Category: freesoftware (Page 8 of 8)
Someone asked me my opinion on the licensing of Qt a couple of days ago; not that my opinion is worth that much but this is a relatively interesting change. On the face of it, moving to LGPL isn’t a major difference – obviously, it enables proprietary software to use the library without paying a commercial license, but the market for third-party applications on GNU/Linux is pretty slim. The relaxing/opening of the development process is much more important, assuming that it actually happens, although I imagine that won’t sink in for a little while yet either.
The WordPress blogs were recently alive with discussion about whether or not having pay-for themes, plugins, etc., was a good (or even legal) thing. Jeff Chandler recently pointed to a post entitled What’s the point of community? which I think goes back to the discussion I had with Tarus Balog of OpenNMS fame a while ago, about social norms and market norms. Basically, one of the points from Dan Ariely’s excellent book “Predictably Irrational” is that when you mix, or confuse, one set of norms with another you inevitably end up with problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
