A Linux Server Distribution For Churches?

Recently I was chatting with a few friends separately about Linux and using it in Churches. This got me thinking about what Churches might need, rather than about how to get Linux onto Church computers.

My friend Wesley and I were chatting about using the Dansguardian filtering software on a main firewall server at his Church’s office. He initially wanted to install it on the desktop computers there, and then had the good idea to rather install it on a central server.

Earlier in the week, my friend Paul was wondering if his open source project for Church websites was possibly being rendered unnecessary by the plethora of excellent open source content management systems out there. Knowing that there’s a gap when it comes to open source Church membership management systems, I suggested a new direction for his project.

Then just yesterday my friend Raphaël, the founder of the Ichthux project, was wondering if Ichthux was really necessary anymore. He said that in a way, trying to force people to use open source software was infringing on their freedom to choose what software they want to use.

The combination of these conversations made me wonder if perhaps there’s a need for a Church server solution. One that acts as a firewall, a content filter, as well as a server for church membership management software, church service management software, and any other server-centered software that a Church might find useful. It could have a nice web interface to configure it and all the software installed on it.

What do you think? Do you think there’s a “market” for a Linux server distribution for Churches, one that would be easy to install, setup and maintain?

Also, would you be interested in helping out with any of the above projects? I know both Ichthux and openchurch could do with folks to help out with development and other things.

Christians in Open Source Community

Update: I’ve started the site and the mailing list. You can find them by going to http://christianoss.org/.

I have been toying with the idea of starting a mailing list for Christian developers, users, and enthusiasts of Open Source Software. This mailing list would be dedicated to promoting Linux and Open Source Software in the Christian context (i.e. Church, family, and other Christian places and organisations).

This is mostly out of my own frustration of not having anywhere to discuss these sorts of matters. I want to be able to ask people questions like:

• How do we promote OSS in churches?
• What Church Management Software is out there?
• How do I set up a web site for my Church?
• What software can my ministry use to display songs using a data projector?
• How do I leverage Facebook and Twitter to be a tool for Christ?
• How do we present the Gospel in a Web 2.0 world?

I know of one mailing list that currently says that it is concentrated on open source software, but unfortunately it tends to become a place for people to debate doctrinal differences and politics, instead of discussing ways of improving our ministries with open source software.

So, what do you think? If I were to start a mailing list, would you join?

Project Spotlight: Xiphos

I thought it only appropriate to highlight the Xiphos, formerly known as GnomeSword, in my second Project Spotlight. This is the Gnome-based frontend to the Sword Bible library.

Xiphos (formerly known as GnomeSword) is a Bible study tool written for Linux, UNIX, and Windows under the GNOME toolkit, offering a rich and featureful environment for reading, study, and research using modules from The SWORD Project and elsewhere. It is open-source software, and available free-of-charge to all.

Once again, to gain a bit of perspective on the developers and the development of Xiphos, I joined the #xiphos IRC channel.

Development Status

With the latest version of Xiphos, version 3, it is now cross-platform, able to run on Windows, Linux and other Unixes. Xiphos has a strong set of developers behind it, who are active in both development and in the community. There are about 6 folks working on the actual code, and about another 10 or 11 who are actively involved in translation of the application.

As mentioned before, Xiphos used to be called GnomeSword. The developers decided to rename GnomeSword to Xiphos at version 3 for two reasons:

• Firstly, they were planning on releasing this new cross-platform verison, and with a few applications with similar names on Windows, they felt they needed to make their application stand out better by changing the name.
• Secondly, they realised that with the high adoption rate of Linux distributions like Ubuntu, some folks were not aware that their desktop environment was called Gnome. Not only that, there were even some reports of folks thinking that GnomeSword was related to Dungeons and Dragons!

Using Xiphos

Firstly, here’s the customary screenshot:

Xiphos 3.0

Xiphos’ features and interface, since it’s a frontend for the Sword Project, is similar to BibleTime. On the left you have the Modules, Bookmarks, Search and Verse List views, each accessible via the buttons above the list. The main part of the application is a tabbed interface with each tab holding a translation of the Bible.

Xiphos has a very nice advanced search, which you can use to do a very customised search. It also has a parallel view where you can see two or more translations of the Bible at the same time.

