Mohammed Sameer's Online Aggregator

I bought some shares in Sun a while back when they were pretty cheap (pre-reverse split, around $4) - I really liked their product line, and liked the noises I was hearing around their free software strategy. For a while, the share did well, at one stage I was up about 50% when the share went over $6.

But then there was a series of things that seem to have shaken confidence - the ticker name changed seemed about as gimmicky as McCain “suspending” his campaign, the reverse split sent completely the wrong message to the market (another cosmetic change, but one that sends a message that you think the price might be going down), and from the heady days of 2007 when we had 5 straight quarters in the black, Sun’s back in the red for the last couple.

With shares now down to pre-split levels, Sun’s lost 80% of its market value in the last year, which leads me to think that one of three things are true:

• Sun is going down the tubes, and the market is singing their requiem - in which case I should sell at a loss, take whatever I can get and call it quits
• Sun is a prime acquisition target - I should probably hold onto my shares in that case and get a little more than current market value
• Sun is a company that will survive and thrive again, and it’s currently undervalued due to the crisis - in which case, I might consider doubling down

Obviously I’m no market expert, and how the share price goes over the next month or so will depend on earnings announced at the end of October - the way things are going, you have to expect those results to be bad. I’m not one to ask for advice like this usually, but I’d appreciate people sharing their insights on Sun’s prospects.

Congrats to the GIMP team on the release of the GIMP 2.6.0. This is the first version to depend on GEGL, which makes it a major milestone for GIMP historians. GEGL can optionally be used for colour operations, and an experimental GEGL operation tool exposes the power of GEGL operations to the user - in a future release, these will hopefully be available as configurable effect layer modes. There are some other pretty impressive new features described in the release notes.

This also represents a very quick release cycle - under 1 year since 2.4.0 - which is good to see.

To follow on from various discussions and the unfortunately short BOF we had on this subject in Berlin, Ryan Abel (who couldn’t make it to the summit) suggested holding an informal IRC meeting to talk about the next steps in the maemo.org revamp.

The IRC meeting will be at 19:00 UTC on Saturday the 27th of September, on the #maemo-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net.

After the Summit, I believe that the basic elements of the changes we want to make are now well understood. Our dual goal is to reorganise existing information to provide the most relevant information to people who are coming to the site from outside the community, while catering to the different needs of people who are long-time members of the community. We’re going to do this by reorganising existing content where possible, rather than attempt to completely redesign the site.

For those of you wondering what the motivation behind that last post was (and for the benefit of one commenter, it’s not because I’m voting McCain - I’m an Irishman living in France), it’s because I’ve been growing increasingly disillusioned with the level of discourse in this election.

Most of the Americans I know (democrats) seem to be concentrating on the ultra-polarisation of the candidates their facing - there’s a consistent attempt to show how dumb McCain & Palin are (and similar attempts coming from the other side), how radical conservative ultra-Christian she is (”burning books! Dinosaurs in schools! Handing out automatic weapons to third graders!”) and so on.

On the other end, conservatives are trying to paint Obama as the no-experience, tax-and-spend (as opposed to reduce-tax-and-spend Bush) ultra-liberal Democrat, with Biden sticking his foot in his mouth every day.

The truth, and the election discourse, is not well served by this. We are discussing minutiae, not what’s most important.

I don’t care whether Gov. Palin knows what the Bush Doctrine is - I want to know if she agrees with it.

I don’t care if McCain knows what the name of the Spanish Prime Minister is (although I must admit, transcripts of that exchange are bewildering) - what I do want to know is how he will act when president, what his priorities are, the factors which will influence his decisions, whether he values human rights more than national security - in brief, his moral fibre.

For the record, it appears to me like the moral fibre is on the side of Barack Obama. The man is, aside from being charismatic and a great speaker, thoughtful in his reflections, and seems to me to have his heart in the right place when it comes not just to America, but to the world.

That’s what I want to find out. Where is your heart.

John McCain’s heart seems firmly set on the White House, his “put America first” mantra implying, of course, that Obama won’t. On that point, I think he’s right. I believe that if America’s interests are at odds with the interests of the world, Obama will do what’s right.

I find it amusing that we hold our politicians to standards that 99% of our citizens could not meet in terms of knowing stuff which usually figures as useless trivia. “Who is the prime minister of Spain?”, “How many soldiers in an army brigade, and an army battalion?”, “What is the Bush Doctrine?”, “How many chucks would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?”

It reminds me of programming job interviews where people think that questions like “What is the difference between an inner join and an outer join?” or “How do you do an XSLT transform using Xalan and Xerces?” are good measures of how good a programmer you’ll be.

Try measuring what decision people will take when faced with a big difficult dilemma, rather than whether he knows the answer to a question which 30 seconds in Google would get him. That seems to me to be a better measure of presiding skills.

Coming to the end of the first day of the Maemo Summit in C-Base in Berlin. From just outside, you have a view of the antenna of the space station that the C-Base group have been mapping out for the past few years. For those who don’t know, this is the terraforming space station which brought life to earth, and which crashed in what is now Berlin 4.5 billion years ago. Only the central tower, now in use as a television tower, is visible above ground.

The two days in OSiM World were useful and educational. I got to meet people from companies trying to learn how to work well with Free Software, which gave a great opportunity to affect real change by talking to the decision makers in those companies. I also got to meet some Maemo people who came to OSiM to meet up and hang out at the Maemo/Nokia stand (by far the most active stand in the conference, by the way).

But the Maemo Summit is a refreshing counter-weight to that - some of the observations that people made this morning were:

• We got better wireless and power for free than at the high-powered conference people paid thousands of euros to attend (given that the CCC is involved in C-Base, that was not surprising to me)
• The vocabulary has totally shifted. We’ve moved from value propositions, cost-benefit analysis, return on investment and fragmentation to people getting excited about tracemonkey, PowerVR, OMAP3, Clutter, hacks, crashes and bugs… the people who are down in the trenches and know what free software is are here.
• Less suits, more t-shirts

It has been an amazing day so far - some big news from Peter Schneider this morning that the interface for the Fremantle will be Clutter based - Rodrigo Novo  went into more details:  Nokia are funding new tablet-oriented widgets and off-screen support for GTK+, the integration of Clutter, and more.The lightning talks were fascinating for the breadth and depth of things which people are doing with Maemo - everything from using them in police cars to porting PyPy through running Debian in a chrooted environment as a Maemo application (presentation given in OO.o running in said Debian on an N810!!!).

As usual, what’s most impressive at these things is meeting old friends and making new ones. I’ve got to spend lots of time with Stormy, Paul Cooper, Jim Zemlin, Lefty, Bdale and others, and today I had a chance to have a good chat with Rob Taylor, Philippe Kalaf, Murray Cumming, Simon Budig and more. I was very happy to put a face to Tero Cujo’s name, the latest addition to Nokia’s maemo.org team. I’m a little disappointed not to have met anyone from Nemein here yet after working with them for so long - but Henri is in Korea for an international Haedong Kumdo competition, and getting his 23rd Dan (or something like that) confirmed by a master while there.

In addition to the summit, there is also a desktop search hackfest happening over the next two days, with people involved in Tracker, Beagle and Xesam getting together to agree on interfaces and work on implementation, to bring rocking search to desktops and tablets of the future.

