The film begins in medias res with an IPO, and then sets the historical stage by showing the beginnings of software development back in the day when software was shared on paper tape for the price of the paper itself. It then segues to Bill Gates’s Open Letter to Hobbyists in which he asks Computer Hobbyists to not share, but to buy software. Richard Stallman then explains how and why he left the MIT Lab for Artificial Intelligence in order to devote his life to the development of free software, as well as how he started with the GNU project. Linus Torvalds is interviewed on his development of the Linux kernel as well as on the GNU/Linux naming controversy and Linux’s further evolution, including its commercialization. Richard Stallman remarks on some of the ideological aspects of open source vis-á-vis Communism and capitalism and well as on several aspects of the development of GNU/Linux. Michael Tiemann (interviewed in a desert) tells how he met Stallman and got an early version of Stallman’s GCC and founded Cygnus Solutions. Larry Augustin tells how he combined the resulting GNU software and a normal PC to create a UNIX-like Workstation which cost one third the price of a workstation by Sun Microsystems even though it was three times as powerful. His narrative includes his early dealings with venture capitalists, the eventual capitalization and commodification of Linux for his own company, VA Linux, and ends with its IPO.

You can see it on: http://video.google.es/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409 (this video is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License )

Next tuesday, September 30 at 19h, we will hold the seminar “The CarSpeed project’ in the Robotics Lab. Victor Hidalgo will explain his work in that project, and the underlying computer vision technology. CarSpeed deals with an application that it is able to carry out precise estimation of vehicle speeds. It also counts the number of the vehicles that travel through the road.

The system uses a single off-the-shelf camera. Its images are carefully analyzed to give estimations of vehicles speed. The application detects and tracks the vehicles on the road. The detection step allows the system to realize the appearance of new vehicles. It uses a sampled motion filter. The tracking algorithm starts for each new detected vehicle. It implements an homography and an evolutionary algorithm that keep several speed hypothesis while they are compatible with the camera images. Check out this video (right) for a demo.

We explain the motivations of this free software project and tools with which we work, both in JDE in the PFC: svn, mediawiki, blog, tracs, etc.. Explain the uses basics, “good practice” and solve the questions. This seminar is designed for all students who are starting their PFC.

Title: Software Tools in the context of JDE
Speakers: Jose María Cañas and Roberto Calvo
Date: 22 September 2008, 18h
Place: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in robotics lab (departamental 2)