You can install more modules using the module manager, which will connect to multiple sites, or even a CD, and allow you to browse and download the modules, which will then appear in Xiphos for you to use.

Interview with Karl Kleinpaste

Raoul:
How long have you been involved with Xiphos?

Karl:
Sometime in early ‘06, by accident I discovered Sword Project software in Fedora repositories.  At the time, I had no idea there was any Bible study software for Linux at all.  The first one I noticed was BibleTime, and upon installing that, of course Sword itself was pulled in as the necessary supporting library dependency.  That led me to looking for what else used the Sword library, and I found what was then called GnomeSword.

Unfortunately, my early experiences with it weren’t very good.  I had v2.1.5, I think, and my initial effort at putting it to use was a real problem, to the point that I wrote… well, not exactly a bug report, but more a transcript of user experience.  I wasn’t trying to be rude, but I wanted to make clear how a first-time user who is no dummy in Linux could far too easily get the application to misbehave.

Even so, I fiddled quite a bit with both BibleTime and then-GnomeSword and decided that GnomeSword just plain fit my brain better.  That’s no criticism of any kind of BibleTime; it was simply my personal choice for which program I felt served my personal needs best. Open source software is all about scratching personal itches, and that’s how I made my choice to use and then get involved with this development.

Raoul:
How did you get involved with the project?

Karl:
It was a couple months after first use that I decided to take an interest in the code, because a couple bugs were really bothering me. So I made some low-grade, rather tepid changes on minor display things before tackling bigger problems.  Once I got adequately comfortable with the code environment as a whole, I began hunting down the bad bugs that were really in my way.  Notably, at the time just spinning a mouse wheel on the verse navbar could induce a crash, and eventually I found a conflict between the GTK multi-thread model and the destruction of an internal verse key.  Shortly after that, I started fixing a lot of other bugs, and trying to get other people to help me find them.

At a certain point, I had a neat thought about using text-to-speech, and one evening I cooked up a basic feature enhancement to provide for the current Bible’s text to be funneled through “festival,” the common TTS system found in Linux systems, as one selected one verse after another. It was at about that time that Terry Biggs, GnomeSword’s founder and project lead, made me a project admin at SourceForge and basically told me to do whatever I felt was necessary — I guess it was pretty clear by then that I just wasn’t going away.

Raoul:
How often do you get a chance to work on the project?

Karl:
Constantly.  We’ve had reason to use the word “obsession” more than once with regard to it.  The Xiphos project has gained a well-deserved reputation for having a thoroughly frenetic development pace; we make a new release every couple of months.  The longest we’ve ever gone without a release since I’ve been involved is ~5 months.

Side issues not directly related to Xiphos code development are important, too.  For example, Terry and I once did a half hour of talk radio on the Christian talk station in my area, chatting about Bible software generally and why it’s valuable, during which we naturally plugged The Sword Project and (then-)GnomeSword heavily.

Another side issue is that I produce a lot of Sword modules which users now find in “the Xiphos repository.”  That is, for a long time, I maintained a module repository on a machine of mine at home, using my ordinary residential-class Internet connection.  As we headed toward the Windows port, and knowing that a far larger population could well come upon our software and want those modules, we set ourselves up with a proper hosting plan so that bandwidth for access to these modules is not a problem.  Today, new users of Xiphos get a set of 4 well-known module repositories, 2 at CrossWire itself (main + beta), bible.org because that’s where the official NET modules are found, and Xiphos’ repository, which contains modules produced mostly by Xiphos-involved people.  There are more than 3 dozen modules there, including several non-English Bibles, some map and atlas modules, updated Strong’s dictionaries, and several general books, such as Hodge’s and Finney’s systematic theologies, The Training of the Twelve, and the massive Early Church Fathers module.

Raoul:
What is your role within the project?

Karl:
At this time, I’m project lead/administrator.  Terry started the project in 2000 — he’s actually a pastor who is good with software, and so Xiphos truly represents the core of the open source concept of “a personal itch to scratch” — and it will truly and always be his baby, but he has told me bluntly that he expects me to keep it going at this point.  He was away from the project for quite a while in 2008, but he has recently come back and written quite a bit of new code, such as the “paratab” feature (full-chapter parallel window as just another tab in the main window).

Raoul:
How does the project make decisions?

Karl:
Both autocracy and consensus.

