J5’s Blog

Havoc Pennington is well known in the GNOME and Open Source communities. He was one of the driving forces behind GNOME’s shift in focus to usability and simplicity during the GNOME 1.0 to 2.0 switch. Recently he had moved on from Red Hat to a small company named Litl. Other well known GNOME hackers followed suit after Havoc had announced in his well read blog that Litl was hiring.

Not much has been revealed about what Litl is working on. Up until this point their employees have been fairly silent and only rumours based upon job openings and the projects that their employees had formerly been working on before getting hired. Litl contacted me recently to ask about sponsoring something during the summit.

At around three o’clock on Saturday the 11th, in between sessions, Litl will have an informal catered snack break at the Summit where their CEO, John Chuang, will speak a bit about the company. Also, employees will be around to answer any questions the community might have. They will also be having a release announcement for some GNOME related technologies which they hope will be valuable to the continued development of GNOME. If it is like anything these GNOME contributors have worked on in the past, it should be some pretty cool stuff.

A big thank you goes out from the Foundation for Litl sponsoring snacks to satiate hungry hackers. It will be great to see what our friends at Litl have been working on.

I just found this out after reading and article about the GNOME Mobile release.  Apparently Movial joined LiMo sometime in August and have pledged to release their Browser D-Bus Bridge as open source.  Perhaps this went over the D-Bus mailing list and I missed it but I am eager to look at the code and documentation to make sure remote sandboxed code doesn’t now have a way of breaking out of its jail.  In other words I hope they have added a permissions based system much like we have for the system bus. If they have a sane system this could really be a powerful tool.

In a local world where all your applications are installed by the user, security on the session bus doesn’t have to be tight as the application will already have all the capabilities that they might gain from using the session bus. They even have more such as rm -rf ~.  However, if web pages are now able to access the bus without a failsafe security model for access rights you would be allowing remote applications access to whatever the session bus exposes.  They would be first class citizens in a very bad way.  Depending on what services are running on the bus, information could be stolen, files added and deleted as well as other exploits.  Already gVFS runs over D-Bus and hopefully in the future we will be moving from a corba based accessibility layer to a D-Bus one which means every UI element would be exposed via the bus.

That is not to say it is all doom and gloom.   Having a browser/D-Bus bridge is very important towards moving the desktop experience forward, so much so that I was considering writing one until I saw this.  Of course there is no open code or documentation yet, at least what I could find.  I do trust them to do the right thing but it would have been nice if the development was done in the open from the start.  Can someone working with LiMo point me to the source or information of when it will be released?

It’s happening all over again!!! Let us know you are coming. There may be some exciting announcements, good fun and who knows…another beer summit, tack on conference may present itself again. So, come on up (or down or sideways depending on your latitude and longitude) to Boston for some good friends, good hacking and good times.

Since I know not many people read the board meeting notes even though Luis slaves tirelessly over them after each meeting I though I would write up a short, what’s happening to get people in the loop.

•  First and foremost, the Foundation is changing in very good ways.  We hired Stormy Peters as our Executive Director and she has gotten off to a flying start, posting on the board list faster than the board can respond and generally keeping us part timers on our toes.  This brings up a good point that members should start participating more in Foundation activities and teams such as with GNOME Marketing, or helping organize hackfests.  With Stormy on board there are more opportunities the Foundation can pursue but we will need people to oversee these initiatives and make sure they are a success.
• As people should know the next Boston GNOME Summit is happening at the MIT Slone building (map):
  DATES:             October 11, 12 & 13, 2008
  TIME:                7:00 AM – 11:59 PM
  ROOMS:            E51-315, E51-325, E51-335, E51-34
• We are also holding the GLib Introspection and User Experience hackfests around the same time frame in Boston.  Hackfests are small invite only gathering (around 5-20 people) focused on moving specific parts of the GNOME stack forward.  I encourage people running these hackfests to blog about them and the work that was accomplished once the hackfest is over.
• The GNOME Asia summit is also set to kick off in Beijing on the 18 and 19th of October.  That is only 25 days left until our first Foundation sponsored Asian event.  It looks like it is going ot be a hit already and something we want to continue to sponsor annually.
• Budgeting changes - as treasurer I have had my head filled with budgets for the last few months.  With the hire of Stormy and the feedback she has been getting from members of our Advisory Board we have started to move budget planning for the whole year instead of adding budget items and asking for money as we need it (like we did for the hackfests this past year).  We want to grow GNOME and the Foundation and in order to do that in a responsible way we need to plan further ahead than we have traditionally done.  A draft budget for 2009 went out to the Advisory Board yesterday to make sure we hit companies budgeting schedule.  In the future I hope to start budgeting talks at GUADEC and get all foundation members involved in figuring out how to best utilize the resources we are given every year.  This also means I will expect more participation in board activities from members as we move forward.
• As many have noticed while we get a healthy amount of donations from individuals from the Friends of GNOME program it pales in comparison to the corporate sponsorships.  While it may always lag behind since a large part of our community may not have the money to donate, whether they are in school or times are getting a bit tougher we still think we can do much better.  Because of this Friends of GNOME is going through some changes to make it easier for individuals to donate throughout the year.  While I don’t want to spill the beans before we launch, sufficed to say,it tears down a lot of the barriers that can make donating to GNOME a bit of a pain.