There’s a heavy GNOME influence at the conference, which makes the various noises I hear about Nokia backing away from GNOME seem exceedingly over-stated. It looks to me like Nokia are using more and more of the GNOME and freedesktop.org stack, and are more than any other company right now setting a direction for GNOME in the future with investments in technologies like Clutter.

So far, great stuff! Looking forward to the party tonight, and day 2 tomorrow.

Last night, “the Roaming Gnomes”, a team I put together, participated in the ACCESS pub quiz at OSiM World, organised by Lefty Schlesinger.

Lefty ran a Jeopardy-type quiz which was raucous, fun, energetic, competitive, and replete with a Windows Vista crash and a Flock bug. A bunch of teams had a go at questions in categories that included “Open source personalities”, “Comics and Movies”, “Mobile industry history”, “History of computing” and some general knowledge categories. And in the end, the best team won.Us! (Photos of the competition will follow later)

So here’s the role call of the Roaming Gnomes heros who helped bring the huge trophy to GNOME.

• Dave Neary
• Stormy Peters
• Paul Cooper (a two-time winner!)
• Alejandro, Alberto and Juanjo of Igalia
• Thomas Jansson
• Richard Rojfors
• Heikki Paajaken
• Bdale Garbee (our resident computing historian)
• Jim Zemlin
• Niels Breet (special mention for knowing the answer to which country has a wife-carrying race)

Congratulations to Lefty on running a very successful quiz - it was a good range of questions, and the rules change mid-game definitely contributed to the animation of the competition. And thanks once more to all the members of the team.

On Thursday I’ll be participating in a panel at OSIM World - “Effectively Building and Maintaining an Open Source Community”. It was a happy coincidence when I saw Matt Asay writing about the issue on Friday, and again today - it gives me a chance to think a bit more about the issues involved, and provides a data point which is very close to the experience that I have repeatedly seen when companies decide to use free software, be it peripherally or strategically.

On several occasions I have seen a lone developer decide to use a free software library to do some job for him. It doesn’t quite fit his needs, but he hacks up the extra feature or two in a couple of days, finds a few bugs that he fixes along the way to make things work as he needs them to, and ships it to a client as part of a larger solution.

At this point, one of two things will happen. The external project either stays as-is in the SCM of the company, awaiting a future upgrade request from the client, or the developer (usually because he is “the Linux guy” in thecompany and knows about these things) bundles up a couple of patches, heads along to the bug database for the project, signs up for Yet Another Bugzilla Account, and creates three or four bug entries with bug fixes attached, and another one for the new feature he hacked up. All told, he spends maybe half a day cooking up patches, navigating account creation, and submitting his work.

Usually, the patches will sit there for weeks or months before being reviewed. In most projects, if you don’t go onto a mailing list or IRC channel and ask the right guy to take the time to look at them, you can expect to wait. He has a backlog, gets lots of bugzilla nag mail already, and anyway, he’s working on a new feature he wants to get done this weekend between playing with the kids and doing the grocery shopping.

When they do get reviewed, the code base is likely to have shifted, so the patches don’t apply cleanly. Perhaps they don’t conform accurately to the coding conventions of the project. The feature, while useful, was done quickly (since it was only a minor part of a larger project), wasn’t accompanied by unit tests, and has a couple of issues that need resolving.

Of the four or five bug reports that our hacker created, one gets marked INVALID, another one is a DUPLICATE, and one patch gets applied and the bug fixed. The feature request status gets set to NEEDINFO, since there are some open issues to be addressed, but ur hacker is now 6 months away fromthe code, 3 projects down the line, and has less time to write unit tests, review and resubmit the code.

Maybe he’ll do it anyway - and maybe he won’t.

In fact, I would say that the vast majority of the features people code up for free software projects  never make it into an upstream bugzilla - developers are perfectly happy shipping a 10 year old version of GNU Kermit with hairy patches sticking out all over the place. And of those patches that do make it into an email or bugzilla, a small percentage ever make it into the upstream code base.

I would argue that when a project is strategic to a company project (as Lucene is to Alfresco), then the company has every interest in having someone who is regularly contributing to the project, who knows the key people in the community, and who is a trusted member of the community themselves. This ensures that your code is getting the care and attention it deserves when submitted upstream, and helps contribute to reducing your maintenance cost long run (as well as giving you influence over a project you depend on).

All this is to say that reducing the argument to “throw code over wall bad, participate good” is slightly over-simplifying - in the case where the project is a core part of your business, I agree wholeheartedly. If you’re using free software libraries as product, and merely tweaking to your needs, then the cost of participating outweighs the benefits in most cases. Reducing that cost by lowering the barrier of entry to participating is key to developing a vibrant community. But increased availability and a very low barrier to entry also incurs a cost on the community. Like most community-related issues, the balancing act is not an easy one to get right.

With the Maemo community council elections over, I’d like to congratulate the newly elected council. Good luck to Eduardo Lima, Andrew Flegg, Ryan Abel, Simon Pickering and Tim Samoff, who will make up the inaugural community council.

The council serves for a six month term, so they have a big job in front of them to define its role, and ensure it’s relevant to the Maemo community for years to come.

After pvanhoof opened the floodgates earlier, I guess I’ll follow up with some thoughts from across the pond…

McCain’s spent the last 8 months being painted by the hard-right nuts in the US republican party as an independent moderate Republican - I think this is an election ploy to make him appeal more to the swing voters.

And now, McCain’s chosen Palin as his VP pick. Where some people see a woman, I don’t think that’s why she was picked. She’s anti-abortion, pro-guns, anti-environment (she doesn’t believe that global warming has been proven, and even if it has, doesn’t believe it’s man-made): all in all, she’s a woman who has nothing in common with Hillary Clinton, and has no chance of picking up any disillusioned Clinton democrats. Sure, she appeals to the right wing of the party, and will consolidate the base.

What’s been interesting after this pick is the way the entire election campaign framing has changed. What people see in Sarah Palin is inexperience. And that’s suddenly become the centerpiece of the election.

The republicans are masters at framing the discussion, at making the democrats play defense. Kerry was a flip-flopper, Gore and Bush were “essentially the same”, the list goes on.

The Republicans almost always win when the most important thing in the campaign isn’t actually the candidate’s platform.

And so, by picking Sarah Palin, McCain’s trapped the democrats. “She’s inexperienced”, they say. “She’s got more experience than Obama”, say the republicans. “Biden’s got more experience than her”, say the Democrats. “McCain’s got more experience than Obama”, say the voices in the voter’s heads.

When you put Obama against McCain and measure experience, McCain wins. When you allow the debate to be framed as “who’s got the experience?”, Obama loses.

What the Democrats need to do is talk less about experience, and more about what you do when elected, where you want the country to go. “I may not have the experience of my opponent, but that just means I haven’t had to cut as many deals as he has,” he should say. “I haven’t had to compromise my ideals. I know where I want to take this country, and it’s a good place, where we take care of our sick, give our children the education they need to survive in the world, and where we use our position as a world leader to make the world a better place, instead of bullying the regimes we don’t like.”

If he speaks to their hearts, Obama will win.

The Maemo community council election has been running for 5 days now, and voting closes at midnight Wednesday - I’ll be announcing the new council (subject to any contestations, protests, etc) on Thursday the 11th, one week before the Maemo community gets to meet in person in Berlin for the Maemo Summit.

If you think you should have a ballot, and you haven’t received one last Wednesday, please drop me a line.

If you have received a ballot and haven’t voted yet, please do so - there is only a little more than 2 days left to the election closing.

