links for 2008-05-14

May 14, 2008 General No Comments

Bug #162726

May 14, 2008 gnome 8 Comments

Select All: Ctrl A: Selects all content in the current document.

GNOME HIG v2

Whose bright idea was it to have Ctrl-A close the current note in the version of Tomboy shipping with Ubuntu 8.04? This was a really bad idea.

Update: Owen Taylor on -hackers, and 5 minutes later Vincent Untz in a comment, hit on the answer: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162726

The upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 had installed the US layout on me, even though I have an AZERTY keyboard (which was the layout selected). So when I hit Ctrl-A, GNOME was helpfully saying that I must have really meant Ctrl-Q. This is really useful if you’re using a non-latin layout, since you can still use Latin shortcuts by installing a US keyboard layout, but if you have another Latin keyboard layout, this sucks big-time.

So, in fact, Tomboy wasn’t closing the current note, it was closing all notes (it just happens that I only ever had one note open at the time).

links for 2008-05-13

May 13, 2008 General No Comments

Dealing with system integrators

May 12, 2008 freesoftware 1 Comment

I was interested to read the exchange around Matt Asay’s “dealing with system integrators” post last week.

What it comes down to is when you’re a free software producer, if you want third parties installing and commercially supporting your software to partner with you, you need to offer something in return.

If my company wants to have some free software commercially supported, I would laugh any integrator who suggested buying a subscription to the commercial version, and who refused to start working on integration until I’d purchased if there were no benefit in that for me. I would insist that the integrator installed & supported the Free version, unless there were very compelling features I needed in the commercial version.

If Alfresco had tied the hands of the guy in front of me behind his back, I would go find someone with no such constraints to support the software.

So for the three people involved in an official integration partner deal (Alfresco, the integrator, and the client), all three parties must have some interest for the deal to happen.

The client wants cheaper, high-quality software. If the commercial offering gives compelling features, he may pay for it. If it doesn’t, he’s not an idiot.

The integrator wants to make some money on the support deal. If being an Alfresco partner gets him more leads, more deals, more clients, more money, then he’ll go for that, and will pay an annual partnership fee, your annual training seminars and any other costs you associate with being a partner. If partnership is a mill-stone around his neck restricting what he can offer his clients to keep them happy, he won’t.

Finally, Alfresco, the software producer, wants as many copies of their software installed worldwide, and they want to ensure high quality local support (so they have an interest in having a high-quality partners network).  They also want to maximise the number of installations of commercial versions, and thus have an incentive to ensure that the commercial offering is compelling for people who will be paying for support.

Forcing integrators to sell commercial copies of the software before doing integration doesn’t in itself make those versions compelling. In fact, if you force extra conditions like the ones Matt outlined, you run the risk of helping a renegade unofficial Alfresco support network to spring up. You’re selling free software, they’re free to support it without going through you. If that happens, you have a short-term gain for a long-term loss.

Getting constructive about Nokia and maemo

May 9, 2008 freesoftware, maemo 14 Comments

There has been some criticism recently of Nokia and its handling of maemo – improving the state of affairs is one of the reasons why Quim contacted me and asked me if I’d be willing to work with the project to improve things.

The key to solving any problem is straightforward:

  1. Identify and characterise the problem
  2. Address one after the other the root causes of the problem
  3. Evaluate the situation after each change

This is similar to Federico Mena Quintero’s characterisation of profiling code. In fact, a surprising array of problems are suitable for attach with measure, change, re-measure, rinse, repeat.

The over-riding arc I’ve been hearing so far is “Nokia is hoarding control over the project, and aren’t doing enough to help the maemo community”. I think that’s a mite unfair, and often I get the feeling that people on the mailing list are confusing a reality where there are problems, but they are poorly characterised, and malicious intent on the part of Nokia.

Some examples:

  • No, Nokia isn’t all-powerful, and can’t make Google fix Reader so it works better in microb
  • Parts of the platform are restricted and can’t easily be replaced with later versions. Let’s get an explanation for that, and talk to the right person to get it fixed. Right now we don’t have the reasoning behind the decision, and that’s what’s missing in characterising the problem
  • “Nokia is keeping control of the project” – what are Nokia keeping control of? Let’s identify the list of resources that would be useful to community members, and work, one by one, on seeing if Nokia is actually keeping control of them
  • “The N8x0 tablets ship with proprietary components” – my priority is to ensure that you have documentation for everything possible on the tablet, but to me, there are two different things, maemo, the community project, and the N8x0 tablets, which are commercial ventures using maemo [*]

So I plan to apply this optimisation technique to various problems in maemo. For each proposal I make, I will be looking for feedback from Nokia and the maemo community to see if it is a step in the right direction.

For a start, I will be proposing policies for access to maemo resources, including maemo.org email addresses, the maemo trademark (which is of course linked to the email addresses), and any parts of the maemo platform which community members don’t feel are sufficiently open.

My goal is not to get everything open in doing this. It is to make clear the limits of the maemo project, and in this way ensure that expectations on both sides of the equation are coherent. I hope that Nokia will accept the proposals I make, but even if there are arguments against, I believe those arguments can be open, and clearly understood by all involved.

* I don’t believe that there has ever been ambiguity about this – all of the tablet which can be open is open, but some decisions to use closed components were made in the interests of product differentiation, cost and other reasons. The N8x0 is not meant to be a completely Free product (unlike the Neo1971 or OLPC, which do aim to be completely Free). What we should insist on is that someone buying an N8x0 has all of the tools they need to paperweight it with custom, non-Nokia, software, and access as much of the hardware as possible with free software.

Irony of ironies

May 9, 2008 General 5 Comments

I finally got a copy of Getting things done from Amazon about 3 weeks ago. Now if only I could find the time to read it…

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