Mark Shuttleworth recently posted about the work Canonical are doing on application notifications, and a couple of things struck me.
The first thing that struck me is that even though what they’re doing is quite pretty, it’s intensely pointless. Designing a notification system that will spew out messages that the person using the computer doesn’t need to see is making the computer less useful: it’s another piece of UI vying for my attention, and every time something interrupts what I’m going I’m losing concentration.
This is based on Miguel’s desire for an IMAP interface to his Evolution mail, but isn’t really focussed on that particularly problem: rather, the more general problem of where “collaboration brains” belongs. One of the things which I think seems to be a bit worrying about free software mail clients is that there is this continuing move to smarter and smarter MUAs.
Miguel is actually asking for something which is much closer to what KDE are doing: the Akonadi project, as I understand it, is basically almost a full-blown local groupware/collaboration server.
Unlike Jono, whose experiences with Tbird 3 are worth a read, I’ve been a loyal Thunderbird user for a few years now – in fact, we’ve had it deployed at work relatively happily for a while now (I say relatively – the mail client is fine; lack of calendaring is a bit of an issue…). I also tried the Tbird 3 beta recently too, although I think I met with even less success.
You may have noticed that I’ve been very quiet on my blog over the past couple of months. This has been for a couple of reasons: primarily, I’ve been really busy, but also because I’ve been sort-of locked out of it while my laptop was out of commission. I was a Blosxom user, which is a lovely piece of software and very simple, and I chose it because it’s very easy to integrate into another site – however, that has now bitten the dust.
So, somewhat little advertised and somewhat exclusive, Linux Live Expo 2008 in London has been taking place. Friday was day two of three; for the first time it’s on a Saturday as well – and we’ll see how that goes tomorrow, I guess. But the first few days have been interesting.
Thursday started relatively slowly, although Bongo was sited next to the awesome OpenNMS guys – who travelled a lot further than I did to get there, and are exceedingly friendly.
Today wasn’t a great day for software patents in the UK: the judgement in the appeal of the Symbian patent application GB 0325145.1 has been put up on Bailii, and the news is that the appeal was rejected. That means that Symbian’s patent will now be valid in the UK.
For those unaware of the patent, it’s effectively a patent on dynamic library loaders. It allows people to patch the binary interfaces (ABIs) of libraries in a manner which still allows you to load them quickly.
We’re probably going to see 0.3 this week. I’m planning on releasing 0.2.94 today, at which point we’ll be back on SVN trunk, and then 0.3 sometime by the weekend. There are going to be a few known bugs not fixed, but it won’t be in terrible state by any means.
Want to see Bongo? I’ve just realised that there’s going to be a lot of Bongo in the community over the next few months.
It’s not often that I’m reading through some article online and come across someone using my own words in print (as it were), but that happened this morning!
It is a very strange feeling. I was reading Free, Open and Eating its Young – the premise of the article is that many free software communities have significant proportions of essentially anti-social contributors. Both Pat and I have blogged about this before – something that is important to me is that the climate of the Bongo community be extremely welcoming.
For a long time, I’ve been wanted to do some serious research into the economics of free software: there is an awful lot of opinion about how you can and cannot make money out of free software, and not really much fact (or, at least, no-one has looked at the experiences of companies who’ve been in this industry for the last 10-15 years).
No-one has really gone through the history of all these businesses and tried to construct some picture of how businesses have done.
Well, I’m sorry to announce that my prediction was about right: we didn’t get into this year’s Summer of Code. From what I’ve seen, this year was extremely competitive, and many good projects didn’t get in.
It looks like only one project similar to us got in was OSAF/Chandler – they are a returning project, so that’s not a huge surprise. They have some nice looking Javascript ideas which I don’t think are very applicable to us, sadly, but who knows.
