The weekend of 17 and 18 July was an important one for Greek Open Source and Free Software developers, as the 1st Open Source Developer Workshop took place in Athens, Greece, as part of an initiative by members of the community, and was held in the central computing facilities of the Athens University of Economics and Business.

The purpose of this workshop was not just to present the benefits of Free Software to the uninitiated, but to actually gather the people involved in the advancement of FS/OSS in this country and help them communicate, exchange ideas, create new projects, help with translations and localization issues, etc.

Initially, it seemed quite difficult to gather a significant number of people, in part due to the relatively small FS/OSS community in Greece, but also because it was impossible to find appropriate dates for the workshop, in the middle of the summer and just over a month before the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. However, the organizers were in for a very pleasant surprise that surpassed their most optimistic expectations, with the actual number of attendees reaching 90 people for the two days of the Workshop. Apparently, the Greek FS/OSS developer community, which a short while ago provided an enthusiastic audience for the 2nd Hellenic Conference on Free Software / Open Source Software (FS/OSS), needed exactly this sort of event to happen.

Despite the mainly technical nature of most sessions, the mood throughout the two-day event was buoyant and friendly, as everyone was very excited to be part of the first event of this kind in Greece. Attendees “flocked” to the event from all over Greece, with transportation costs for many covered by a well-known corporation that wished to remain anonymous, while catering and administrative/technical support was funded by E-Business Forum[1] and the Greek Research & Education Network (GRNET). E-business Forum also arranged for the provisioning of the facilities at AUEB and generously covered all related costs and expenses. Presentations were given on a wide range of subjects but, more importantly, the participants were put in groups that each tackled a specific task throughout each day.

Many participants brought their own laptops, while the rest made use of existing lab computers. This was made possible by furnishing roomfuls of PCs with bootable CDs bearing a localized Greek version of Knoppix, appropriately called Knoppel, which is prepared and maintained by Nikos Niktaris, to flawlessly provide a GNU/Linux environment without affecting the installed configurations.

There was complete photographic coverage of the event. Photos are available online in the photo gallery section of the dev.ellak.gr web site. There is also plenty of video footage which, once edited, will be combined in a short movie covering the highlights of the event, and will be made available online in a streaming format.

The following presentations and tasks took place in the two-day event:

1. A presentation on the issue of Software Patents and their future in Europe was given by Dimitris Glezos. This is currently a complicated and critical issue affecting European software developers and users, and educating people about its implications and hence is of extreme importance. Aside from presenting the issues involved, Dimitris spoke about the efforts of the Greek team against Software Patents, the standings of Greek members of the European Parliament, and offered simple ways for everyone to contribute for even more positive results.

2. A presentation about encodings and fonts was given by Alexios Zavras, regarding greek language support in modern encodings (ELOT 928, ISO-8859-7, UTF-8, etc, especially Unicode), and on the lack of freely available Greek fonts and future steps in this direction. The presentation was followed by a discussion on OpenType and new font technologies.

3. A presentation on font design and its history was given by Michael Semoglou, followed by a presentation of the custom designed font to be published soon with an Open Source compatible license. This new font will cover Latin (of course), Greek (both simple and polytonic) format and it is, to our knowledge, the first project to design Greek letterforms from scratch by a professional font designer.

4. Dimitris Korbetis presented the efforts of the Greek localization team for the OpenOffice.org office suite. Dimitris discussed how Greek support in OpenOffice.org can be improved, outlined the process of QA testing and elicited volunteers in this direction.

5. Manolis Galatoulas presented the popular source code versioning tools CVS and Subversion (SVN), demonstrated their use in large-scale projects (like the debian-installer) and outlined their differences and comparative benefits.

6. An important task was started in this Workshop: that of adding input support for UTF-8 encoding in the groff program. A large number of developers were coordinated by Alexios Zavras in addressing this task, while Konstantinos Margaritis tried to distribute the effort of adding the much needed support. The rationale was that as the default locale entry for Greek in Debian is now UTF-8 based, unless groff supports input in UTF-8, it will be very difficult to view and process Greek man pages in this environment. A very good head start was made, but of course there is still a lot of work to be done on the project.

7. A task to provide Greek support for the Scribus DTP application was coordinated by Alexios Zavras, with a number of developers coming together to test Greek support in the software, and begin the localization effort. The wonderful news is that, once Scribus is used on a system with a correct Greek environment (locale, keyboard input, fonts containing Greek glyphs), it works perfectly for typesetting Greek text.

8. Konstantinos Margaritis presented an introductory tutorial of Kdevelop, programming an application with localization in mind (using glib’s gettext C++ interface) and using Kbabel afterwards to create the localized messages. Petros Velonis demonstrated the use of poEdit in a similar manner, the purpose being to acquaint developers with the variety of easy to use Open Source localization tools. These presentations were followed by an impromptu brief tutorial on the use of Eclipse, a versatile and powerful Open Source IDE, given by Anastasios Bassoukos and Asteris Masouras.

9. Alexios Zavras gave some very interesting tutorials on the use of GNU Make as well as an introduction to the TCL/TK language, which were much welcomed by attendees.

10. A lively and productive round table on translation issues followed. As Greek is a very difficult language to translate to, the task has to be approached with care and forethought, especially in regards to technical terms and jargon. A fruitful discussion was initiated regarding difficult terms, that is, terms that pose problems for Greek translators, and several decisions to finalize translations of frequently used terms were made on the spot.

11. A session concerning testing of the localized Debian Installer was coordinated by Manolis Galatoulas. Almost every attendee was interested in testing and helping in the Greek translation of the new Debian Installer (sarge). This proved a very useful task on its own, as many spelling corrections were made.

12.Konstantinos Margaritis initiated a recruitment drive for Greek Debian Helpers/Developers, attempting to clarify the complexities of the participation process. So far, the number of Greek DDs is regrettably small (just two). In this event, there was a surge of people interested in joining and helping Debian support the Greek language in every way they can, either with documentation and testing localization issues, but also with plain coding and development as well as QA testing.

13. Dimitris Glezos advocated the idea of creating a Slashdot-like news weblog in Greek. A lot of discussion took place about this subject and it appears that there are many people in favour of such an initiative, both as editors and users.

14. A new Open Source Project was proposed by Konstantinos Margaritis and enthusiastically adopted by attendees: a real-time poll/voting software. More details on this as they become available!

15. The event was concluded with the traditionally requisite GPG Keysigning Party: strengthening the local Web of Trust in Greece. No comments on that :-)

Yes, we actually did all that! It may seem quite a lot of work, but everyone liked this event so much that we actually wanted to have more time and more tasks. Everyone was really disappointed that it ended so soon, but we made a promise to try to repeat such an event every 3 months or so. It was decided that the next one will take place in Thessaloniki in mid-October. Such initiatives should not remain captured solely in Athens but they should reach the entire community all over the country, and this could be the first step.

Thanks to everyone for attending this event and we hope to be seeing you in the next one!
Contact us by e-mail: workshop-at-debian-dot-gr

The organizers

Konstantinos Margaritis
Alexios Zavras
Zenon Mousmoulas

[1] E-business Forum is a standing state consultation mechanism with the business and academic community, social and professional agencies, aiming at producing views and proposals to strengthen business competitiveness in the new digital market and support electronic entrepreneurship.