While I’m talking about the election, I’d like to thank GNOME for the election software we stole^Wborrowed and got working^W^Ware using for the election. I hope that the instructions which I wrote for the module are useful, and end up getting included in the foundation-web module.

Thanks also to Henri Bergius from Nemein, who got the software installed and has been my hands and eyes for the past few days on  a server to which I don’t have access.

A couple of major things are happening around Maemo just before my holidays (oooh, scary) - first is that we recently rolled out some improvements to Maemo profiles - there are many new fields, including IM and IRC usernames, and the possibility to enter multiple email addresses for karma, and in general we prettied things up.

One new field is the company that people work for - and this is particularly useful in the newly spruced up  profile ranking page - previously this page listed only usernames and karma, it now includes company and real name, allowing you to see at a glance where contributions are coming from. Of course, for this to be really useful, now that the fields are there, we need more people to fill them in

The second big thing is the inaugural Maemo community council election. The entire Maemo community will be electing 5 people from among the most active community participants to represent the community’s interests to Nokia, and to co-ordinate community initiatives.

Nominations are open now - anyone with over 100 karma points can nominate themselves by sending a mail with their name, company affiliation and motivations for running to maemo-community@maemo.org before 23:59 UTC on the 2nd of September. The full list of eligible candidates is in the wiki.

I’ve been evaluating Alfresco over the last day or two, and I’ve had some trouble getting started.

The main problem I’ve had is that there doesn’t seem to be any docs specifically for people trying out the 30 day hosted evaluation. All the docs I’ve seen have, at some stage, entries like “If you are unable to map your drive, contact your system administrator or refer to the topic Setting up the CIFS server in the Installation Guide”. There seems to be an underlying assumption I’m self-hosting.

So in spite of my best efforts to try and use CIFS or WebDAV to copy content, play with versioning, etc, I have no idea what to enter for server name, share & directory for a file share in Nautilus, and the links “View in CIFS” and “View in WebDAV” don’t work for me in Firefox.

I also downloaded AlfrescoEnterprise 2.2.0, which suffers from the typical problems I’ve seen most Java enterprise software suffer from - it doesn’t seem to work out of the box. I have a JDK installed, and OpenOffice, but the various install scripts fail at various points because @@ALFRESCO_DIR@@ hasn’t been replaced during installation, and once I’ve edited the scripts to handle that, one script (start_oo.sh) looks for an soffice binary in “~/Alfresco/openoffice.org2.1/program/”. So, not heard of “which” then.

End result of several hours of playing around is that Alfresco looks like a nice web application, but I’m not in a position to recommend it to Linux users because the client software doesn’t install properly, and I can’t figure out how to use the file shares in Nautilus.

Lazyweb, can you help me out, please?

PS. Why does Nautilus’s “Windows share” dialog have all 3 of server, share and folder? I’d really like to be able to follow docs for windows that talk about entering \\YourMachineName\alfresco\Users\YourSpaceName as the share (s/\\/\//g;s/^/smb:/), and let the client software work out which bits are the share, and which bits are folders. Idem for WebDAV.

Federico: Completely agree. In fact, you’re now training people to go through a whole new “ignore security” conditioning - previously it was just “Add exception” or whatever. Now it’s “Next, Next, Add exception, Get certificate, Next”.

From that presentation you link to, this statistic stood out:

SecuritySpace survey found that 58% of all SSL certificates were invalid (expired, self-signed, unknown CA, incorrect domain, etc)

He also said that “most people only see the valid certs from big sites, so this problem isn’t very visible,” which is the point that MoCo makes.

I discussed this with Gerv during OSCON, and his take on it was towing the party line:

• Your cert is expired? Fix it already
• Your cert is from a different domain? Fix it already
• You’re self-signing a cert instead of paying $10 a year for one signed by a CA? Spend the money!
• If you’re running a volunteer site, and want a self-signed cert just to encrypt usernames & passwords, your visitors represent less than 1% of the internet population, sucks to be you!

(this is a paraphrasal of my memory of the conversation).

I may be an edge case, but I seem to run into an awful lot of sites where the absolute correct thing for me to do is “Add exception Next Get certificate Next Next”. Sucks to be me, I guess.

As part of the judging panel for the maemo.org logo contest (along with Peter Schneider, Tim Samoff and David Greaves) I had the daunting task of choosing the winner from the long list of entries to the maemo.org contest. There were 62 people who submitted logos for consideration, and a total of around 120 logos to choose from (excluding variants of the same logo), we had our work cut out for us.

In the end, we went for  this logo from glaolivier:

The judges (that’s me!) liked the modernity of it, the clean typeface, the call-out to the current maemo.org colours, and the mixed metaphor of the a and e joined - infinity, a meeting of minds, and openness. And it was pretty. There are a bunch of single-colour and flat variants for things like monochrome print, t-shirts and so on.

We’re very happy with it, and we believe that everyone else will be too.

Can someone who understands markets better than me explain why this doesn’t imply I should go to the bank & borrow 10 or 12 billion dollars right now?

• Sun Microsystems assets (end March 08): $14.262 billion
• Sun Microsystems market cap at $10.21 per share: $7.98 billion

Incidentally, Sun’s market cap on the 15th of July, at $8.78 per share, was $6.86 billion.

Of course, you have to clear liabilities, and get a good price for the profit-making businesses, but doesn’t this smell to anyone else like a fire sale in the waiting?

OSCON has been pretty cool this year so far. It’s been really weird, since I haven’t been in North America too often in the past, and this is my first ORA conference, to be meeting people I’ve exchanged email with for years in the corridors, and bumping into people that I’ve been hearing about for ages. There’s also a decent scattering of people I already knew, too. Far too many to name individually without leaving people out & insulting somebody…

I arrived on Friday, and to help get over jet-lag, I decided to go out for an hour-long run. After losing all sense of orientation, and going North when I thought I was going East, that ended up being a 2 hour run.  Which was nice.

Over the weekend, the FLOSS Foundations group met, and we talked about lots of stuff - accounting, membership, CRM & donor management software that non-profits can use (there isn’t any that works well enough), merging foundations, and how umbrella foundations work (targeted funding, etc), best practices for dealing with donors (big and small), merchandising, CLAs, trademark policies, and a really interesting discussion on university outreach, the creation, aggregation & distribution of open course materials and university outreach.

All in all, a very valuable 2 days.

On Monday, I attended OMX, the first edition of the Open Mobile Exchange. Myself & Paul Cooper stepped in at the last minute to give a tag-team presentation on GNOME Mobile which went, to my mind, very well. Having 2 people was great, because it meant that all of the things we wanted to say got said (usually I end up being quite non-linear and saying “oh, earlier, I forgot to mention…”, with Paul that didn’t happen). There was a decent amount of GNOME Mobile presence in any case - Jim Zemlin had nice things to say about us, and Jenny Minor from Vernier and Lefty Schlessinger from Access gave presentations from the perspective of a device manufacturer and a platform developer.

Tuesday was a quiet day for me - finally got to have quality phone time with Anne, and attended the Maemo sprint meeting on IRC before eating with Stormy - we talked about a couple of cool things I’ve been working on for the past two days that I hope to be able to announce in the next few days.

All in all, a great conference, social & work merged, mixed, mashed, and with a spot of early-morning running & Tour de Francing.Happy happy joy joy.

Tonight: RedMonk beer tastes Good.

