It has been an incredibly interesting week in free desktop-land, in that kind of “interesting like a soap opera” kind of way. I guess it’s not news that different participants have different recollections of the same series of events, but it is a bit sad to see it writ so large on a public stage.
Timing-wise, it’s quite co-incidental, but it’s enlightening (I think) to read Mark Shuttleworth’s latest “Internal competition is healthy, but depends on strong and mature leadership” alongside Mark Wilcox’s “What happened to Nokia?
As predicted, Microsoft and Nokia are tying a knot of sorts, and all sorts of people are extremely disappointed by this news. I’m an Android user right now, but I’m particularly disappointed because Android just isn’t the free platform it claims to be.
A lot of people are blaming Microsoft and dreaming up “entryism” conspiracy theories. These people are entirely wrong; the decision to go MS was signalled a long while ago by Nokia’s board.
Today was Open Source Expo day. While I had been asked by one of the organisers whether or not I could propose a .Org to exhibit there, I decided against it for a couple of reasons: mainly, because I hadn’t heard very much about the exhibition, was a bit worried about the timing, and questioned whether or not it would be a good use of time for me or anyone else involved in an open source project to attend.
One thing that has always bothered me is that there has always been little way of getting data in and out of Bongo stores easily. Well, no longer (sort of): I’ve upgraded the storetool a bit to make this easier. Some examples are better than words:
It’s not totally complete yet: we need some commands to remove, move documents, fiddle with types, flags and properties too – but it’s a start!
Now, this isn’t something you’d probably want to do every day, but sometimes you have a 32-bit Fedora install which you’d like to be able to run 64-bit software on: my use case is that I have this desktop which I want to start running virtual machines on. Now, if you have a 32-bit install, you can’t run 64-bit machines – a bit weird given the hardware is supposed to be virtualised, but that’s how it works.
It looks like someone has been attacking Savane-derived hosting platforms. Recently Savannah has been down, and the page that has now gone up confirms that they had a security breach. Unfortunately, Gna! has a similar code-base, and their site now confirms that they are investigating an issue too.
This has a knock-on issue for Bongo, since we use Gna! hosting. Our download area appears to still be alive, and thankfully we have always signed the releases.
I don’t particularly like talking law on this blog; it’s boring and – for the most part – disinteresting. However, recent developments in SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Limited (as written up here – thanks to Cristian for bringing this up at FFII) deserve to be aired.
The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. For those who don’t know, SAS is a statistical package which is both popular and influential, and to a large extent can be thought of as a programming development environment.
It’s been a little while since I talked about SparkleShare; since then it has moved project hosting (here’s my fork) and there have been various changes – thankfully, updating the packages for the new version and to get it on Fedora 14 didn’t take too long. There are likely to be problems here and there with the packages – invitations don’t seem to work right now, but I haven’t tracked down that bug yet – but they should be mostly working.
It seems like everyone has had their word on the latest release, but like a fashionably-late party-goer, I’m going to waltz in at the 11th hour and offer my 2p 🙂
I think it’s well-known at this point that 14 has shaped up to be a very good release, but I’d like to draw attention to one point in particular: the version of Nouveau in this release is another big, big step forward.
If you haven’t read it already, Bradley Kuhn’s take on where Canonical are aiming is deeply interesting. There is bound to be push-back against the article, because it does connect a few distant dots, but I found it particularly interesting because it’s apropos of a recent discussion on Surrey LUG’s mailing list – which has no public archive so therefore I cannot link, but the gist of the thread was a discussion on the various approaches Canonical takes to getting income.
