Safe as Milk

The future of GNOME?

A few days ago, I was asked for an interview what I thought the future of GNOME held – in the context of the recent LUGRadio episode (where GNOME’s lack of direction and leadership was cited as a major reason why we’re not making any revolutionary change to the desktop) I thought it was relevant and worth wider distribution.

We will see is one of two things happen – either GNOME will grow beyond what it is currently, and develop a number of different façades which will become GNOME releases (such as OLPC GNOME, LinEx GNOME, Enterprise GNOME, Home & Small Office GNOME, etc) or we will end up shrinking to something smaller than we currently are – the most important GNOME product will be the platform, which will then be re-used by third parties to build the interfaces they’re interested in on top of it.

We have already started to see this trend – distributors cherry-pick the applications they are interested in for their own desktop projects, which are then themed and targetted for their core audience. The variety of platforms and human interfaces being built upon the GNOME platform is dazzling – these go from small form-factor interfaces like the Nokia N800 and the Maemo application framework and OpenMoko and GPE through to innovative interfaces like Sugar from OLPC, which is totally unfamiliar to someone used to the GNOME desktop, but which is undeniably GNOME based. Even the major distributions have modified the GNOME interface to suit their needs – the OpenSuse, Red Hat Enterprise and Ubuntu desktops all behave in different ways, and have different target audiences.

Clearly, when you see groups like ACCESS, Nokia, OLPC, Sun, Novell, Red Hat and pretty much every other software producer and distributor in the free software market opening up their own internal sources, their preference is clear – they want to encourage common spaces of collaboration, and concentrate only on differentiation.

The project has the choice of embracing this trend, and becoming a place where this kind of targetted development happens in a co-ordinated (free software) way, or letting the trend pass us by, and have each distributor in the market have their own specialised interface, or search for collaboration elsewhere, and simply use the GNOME platform as just another building block.

Mad Props Eitan and Brad

During SCALE, Eitan Isaacson and Brad Taylor were demo animals on the GNOME stand (photo shamelessly linked from Scott Ruecker’s LXer article series) – I failed miserably to make good on my promise to spend at least a half-day on the stand – in the end, I was there for about an hour showing off the N800’s Jingle video call capability with Eitan, and demoing Dasher’s text input reasonably successfully.

At the end of Sunday, I was caught up jabbering away to people, and didn’t even get a chance to clean up the stand & say goodbye.

So – thanks Eitan and Brad, and goodbye 🙂 See you both next year?

Update: I found a nicer picture (with me in it) from Celeste Paul of KDE-usability – we had a nice chat and messed about with the Nokia N800s we had quite a bit. Yes, I know I need a haircut, no need to remind me.

Oracle to ship RedHat?

There’s an interesting article on ZDNet about comments from Larry Ellison that Oracle should be shipping “a full stack of software” to customers.

What’s most surprising about this is that it’s news.

HP already ships a choice of full stacks of software which are certified for their servers (and laptops). Nokia ships a full stack of software which is taylor-made for the 770. OLPC will be shipping a full custom-tailored stack of software on their laptops.

A common usecase for Oracle customers is to have one server doing nothing but serving a database. Doesn’t it make sense for Oracle to do the tuning work and make sure that the system is optimised for that usecase, and then ship a fully functional system to their clients?

In addition, your clients suddenly no longer have to ask themselves what distribution is best for their Oracle database server – the answLiveCDs for everything and anything and VMWare and Xen appliances?

Free software gives you the freedom to take and adapt software to your needs, and also to the needs of your clients. The only real question is what took them so long?

770 adapter: update

Thanks to all who commented on how to get an adaptor for my 770 – several of you mentioned that the chargers are the sam as for the Nokia N70, N90 and others. So I got one of those, but can’t help but feel that I was a bit fleeced – I paid €15 for it. And that was after shopping around in a big department and 2 specialist mobile phone stores.

Thank you, O Lazyweb, thou art wise and knoweth all things.

770 power adapter

I recently lost my adapter/recharger for my Nokia 770 – anyone know where/how I can get a replacement?

Nokia 770

I joined the growing club of people who received their Nokia 770 today. Woohoo!

I didn’t manage to get the bluetooth to work with the mac, and I don’t have wifi set up on my freebox, so for the moment there’s not much I can do with it, but that’s not going to stop me from playing.