There have been fairly long dry periods during which I was doing the vast majority of new development and bugfixing.  Especially during those times, I made decisions almost entirely as I saw fit, though I often would poll the mailing lists for opinion about plans I was thinking about carrying out, just to be sure I wasn’t slipping off the tracks entirely.

More recently, quite a few people have gotten far more involved, which is a truly lovely thing to see happen, a new sense of critical mass.  In these more recent months, we’ve begun to operate in a largely consensus-based manner.  There are still occasional tough decisions, such as how to go about getting new graphics developed as we changed names.  But the name change itself is a good example of consensus: As we began the port to Windows, the point was made that the name “GnomeSword” was poor in that environment, both because there are other “Something-Sword” Bible programs for Windows, and because the “Gnome” part of the name means little enough to Linux users and nothing at all to Windows users.  So we got a core set of the dozen or so people who really cared about the issue to discuss the matter privately, took suggestions, debated their value, and came up with Xiphos, which nearly everybody liked.  The word is the transliteration of ξίφος, a Greek word for Sword, maintaining our connection to The Sword Project as a whole.

There is seldom a need for a raw democratic majority vote kind of decision.  Truly, we’re all on the same page for nearly everything we do, and such differences of opinion as arise are not severe, so it’s not hard to re-achieve consensus on things that begin to raise a barrier. Only a couple of times have I had to make a deliberate selection for who should do what, in a raw management role in the project.

Raoul:
How does being a Christian influence your work on Xiphos?

Karl:
Well…It’s Bible software.  It’s hard to get closer to the core of Christian belief than to provide new and better and ever-improving tools to help other Christians study God’s word.  I’ve had a long (if vaguely unreasonable) goal that Xiphos could be the proper superset of application capability across all the applications in The Sword Project family, and the friendly competition that exists is a motivating force for how to make this particular tool ever better.

The basic work of Christianity is summed up in The Great Commission. Within that, I have always understood that there are those who should Go into the mission field and the rest should Send those who Go.  I believe that our work facilitates Sending hugely.  This was deeply exemplified to me a year ago: When I attended the BibleTech:2008 conference on Bible
software, I was pleased and gratified to learn that Wycliffe/SIL have taken a serious particular interest in Xiphos for their field translators to use.

Raoul:
How does the team resolve conflict?

Karl:
Within the Xiphos crowd, to be sure, there exists conflict now and again, but it is very rarely of a sort that distracts from the work. Usually, I find out about conflict arising via private email, a note or two can be exchanged about what’s going on, and a decision can be reached regarding a solution.  This has never gone on longer than a day or two.

As anyone knows who has read the mailing lists of the greater Sword Project, there is clearly more conflict between completely different application groups than there has ever been within Xiphos itself.  Our little crowd is really very much of one mind about the vast majority of questions; it’s when what our little crowd wants bumps into what the rest of The Sword Project wants that actual conflict results.  We’re not in charge of resolving that kind of conflict, so I can’t address the
situation much, but I can say that, having been in the middle of such conflict, I do try to step back and re-address difficult matters privately with some of those involved.

Raoul:
Anything else you want to say?

Karl:
We are always looking for new people to contribute.  An especially useful and not-too-difficult contribution is translation of the interface to new languages.  Currently, we have a dozen translations — the most of any Sword Project application — but we would love to have more.  Before v3 was released, we looked over the existing translations and actually retired several due to lack of ongoing support.  It would be extraordinarily useful to have new maintainers of Spanish, Russian, Slovak, and Ukrainian translations again.

Other than translation, we of course can always use fresh new ideas, and people who can implement such ideas, for all the things Xiphos should be able to do.  Xiphos is a strong, mature Bible study application, but there are always existing capabilities in need of reconsideration as well as a need for new thoughts on what Xiphos could do.  For Christians, I really do think developing Bible study software represents a personal itch we can all understand and respect.  We welcome all those
who would like to join the party, so to speak.

In Conclusion

Well, Xiphos is  a nice mature frontend to the Sword Project, and with it’s new cross-platform capability, it provides Windows users a decent alternate at last. Xiphos has some handy features (like the advanced search) and their translation team is working on getting Xiphos availble in as many languages as possible.

Project Spotlight: BibleTime

From time to time, we will be looking at Christian open source projects, chatting with the project leader, and trying to get an overview of what the project is about. We hope to be able to highlight useful applications for the Christian who uses open source software.

