Safe as Milk

Taking the wraps off the new wiki.maemo.org

A few weeks ago, a new MediaWiki instance was installed by Ferenc Szekely of the maemo team, in response to numerous requests. Many people were not fans of Midgard’s user interface for the wiki, and missed a number of features available in other wiki software. And so we have been undertaking the second major migration for the maemo wiki (we previously moved from MoinMoin).

Over the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve been organising a small team which has moved over content from the old wiki, has worked on stylesheets, templates and categories which make sense, and we’re now ready to take the wraps off! Head on over to http://wiki.maemo.org and have a look.

This is not a finished work, like most wikis. Content in the “Midgard wiki” category  needs review and editing, and a lot of theofficial documentation of maemo will be wikiised over the coming weeks and months. Some content still needs migrating and categorisation. But we have a decent start, an editing team, and the new wiki has already been baptised with its first couple of pages with over 100 edits: 100Days and 2010 Agenda.

Credit where credit’s due! The following people have been outstanding throughout the migration: GeneralAntilles, jaffa, Niels Breet, ludovicus, trickie and Navi. I’m probably leaving lots of people out but these guys have made their mark with me over the past couple of weeks.

Paperwork blues

There’s a curious phenomenon I’ve noticed when I attend conferences. During the conference, the energy of everyone around me pumps me up & keeps me going. I love meeting people & talking to them, hearing about the cool stuff they’re up to and making contacts for new projects. This was true of meeting the maemo guys last week – we had a great evening talking about tablets, maemo, and life in general over mugs of good German beer.

But after the conference, it’s like you’ve been on some kind of artificial high of late nights, early mornings, high concentration & caffeine charged conversations – and you get on the plane to come home, and you just deflate.

It always  seems to take me about the same length to recover from a conference as I spent at the conference. Which meant that I was still in a funk on Monday, when I decided that the first thing I had to do was get rid of some Stuff.

Paperwork had built up over the past month or so, I had bits & pieces all over my desk, in stacks on the floor, in drawers… From what I can tell from Getting Things Done (I’m about half way through! yay!), this is a pretty normal situation – something comes into your hand that you can’t forget, but that you can’t handle right away, so you add it to the top of a bunch of other stuff which you couldn’t do straight away, but which you couldn’t forget, and there it lays until you’ve forgotten it.

And so Monday and Tuesday, I spent ages working through email, expenses, receipts, forms for insurance, tax returns and all of the other things that had been building up. At the end of it, my life feels a bit cleaner, but I’ve got the impression I lost half the week.

I can’t wait until the magic happens and my office space suddenly becomes magically organised so that filing becomes fun and I always have a list of things I can do, regardless of what I’m up to at the time. That’ll be fun (I’m not holding my breath).

maemo.org track in LinuxTag

So far, the maemo.org track has been great – very informative. Some highlights:

Gary Birkett (better known on IRC as lcuk) gave a short talk on how and why he got involved in memo.org – an interesting perspective on motivations of volunteers, and a classic “scratching your own itch” situation. He’s developed a text reader which works in full-screen, and has smooth scrolling with finger & stylus (like the iPhone).

Niels Breet is the maemo.org webmaster. He was an active community member doing great work, who has recently been funded by Nokia to work on project infrastructur. It’s an interesting model of community funding – Niels explained that his boss is the maemo.org community, even though it’s Nokia who’s paying his wages. He talked about some of the things that he’s working on improving, including the newly published maemo.org packaging policy (PDF), and fixing the repositories mess to make it easier to upload software to a central maemo extras repository.

The main presentation to close out the morning was Quim Gil talking about the maemo.org strategy of Nokia over the next couple of years. Without going into details, he talked about the next two versions of the platform, Fremantle and Harmattan. Fremantle will continue to be primarily GTK+/Hildon based, and QT will be integrated into the platform in the Harmattan release.
Quim then talked about the role of community in maemo.org and tablet development. He mentioned that Nokia have recently invested in 3 roles (webmaster, bugmaster, docmaster) where the people being funded answer primarily to the community. This represents a big investment in the community.

