Build Better Products, Faster on Alex Hudson

It has been great to see Fedora 12 release this week.

As part of doing some testing of the upcoming Fedora 12 release, I decided to put it on my EeePC 901 netbook.

Years ago, Mitch Kapor invested large sums of money into the OSAF – Open Source Applications Foundation – to come up with a new personal information manager called Chandler.

So, litl has finally broken cover – I had written previously some first thoughts based on the various tid-bits that had leaked, and I thought it might be interesting to follow up on this.

It’s not very often that there are genuine reasons for investigative journalism in the free software world; for the most part, the stuff that happens within the community is open and well-covered by the likes of LWN (who, if you don’t already subscribe to,

I’ve been waiting for litl to break cover for what seems like forever.

A horrible, horrible headline for an extremely interesting story: RMS is amongst one of those who has signed his name to a letter to the Commissioner for Competition and Director General Competition of the EU that the Oracle-Sun merger should not take pla…

Matt Asay has written another entertaining blog piece on his particular theories of open source economics, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann and he have engaged in what is superficially a bit of “Is not!”

Let me start this by saying that I really, really want OpenMoko Inc. to be a raging success.

It’s difficult to tell apart the different factions of the people of Judea these days.

Apologies, but I couldn’t help but comment on this.

That’s apparently what a group of UK inventors are asking for.

For various reasons, I’ve been playing with Clutter over the past week.

Recently, we changed the build system of Bongo – we’ve moved away from autotools.

MJ Ray has some interesting thoughts on the recent discussion of BoycottNovell’s lash out at people criticising RMS’ GCDS keynote.

Now, I’m not a huge one for using web applications as a means civic communication – I tend to believe that communicating with your representatives is much better done in a public space rather than a private one like Facebook.

As I drove to a business planning session (a.k.a. entrepreneur funday) this morning, I heard on the radio that Google had announced their intention to release a consumer operating system.

It has been interesting watching the debate around Mono over the past few months.

Mike McGrath asks a pertinent question: why didn’t you vote?

I read with interest the various Twitterings about price of disk space – in particular, about Bitfolk, but it applies to any other service really.

I’ve hit across this problem a couple of times and always end up having to look up the magic incantations, so I’m going to store it here for posterity and in the hopes it may also aid other people.

I did promise Lance that I would blog more on Bongo, and I’m going to try to stick to a post a week at least – however, this first one will only tangentially be about Bongo.

It’s been great to see Fedora 11 released, even with a couple of small delays it didn’t seem to me like a terribly problematic release.

apComms is an all-party group interested in various technological issues, and they’ve just announced that they’re starting an enquiry effectively into ‘net neutrality.

So, the news is out that Sun are being bought by Oracle.

So, probably as I was posting my little blog piece yesterday on IBM taking over Sun, it seems that the IBM and Sun deal was falling apart – seemingly a quabble over the pricing, but I suspect a little more must have been to it than that.

If we’re to believe what we’re told in the press, sometime tomorrow – or perhaps later in the week – IBM and Sun will announce some kind of merger.

When Fedora 10 was released, one of the first things I did was enable nouveau as my graphics driver – nv was horribly slow on my Dell, and I didn’t want the pain of the proprietary drivers.

This weekend saw the arrival of a new computer – woo!

Just the other day, the UK Government published a new paper entitled “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan” (amusingly, they’re also tracking the tag #ukgovOSS to get responses – so there we go!).

When the new “MailCo” (as it was at the time) was announced, the first thing they did was poll people on what changes they should be looking to make to Thunderbird as kick-ass as possible – you can see from the initial launch blog post that integrated cal…

Over the past couple of days I got added to the packagers group in FAS and uploaded my first approved RPM – it has been a very interesting process, particularly going through the various policy pages on the wiki (which, while informative, are pretty badly…

The awful News of the World managed to shut up about it, although they did give it away to anyone with half an eye, but the Daily Mail can’t – they’ve felt it necessary to spoil the worst-kept secret in TV and name Ben Collins as “The Stig”.

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.

The news of the world “newspaper” did a “reveal” of Top Gear’s “The Stig” character – so many quotes, but Stig is just a name, they didn’t actually reveal who it was, and I’m not sure they’re really a newspaper 😉 At least.

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.

So, Christmas is now over for another year pretty much – and it has been good fun, albeit interspersed with slight bouts of snottiness.

Mark Shuttleworth recently posted about the work Canonical are doing on application notifications, and a couple of things struck me.

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.

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 calendari…

You may have noticed that I’ve been very quiet on my blog over the past couple of months.

So, somewhat little advertised and somewhat exclusive, Linux Live Expo 2008 in London has been taking place.

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.

So, someone asked me the first good question about the vision for Bongo.

So, this is the extra task I alluded to in my last blog post, but don’t let that put you off!

I was hoping we’d have an initial attempt at M3 by now – we’re so close, honestly, but just not quite there yet.

Recently, I became very annoyed at Ubuntu.

From Friday until late Monday night, I will be on retreat and entirely away from the internet.

I sent this link around the Bongo people on Mugshot, and on IRC, but here it is again for the benefit of people watching our planet: the future of Thunderbird seems to be a bit cloudy, Mozilla Corp. seem to have realised that it doesn’t quite fit it.

A while ago, I wrote some thoughts on Thunderbird in the aftermath of the announcement of the new MailCo and the resignation from Mozilla of two key developers.