For our first Project Spotlight, we’ll be looking at BibleTime:

BibleTime is a Bible study application for Linux. It is based on the K Desktop Environment and uses the Sword programming library to work with Bible texts, commentaries, dictionaries and books provided by the Crosswire Bible Society.

I have recently started to hang out in IRC with the guys who work on BibleTime, and thought I’d talk about what they’re doing and where they’re heading with the next version of BibleTime.

Development Status

The current version of BibleTime is 1.6.5, and is the last KDE3 version. The developers are busy working on a KDE4 port, to be released as version 1.7. After version 1.7, BibleTime will be slowly moved over to being a pure Qt4 application, allowing it to be compiled for not only Linux/KDE4, but also Windows and Mac OS X.

Using BibleTime

Here’s what BibleTime 1.7 looks like on my computer (complete with my KDE4 dark colour scheme, and my custom dark BibleTime theme to match KDE4’s colours):

BibleTime is a fairly simple application to use. The core of the application is, of course, the Bible text viewer. The window has controls at the top to facilitate navigating around the Bible, and the current verse is highlighted. Each verse reference can also be dragged over to the bookmark manager to create a bookmark.

BibleTime features a “bookshelf” (top left) which contains all the various texts that can be downloaded from the Sword project’s site via the Bookshelf Manager. It also has a “mag viewer” (bottom left) that shows footnotes or related items from the current text. This is especially useful for a translation like the KJV which contains references to Strong’s concordances. As you hover over each word, it displays the associated entry in the concordance.

Since BibleTime is a frontend for the Sword library, it supports all the bibles, concordances and other texts available at the Sword Project’s site (which can be downloaded direct from their site via the Bookshelf Manager, as I alluded to earlier). This means that you can even download Greek and Hebrew texts, a great help to Bible scholars and pastors, I’m sure.

Interview: Martin Gruner

Martin Gruner is the senior developer of the BibleTime project. He’s been working on BibleTime for the last 3 years. I asked him a couple of questions:

RS: How long have you been involved with BibleTime?
MG: Since late 1999.

RS: How did you get involved with the project?
MG: Well, I switched to Linux because it is free, and looked for Bible software that would run on Linux. So I found The Sword Project, and BibleTime (BT) in particular. I had the chance to meet the project lead of BT, Joachim, in person, he lived quite nearby. We developed a friendship, and one of the pillars of our friendship was our common work on BT.

RS: How often do you get a chance to work on the project?
MG: Much less than I would hope to. I check and respond to mail daily, small tasks are done immediately. But I don’t have much time for development these days. If that happens once a week, it was a good week. =)

RS: What is your role within the project?
MG: When I joined the project, I had no experience with C++/KDE/Qt, BT forced me to learn a lot. For several years I acted as a developer, with the amount of work increasing slowly.
When Joachim decided to leave the project (I believe in 2007), I had to take over the project management as well. Unfortunately, there was no other long-term developer on the team at that time. This situation has improved dramatically in the last year, and now there are several dedicated people who work on BT regularly and diligently. I am often humbled by their dedication.
Given the fact that I do not have as much time as when I was a student, my role changed a bit from development to management. My goal is to provide an environment for talented and gifted people such as Eeli, Gary, Thomas and others to share their skills with the world through our project. That means I care about the cmake based build system, try to help with difficult questions,
to participate in design decisions and to work out, together with the team, a project schedule.

RS: How does the project make decisions?
MG: Like most projects, I suspect.
Usually somebody makes a suggestion. Others comment, and consensus is reached.

RS: How does being a Christian influence your work on BibleTime?
MG: Maybe not enough. Many times there should be more motivation than there really is in me.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be a part of BT if I were no Christian. The interest in God’s unique word was the reason for Joachim to start BT, and it motivates us to keep it going. It might even turn out that it is kind of a lifetime project for me.

RS: How does the team resolve conflict?
MG: By being ready to make compromises, most importantly. We create BT to serve others.
In the rare cases where we cannot reach consensus on a question, people respect the opinion of more “merited” team members. That might mean that in the end I have to make a decision, but as I said this is very rare and a situation that we all try to avoid. It is a basis that an opensource project cannot operate on in the long run.
I really cannot remember any serious conflict that we had in BT. There is a great atmosphere of cooperation and mutual help, and I am very glad about that.

