Day: June 20, 2005

Hey Federico, where do I apply to become one such superhero? :-)

No really. I agree with your statement. We do need more superheroes who for example decide to start building a programming environment (and btw. many other extremely important desktop components being used today).

But other than only the superheroes, we’ll also need the 3th party software solution providers. Most companies already have their software building partners. They aren’t going to change any of their infrastructure if their current software builder wont support it professionally. That would just be way to much of a risk for them.

And yeah for getting lots of specific things done, those superheroes are great individuals and I’m extremely grateful for their contributions to the softwares which I use every day. I’m even building my career using and learning from many of the components build by those superheroes. I thank you guys!

But in reality we still have two incompatible desktop development platforms. And it’s not helping acceptation of our technology in the large, small and middle sized businesses that don’t want to both employ a lot computer scientists and give them KDE and GNOME desktop development training.

Yet it’s (imho) precisely that what is very important to achieve Jeff Waughs 10×10 idea. Are the (in comparison with the Microsoft world) few GNOME and KDE developers going to support all the desktop software in this world? That would be insane! That’s not being realistic about the situation.

So yes, go superheroes! But we also need to start agreeing on specifics and seeing our very own problems. Our opensource and free software development models have flaws. And imho we need to address them today and now. Else I fear that our nice platforms will eventually become obsoleted.

Hey Christian, about Galago, (you already know about this but) I prepared the beginnings of the Python language binding and am planning to integrate Gossip with this (but the Gossip developers are of course welcome to be ahead of me). I hope all instant messengers will consider checking out this Galago as I’m foreseeing your framework to be used as one of the (many necessary) key elements to make my dream about Utopia come true. Don’t underestimate the importance of your framework. I do believe in it.

And let those people who believe we should talk to their whatever instant messenger client directly, think what they want. Do they really believe we (at Evolution, as I’m a contributor) want to talk to every single messenger available using a huge amount of EPlugins that are all to be configured by the end-user? Galago is the way to go! And we do want presence notification support in Evolution. Really, we do.

I hope the KDE messengers will also be interested. Perhaps even the Win32 ones as for example Evolution is coming to your Windows systems sooner or later. Let’s show the world that we do can play nice and all work together. Galago might be one of those nice framework components to achieve this goal.

I just wished an organisation (like fdo or whatever) would have persuaded the other free software developers to start supporting a framework like Galago. What if they would have, after consideration by for example an elected board, steered the developers of messengers to actually start integrating with this technology? Wouldn’t that just work better than this anarchic mess? I do understand that we, free software developers, don’t want to listen to leadership or steering committees. But lets face it people, we are becoming a group of insignificant childish anarchists if we don’t.

Oh yeah, lets all start looking in our own directions and be ignorant to each others technologies and infrastructure. Lets make this stupid situation worse and play the game with nothing but our egos. That isn’t going to get us closer to our goals! That won’t make it more easy for the salesmen to one day say: “Hey it doesn’t matter whether you, the customer, runs KDE or GNOME. We can develop using our way and our employees and that will just work seamlessly on both major platforms”. In stead of having to ask the customer: “Do you run GNOME or KDE”, and depending on the answer tell the customer: “Oh I’m sorry, we don’t have developers for that platform, we can’t help you”.

In fact is this “ego thing” making the entire opensource and free software desktop community (me included) look insignificant. No really I’m serious about that! For people who don’t know how most GNOME and KDE developers think, please note that most developers don’t want this at all. When asked (and I do ask the others frequently) most think working together professionally is very important. And those who don’t can probably be easily convinced with some beer at meetings like GUADEC.

So what are we waiting for? The holy grail of the free desktop? Time? Lets go get some beer!