Alex Hudson

So, someone asked me the first good question about the vision for Bongo. To paraphrase, why am I against using the word groupware?

The easy historical answer is that it was almost the rallying call for Hula, and the groupware bad essay by jwz expressed this quite neatly in some ways. But that’s not a very good ‘why’ answer.

For me, the difference is probably quite slight in some respects, but it comes down to who we design features for. Do we design them for people, or do we design them for groups / teams / organisations? In my opinion, the answer has to be that you design for individual people.

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I wasn’t going to mention Hula particularly, but since the recent announcement it seems the right time. I’ve said basically the same thing on bongo-devel too:

• I’m pleased to see Novell have finally got something sorted out. I think we were left in the dark too long, and it was supposed to be an open source community.
• I’m glad to see Messaging Architects look enthused about Hula, and I will watch where they take it with interest.
• Bongo is still relevant. While I hope MA will run Hula like a true free software project, I don’t think Novell did, and it will be hard to turn that around. The Novell CA which put a few hackers off is still there. I’m hoping that we can work with MA in the future, we’ll just have to see how thing go.

At the end of the day, we started Bongo because we didn’t want to be reliant on the success (or not) of Hula. I think the inverse is true: the success of Hula doesn’t depend on what happens with Bongo. Either or both projects can achieve that success, and that’s what we really care about.

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Pat and I had a good talk the other day about aliases, which I think was triggered from another conversation he had. Hula promised an Alias Agent from about day one, and it never arrived – and it is a big feature a lot of people want. “Group Objects” were misused to attempt to provide this function: I’m not totally sure the difference between a Group and an Alias, except that one relationship was potentially one-to-many.

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As releases go, 0.3 has been turning out pretty well. I meant to write about this sooner, but certainly for me after the release of 0.3.1 (which fixed some sadly quite obvious bugs), it’s been going great guns – on my Xen machine (~128Mb RAM, P3) it’s causing basically no load and has been running a couple of weeks without restart (which is rare, because any time I encounter a bug, I will try and fix it which necessitates a restart of Bongo). I have several thousand mails in my account over that time, and while there are a few oddities with mail parsing it’s basically fine.

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It’s been a little while since I blogged about anything 🙂

I have a number of Bongo patches on the go, but have only managed to commit one so far – the creation of secure certificates and crypto data that happens when you install Bongo should now be faster. For those with headless machines, hopefully much faster. We’ve also lost our dependency on gnutls’ certtool, which was a common installation problem (people often didn’t realise it was required). I’d love to hear from anyone who has any problems with the new setup.

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So, recently a lot of stuff has been going on in my life – displacing the lower status stuff like hacking Bongo, painting the house, washing, shaving, that kind of thing. While I’ve tried to be online to cajole inspire others, that doesn’t really work – apparently my code talks better than I do. Ho hum.

More bad news – it’s looking increasingly likely that I’m not going to get to Ohio Lugfest in the States like I planned. The choice is coming down between “Ohio LugFest” and “New Kitchen”, and somewhat surprisingly my better half is demanding the improved culinary facilities. I’m still going to hit the States this September, though, I just won’t be able to stay quite as long – but I will try to make a point of seeing people while I’m over.

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Many interesting IRC discussions today, so I thought I’d write some of it down. This helps settle things in my mind’s eye if nothing else 🙂

Netmail traditionally allowed people to cluster things in quite interesting/bizarre ways, and you were able to set things up so that there was no single point of failure: the configuration directory could be replicated, as could the store (I believe), and obviously you could set up redundant agents, all over many servers.

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It has taken a while for the paperwork and stuff to work through, and I’m sure people who followed the discussion on our mailing lists will have almost entirely forgotten about this by now – but today’s big news is that Bongo is now officially a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. This is strangely exciting – it’s another step forward for our project which re-affirms our commitment to what we’re trying to achieve.

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This isn’t a great looking URL, but hopefully it will continue to work into the future: this is a Bongo group on Mugshot. At the moment, it’s just me – I wanted to try Mugshot out before I got into all the GNOME online desktop stuff that people are working on, but others are free to join in. The web swarm looks a particularly fun idea for sharing links we think are interesting.

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Chris Lord has posted an essay entitled “Introducing Social Calendaring” which I think is an interesting read for Bongans. It took me a couple of reads of the paper to actually figure out what was being proposed, but that’s probably because I skimmed it first a few times with my own preconceived idea of what was being proposed.

I would love to see some of these ideas implemented in Bongo, although I don’t know to what extent some of it would work. While I like some of the proposals in the paper, it is a shame that there was no kind of implementation work, because there are a couple of things I really think deserve more analysis (this might not make too much sense until you read Chris’ paper):

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