RS: Anything else you want to say?
MG: Stay tuned about BT! 2009 will bring exciting changes. We hope to offer a crossplattform version of BibleTime this year, that is no more dependent on KDE, and it will run on Linux, Windows and MacOS (at least, hopefully).

In Conclusion

BibleTime is a handy resource for preparing Bible studies, sermons, or just looking up passages electronically. With more developers on board, and moving to use just Qt4, it looks like BibleTime will be going places in the near future.

That’s all for our first Project Spotlight. We hope to bring you more information on other Christian open source projects on a monthly basis.

“Christian” vs “Secular” Software

As a Christian and a user of software, every now and then I’ve come across a project or a piece of software that has one or a few Christian developers. On the occasions I find myself using a similar product, but one that doesn’t have any Christians associated with it, I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t switch to that product, as a way of supporting those Christians.

I’ve been thinking about if for a long time, and I think there are a few more issues to consider than just the beliefs of the developers.

1. The Task At Hand

The first issue I think one needs to think of is the task at hand. What do you want to do? Make sure that the tool you choose isn’t limiting what you do.

2. The Best Tool

Use the best tool for the job. This point might seem synonymous with the previous point, but it is slightly different. If you have a wide selection of software that looks like it’ll do the job, select the best one. Don’t be swayed for a particular tool because the lead developer is a Christian.

3. Software Is Not Spiritual

Software has no spiritual significance. It is neither good nor evil. It can be used for either, but that doesn’t make it one or the other.

4. Promotion Of Beliefs Through Software

Are the developers promoting their beliefs through the software? I’m not only talking about Christian developers, I’m also talking about those who promote ungodly causes. You don’t want your church using a piece of software that is being used to promote something that is wrong. I think there’s also a case for not using software written by a Christian who is brash about his/her faith, causing more folks to reject the Gospel than accept it^[1]. The reputation of that developer and his/her software may damage your reputation.

5. God Requires Excellence

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

1 Corinthians 10:31

Of course the point underlying most of my previous points is that God requires excellence from us. After all, everything we do is for the Lord in the end, so we should be doing things properly, even if they are for ourselves or our employers. Just because a piece of software has a Christian developer doesn’t mean it’s the best software for you.

Should I Use This Software?

The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

Luke 16:8-9 NIV

Where possible, I certainly recommend using software developed by Christians. Let them know that you support their work and encourage them to continue. However, if there is better software for the task at hand, use that software rather. Pleasing and obeying God is far more important than pleasing man.

Footnotes:

[1] I take the train to work, and I see train preachers who do exactly this. They stand in the carriage and shout and scream, and I find it very hard to respect them because they’re shoving the Gospel down people’s throats. This only serves to drive the people further from the Gospel, making sure that those who might have stepped into a church some time decided now to never go near a church again. This is very sad, and unfortunately these preachers don’t listen to reason either (I’ve tried!).

Mac OS X and Open Source Software

At work I use a Mac Mini running OS X, and being an open source person I try to use as much open source software on my Mac as possible. So when I got it in the beginning, I looked for open source applications for all the various things I wanted and needed.

Finding Open Source Software

One of the difficulties I encountered when looking for OSS for Mac OS X was that there isn’t a huge amount of it. It seems that most software for Macs is commercial. Fortunately I found a site that is a great help: Open Source Mac. This site lists a lot of open source software for Mac OS X, and I use a number of applications that are listed there.

However, not all software is listed on Open Source Mac. I couldn’t find a decent audio player. Mac OS X comes with iTunes, but iTunes doesn’t support Ogg Vorbis files, the format all my music is in already. Eventually I found a little discontinued app called Audion, which works fairly well (although it hangs occasionally and cannot handle complex audio) and, most importantly, supports Ogg Vorbis files.

Before I babble on much further, let me list the open source applications I found and that I use on a daily basis.

Web Browsing: Firefox

Of course the first thing I did was to download Firefox. I use Firefox’s extensions for my development work, and extensions like the Web Developer Toolbar are essential. Firefox has a Mac OS X version, so it was a simple matter of going to the Mozilla site and downloading Firefox.

