 of your URL, e.g. ‚http://localhost:3000‘. But you need to fire up the Plone instance too with e.g. ‚bin/instance fg‘ too (otherwise you will get error messages).

Plone Volto in mobile resolution

The screenshot above shows the Plone site within a resolution for mobile devices. The Volto app uses the Pastanaga theme and is ‚mobile first‘.

FOSDEM And A1 Form?

In about two weeks many free software developers and enthusiast meet at the FOSDEM in Brussels for at least two days. They are traveling from other countries inside the European Union as well as from countries around the world to Brussels. Many developers (and some open source supporters too), which attend the event are  employed by open source companies, they are traveling to Brussels within the scope of their payed job (for different reasons) and give talks on topics around their dayly work.

If there is a connection between the the payed job of an attendee and the participation at the FOSDEM, people from inside the European Union that travel (in this case) to Belgium, Brussels need a form A1. If they didn’t own such a certificate their work runs under the rules of the Belgium social security. I explained the features of the A1 form already some weeks ago on my blog here. A connection to the daily could be e.g. a presentation with the branding of the employer or even the statement of a business trip at the hotel reception.

First Quarter Without Work For TDF

I did pour volunteer work for LibreOffice and its antecessor for about sixteen years. I worked in different roles for the open source project during this long periode.  The project consumed a lot of my spare time. But then I experienced a ’nice‘ communication experience inside the community (from some ‚core‘-members), that showed me a lack of respect for my project work, its value and also for my person. Thus I decided to completely stop my pour volunteer work within the project three month ago. The LibreOffice extensions and templates website (extensions.libreoffice.org) lost its maintainer and project reviewer since that time.

I used my free cycles to improve my fitness. And I was able to do this way something in balance to my day by day payed office work. Seemed it was a smart decision 😉