His major announcement was that he was launching 10 days of community brainstorming on two subjects: the 100 Days community plan and maemo.org 2010, defining short term goals for the community, and helping Nokia define the mid-term goals and strategy for the project. He also announced the maemo summit, to be held in Berlin on the 19th of September, after OSiM World, and finished with a call to arms. Nokia is looking for real community input and action, and wants help finding the right balance between the commercial constraints involved in producing mass-market devices and the community requirement for transparency and openness.

After lunch, we had some presentations of some of the cool apps which have been written by community members for the maemo platform.

Alberto Garcia of Igalia presented Vagalume , a beautiful and well-integrated Last.fm client for GNOME and maemo tablets.

Florian Boor presented the GPE application suite which includes a bunch of small applications targeting handheld form-factors.

Urho Konttori, who has since become a project manager in Nokia, talked about the UKMP media player, UKTube YouTube downloader & plater, and some other applications which he has written for the maemo platform.

Next up: maemo.org platform hacks, and “what’s next?”.

OLPC, OpenMoko and GNOME Mobile

Some recent stories have started raising brows among some comentators on GNOME Mobile (see the comments in particular):

• OLPC figurehead Nicolas Negroponte announces that they will be installing Windows on the XO laptops, and porting Sugar to Windows
• OpenMoko project lead Michael Shiloh announces that future versions of the platform will have Enlightenment as the windowing system and Qtopia apps by default

Both of these stories are not complete abandonments of GTK+ or the GNOME platform. Sugar will still be GTK+ based, and OpenMoko will continue to support GTK+ in the platform, and the previously developed GTK+ applications.

But it would be disingenuous to suggest that these announcements don’t represent a cooling towards the GNOME platform on the part of both organisations.

So what happened? There are two plausible explanations:

• Bad tools – the GNOME platform is not suitable to the applications, or it’s difficult to develop with, there is a shortage of development tools,  books, or maybe the platform itself has quality or performance issues – perhaps the organisations had trouble hiring hackers with GTK+ experience
• Bad workmen – the projects over-reached, had unreasonable schedule expectations, were not sufficiently planned, and were poorly executed, due to poor management or weak team members – the choice of technology is irrelevant to the failures of the projects to deliver on expectations in terms of schedule, functionality and quality, perhaps the projects had poor or inconsistent focus and vision

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

I think most people who have tried would say that software development with GTK+ in C is hard, development in C++ or Java is quicker and less painful. A case, if one needed to be made, for focussing more than ever on gtkmm and java-gnome, and ensuring that these bindings are promoted, and as high-quality as possible.

But if you look at the goals of OLPC, their goal was to completely rewrite the graphical interface to the OS to be completely focused on the educational paradigm they were aiming for. This is a huge task, and it seems clear (in hindsight) that the enormity of it was underestimated. Free software is not the cure to all ills, things don’t go quicker just because you chose a free software licence for your project. The reality of the project’s status didn’t keep up with schedule pressures and marketing, to thepoint where the project’s credibility has been damaged by theGive One Get One and some high-profile withdrawls from the program.

The same thing goes for OpenMoko. Looking in from the outside, the technical management of the project has not been consistent from the beginning, partly because unreasonable expectations at the beginning led to impatience when early objectives weren’t being met. With objectives unmet, band-aids were plastered on band-aids, the direction changed, and now the OpenMoko platform has three competing application frameworks supported – QT, GTK+ and EFL.

It may be, and I hope it is, that both these projects survive their current difficulties and go on to be great successes. I’m sure that there are lessons to be learned for us in their stories.

But people who announce that this means the end of GNOME Mobile are quite obviously over-reacting.

We have several high-profile participants, including Nokia and ACCESS, committed to using GTK+ in their platforms. Important components of the GNOME Mobile stack area key part of the moblin platform, and are included in the LiMo reference platform (PDF). Devices such as those announced recently by Verizon, and the 18 phones announced by LiMo earlier this year, are based on this platform, so it seems clear that we are going to be a player in the mobile device space for many years. Success stories like the Vernier LabQuest and the iRex e-book reader show that we can be a compelling option in niche devices with custom interfaces.

With the current work of the initiative following on from the Austin summit last month, which includes creating a GNOME Mobile release set for release with GNOME 2.24, and raising awareness of what we’re up to, you should be seeing some interesting news over the coming months. The GNOME Mobile initiative is more necessary and useful now than ever.

