The Legionaire’s Lament

I have an idea of where the app developers are.

they are in an ecosystem that put up with a language that calling niche 10 years ago was flattering.

or they are in an ecosystem that is so fragmented that you can forget complaining about three or four major distros, when you have to deal with five different major versions on dozens of devices and form factors, all with minimal or no upgrade paths.

more importantly, though, I think that the app developers are where stuff looks cool and where the community leaders don’t eat their children in constant whining on public venues.

Rox in the Box

public service announcement — I just revoked my trusty GPG key, which I also used to sign Clutter releases:

pub   1024D/A4320FF4 2000-09-18
      Key fingerprint = 4DD0 C90D 4070 F071 5738  08BD 8ECC DB8F A432 0FF4
uid                  Emmanuele Bassi 

the size of the key was ultimately too small to be trusted indefinitely. it’s been superceded by the following key:

pub   4096R/EA11BBB7 2012-06-22
      Key fingerprint = 53EF 3DC3 B63E 2899 271B  D263 22E8 091E EA11 BBB7
uid                  Emmanuele Bassi (GNOME) 
uid                  Emmanuele Bassi 

which will (hopefully) last at least as long as the old one, and possibly more.

The Rake’s Song

today is my last day here, at Intel.

it’s been an honour and a privilege working with one of the best teams in one of the best companies in the world. as I leave behind people that humbled me and made me a better engineer, I cannot but feel a bit sad; still, all good things must come to an end — and I’m sure that the good things done will, in time, temper the bad things that happened during these nearly four years.

what will happen on Monday, I’ll leave for a latter blog post — but suffice it to say that I’m going to stick around the free and open source software community at large (and GNOME in particular) for a while longer.

I know what your question will be: what happens to Clutter’s maintainership? well, if the demise of Moblin and MeeGo, and the rise of Tizen, haven’t killed Clutter I suppose nothing short of an asteroid impact will. so if you were already planning to open the champagne bottle and celebrate me stepping down from my self-appointed position of Clutter (almost) benevolent dictator, I’m afraid you’ll have to postpone the party for a long while.

I also want to thank all the people that voted for me, as well as the other candidates in the GNOME Foundation elections for the Board of Directors.

finally, see you all at GUADEC 2012:

GUADEC 2012 Badge

where I’ll give a talk about Clutter 2.0 and GTK+ 4.0.