Alex Hudson

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. There are examples of businesses that are pretty successful – Red Hat, Google, MySQL – are there are examples of those who haven’t been successful. Progeny are the most recent example, and are why I’m thinking of this right now – I just read the article on Linux.com about their demise.

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Well, I’m sorry to announce that my prediction was about right: we didn’t get into this year’s Summer of Code. From what I’ve seen, this year was extremely competitive, and many good projects didn’t get in.

It looks like only one project similar to us got in was OSAF/Chandler – they are a returning project, so that’s not a huge surprise. They have some nice looking Javascript ideas which I don’t think are very applicable to us, sadly, but who knows. They also have a natural language parsing idea which was something I wanted us to do, so I need to investigate what they have and what they’re doing.. I hope they’re doing it for international languages, but we’ll see.

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My best wishes to everyone in the Bongo community for the year ahead. I’m sorry not to have been around much over the holiday; our family lost our Grandmother four days ago, and as you might imagine things have been a bit upside down since. One minute I was committing a patch for new mail processing, the next I was in hospital (almost literally), and things have been a bit strange since.

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By the time M3 will come out finally, it will have been five months since the last proper release. Time flies when you’re having fun! In all seriousness, that’s far too long, and we did bite off a bit more than we could easily chew. Ho hum.

The first test release for M3 is out there, though. I was going to call these release candidates, but I decided against it – there’s no way the first few will be released, so they’re not really RCs.

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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. I was disappointed at the time, but looking back at my post, I don’t think it was particularly negative – if anything, I was pointing out how vital I still thought (and think) it is that Tbird be a successful project.

Having exchanged pleasantaries with David Ascher over the past couple of days, and read what he has to say about Tbird, I’m much less disappointed and much more hopeful. Tbird is important to Bongo for a variety of reasons, particularly having a good standards-compliant client for Windows users is crucial. Over time, I’d like to see Tbird become an exemplar client: it should be possible to have mail, events and contacts all integrated, and take full advantage of server-side functionality so that the sum of bongo + tbird is greater than the sum of the parts. Implementing server/client standards, like mail, is a chicken and egg problem. Having both the chicken and the egg drive each other forward (is that stretching the metaphor too far ? 🙂 can only be a good thing.

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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.

Primarily, this disappoints me, because I always saw Tbird as a natural fit to the Bongo Project. We’re developing a kick-ass webmail, and that will appeal to a lot of people, but there are other people – like me – who simply don’t use webmail. The business I run uses Thunderbird, and (coupled with Lightning) we’re pretty happy with it, even though there are a lot of rough edges for a business. I had hopes for a Bongo add-on to Tbird which would automatically set it up for you, with your calendars and contacts and stuff, and work well with your server-side config. Ideally, you’d be able to edit your mail filing rules, get the server to mark mail as spam, and setup vacation response.

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From Friday until late Monday night, I will be on retreat and entirely away from the internet. No, Bongo hasn’t scared me off, I will be back 🙂 So, I figure that I’m going to try again my “pretty please” act to get people to look at some bugs: it worked great last time I tried it, and I can’t remember why I didn’t try again. Of course, many people won’t feel competent enough to look at some of these bugs, so there’s an extra-credit task at the end of this coming up in a further blog post 🙂

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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.

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I was hoping we’d have an initial attempt at M3 by now – we’re so close, honestly, but just not quite there yet. Annoying, even for me, but good things come to those who wait.

I’m acutely aware of one problem: our up-front decision with this project was to lay out a road to 1.0 that we thought was achievable, and basically just do it in milestone steps. Between M2 and M3, this hasn’t really worked out in the way I would have wanted. From the outside, I assume that it looks like the project has slowed down a bit.

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

I’d love to hear from people about how they use Bongo now, and how they want to use Bongo in the future. Especially, I’d like to hear from people who are watching this project but not participating more directly. So, to that end, I’ve kicked off a discussion on the forum: Where do you (want to) use Bongo?

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