My best wishes to everyone in the Bongo community for the year ahead. I’m sorry not to have been around much over the holiday; our family lost our Grandmother four days ago, and as you might imagine things have been a bit upside down since. One minute I was committing a patch for new mail processing, the next I was in hospital (almost literally), and things have been a bit strange since.
By the time M3 will come out finally, it will have been five months since the last proper release. Time flies when you’re having fun! In all seriousness, that’s far too long, and we did bite off a bit more than we could easily chew. Ho hum.
The first test release for M3 is out there, though. I was going to call these release candidates, but I decided against it – there’s no way the first few will be released, so they’re not really RCs.
A while ago, I wrote some thoughts on Thunderbird in the aftermath of the announcement of the new MailCo and the resignation from Mozilla of two key developers. I was disappointed at the time, but looking back at my post, I don’t think it was particularly negative – if anything, I was pointing out how vital I still thought (and think) it is that Tbird be a successful project.
Having exchanged pleasantaries with David Ascher over the past couple of days, and read what he has to say about Tbird, I’m much less disappointed and much more hopeful.
I sent this link around the Bongo people on Mugshot, and on IRC, but here it is again for the benefit of people watching our planet: the future of Thunderbird seems to be a bit cloudy, Mozilla Corp. seem to have realised that it doesn’t quite fit it.
Primarily, this disappoints me, because I always saw Tbird as a natural fit to the Bongo Project. We’re developing a kick-ass webmail, and that will appeal to a lot of people, but there are other people – like me – who simply don’t use webmail.
From Friday until late Monday night, I will be on retreat and entirely away from the internet. No, Bongo hasn’t scared me off, I will be back 🙂 So, I figure that I’m going to try again my “pretty please” act to get people to look at some bugs: it worked great last time I tried it, and I can’t remember why I didn’t try again. Of course, many people won’t feel competent enough to look at some of these bugs, so there’s an extra-credit task at the end of this coming up in a further blog post 🙂
Recently, I became very annoyed at Ubuntu. The plan for the next version of Ubuntu, “feisty”, is to include the binary graphics drivers that we all know and hate by default. Ubuntu has done a great job of creating the impression of a community-driven grass-roots distribution, which has left me feeling somewhat sold out and while it’s not outside the wording of the Ubuntu licensing policy it feels like it’s outside the spirit.
I was hoping we’d have an initial attempt at M3 by now – we’re so close, honestly, but just not quite there yet. Annoying, even for me, but good things come to those who wait.
I’m acutely aware of one problem: our up-front decision with this project was to lay out a road to 1.0 that we thought was achievable, and basically just do it in milestone steps. Between M2 and M3, this hasn’t really worked out in the way I would have wanted.
So, this is the extra task I alluded to in my last blog post, but don’t let that put you off!
I’d love to hear from people about how they use Bongo now, and how they want to use Bongo in the future. Especially, I’d like to hear from people who are watching this project but not participating more directly. So, to that end, I’ve kicked off a discussion on the forum: Where do you (want to) use Bongo?
So, someone asked me the first good question about the vision for Bongo. To paraphrase, why am I against using the word groupware?
The easy historical answer is that it was almost the rallying call for Hula, and the groupware bad essay by jwz expressed this quite neatly in some ways. But that’s not a very good ‘why’ answer.
For me, the difference is probably quite slight in some respects, but it comes down to who we design features for.
I wasn’t going to mention Hula particularly, but since the recent announcement it seems the right time. I’ve said basically the same thing on bongo-devel too:
I’m pleased to see Novell have finally got something sorted out. I think we were left in the dark too long, and it was supposed to be an open source community. I’m glad to see Messaging Architects look enthused about Hula, and I will watch where they take it with interest.