E-mail: Thunderbird

Once again, this was a no-brainer. Thunderbird is a decent e-mail client, and partnered with the Lightning extension, can handle all the Outlook meeting requests thrown at it. Add in the LookOut extension, and it can even decypher those irritating proprietary winmail.dat files that Outlook uses to hide it’s attachments (I still don’t understand why Outlook can’t be a normal mail client and send normal attachments).

Office Suite: NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org 3.0

OpenOffice.org 2.x for Mac needs X11 to run. I didn’t feel like having to deal with X11, so I downloaded and installed NeoOffice, a native port of OpenOffice.org. Unfortunately NeoOffice is a little behind the stable OpenOffice.org releases, so when I heard that OpenOffice.org 3.0 was going to run natively on Mac OS X, I took the plunge and installed the alpha version.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 has worked well for me. I find it hangs a little from time to time (beta2 especially, RC1 seems to have improved), but overall it works well.

Terminal: iTerm

Mac OS X’s terminal app just doesn’t cut it. I downloaded iTerm and I haven’t looked back – it’s a simple but effective application. It has tabs for multiple sessions, it uses Ctrl rather than Apple, and the Home, End, PgUp and PgDn keys actually move the cursor.

Instant Messaging: Adium

At home I use Pidgin for my Instant Messaging client. It’s feature-full, multi-protocol, and I’ve been using it for years. What better application to use for IM on my Mac than Pidgin’s Mac cousin, Adium. While not an exact replica of Pidgin, Adium uses the same backend (libpurple) and mostly works the same.

IRC: Colloquy

Almost any Linux geek lives in a few IRC channels, and I am no different. Colloquy is a nice app that follows the Apple UI guidelines. I had to create my own theme (I like the white text on black background, which I couldn’t find any themes for), but that was the only real problem I’ve had with Colloquy.

Music Player: Cog

As I said earlier, I found Audion after some searching, and it did the job. However, there were two things I wished for: Last.fm support and IM status message updating. The other day I decided to look through Adium’s Xtras again and see if I could find anything.

The description of one of the scripts listed said, “This script shows your current Cog music.” which got my interest. I did a search for Cog and to my delight found it to be open source, and it works much more like Amarok than Audion did. It also included Last.fm support (although you do need the Last.fm Mac OS X client) which was a second bonus for me.

Code Editor: KomodoEdit/OpenKomodo

Just like any other coder, I need an application that works with me when I write my code, rather than against me. I used a fantastic commercial application called Coda (which was how I found out about Audion), but unfortunately it’s 30-day trial expired, and I had to look for another editor.

At the same time a friend told me about OpenKomodo, an open source version of KomodoIDE. It’s not yet been renamed to OpenKomodo, so the application still calls itself KomodoEdit, but you can download it and use it. It’s not as brilliant as Quanta+ but since about half my work is done on the serve in VI, I think I can live without Quanta+’s extra little bits. One of the big plusses for me with regards to KomodoEdit, howeverm is that the End and Home keys move the cursor. w00t!

Update: Today I opened KomodoIDE and it asked me if I wanted to start a 21 day trial. Evidently the pre-beta releases were free, but they’ve decided to keep KomodoIDE closed source. How disappointing. Back to KomodoEdit for me.

Effective Church Presentations

One of my pet peeves is those OpenOffice.org Impress or Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that folks do in churches. I’ve seen too many half-hearted efforts in the 28 years I’ve been in church.

This evening in church we had another presentation, and it got me to thinking about how to write an effective presentation. So this evening I wrote up a guide to effective church presentations and posted it to my personal blog. I hope this helps other folks who want to make their presentations effective.

Last to the show

I just wanted to take a few minutes to say hi and introduce myself. I have actually been trying to think of something intelligent to post about but this will just have to do So here is a little information about myself.

I am a Christian, husband, father of 3 wonderful kids, and a computer geek. I strive to keep my priorities in that order but sometimes I get things messed and out of they get shuffled.

I was saved in 1990 at a Ichthus weekend with the youth group that I was part of. I have been on a few mission trips with one to a little island called Dominica to teach Vacation Bible School. For a little while when our church was looking for a new youth minister my wife and I along with the pastors wife filled the gap. Once God delivered a new youth minister to us I started / lead the college ministry. Since that time we have moved to a new church but we still try to be active.