That is the question…

I am honoured to have become the latest GNOME personality to catch the eye of Sam Varghese.

Sam feels I was unfair in my characterisation of him as a “shock jock”. He may be right… he says himself that the definition of a shock jock is “a slang term used to describe a type of radio broadcaster (sometimes a disc jockey) who attracts attention using humor (sic) that a significant portion of the listening audience may find offensive.” Clearly, since Sam’s not funny, I was unfair. Sorry Sam.

I take issue with Sam’s massive leap (which reminds me of when my maths professors used to say “obviously it follows…” at the end of complicated theorems) when he says that I “have to fight the perception that any of [our] major sponsors is making nice noises to the other camp”.

First, as I have told Sam on numerous occasions when he contacts us for answers to leading questions, we do not think of KDE as “the other camp”. Second, Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t exactly avoid a perception that he’s a fan of KDE. Later in the same article, he says that he thinks that KDE have got a nice rate of development going, and are driving innovation better than GNOME. He’s the first top-paying member of KDE eV, which is roughly the same amount of money annually as Canonical gives to GNOME.

And Mark’s not alone. Nokia are sponsors of both Akademy and GUADEC, as well as investing heavily in both GNOME (through Maemo) and QT (and paying the wages of some KDE developers).

What Sam has trouble understanding is that I have an issue with sloppy journalism. I like the KDE developers, we get on well, and I’ve done a lot of work bridging gaps between projects - whether it be through the organisation of Libre Graphics Meeting or FOSTEL, or my participation in the FLOSS Foundations group, or the numerous conversations I have with KDE board members about any number of subjects (including Akademy & GUADEC colocating).

So when Sam sets me up as a shill, or as someone who has a problem with KDE (or considers them competitors) he’s ignoring a body of evidence that suggests otherwise. But then, with Sam, that’s par for the course.

I only just got home Friday evening, and after a weekend with the family, and 3 working days this week, I’m off again to OSCon, for the first time. I have a feeling I’ll be seeing some familiar faces I’m currently posting this blog entry (which I wrote on the airport) in room 640 of the Doubletree (anyone who’s reading this & wants to grab a bite tonight, ring me at +33 677 019 213).

On Saturday and Sunday, I’ll be helping run the FLOSS Foundations meeting, then on Monday I’ll be helping out a bit with the Open Mobile Exchange day. I may take Tuesday as a relaxing/working day before the conference proper, where I’ll be giving the State of GNOME lightning talk on Thursday morning.

My main reason for going to OSCon, though, is to meet people who might be interested in availing of my consulting services. As someone who’s recently set up shop, but who has worked with free software communities for many years, I feel I’m well positioned to help companies save money by working better with communities they depend on. It benefits everyone.

My services go from presentations to managers & directors, training of developers in the dynamics of a given community and how best to work with them, to on-site consulting on specific issues like free software governance, community management and integrating free software best practises into your development team.

The transition from closed shop to free software participant is complex, and often underestimated. I can help make it easier.

I don’t much like banging my own drum on my syndicated blog, but I figure that I don’t do it very often, so… if you need someone like this, drop me a line.

It’s been a hectic week, but I really wanted to write up some notes from this year’s GUADEC for posterity, and to share some of the great stuff that happened that people might not know about.

After arriving late (very late) on Monday, I was up early to go & lead the GNOME Mobile BOF in the nice luxury bar on the top floor of the building.

The meeting location had been changed the day before, so we left people an extra half an hour to find the room. Unfortunately, we were a couple of days late to appear in the printed program once we’d decided when to hold the BOF, so some people who really wanted to be there found out afterwards.

The BOF went well - some really interesting discussions, and, I hope, some momentum to carry us through to a successful 2.24 GNOME Mobile release and a productive collaboration effort over the coming months.

We will be working on updating the website to list the active participants, collect and publish success stories from GNOME Mobile developers and users, and provide a more fruitful collaboration forum for participants.

I loved Leisa Reichelt and Matt Webb’s keynotes. Since I was the one who invited them, I’m glad that they seemed well received by those who attended. Matt’s keynote suffered a little by being at 10am, but unfortunately he had to fly away early in the afternoon, being the FOO that he is. Interesting factoid: the book that Matt co-authored for O’Reilly, “Mind Hacks”, was not for sale at the ORA stand. I bet that we could have set up a signing session if she had some

I also enjoyed Chris Blizzard’s keynote, and Alp Toker and Kristian Reitveld’s sessions were choc a bloc with interesting technical stuff.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see Federico’s talk as I was already at the airport, and thus I also missed the closing plenary, the foundation meeting, and (with great regret) the lightning talks.

I did get to catch some great presentations though. Clutter Guts was great - really fascinating stuff, and as always, pippin gives a mean demo.

I caught Travis Reitter’s Soylent talk, and I think I missed most of the feature presentation & demos in the first 5 minutes… which was unfortunate. It seems to me like libsoylent is aiming to provide the type of API I was kind of expecting from Telepathy… I don’t know if that’s a pair representation.

I also caught Owen Taylor presenting Big Board and the GNOME Online Desktop - promising stuff, and it seems like it’s almost at that inflection point you get in a project where it goes from a small project to one that gets adapted everywhere. It seems to be, as I tweeted at the time, like Gimmie, brought through to completion.

I think the only other presentation (outside of keynotes) I caught was my own, which seemed fairly well received. I managed to give Chris 20 minutes break before his keyboard too, which was great.

I’m not going to take any part in the whole GTK+ 3 discussion, though, except to share my own experiences with third party developers. Having worked with a company that had a GTK+ 1.2 interface that we were supporting for years for a client because the client didn’t want to pay to have it ported to GTK+ 2.x, I see where Miguel is coming from. I also understand that it would be good to have some idea of the things people don’t like in the current platform before committing to an API freeze for at least 2 - 3 years again.

Perhaps that would be a good first step - going beyond the initial rant to say “OK, what features do people not like? What do we need to change/add to the current platform to address the needs application developers have?”.

Like I said, I’m going to mostly stay out of it, except to reiterate one point I made on the marketing list - I think it’s a bad idea to connect a change in major version number in GNOME to a change in the API of the platform. GNOME version numbers indicate compelling new features to users, API version numbers convey something about the API, which users (and, by extension, press) don’t care about. We need to concentrate on the user when talking about GNOME versions.

I was happy to sit in with the board on the discussion with KDE eV when the three bids for GUADEC/Akademy 2009 were considered. Based on what I’ve learned from being involved in GUADEC organisation every year since Kristiansand, I recommended that the final cost to attendees (with particular thought for companies sending many developers from the US) be the primary deciding factor, the organising committee and their community credentials second, with the location itself being third.

While I’m happy to see the Canaries chosen as the final choice, I don’t think that my suggestions were particularly given precedence in the decision making process. In any case, I hope I’ll be able to help make GUADEC 2009 a success.

I know what she’s thinking - “I’ve had enough publicity at this stage, let’s get people talking about GNOME” - but I am really really pleased to see Stormy come on board as the new Executive Director. When I mentioned it to her back in April, I really didn’t think that she would be interested, but I saw from that first spark of interest that she has wanted to work with the GNOME project for a long time. The stars were aligned and it has come to pass.

I know, when we decided to hire for the role a couple of years back (yes, it’s been that long) Jeff had major concerns about the title - he wanted to set different expectations to those we had of Tim. I agree with that - and I think that the board have done a good job of setting those expectations with Stormy. She is our relationships person, and we direly needed one working full time.