Live from LinuxTag

I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday for three days in LinuxTag 2008 to meet up with some members of the maemo.org community, see old friends, and generally chat with as many people as possible.

After arriving, I managed to  get out for a run, which was surprisingly pleasant – ourhotel is quite near the Tiergarten behind the zoological gardens, so while running around I accidentally went past some lovely landmarks, and managed to scout out a nice beer-garden beside the Neuen See where we had some nice Weisswurst last night.

It’s been fun so far – I met up with Quim and Marcell on Tuesday, and Kate, Peter, Niels and Marius yesterday. I spent a lot of time wandering around playing “spot the familiar face” – it was great catching up with Jochen Topf from Open Street Map (formerly FOSTEL organiser), Vincent Untz and Joe Brockmeister who are here for OpenSuse, Nils and Florian from OpenEmbedded and GPE.

I ran into Anne Oestergaard too, and it was great chatting with MaryBeth and Rob from OpenMedia Now, Knut Yrvin from Trolltech, and most of the KDE eV board who are here this week too – I met Aaron Seigo for the first time, after years of email conversations, and Sebastian and Cornelius are here too.

With so many familiar faces, it can be tempting to just talk to people you know, but I do like meeting up with new people at these things too – and the number one conversation starter I’ve had this week has been  Big Buck Bunny – my kids love this cartoon, so much that Tuesday they watched it on repeat for an hour. And it goes down well with the adults too. Mad props to Ton, Sacha and the gang on the great success – they have attained their goal of an accessible cartoon to follow on from the “arty” Elephants Dream.

Already today we’ve heard Cat Allman from Google telling us about Google Summer of Code and GHOP, and  the always entertaining Knut Yrvin on QT. After Knut’s session the maemo.org track starts, and I will be reporting as much as possible. Nick Loeve (trickie) proposed having a Wiki sprint today, and if I can get critical mass (and critical internet access) for that, we’ll do that a little later.

Call for help!

I received my copy of Big Buck Bunny today, and I’m leaving for Berlin tomorrow morning for LinuxTag.

I’d like to be able toshow BBB on my Nokia N810, but when I copy the AVI file from the DVD onto the tablet, it doesn’t load (“File format not supported” it says). Same goes for “Elephants Dream”. The same also goes for the Nokia N800 (although there I just get a message the there is no application that can manage the file format).

Can anyone point me towards the codecs I’ll need to get this working tonight, please? I’d hunt myself (really I would) if I wasn’t packing a bag and putting kids to bed.

Thanks Lazyweb!

Getting constructive about Nokia and maemo

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.

Hello planet Maemo!

I see that my blog is now aggregated on Planet Maemo (at least for Maemo related stuff) – all of you who want to get my off-Maemo ramblings on GNOME, the Libre Graphics Meeting, my life, or free software in general will just have to check out my journal at the source.

For those wondering why I’m here: I’m being funded by Nokia to help make the Maemo documentation community rock. I’ll be working a bit more than part-time on improving documentation organisation and processes, and removing roadblocks anywhere I can. If anyone has any problems with the documentation, reports of “bugs” with the organisation of docs, or has general suggestions for things that we can improve, I’m all ears.

I’m still feeling my way around, and with the forums, mailing lists and wiki, there are a lot of entry points to this community – but the best way to get started is to start solving real problems, and over the next few days I’ll be working to resolve some outstanding website bugs and get access to everything I need to do that.

Oh – and if anyone has any hints for solving the Numpty Physics level where the yellow ball is in a kind of snail’s shell, I’d love to hear them. And is it possible to delete the last stroke with the N810? I haven’t figured it out yet.

Back from China

Last week I was in China for the first Linux Foundation/COPU China Developers Symposium. I met a bunch of people for the first time, including Jonathan Corbet, Matt Keenan and Andrew Morton from the kernel, Fred Muller, Ollo, Pokey, Anthony and all the others from the Beijing LUG (thanks for the welcome guys!), and Angela Brown from the Linux Foundation.

I also got a chance to catch up with some people I had met before including Jim Zemlin and Bill Weinberg, both of whom had very encouraging things to say about GNOME in mobile platforms. In fact, I will be organising a meeting of GNOME Mobile at the upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, Texas in April.

