Incoming super geek blog post … in 3, 2, 1 …
Starting things off with a sexy twist, this site is amazingly cool: http://panic.com/goods/. It’s really amazing how far client side web tricks are progressing.
Jesse: Following ifolder’s dev process, it seems as if Novell is fractured when it comes to OSS development (which can be expected when working within a collosal company like that, with many levels of management and understanding of the free software philosophy).
Of course it’s common knowledge now that there are 2 commonly used ways to make money using OSS as a business model.
1* Open all code and development. Other people can reap all benefits of the software freely, but in turn everyone wins as work done by individuals is (hopefully) pushed back into the product.
2* Open part of the code and development, but keep a key portion of it propriatary so that businesses have an incentive to pay you mucho dinero.
In my opinion, 1* rocks the house, *2 sucks the big one. Keeping parts of the code, and especially the development process closed just frustrates potential developers, and you might as well just keep the entire system propriatary from the getgo.
I hope that as more people in the Novell ranks ‘just get it,’ we’ll see more 1* (opening Ximian connector, placing Evolution within Gnome base, etc) and less *2 (ifolder/netware). I’m with you in hoping that Hula attracts some community involvement!
Ok switching gears … (I should really break this up into two posts. Oh well.)
Seth Nickell made an awesome post which anyone interesting in ooh-la-la desktop effects should read. He brings up a very interesting point that has worried me quite in the past concerning coordinating efforts between multiple vendors (mostly Novell and Redhat). I first saw this when Novell announced NetApplet and Redhat in turn suddenly announced all the in-house work they had been doing on NetworkManager, which had no press prior to that date that I had seen. This isn’t to say that there was no mention of it at all; please correct me if I’m wrong here.
Seth’s concerns are right on.
I think the solution is pretty simple though, and I never thought I’d say this, but the guys working on these in-house technologies need to blog, blog, blog! Get the guys on planet.gnome for cryin out loud! Also, it probably couldn’t hurt to have more of this work discussed on the fd.o listservs.
Whew, I just noticed I’ve been typing all this in gedit, when I really should be using Tomboy (and of course you should to if you aren’t already!). What Tomboy really needs is to be able to export a note via XMLRPC to a blog. Maybe I’ll look at the Rails code Tobias just released to hack something into the bliki Jesse and I are working on.