The FreeFA World Cup has its third running this year, with 3 teams battling it out in the Turkish sun (I’m still trying to work out if we were mad dogs or Englishmen) before battling with Turkish rush-hour traffic (for some reason, Istanbul rush hour seems to be around 8pm). Others have written about it already. In spite of the considerable handicap of wearing the most heat-absorbant t-shirts, the black team won through against the red & white teams, thanks to a rock solid defense. There’s no praise like self-praise they say.

SMASHED was again a great success - this is the third time I’ve brought a bottle to a conference, after buying a Glenrothes 10yo on my way to China for the Linux Foundation Developers Summit and bringing a bottle I’ve completely forgotten to Austin for the Collaboration Summit in April.

This time, I will definitely not forget - the Glengoyne 12yo cask strength I brought was a lovely bottle among other lovely bottles. We spread the whisky love around, I hope that all the whisk[e]y lovers on the boat got at least one wee dram. Karl & John Carr were feeling a little worse for wear at the end of the evening. I managed to be a little more reasonable than those two… but only slightly. And the nightcap of reki on the pillows put paid to any hope I had of making it into the conference the following morning.

I really enjoyed getting some quality time with Luis, jrb, Lefty, vuntz and Stormy, and the many discussions I had on the rooftop, in the hallways, and on the boat. The really best thing about GUADEC is the conversations happening all the time.

I hate to give attention to Sam Varghese, but he is, after all, my favourite free software Shock Jock - always looking for conflict, or the controversial angle on the most innocuous statement.

This week, he wrote:

Is Mr Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, slowly warming towards KDE?[…]

Given the amount of flak that the recent KDE release - 4.0 - has taken from the pro-GNOME pundits at sites like linux.com, you would think that the worst possible thing any supporter of GNOME - as Shuttleworth is perceived to be - could do is to speak out in support of anything associated with KDE.

But you would be wrong. Shuttleworth is now floating the idea that there can be a QT-based GNOME.

So we look farther, and see that Sam is referring to the article in derStandard.at which Andreas wrote in GUADEC. Mark says, and I paraphrase: “GNOME’s platform licencing is company friendly, QT’s isn’t, but if QT were to change their licencing strategy to a company-friendly licence, GNOME would have some hard choices to make”.

To be fair, let’s get the direct quote in here:

A lot is going to depend on what Nokia is going to do from a licensing point of view. And separately what GNOME is going to do if Nokia makes the QT-licenses effectively compatible with the GNOME vision, can they embrace QT as a platform? […] I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of QT. There are licensing issues, GNOME is very much built on the LGPL, allowing companies to build their own products on a free software system, giving them some freedom and flexibility in their choice of licensing. That’s very frankly been a huge drive for the adoption of GNOME by corporate ISVs.

So, let me read between the lines (well, in fact, I’m just reading *on* the lines): if QT became LGPL or X11 or BSD, that would instantly make it a more attractive platform for commercial developers. Mark thinks that it’s possible to bring the GNOME vision of universal access through a beautiful, simple, accessible, internationalised, integrated user experience to the QT platform.

I may be nuts, but isn’t that more an indictment of KDE than a recommendation? Isn’t he saying “the KDE guys should be more like GNOME”? Isn’t he suggesting that if QT were available as LGPL or more liberal that we all become C++ hackers and port GNOME over to QT?

As it happens, I think that’s extremely unlikely, given the investment in C that GNOME has already made - changing the underlying platform would mean re-writing every single application, and leaving a lot of dead & wounded behind. Plus, I have a lot of faith that through improved bindings and a less shackled GTK+, combined with the 2-3 year “vision” arcs that the release team proposed at GUADEC, that we can inject a healthy dose of adrenaline into the heart of GNOME over the next couple of years.

Courtesy of Juliette Jarry of AJEL

Between:

• What I think
• What I want to say
• What I believe I’m saying
• What I say
• What you want to hear
• What you believe you’re hearing
• What you’re hearing
• What you want to understand
• What you believe you understand
• What you understand

…there are ten ways to have problems communicating with each other.

But let’s try anyway.

So when’s the Malt Appreciation Society meeting this year? I have a bottle of cask strength 12yo Glengoyne I picked up today & was planning to bring along - no idea if it’s any good. So… when do I get to find out???

Also, anyone interested in going for an early morning run (not the day after the Malt Appreciation Society meeting) drop me a line, especially if you’re in or near the Golden Horn Sirkeci… we can do some early morning tourism at about 12km/h.

I rebooted my computer and went out for lunch with some friends. When I came back, it was particularly unresponsive, so I went hunting, and top showed me this:

19055 root      20   0 1343m 453m 1524 D  0.3 45.3   1:46.13 rsvg-convert

A quick ps…

dneary@sligo:~$ ps -ef | grep 19055
root     19055 19054  0 12:25 ?        00:01:45
  /usr/bin/rsvg-convert -o /var/log/bootchart/hardy-20080704-1.png
  /var/log/bootchart/bootchart.svgz

Ouch!

Does bootchart run until you log in? Is this normal behaviour? 1.3G of virtual memory is an awful lot…

For anyone who has experienced pain when upgrading to a more recent version of Ubuntu with X and xrandr on Intel hardware, consider running this fabulous command.

This goes in particular for anyone who needed i915resolution before for wide-screens, and had a “ForceBIOS” option in xorg.conf. The driver to use for the hardware changed, and the xorg.conf got about 100 times smaller since Ubuntu 6.06 or 7.04.

This is the major weakness in the Ubuntu upgrade process, really… if hacks are needed to work around falings in previous versions, those hacks are (silently, IIRC) kept after an upgrade, even though they’re no longer necessary (and are, in fact, harmful).

Many thanks once again to Claude Paroz, wo helped me work through the projector problem & got me moving towards the fix.

I’m coming to the end of my two days in Mont de Marsan (and, as it happens, to the end of the charge in my laptop battery). I think the GNOME Accessibility presentation I gave went very well, certainly people seemed to get a lot from it. I’ll put my slides online at some stage (before the weekend), and I was filmed, when I have a link to the video I’ll throw that up too.

As usual, the great thing about conferences is meeting old friends, and making new ones, and there are a lot of familiar faces around.

One thing that did come out of my presentation is the need for those storyboards I proposed a while back. In particular, I tripped up when demoing Orca (no real plan to show off its functionality, other than turning on TTS, and “doing stuff”, then turning on magnification, and “doing stuff”, etc…), Dasher (it’d be handy to have a few phrases to type rather than coming up with something on the spot), and sticky & slow keys.

I hit a few problems with the keyboard a11y. When I had both sticky & slow keys activated, I got double letters (I’m sure it was a configuration issue, but anyway…). And when I used the keyboard shortcut to navigate to the top bar, I hit two bugs - if I open a menu in the top menubar, I can’t navigate away with the keyboard (Ctrl-Alt-Tab doesn’t work any more), and I can’t navigate to the notification area with the keyboard. And I got some comments on MouseTweaks (”we need a way to temporarily disable it for times when you’re reading a document or a web page, for example”) and Dasher (”not really suitable for certain classes of users” - I’ll try to get more information).