I have been married for 11.5 years now and I am very blessed to have been given a woman who loves God more than she loves me This is the way it should be too. She and I have been granted the gift of our 3 fantastic kids. We have a daughter (9) and 2 sons (7,5).

Lastly I am a sysadmin (Windows) by day and a Foresight Linux developer by night. I find a lot of joy helping users in irc / mailing lists / forums.

Eric (etank)

About Me — An Introduction

I think I’m the last of the different authors to post here anything here, been busy with really busy with work as a big conference is coming up and need to make sure the demo lab is up and running.

Anyway, I wanted to post an introduction about who am I and my use of open source software.

Besides being one of, maybe the last person, to post here, there is another thing that is different about me.  I use “evil proprietary” software every day for work.  I am full time consultant that specializes in software that runs on Windows Server and utilizes Microsoft SQL server.  I also run Windows Vista on my machine.  Like I said I’m the weird one.

But I do use and contribute to Open Source Software.  I am spend most of my time working on Kubuntu related things.  I am a part of the Kubuntu-Devel team, Ubuntu-Doc team and Ubuntu-Bugsquad team.  Also I am one of the co-authors of The Official Ubuntu Book by Prentice Hall.

The first version of Linux that I installed was Slackware 8 I think.  Don’t remember what year it actually was, but it was my first introduction to Linux and OSS.   Off and on for several years I installed the latest “hot” distro but could never find any way to give back to the community as I wasn’t a coder or a developer.  When I first found Ubuntu, back in the Warty days, I found a   community that  had a place for me to start contributing.  So I spend my free time working on adding documentation to the system and helping out in as many ways that I can.

Where does Open Source software need to go?  Into the enterprise, there needs to better enterprise deployment and management tools.

Looking forward to posting more about Christians and their role/viewpoint in the OSS world.

 

Jonathan

Making a difference

Today, Jimena and I were at the wedding of good friends from our church, in the mountains close to Nice. On our way back, we took another friend back home to Nice. This friend is studying political science and wants to write a thesis on the privatization of security. That got us to talk about the role of the USA in the world, which jumped to their role in WWII, and soon enough, we came to capitalism, world economy, and the alternative that open-source is to the current economic jungle of liberal capitalism.

What surprised me the most was not her positions, which were very academic, but rather the lack of personal challenge of what was taught to her. I was surprised that someone studying politics and economy might not challenge more what is taught officially. Her conclusion on every subject was that moral values and ethics should not be mixed with politics and economy.

As Christians, we are to be the light of the world, the salt of the Earth, but in order to make a difference, we have to be careful to not build a wall between our moral values, which are guided by our spiritual life, and the way we actually live, think and work. If we are to be the salt of the Earth, the light of the world, it should not be fine for us to leave our moral values at the door when we step into the world. In order to make a difference, we have to be integer, whole. Integrity makes a difference.

Christians in open-source are witnesses of a difference. We stand for values that most of the world don’t share. Our involvement in open-source is driven by the perspective of a different economic order, where sharing knowledge leads to more wealth for everybody.

Let’s step out and stand for our values. There’s two places where we can do that. In open-source, as Christians, and in the body of Christ, as open-sourcers.

In open-source, we should not forget that our identity is to live in Christ. We have been given that new life in Christ, and our moral values today are consequences of this new life in Christ. For many of us, our involvement in open-source is a reflexion of these values, and the compatibility of these values with the open-source system. As Raoul pointed in an earlier post, we are amazed to see how many Christians there actually are in open-source already. Let’s be proud of what drives our lives: our salvation in Jesus Christ, and witness that our values are led by our life in Christ.

In our communities, we can witness of the values we find in open-source and of how they correspond to our moral values as Christians. In my opinion, it is not solely a matter of choosing open-source software over proprietary ones in churches. This is a big part of it, but it goes further, and my talk with this friend tonight was an example of that. Education systems condition us to believe some things about the way the world is going. This friend had lots of arguments to explain why the world is the way it is, why we need patents, why private armies are fine, and so on, and she wouldn’t challenge all this. I think we can witness that there are other ways to do things, in real life. Not filing software patents doesn’t mean not making money. Sharing your knowledge doesn’t make you poorer. And so many things that are not obvious to people today, but that we could witness about to fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, to challenge their walk and help them make a difference in this world… that they might be the salt of the Earth, and the light of the world…