Alex Hudson

(this is part 2; you may want to read part 1 before reading this)

I said last time I would go into the file maangement side of GNOME 3 a bit more, and I think I would be right in saying that there are a number of people who think this is probably one of the weakest aspects of the release.

The first thing to say is, I vaguely surprised myself by the lack of problem in this area. If you read various reviews, the changes in accessibility to file management and the lack of desktop icons are quite often brought up as serious issues, and as a relatively heavy user of the desktop file space I imagined that this would be the thing which would hurt the most.

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This is part one of what will be a multipart blog series: how tremendously exciting, eh?! In all seriousness, with GNOME 3 imminent, I thought rather than do a review of the desktop it would be much more interesting to talk about it from the perspective of a relatively hardened Linux enthusiast actually using it within a business environment.

First up, disclosures: I’m an extremely happy GNOME 2 user. I have a copy of Fedora 12 on my Eeepc 901 netbook, with what is now a relatively ancient version of gnome-shell on it, but to be honest the shell is little more than an interface for launching Firefox on that machine. Other than that, I’ve not really used GNOME 3 / gnome-shell in more than passing. I called this post “Drag me to shell” quite deliberately: honestly, I’m happy with GNOME 2. But, I’m somewhat forcibly trying to move myself to GNOME 3 full time. (Yes, I have seen these various KDEs and Unitys an other desktops. No, I’m not interested, and this isn’t meant to be taken as some kind of comparative to other systems. Also, I’m running this on what is to become Fedora 15, which has changed like wind blowing sand recently, so there’s stuff in here that may well change before the final GNOME 3).

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It has been an incredibly interesting week in free desktop-land, in that kind of “interesting like a soap opera” kind of way. I guess it’s not news that different participants have different recollections of the same series of events, but it is a bit sad to see it writ so large on a public stage.

Timing-wise, it’s quite co-incidental, but it’s enlightening (I think) to read Mark Shuttleworth’s latest “Internal competition is healthy, but depends on strong and mature leadership” alongside Mark Wilcox’s “What happened to Nokia?” of a month ago. I’m quite clearly going to side with latter-Mark on this one: internal competition is generally not healthy; in fact, in my experience, it can be of the most damaging things you can do to a group of people. That’s not to say that it’s always a bad thing – to a large extent, it works for the Linux kernel (who I think are a special case in this regard) – but in a community telling someone their contribution isn’t wanted is a hurtful thing. You can see the hurt if you read what Mark S. is saying, it’s both implicit and explicit. Internal competition isn’t a solution to this, though, of course – it’s the equivalent of taking the disagreement outside and settling it mano-a-mano, swapping one hurt for another. It’s a red meat solution, a particularly macho form of solving problems.

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As predicted, Microsoft and Nokia are tying a knot of sorts, and all sorts of people are extremely disappointed by this news. I’m an Android user right now, but I’m particularly disappointed because Android just isn’t the free platform it claims to be.

A lot of people are blaming Microsoft and dreaming up “entryism” conspiracy theories. These people are entirely wrong; the decision to go MS was signalled a long while ago by Nokia’s board. Nokia are a $40B business: decision making doesn’t work like that. What is true, though, is that occasionally the free software community gets the benefit of large corporations putting resources into developing software, and occasionally those corporations change their mind later. We celebrate the former and mourn the latter, it’s only natural – I’m a big GNOME fan, but it seems that GNOME Mobile, MeeGo, and the various related stacks are basically dead in the water at this point.

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Today was Open Source Expo day. While I had been asked by one of the organisers whether or not I could propose a .Org to exhibit there, I decided against it for a couple of reasons: mainly, because I hadn’t heard very much about the exhibition, was a bit worried about the timing, and questioned whether or not it would be a good use of time for me or anyone else involved in an open source project to attend. To be clear, this event is held over two working days, and is in the middle of London: not the end of the world for me, I could take time off work, but others I know are consultants and would be literally losing money by going. I have to say, I’m glad I didn’t spend much longer there than my lunch break today allowed.

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One thing that has always bothered me is that there has always been little way of getting data in and out of Bongo stores easily. Well, no longer (sort of): I’ve upgraded the storetool a bit to make this easier. Some examples are better than words:

It’s not totally complete yet: we need some commands to remove, move documents, fiddle with types, flags and properties too – but it’s a start!

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Now, this isn’t something you’d probably want to do every day, but sometimes you have a 32-bit Fedora install which you’d like to be able to run 64-bit software on: my use case is that I have this desktop which I want to start running virtual machines on. Now, if you have a 32-bit install, you can’t run 64-bit machines – a bit weird given the hardware is supposed to be virtualised, but that’s how it works.

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It looks like someone has been attacking Savane-derived hosting platforms. Recently Savannah has been down, and the page that has now gone up confirms that they had a security breach. Unfortunately, Gna! has a similar code-base, and their site now confirms that they are investigating an issue too.

This has a knock-on issue for Bongo, since we use Gna! hosting. Our download area appears to still be alive, and thankfully we have always signed the releases. You can check a release of Bongo quite simply:

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I don’t particularly like talking law on this blog; it’s boring and – for the most part – disinteresting. However, recent developments in SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Limited (as written up here – thanks to Cristian for bringing this up at FFII) deserve to be aired.

The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. For those who don’t know, SAS is a statistical package which is both popular and influential, and to a large extent can be thought of as a programming development environment. WPL, the defendants, wrote software which could interpret SAS programs. There is no direct analogy in the free software world, but LibreOffice Calc interpreting Excel spreadsheets is close enough for the purposes of our discussion.

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It’s been a little while since I talked about SparkleShare; since then it has moved project hosting (here’s my fork) and there have been various changes – thankfully, updating the packages for the new version and to get it on Fedora 14 didn’t take too long. There are likely to be problems here and there with the packages – invitations don’t seem to work right now, but I haven’t tracked down that bug yet – but they should be mostly working. Please let me know if you’ve tried them and found any problems.

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