Cool Stuff

Today's list of cool stuff from Planet GNOME is:

• Larry Ewing and F-Spot Hacking.
• Robert Love on GNOME netapplet entering CVS.
• Davyd Madeley on his jbuild tray icon.
• John Palmieri on his Application wheel of fortune.

What is it? Is there something in the water today that's making all this cool stuff appear?

tech/GNOME | 27 Aug 2004 | #

Where is the focus?

Joel made some comments on competing forces within Microsoft and lots of people commented, including me.

Well it seems that some people within The Great Satan have taken it to heart. What did catch my attention was this:

The Microsoft culture is about creating the newest, latest greatest thing that 'changes the world' not improving what is already out there and working for customers.

Wow.

Here's an important guy working in the trenches, creating APIs for millions of developers, and he admits they don't work for customers and they have a culture that's about doing cool stuff. Maybe they aren't that far from the OSS community after all :-)

Of course, Joel didn't miss that point either, and concluded:

As a developer, I would much prefer if the Raymond Chen camp won -- it sure makes my life easier -- but as a competitor to Microsoft, I have to assume that the stupider Microsoft is, the better.

...to which I add my thoughts. It's a balance - cool stuff and customer satisfaction. Cool stuff is strategic, long term, things you have to invest in or else you will lose in the end. Microsoft have to do this, because with 85% desktop market share, there's only one place to go - down, if they don't. There will always be some nimble startup, some guy in his garage, who will come up with something cool and eat your lunch.

On the other hand, customer satisfaction is tactical, short term, easily lost, and something that is driving people to Nirvana every day. The fact that security isn't getting better out of the box under Windows, that you still need to install n different products on top of Windows to get a usable and secure experience, and that every software upgrade needs a subsequent hardware upgrade due to the bloat creep, shows that they don't get the customer side of things either.

So, it's a balance. Does OSS do it better?

In some ways, yes. OpenOffice is seeing massive uptake everywhere I look - on the OSS desktop and on Windows. Similarly the Gimp - on OSS and Windows! Seeing how easy it is to manage my Debian boxes remotely puts Windows to shame with that SMS mess. But hearing horror stories of getting Gallery running with Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows, shows me we still have a long way to go in some areas. OSS has the moral upper hand advantage too.

OSS needs to focus on delivering for customer, while continuing the astounding pace of innovation. GNOME's doing just that, other OSS projects can too.

tech/code | 27 Aug 2004 | #

Ghosts

Off to Canberra tonight for the Ghosts of Conference Past meeting with sjh and co to talk about preparations for Linux.Conf.Au 2005.

Also a face-to-face meeting with the rest of the Linux Australia committee.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 27 Aug 2004 | #

Friday night ghosts

So Ghosts has started, for me this is the first time as the interrogator, rather than the interrogatee :)

First thing is that the flight from Adelaide to Canberra had one of the roughest landings ever. There were squeels from other passengers. On the flight started reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Not impressed so far, book review to come once I finish it. The other book I've brought with me to read is Mono: A Developer's Notebook by Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein.

Alli was on the same flight, so I hitched a ride with Alli and Rusty back to their place to see the wonderful jigsaw and to eat sugary nuts. Then off to All Bar None to catch up with Anand, AJ (briefly), Martin, Stephane, John (last two met for the first time) and of course the Man-Who-Has-Lost-His-Life-For-Another-7-Months.

Back to sjh's house, talked LCA some more, chewed email and blogged. Time for sleep. Big day tomorrow.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 27 Aug 2004 | #