After the conference, Angela organised a tourist trip for a gang of us to climb the Great Wall at Badaling and visit the Forbidden City and Tianemen Square on Thursday, which was great fun. Although after the field trip which we had with the BLUG gang after dinner on Wednesday evening I don’t think either myself or herself were in the greatest of form.

I gave a presentation entitled “2008, year of…” where I poked fun at the annual articles we get at the beginning of the year claiming that “this year will be the year of Linux on the desktop”, and yet…

Every year, we have seen significant gaps being filled – in the early ’90s, it was application gaps, like Evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Eclipse. There was the advent of successful funding runs for free software-based companies like Ximian.

Then it was corporate support. RedHat, Sun and Novell threw their weigh behind free software and bet on GNOME. Ubuntu making a distribution designed and tailored for a mass market), and increasingly momentum from ISVs who now target the free software desktop. Most recently, IBM releasing a beautifully integrated Lotus Notes comes to mind, previous examples of major ISVs targeting Linux include VMWare and Adobe.

We have seen the importance of standards and data take center stage with the standardisation of ODF, and the move by a number of governments to insist that all public data be stored in open formats – resulting in the (flawed) standardisation process of OOXML being launched by Microsoft.

In addition, we have seen new paths to market open up for Linux based PCs – WalMart selling Everex PCs, OEMs finally offering Linux based desktops, and Dell, Lenovo, HP shipping laptops with a free software OS pre-installed.

We have also seen considerable momentum in GNOME-based UIs outside of desktop computing – hand-helds from Nokia, phones from OpenMoko, lab measurement devices from Vernier, set-top-box applications, and of course OLPC and the Eee PC.

And through it all, a healthy peppering of massive institutional deployments – Extremadura and Andalucia, the Korean government, the French gendarmerie, Sao Paolo’s telecentros project, PSA in France, and on and on.

And so, as I look back over the decade which saw Linux have its first Superbowl ad, I wonder at how far we’ve come, and I believe I can say without being ridiculous that the ’00s has in some sense been the decade of Linux on the desktop.

We have not yet made a breakthrough in market share, but we have momentum in every sector – the quality of our platform, the number of ISDs developing applications for GNOME, the number of organisations investing cold hard cash in using, developing and deploying our work, the size of our user-base. I am enormously hopeful that we will continue to make progress in the coming years.

GStreamer, Fluendo and Collabora

I tagged an announcement by Collabora that they were hiring Christian, Edward and Wim from GStreamer, formerly of Fluendo, with the comment “Is this how Free Software acquisitions work?”

That got some response in the comments, and especially from Julien Moutte, CEO of Fluendo.

First, let me say that I wish the project well. I’m convinced that GStreamer is a core part of Collabora’s activity, and that GStreamer consultancy will make up a decent chunk of revenue for them. I also expect that Fluendo will continue to invest in a core technology that they depend on for their growing range of products, and that others depending on GStreamer such as Nokia will continue to support and encourage its development.

Julien confirms that Fluendo are continuing investment in GStreamer (great!), and affirms that all of a sudden, it’s just become a much more open project, since people are spread across many companies.

I hope that’s the case, but it’s not an automatic consequence of a few people leaving. Project governance is much more complicated than who employs the N most active hackers.

In the past, there has been rumblings that decisions affecting the project were being made in private in Barcelona, and then discovered by the community (see comment on GStreamer design – I remember other similar comments, but can’t find them right now).

GStreamer’s not alone in this – pretty much every project with one primary company sponsor/owner runs into the problem (OOo, Java, Mozilla, Evolution, and yes, even OpenWengo come to mind). The results are that company employees feel frustrated that they’re not getting community traction, and the community is frustrated because they have a feeling the company is looking for cheap labour to implement its agenda, rather than equal partners.

Whether GStreamer in particular becomes a more open project depends, now, on the governance model that is put in place. A model can be informal and ad-hoc, as long as it’s efective. Who gets to say what goes into the main tree? What’s the patch review process? Who are the core developers who can just commit? If those processes aren’t in place, or if one company controls all of the processes, then you will continue to see the kinds of problems which OpenOffice is currently seeing, even if there are many companies and individuals bearing the burden of development.