Yesterday’s presentation “Building bridges” went less well - it was a dry run for my GUADEC presentation, and I’ve taken away 3 or 4 good ideas for improvements. But like all the English presentations here, attendance was poor - I have about 10 or 12 attendees. And at 9am this morning, there was one person who turned up for my presentation in English on accessibility in GNOME - lucky enough, since when I tested my laptop with the projector, I had a bunch of problems! Many thanks to Claude Paroz, who helped me identify the problem (old driver + options which were necessary in Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.04, but have since been deprecated) and the solution (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg). My laptop works with projectors! Yay!

This week, I will be travelling to Mont de Marsan, near Bordeaux, Agen, Bayonne and Pau (or let’s say, equally far away from all of those) to give a few presentations, meet a few friends, have a few drinks, and hopefully survive a 9am presentation slot on Thursday morning.

My three presentations (really, two, but they’re taking advantage of my bilinguality) are:

• Bridges between projects : 16:45 on Wednesday. A dry run for my GUADEC presentation, presenting a variety of ways that different projects are co-ordinating, and what we’re talking about, that most people don’t know about.
• Digital Ramps and Handrails: 9:00 on Thursday (in English), and 11:45 on Thursday (in French). It’s with some trepidation that I proposed a presentation on GNOME usability for the conference, since I’m by no means an expert. But I feel that we’ve done such good work in this area, and I’m so impressed with the passion of the accessibility team, that I felt that we definitely needed to talk about it more, so I’ll take my chances. I plan to give a low level overview of the accessibility tools built into GNOME, including keyboard shortcuts, accessible themes, audio events, sticky keys, slow keys, mousetweaks, alternative input methods (Dasher, on-screen keyboard), and of course a short description of Orca and our support for screen readers and GNOME Magnifier. I’ll also mention the surprising side-effects of having an accessible desktop - graphics application test frameworks Dogtail, LTSP and Accerciser. When I get to talking about AT-SPI, that’s where I get nervous, because I’ve had some trouble with gok in the past where my keyboard got disabled when I launched it… I’m going to avoid demoing gok.

Did I miss anything important? Please let me know if you saw anything braindead that I should talk about that I haven’t yet.

Unfortunately, I can’t really afford to travel for the full week, so I’m heading off tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday), eating with friends in Bordeaux tomorrow evening, and spending Wednesday and Thursday at the conference, before heading off again Thursday evening.

If anyone else overlaps and would like to meet up Wednesday evening, drop me a line!

I got a definitive answer today from the Golden Horn in SultanahmetSirkeci as to why I hadn’t yet received a confirmation of my reservation: I don’t have a reservation.

I have contacted the hotel by phone, filled in the online form, and following instructions, patiently awaited a confirmation, which never came. At that stage, after waiting perhaps a little too long, I tried the hotel again (the person I talked to didn’t know anything about the group code, the online reservation system, and to be honest, didn’t speak English very well), and asked Baris to look into it. Which he did. And got confirmation yesterday that myself and at least one other person who had registered online did not have reservations.

So if, like me, you reserved online at the Golden Horn SultanahmetSirkeci, and like me, you have not yet received any confirmation of your booking, then like me, you’ll need to find another hotel. Bummer.

Update: Baris informs me that the Golden Horn in Sirkeci has made more rooms available under the group code, so there’s hope for me yet.

It’s with great disappointment that I just found out that Eric Sink is cancelling his GUADEC keynote. Eric’s been told by his doctors not to take the trip for health reasons, and while I’m disappointed (I was really looking forward to his keynote), I can of course understand his decision, and I wish him a full & speedy recovery.

I only just found out, and let Baris and the programme committee know, so I don’t know yet what we’re going to do given Eric’s cancellation. I’ll keep you all posted, of course, when I know more.

The maemo.org logo competition is going strong, and we now have many dozens of logo contest submissions.

Some of my favourites so far:

The very first one, Attila’s butterfly

Jussi’s first effort - particularly with just the A and the E:

And Jussi’s second entry, with the Möbius strip. You can see the evolution of this idea, and his collaboration with Thiercito, on the latter’s talk page, which provided some insights into the creative process for me. It’d have been nice if he had trimmed some excess whitespace off the images, mind:

Think you can do better than these or other entries? There’s still lots of time left to get your entries in before the deadline! We’ll be announcing the selection process over the next week or two once the last details are sorted out.

With the recent discussion in blogs around the GNOME world, it can be easy to forget that there have been some great new applications for GNOME appearing recently. Many of these are written by a new breed of GNOME developer, young students with none of the weight of history sitting on their shoulders, and they are great!

If you haven’t tried them yet, then you should. Most of these aren’t in the GNOME desktop suite, and could probably do with some more exposure.

Here’s a few that came to mind without me having to think too long:

• GNOME Do: This is an amazing application! Its plug-in system is what makes it really great - add all music by an artist to your Rhythmbox playlist, tweet that you’re at your computer, send an IM to a contact, all with just a few keystrokes
• Hamster: I discovered this app recently, and have been very impressed. A plug-in for GNOME Do, and it’d be perfect
• Tasque: For the GTD wannabe that I am.A clean, small app to handle TODO lists.
• Cheese!: Now that this is in the desktop, I guess everyone knows about it. A PhotoBooth clone with an authorwith a sense of humour - especially on April 1st.
• Vagalume: My absolute favourite Last FM client.
• Pimlico: A mobile suite of applications. I tried out Dates and Contacts on my N810, and was very impressed. Everything I personally want in a PIM - simple, functional, intuitive, beautiful.
• Transmission: After using the old GNOME bittorrent client for so long, I was really happy to see someone put the work into making a sensible BT client for GNOME, and Transmission is it. Bravo.

Some of these apps have come from people working in companies like Igalia, Opened Hand and Novell, some of them from students, some of them from hack weeks, all of them have some things in common - a sense of aesthetics and attention to the user experience, lightweight user interfaces ruthlessly focussed on a core usecase. And all serve their users well.

Another thing that many of them share is a sense of humour - when using Hamster or Cheese, you can’t help but feel that the author was having a ball.

Nothing in particular set me writing this, I just wanted to point out that there are many new applications aimed at the end user  coming out of GNOME, humour and creativity still live here.

“We all have some learning to do” - that was the core message of Ari Jaaksi’s presentation, which has turned into a massive shitstorm over the past few days.

Yet again, I’m amazed at a knee-jerk populist reaction to a news story, and completely stunned at the spin which has been given to this, and swallowed hook, line & sinker by a large group of supposedly intelligent people. It’s been going on for years, so perhaps one more time shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.

For the benefit of those living in a burrow, here’s the quote that started it all:

“We want to educate open-source developers,” said Jaaksi, who is Nokia’s vice president of software and heads up the Finnish handset manufacturer’s open-source operations. “There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.”

That’s the bit, since quoted without context, from an article which included the quote with little context in the first place. Look a little further, and you will see that this is the same message that Dr. Jaaksi delivered in San Francisco a few months ago: Nokia is learning how to interact with free software projects, but if free software developers want the software to be adopted further in mass-market products, then we need to understand the constraints that businesses work under, and address them.

In my mind, that’s a big “if”. Companies work under a bunch of constraints which don’t sit well with free software - DRM, the need for differentiation and a competitive edge. But also dealing with sub-contractors and suppliers who have their terms and conditions under which they’re prepared to work.

Some of the most outrageous things I’ve read these past few days:

“No more Nokia for me, I’m buying an iPhone”

Yeah, because Apple are a really free software friendly company.

