- It is very hard to be an old legacy company trying honestly to turn into an open company, example #5321: Jonathan Schwartz’s request for benchmarking on new Sparc/Solaris boxes is directly contradicted by the Solaris license. I am absolutely certain this is not what Jonathan intended, and I know that clause is standard throughout the proprietary software industry, but Sun should really fix the discrepancy and continue their well-intended but unevenly implemented transition to a company that legally guarantees openness instead of just talking about it.
- I forgot to mention that my post about bounties and ‘crowding out’ was motivated by Herzi’s use of fundable to motivate handwriting recognition work. I have no firm opinion on this yet- it seems likely that the ‘self-funding’ nature of fundable might avoid some of the problems described in the literature that I linked to. In the mean time, I want good tablet support sooner rather than later so I’ve pledged support :)
- The excellent Ezter Hargittai has blogged about her research into what college students do online. The interesting numbers are on pages 17-25 of her slide deck, but the relevant numbers in a nutshell: less than 2% use flickr, less than 1% use delicious, 50% use myspace, and nearly 80% use facebook. Enabling people to talk to each other is the real killer app- a big part of why we’re using writely a ton at work right now.
- Some proprietary companies still staff open source teams like they were proprietary software; they should learn. Matt Asay puts this in language managers can understand :) Steven O’Grady also dished excellent wisdom about systems integrators who still don’t get open source, and about how open source analysis can not just work but kick the pants off traditional analysis. Excellent trio of pieces in plain english about the strengths of open source.
- The interesting question is not ‘who is the next microsoft’ but ‘who is the next Windows-like developer platform’. Netscape wanted to be it; Second Life wants to be, and MySpace is headed in that direction. I realize everyone else knew this already, it just finally became clear to me today and I wanted to write it down. :) [update: see the excellent How To Make Platform War for some better thoughts on this.]
- Was glad to see that the gnome mailman archives are back. To celebrate, all GNOME and GUADEC newbies should go read this important historical post relating to traveling in Spain.
- Apparently Prashanth (GNOME Summer Of Code hacker) has succeeded in integrating jhbuild, ldtp, and dogtail. I’ll not have a chance to use this myself, but I hope others start testing it ASAP and reporting issues to Prashanth- once he has ironed out the (inevitable) bugs, this will be a huge step forward for the free software desktop’s reliability and testing.
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Its nice to see the progress of Tinderbox integration with LDTP / Jhbuild ! I appreciate the work of Prashanth Mohan. I’m happy to see Luis Villa comment on tinderbox integration. Luis Villa has blogged about Tinderbox integration in his blog too. I’m too happy to see that too ;) Prasanth Mohan is getting good support from Frederic and James for Tinderbox and Jhbuild related queries. I thank Varadhan and Emily Chen (Google Summer of Code
[…] I bought a Lenovo X41 tablet two weeks ago. I got it for a number of reasons- ease of note-taking, improved interaction with professors, just needing a new machine anyway, etc. I knew going in that the state of linux tablet software was sort of poor, but after more investigation I’m surprised at how poor, and perhaps more troubling, how fragmented and nearly stagnant it is. There are a variety of notepad-type tools. Jarnal came with the tablet, and is pretty damn good, except for the handwriting recognition, which is passable with training, but not great. Unfortunately, it appears that there is no active development, so we get what we get. Gournal is around, and looks pretty solid, though I have not actually used it yet. Xournal looks to be both cool and actively developed, at least for now, though it is not as sophisticated as Jarnal (no handwriting recognition, primarily; I have great faith that gocollab will make the collaboration part trivial soon ;). Maybe Xournal will be my first review for Quim’s new project- I’ve been using it every day for two weeks now and am pretty happy with it. None seem as polished as their Windows counterparts at first glance, but they are decent, and Xournal may be picking up steam. Sadly, Xournal appears not to be part of edgy, so I’ll likely have to break my no-compiling rule for another app (currently only gimmie is cool enough for that.) (If tomboy allowed scribbling into notes as well as typing, I’d wet my pants with joy, by the way.) Unfortunately, for notepad-like tools to become really, really useful, they need handwriting recognition. More unfortunately, the more interesting-looking handwriting recognition/stroke-based text entry projects all appear to be dead in the water. GPE’s rosetta hasn’t had a significant commit in 16 months; mallum’s cool-looking xstroke replacement hasn’t had one in 11 months; and herzi’s HRE work got very little interest at fundable. This is a shame- I wish I had some clue about the ‘why’ to this problem- I’m guessing some combination of low demand and high skill barrier, but don’t really know. (Is there some project out there I don’t know about?) There is at least some push in the keyboard area- obviously GOK is powerful, omnipresent, and under development. Frankly, though, I was surprised at how difficult it was to get going, and it apparently disabled my pen at one point! I’m intrigued by Ubuntu’s ‘OnBoard‘ project, and it looks nice and ‘Just Works’, though I’m curious why it isn’t just a GOK mode- just too radically different in aims? The laptop shipped with xvkbd, which works, once you figure out the trick :) […]