Well, that is all the exciting bits, to some degree of exciting.  I’m going to try and post regularly but most of the time the week to week running of the Foundation isn’t all that exciting (if it were more people would read the meeting notes).  The exciting bits happen around the stuff that the Board enables through its work.  While we make sure resources are procured and allocated for the various projects and conferences it is the people on the ground, hacking, organizing and making these things happen which make the Foundation run smoothly and GNOME get better from year to year.  This is something seven board members and two staff members can not do on their own.  Consider getting more involved in our different teams, offering to help with a local event or donating your expertise in various areas that the board deals with (e.g. read the meeting notes on foundation-announce to see what we are working on and see if there is an action item you may be able to help out with).

You can post whatever you want within the guidelines of the Gnome Code of Conduct (and I don’t think I have seen anything in your posts to say you have overstepped those rules).  I would fight for your right to post whatever to your blog and be aggregated even though I often find your posts illinformed.  You however should understand that others also have the right to disagree with you, and disagree with you strongly.  Throwing a temper tantrum doesn’t really help your cause, whatever that is.

Havoc,

I totally agree that embeddable languages is the way to go.  I’ve been using JavaScript heavily lately, along with the excellent Firebug for debugging (decent debuggers are something some very big languages are missing btw).  The biggest issue I have with JavaScript  is it’s lack of structure and horrendous scoping rules (this certainly doesn’t mean you are calling the containing object, especially when running a “method” from a callback).

What would really make JavaScript even more useful is the proposal for JavaScript 2. Unfortunately that presentation was made in 2006 but some, if not all of those features are part of the ECMA Script 4 proposal.  They even have a reference implementation up which is under a liberal license (I haven’t looked into it much but it links to a GPLv3 library).  As anything in committee, it is slow moving.  Hopefully we will see a finished spec sometime soon but I couldn’t find a timeline.

In the meantime there is an ECMAScript 4.0 to JavaScript converter call Mascara.  Unfortunately it is under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license which means the code can not be distributed on many distributions because of the Noncommercial clause.  It isn’t always clear what constitutes commercial and most distributions I know of want to allow the possibility of for pay distribution or use in a commercial product by 3rd parties.  It also isn’t clear if that license extends to the generated code.  Does anyone want to write a GPL version?

Truthfully, I have a dirty little secret - I like JavaScript with all of its warts and hackish workarounds.  I like it because I know non-programmers who can grok JavaScript but can’t wrap their heads around Python or C.  I attribute that more to the environment than the language itself because it allows for the instant gratification of hitting the reload button and seeing something happen.  But what I like even more is the idea of embeddable languages bringing that sort of development process to GNOME.  There are a few apps that already do this and though it isn’t as easy as it is with the web whenever I have jumped into one of those apps, such as experimenting with writing a quick Vi mode for gEdit, it is amazingly simple.

What would keep me working in those environments would be an embeddable debugger, object viewer and UI/extension point tree.  Whoever writes those components and makes it simple to add scripting to any GObject app will be a hero in the community.  Anyone willing to sign up?

