Sunday, August 03, 2008

Catalan Summer of Code

So Catalan government decided to run a project similar to Google's Summer of code program. That's cool, the bad news is that the law that grants the money was approved as of May 30th and i just discovered the site because i was doing some random browsing.

So if you can read catalan go to http://www.lafarga.cat/beques/bases-de-la-convocatoria and start thinking what to do for Free Software.

Actually it seems like it's non-published on purpose so either:
a) It fails and politics can say "See Catalonia has no interest for Free Software" and they can go on paying Microsoft for doing sucky and patchy translations of their products to Catalan (yes they pay twice, license and translation)
b) Someone's son needs to make sure he is the chosen one, so the less publicity the better.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you comment on the current situation of the open source community in Catalonia? I read several articles in the past which stat that quite a lot of things is happening. Therefore I wonder why there is so little public resonance only. At least computer science departments (e.g. FIB, UPC) should promote such programs.

Albert Astals Cid said...

Well, i don't consider myself an expert of the situation of the open source community in Catalonia, i actually was just complaining that i did not got any notice of this happening and i usually try to be up-to-date.

From what i know the situation is quite ok.

Anonymous said...

If you're right and they are trying to make it look like their's no interest, the only thing to do is stir up interest. If you want, I'll help even though I don't live there.

Albert Astals Cid said...

Well, i just saw it passed the date already when you can present things, they only gave 15 days :-/

So thanks for the offer for help but it's a lost battle already.

Anonymous said...

Sorry but I can't understand this pessimism... well actually I can understand it... you are catalan and... l'important es queixarse :P (sorry if I mispelled something, I'm not a native catalan :P)

Really, maybe this is not the best that they could do, but at least it's SOMETHING. Do you preer this or simply nothing, and have the Generalitat paying with citizens' money the development of catalan editions of Microsoft's or Apple's programs as they did in the past (and probably they're still doing)?