 ”If Nokia can’t get the specs for chips from their suppliers, they should just build their own”

Uhmmm… do you really think that Nokia wants to go into competition with every micro-electronics company in the world? How much resources do people think Nokia really has?

Some people think that Nokia should use only free software in all their devices, regardless of the consequences of that (the consequences would be more difficult government validation of your phone with the GSM networks, no operator take-up of the phones, and thus no cheap phones subsidised when you take a subscription, and underpowered and outdated hardware). That may be fine for a user to have as an option if they don’t mind paying hundreds of dollars fora phone that doesn’t do as much as one that they can get for a tenth of the price or less - in fact, the Freerunner is aimed right at that market. It’s a niche market, not a mass market. One day, maybe…

In the meantime, the conclusion I draw from this is that the slashdot crowd aren’t as reasoned as I had hoped, many people who should know better are jumping to conclusions based on news headlines. What ever happened to critical thought?

Free software is great, a momentous gift to the world, but does not provide the answer to all questions. Sometimes, free software will not be the answer. Some sets of constraints will exclude us from the start. The battle is to change the constraints. But you cannot expect a business to lose money to satisfy philosophical arguments. If you’re ever talking to someone and trying to “sell” them free software, your starting point should be: “how will this (make|save) me money?”

Usually that answer will be easy to find - lower R&D costs, licencing fees, support costs you control better by deciding when to buy support, on what terms. But occasionally, there is no argument. There is no way to persuade Microsoft that releasing Office under the GPL would be a money-making move for them - it plainly wouldn’t be.

So if the answer to that question is “it won’t”, then wish them well, perhaps recommend something that will, and move on to another subject.

This IRC conversation, in some sense, sums up all my feelings about the recent decadence  wave running through GNOME.

Me:

It seems like there are lots of interesting directions to go, which would add transversal functionality to GNOME which would be really new & useful. And they’ve been around for years.

Think of a geographically aware desktop, presenting contextual data based on where you are. Or something like Dashboard, presenting contextual data based on what you’re doing. Or something like the project-based desktop, showing only data which is related to a particular project/topic. Or person-based, where your contacts are first-class objects and you’re always aware of who’s around. Or integrating with existing online RESTful services, and (why not?) creating others that meet our standards.

And we have libraries for all of this stuff - GeoClue, Beagle, LeafTag (or something similar), Telepathy.

All you need to do (!) is add useful features based on that information to all of the applications that people use, from email through web, office, communications, games, …

Simple!

ozamosi

I Would do that myself, but I’m busy writing a blog post about that someone should do it.

A few weeks ago, a new MediaWiki instance was installed by Ferenc Szekely of the maemo team. Over the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve been organising a small team which has moved over content from the old wiki, has worked on stylesheets, templates and categories which make sense, and we’re now ready to take the wraps off! Head on over to http://wiki.maemo.org and have a look.

This is not a finished work, like most wikis. Content in the “Midgard wiki” category  needs review and editing, and a lot of theofficial documentation of maemo will be wikiised over the coming weeks and months. Some content still needs migrating and categorisation. But we have a decent start, an editing team, and the new wiki has already been baptised with its first couple of pages with over 100 edits: 100Days and 2010 Agenda.

Credit where credit’s due! The following people have been outstanding throughout the migration: GeneralAntilles, jaffa, Niels Breet, ludovicus, trickie and Navi. I’m probably leaving lots of people out but these guys have made their mark with me over the past couple of weeks.

For those who were looking forward to the GUADEC table quiz, I’m sorry to say that it won’t be happening this year. Unfortunately, problems organising an appropriate site, and a lack of room in the schedule (which is packed with great social events) mean that it’s not going to fit in this year. Thanks for all your interest though - and hopefully the torch will get carried on to next year. Quizzes are, after all, great.

I only noticed this after finally meeting him in the flesh at LinuxTag - Aaron Seigo bears an uncanny resemblance to Franck Ribéry, French footballer extraordinaire (except for the scars that Franck got going through a windshield as a kid and the funky hairdo).

The proof?

Aaron Seigo

Franck Ribery

• Does an atmosphere generator like this exist? - Internet Tablet Talk Forums This would be a great plug-in for rhythmbox - generate pink noise like the wind in the willows, a mountain stream, birds signing in the trees… I don’t know how you’d do it, mixing different samples + some randomisation? (tags: pink noise audio music sounds)
• Relaxing music, sleep-aids, anxiety reduction, relaxation tools A decent source for samples for the relaxing sound generator plug-in? (tags: rhythmbox relaxing sounds pink noise)
• freesound :: home page Another possible source of free sound samples (tags: sound samples pink noise relaxing rhythmbox)

There’s a curious phenomenon I’ve noticed when I attend conferences. During the conference, the energy of everyone around me pumps me up & keeps me going. I love meeting people & talking to them, hearing about the cool stuff they’re up to and making contacts for new projects. This was true of meeting the maemo guys last week - we had a great evening talking about tablets, maemo, and life in general overmugs of good German beer.

But after the conference, it’s like you’ve been on some kind of artificial high of late nights, early mornings, high concentration & caffeine charged conversations - and you get on the plane to come home, and you just deflate.

It always  seems to take me about the same length to recover from a conference as I spent at the conference. Which meant that I was still in a funk on Monday, when I decided that the first thing I had to do was get rid of some Stuff.

Paperwork had built up over the past month or so, I had bits & pieces all over my desk, in stacks on the floor, in drawers… From what I can tell from Getting Things Done (I’m about half way through! yay!), this is a pretty normal situation - something comes into your hand that you can’t forget, but that you can’t handle right away, so you add it to the top of a bunch of other stuff which you couldn’t do straight away, but which you couldn’t forget, and there it lays until you’ve forgotten it.

And so Monday and Tuesday, I spent ages working through email, expenses, receipts, forms for insurance, tax returns and all of the other things that had been building up. At the end of it, my life feels a bit cleaner, but I’ve got the impression I lost half the week.

I can’t wait until the magic happens and my office space suddenly becomes magically organised so that filing becomes fun and I always have a list of things I can do, regardless of what I’m up to at the time. That’ll be fun (I’m not holding my breath).

• maemo LinuxTag Update Quim Gil’s update on maemo.org’s future direction in LinuxTag. Some important new information here - including a commitment to GTK+/Hildon for at least two more versions of the software. (tags: maemo gtk+ presentation linuxtag)

So far, the maemo.org track has been great - very informative. Some highlights:

Gary Birkett (better known on IRC as lcuk) gave a short talk on how and why he got involved in memo.org - an interesting perspective on motivations of volunteers, and a classic “scratching your own itch” situation. He’s developed a text reader which works in full-screen, and has smooth scrolling with finger & stylus (like the iPhone).

Niels Breet is the maemo.org webmaster. He was an active community member doing great work, who has recently been funded by Nokia to work on project infrastructur. It’s an interesting model of community funding - Niels explained that his boss is the maemo.org community, even though it’s Nokia who’s paying his wages. He talked about some of the things that he’s working on improving, including the newly published maemo.org packaging policy (PDF), and fixing the repositories mess to make it easier to upload software to a central maemo extras repository.

The main presentation to close out the morning was Quim Gil talking about the maemo.org strategy of Nokia over the next couple of years. Without going into details, he talked about the next two versions of the platform, Fremantle and Harmattan. Fremantle will continue to be primarily GTK+/Hildon based, and QT will be integrated into the platform in the Harmattan release.
Quim then talked about the role of community in maemo.org and tablet development. He mentioned that Nokia have recently invested in 3 roles (webmaster, bugmaster, docmaster) where the people being funded answer primarily to the community. This represents a big investment in the community.

