The breakfast sessions at Hotel Augustin where most of us are staying have turned into a very nice and vital place to be. Coffee, juice, eggs, lots of bread, yoghurt, fruit, fish and cheese...mmm. I have actually started to get up earlier just to prolong these unformal exchanges of experience and wisdom. The breakfast room has a mellow atmosphere to it where we have time to talk about (possible) other aspects of life than just the unexpected error messages in the shell (OK, just kidding)

While I am still in breakfast mode - I find it fantastic how Piksel is now a gathering of both girls and boys using a variety of platforms and software. I have discussed with Gisle whether the latter is a good thing or not - should Piksel be a platform for Linux only, or do we want to encourage a cross-platform approach? Big questions of course. The Free Software platform goes without saying, but that taken into consideration I guess the road from here is still open..

Todays workshop session were conducted by Yves (PiDiP) and Georg, Martin and Phillip (GePhex crew), respectively. Again it is easy to see how works built on the PureData architecture are quite dominating at this event. Which I guess has to do with the cross-platform modular approach, and it is a growing community with lots of competence and experience. The GePhex app however does not belong to this family, and I am personally curious to see it in action on saturday nite. One big political and evolutional question is obviously how the variety of smaller programs not utilizing PD will sustain in the long run, compared to the well-proven workability of applications within the PureData architecture. Since I am unfortunately still pretty incompetent on the coding field I am curious how much one can actually share - are there really things to learn for everybody from everybody?? I would certainly hope so. On the other hand, referring to the world of music and media sharing on a simpler level (see Creative Commons, tuesday) I have experienced that actual sharing isn't always easy. It is of course easy to *offer* something to others (be it code, music or whatever), but people simply aren't interested. Can someone from the coding side offer me some insight please??

Thursday evening started a bit earlier than usual, with a well-attended panel discussion titled "Between industry and culture, art and business", moderated by Grethe Melby. The question was if different approaches into Linux have anything to gain from each other. She had gathered a very interesting gang; representatives for IBM, The "Skolelinux" (School Linux) project, and head of tech infrastructure in Bergen Kommune all have different reasons for utilizing Linux in their jobs, and Jaromil was there being the free developer and artist. One would think that the man from IBM was supposed to take on the character of the "bad guy" on the panel, and surely enough Bjørn Roksvold (sales CEO of IBM Norway) quickly stated that there were no altruistic reasons for IBM for jumping on the Linux train. They are capitalists, and the Linux involvement for them had been to cut costs. At the same time he said that by this involvement people within the corporation had to "take their own medicine" (his words) and thereby participating in the Linux developer community (resulting in, according to him, some nice codeworks availble for everybody). Linux is a very safe a stable system when configured and maintained correctly, and IBM are putting it into crucial uses where the Open Source community are of great help. Ole Bjørn Tuftedal in turn stated that Bergen Kommune (municipality) basically had the same reason as IBM - cost effectiveness - for using Linux, but added the importance of using open formats in general for a variety of obvious reasons, and provided some examples on how the transition was working in practice. Vidar Bakke was representing Skolelinux, and although obviously with all good intentions didn't really manage to convince anybody with his rather old-fashioned examples of how teachers are advocating "piracy" by using MS packages, which is the reason why one should convert to Linux instead. Sorry mate, but your arguments and reasoning are highly speculative and sounds like cut & paste from the copyright industry point of view. Maybe this is what happens when one tries to be too understanding of your enemy's perspective. OK, there were people from the audience correcting him, and of course Jaromil, whom I must again compliment for his extremely well-spoken argumentation. No flirting, no recessions but a pragmatic and charismatic rhetoric; Jaromil does not pretend to agree with you if he doesn't. I suggest someone give Skolelinux a copy of dyne:bolic for christmas as an example of good marketing of great ideas put into practice.

To educate mr.Skolelinux, here is a quote from an article by Armin Medosch/Kingdom of Piracy, for the DIVE compilation:
'Piracy' is a question of the power of definition, which currently clearly lies with the data lords. Hollywood film studios, software giants and multi-national record companies have chosen to use the term 'piracy' to cover all kinds of copyright infringement. This might turn out to backfire. As Bernhard Günther points out (4), Hollywood has produced numerous pirate movies where audience sympathies were usually with the somehow more 'human' pirates, rather than with the captains of the navy frigates. People on the street tend to favour the underdog. By chosing the term 'piracy', Hollywood has maybe failed to understand its own propaganda of an earlier age. Is it pure coincidence that one of the most successful Open Source softwares is called 'Apache', an indigenous North American tribe that was mercilessly slaughtered almost to extinction by white settler cowboys?

- Armin Medosch, "Piratology, the deep seas of Open Code and Free Culture" (p.12)
http://residence.aec.at/kop/DIVE/cd/text/pirate.html

The debate was cut off because of a double booking at Landmark - a (swedish?) jazz quartet had been hired to play. Which wasn't bad at all, actually they were great with their groovy, Mingus/Coltrane style jazz. I had hoped to see Tatiana (and Yves?) doing their VJ set on top of that, which didn't happen. But I am sure it would have made a great combination, and a rare one. Who has decided it always has to be techno or noise/ambience accompanying VJ sets?