We’ll I’m going to dive into the deep end (flames welcome) because I have been talking to people about the Qt “possibility” since Nokia bought Trolltech and GNOME was considering what to do for the future of its toolkit.  I can see the headlines of yet another GNOME developer advocating using Qt4 as the basis of future releases but this simply is not the case.  It is, in its basic form, an exercise in “what ifs?” and an iterative process of looking inward at our ecosystem and seeing the pros and cons of certain directions we could take.

Is this going to happen?

First off this is a highly unlikely scenario. The planets would have to align, Qt would have to go LGPL, Nokia would have to loosen controls on contributions to avoid a fork, the Qt team would have to accept a community which has slightly different goals and the GTK+ team would have to signal their willingness to move. We are not going to turn our back on the great work the GTK+ teams are doing and most certainly the base libraries we use such as GStreamer wouldn’t change.

What are the possible advantages?

• Less confusion for the non-insiders on what to learn and program for
• We can get rid of the whole Freedesktop common widgets talk (e.g. Print and File dialogs) which is nonsense and a distraction anyway
• Hopefully less bickering in the community meaning a more unified and focused front against larger threats
• Focus can move from the lower toolkit layers to the higher level desktop layer which really define the value differences between GNOME and KDE
• Easier technology sharing

Note that these are all only possible advantages and may not even happen even if there was a move.

 What are the possible disadvantages?

• More bickering on how to write applications (who’s approach to usability wins out?)
• Less focus and a return to writing applications without a shared guideline (just look at old XLib interfaces - almost like snowflakes)
• A loss of identity
• Loss of amazing GTK+ developers who may feel abandoned
• Splintering of the community so we have parallel GTK+ GNOME and Qt4 GNOME development
• Screwing ISV’s who bank on GTK+’s stable interface
• GTK+ isn’t just a license - we would be losing a lot by switching away from the codebase
• Falling into the growing pains GTK+ 2.0 brought GNOME and Qt4 is still bringing KDE
• A loss of activity at Freedesktop.org which is actually sometimes useful in producing dialogue and shared practices
• A loss of control over the direction of the toolkit effecting the quality and feel of the GNOME desktop
• Really a lot of development is moving to the web - will toolkits be important enough to warrant the pain of the move

What this wouldn’t be

This wouldn’t be a merging of GNOME and KDE.  Each community has a different idea of what constitutes a usable desktop and Qt would simply be an implementation detail bellow GNOME.

Conclusion

This is pretty much a pipe dream.  It solves some issues while creating a whole host of different ones.  I’m not going to advocate it other than seeing what peoples reactions are.  On the flip side if the work was put behind it, the planets aligned, and both communities came to an agreement I wouldn’t object to the arrangement.  Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath nor would I be elated or saddened if it did or did not happen. To me it is all what is best for Linux, GNOME, Free Software and the wider market. It is unclear what direction would be best (any claims to that knowledge would be suspect) but honestly and actively looking at the possibilities is a useful activity, however remote. People reading should not put their “hopes and dreams” on this or believe it to be more than it is.

Istanbul was a great place to have GUADEC this year though I wasn’t really able to be a part of the regular conference schedule due to my Foundation duties.  These days I am mostly around for the community aspects and to get a feel for where said community is headed.  To that effect for me GUADEC is mostly about friends, food, beer and moving GNOME forward in a stampede of boisterous hackers with common interests.  Along those lines here is a summary of GUADEC though my eyes (more…)

That’s right, in order to support the upcomming release of GNOME 3.0 which is introducing a new tabbed interface, we’ve totally made D-Bus HIG compliant by adding tabs to the API.  No longer do you have to select a system or session bus while connecting.  Now all you have to do is select the correct tab and you are connected.  Now you might be saying, I can’t see these tabs.  Because of constraints of the D-Bus system, namely not having a GUI, we had to add virtual tabs.  Don’t worry, they are there, you just have to randomly click and eventually you will select the right bus.  Or you can simply use the new D-Bus Gtk+ bindings which exist to provide a GUI in which to display the tabs.  A word of warning though, because of Qt4’s abstraction layers when using the D-Bus Qt4 library they will show up as plasmoids.  We here at Freedesktop.org hopes this makes your D-Bus hacking a much more enjoyable experience.

When asked who in the audience

• are GIT users? - roughly 90% of the hands in the room went up
• are BZR users? - less than 5% of the hands in the room went up
• are Hg(Mercurial) users? - roughly the same as BZR, perhaps a few hands less

Converse amongst yourselves.