His major announcement was that he was launching 10 days of community brainstorming on two subjects: the 100 Days community plan and maemo.org 2010, defining short term goals for the community, and helping Nokia define the mid-term goals and strategy for the project. He also announced the maemo summit, to be held in Berlin on the 19th of September, after OSiM World, and finished with a call to arms. Nokia is looking for real community input and action, and wants help finding the right balance between the commercial constraints involved in producing mass-market devices and the community requirement for transparency and openness.

After lunch, we had some presentations of some of the cool apps which have been written by community members for the maemo platform.

Alberto Garcia of Igalia presented Vagalume , a beautiful and well-integrated Last.fm client for GNOME and maemo tablets.

Florian Boor presented the GPE application suite which includes a bunch of small applications targeting handheld form-factors.

Urho Konttori, who has since become a project manager in Nokia, talked about the UKMP media player, UKTube YouTube downloader & plater, and some other applications which he has written for the maemo platform.

Next up: maemo.org platform hacks, and “what’s next?”.

Some recent stories have started raising brows among some comentators on GNOME Mobile (see the comments in particular):

• OLPC figurehead Nicolas Negroponte announces that they will be installing Windows on the XO laptops, and porting Sugar to Windows
• OpenMoko project lead Michael Shiloh announces that future versions of the platform will have Enlightenment as the windowing system and Qtopia apps by default

Both of these stories are not complete abandonments of GTK+ or the GNOME platform. Sugar will still be GTK+ based, and OpenMoko will continue to support GTK+ in the platform, and the previously developed GTK+ applications.

But it would be disingenuous that these announcements don’t represent a cooling towards the GNOME platform on the part of both organisations.

So what happened? There are two plausible explanations:

• Bad tools - the GNOME platform is not suitable to the applications, or it’s difficult to develop with, there is a shortage of development tools,  books, or maybe the platform itself has quality or performance issues - perhaps the organisations had trouble hiring hackers with GTK+ experience
• Bad workmen - the projects over-reached, had unreasonable schedule expectations, were not sufficiently planned, and were poorly executed, due to poor management or weak team members - the choice of technology is irrelevant to the failures of the projects to deliver on expectations in terms of schedule, functionality and quality, perhaps the projects had poor or inconsistent focus and vision

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

I think most people who have tried would say that software development with GTK+ in C is hard, development in C++ or Java is quicker and less painful. A case, if one needed to be made, for focussing more than ever on gtkmm and java-gnome, and ensuring that these bindings are promoted, and as high-quality as possible.

But if you look at the goals of OLPC, their goal was to completely rewrite the graphical interface to the OS to be completely focused on the educational paradigm they were aiming for. This is a huge task, and it seems clear (in hindsight) that the enormity of it was underestimated. Free software is not the cure to all ills, things don’t go quicker just because you chose a free software licence for your project. The reality of the project’s status didn’t keep up with schedule pressures and marketing, to thepoint where the project’s credibility has been damaged by theGive One Get One and some high-profile withdrawls from the program.

The same thing goes for OpenMoko. Looking in from the outside, the technical management of the project has not been consistent from the beginning, partly because unreasonable expectations at the beginning led to impatience when early objectives weren’t being met. With objectives unmet, band-aids were plastered on band-aids, the direction changed, and now the OpenMoko platform has three competing application frameworks supported - QT, GTK+ and EFL.

It may be, and I hope it is, that both these projects survive their current difficulties and go on to be great successes. I’m sure that there are lessons to be learned for us in their stories.

But people who announce that this means the end of GNOME Mobile are quite obviously over-reacting.

We have several high-profile participants, including Nokia and ACCESS, committed to using GTK+ in their platforms. Important components of the GNOME Mobile stack area key part of the moblin platform, and are included in the LiMo reference platform (PDF). Devices such as those announced recently by Verizon, and the 18 phones announced by LiMo earlier this year, are based on this platform, so it seems clear that we are going to be a player in the mobile device space for many years. Success stories like the Vernier LabQuest and the iRex e-book reader show that we can be a compelling option in niche devices with custom interfaces.

With the current work of the initiative following on from the Austin summit last month, which includes creating a GNOME Mobile release set for release with GNOME 2.24, and raising awareness of what we’re up to, you should be seeing some interesting news over the coming months. The GNOME Mobile initiative is more necessary and useful now than ever.

I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday for three days in LinuxTag 2008 to meet up with some members of the maemo.org community, see old friends, and generally chat with as many people as possible.

After arriving, I managed to  get out for a run, which was surprisingly pleasant - ourhotel is quite near the Tiergarten behind the zoological gardens, so while running around I accidentally went past some lovely landmarks, and managed to scout out a nice beer-garden beside the Neuen See where we had some nice Weisswurst last night.

It’s been fun so far - I met up with Quim and Marcell on Tuesday, and Kate, Peter, Niels and Marius yesterday. I spent a lot of time wandering around playing “spot the familiar face” - it was great catching up with Jochen Topf from Open Street Map (formerly FOSTEL organiser), Vincent Untz and Joe Brockmeister who are here for OpenSuse, Nils and Florian from OpenEmbedded and GPE.

I ran into Anne Oestergaard too, and it was great chatting with MaryBeth and Rob from OpenMedia Now, Knut Yrvin from Trolltech, and most of the KDE eV board who are here this week too - I met Aaron Seigo for the first time, after years of email conversations, and Sebastian and Cornelius are here too.

With so many familiar faces, it can be tempting to just talk to people you know, but I do like meeting up with new people at these things too - and the number one conversation starter I’ve had this week has been  Big Buck Bunny - my kids love this cartoon, so much that Tuesday they watched it on repeat for an hour. And it goes down well with the adults too. Mad props to Ton, Sacha and the gang on the great success - they have attained their goal of an accessible cartoon to follow on from the “arty” Elephants Dream.

Already today we’ve heard Cat Allman from Google telling us about Google Summer of Code and GHOP, and  the always entertaining Knut Yrvin on QT. After Knut’s session the maemo.org track starts, and I will be reporting as much as possible. Nick Loeve (trickie) proposed having a Wiki sprint today, and if I can get critical mass (and critical internet access) for that, we’ll do that a little later.

I received my copy of Big Buck Bunny today, and I’m leaving for Berlin tomorrow morning for LinuxTag.

I’d like to be able toshow BBB on my Nokia N810, but when I copy the AVI file from the DVD onto the tablet, it doesn’t load (”File format not supported” it says). Same goes for “Elephants Dream”. The same also goes for the Nokia N800 (although there I just get a message the there is no application that can manage the file format).

Can anyone point me towards the codecs I’ll need to get this working tonight, please? I’d hunt myself (really I would) if I wasn’t packing a bag and putting kids to bed.

Thanks Lazyweb!

• KDE at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 (tags: libre graphics meeting lgm08 review)

• 2talk First Impressions (tags: openwengo qutecome 2talk)
• suume: Programs I run that are not open source (tags: openwengo wengophone qutecom)

• Trolltech Labs Blogs » Introducing QGtkStyle… Quite a cool development from Trolltech - qgtkstyle styles QT widgets according to your GTK+ theme, making QT apps look good on your GNOME desktop. There’s no reason not to choose GNOME any more! (tags: gnome