Documents attached to email messages are annoying. It’s 2012: do I still have to save, edit, attach again? Geez, what a waste of time. 224 days ago
@sukenikspacenyc Thanks, I’ll try it out. Sounds complicated but doable… will need to buy a printer first in reply to 225 days ago
Pronti a vederci a Udine dopo l’OpenStack Summit? http://t.co/8u31y5dL Dettagli (PDF) http://t.co/3APy2Beh 225 days ago
@syedarmani add your blog http://t.co/sOpzM5DJ to http://t.co/dhHnfyzM. Good content there. Instructions on the planet page 226 days ago
sending money to volunteers around the world is too expensive/complicated. Is BitCoin a solution? Not yet but promising http://t.co/uDNBEJs5 226 days ago
My experience at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego has been really good. I have received lots of positive comments about this configuration, merging the Design Summit with the Conference. Despite the high amount of people it seems that things went well. I’m waiting to gather more details about the remote participation to the Design Summit with WebEx, I’ll report more about that soon.
I presented one session at the conference, lead two sessions on the Design Summit track and facilitated the meeting of the APEC group. Especially on the last day I missed the integration of the summit’s agenda from sched.org into my personal calendar applications (phone and desktop) because I ended up overbooking myself a couple of times. Thankfully Monty Taylor covered for me.
The ‘Community Dashboard‘ that I presented with zAgile was received with enthusiastic comments: the crowd cheered ‘ship it’ when I asked them what they thought of the demo. I’ve talked with Sanjiva and Andrew after the presentation, we should have an early beta out there by the end of the year.
More needs to be done in order to improve the community resources: IRC channels are not owned by the Foundation, some services depend by one person only (the main website and etherpad service, just to make an example). The forums need some love and probably we should have a Q&A system in place. During the sessions Atul Jha from India showed an askbot-powered system that he volunteered to run. In the next weeks I’ll help him go live with it. We discussed also the migration of the General mailing list out of Launchpad: unfortunately I have no news since my last update. The planet needs a better look, if nothing else. And the OpenStack blog needs a better content policy: some people in the room raised some concerns over the abuse of corporate posts on it.
During the discussion on how to track OpenStack’s adoption I was suggested to focus on users’ survey instead of proposing to add some ‘telephone home’ capability to OpenStack’s code (like Mozilla Foundation does with Firefox). I think this is a good idea and I’ll make sure this will become a project of the Foundation in the next months, once we’ll be fully staffed (we’re hiring).
Monty lead the session I proposed about an Integrated Identity System among all OpenStack tools. We went through the improvements we’re working on regarding the CLA workflow and its integration into Gerrit and the Foundation’s membership database. Todd Morey was in the session and we had more ideas on how to make things progress a bit faster (we agreed that hanging out on IRC is a prerequisite for make things happen faster). The future of Launchpad as the main ID system for OpenStack will be decided after Ubuntu Developer Summit: Thierry will spend time with Canonical’s folks there to understand if it will still be able to serve our purposes in the future.
My list of things to do has increased, as it’s expected after the Summit. Thanks everybody for joining.
I have only a vague idea of what I was going into when I decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64bit on my new ProjectSputnik machine. I knew that OpenStack is using WebEx for many of its meetings and I knew that WebEx has issues with 64bit Java on Linux. I had no idea though that trying to run 32bit Firefox and 32bit Java on a 64bit machine turned out to waste 5 hours of my time until I gave up. Here is what I did, maybe somebody else smarter than me can help me.
First thing, install openjdk plugin for i386 with a simple apt-get command:
reed@sputacchio:~$ sudo apt-get install icedtea-7-plugin:i386
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
icedtea-7-jre-jamvm:i386 icedtea-netx:i386 libacl1:i386 libatk-wrapper-java-jni:i386
libatk1.0-0:i386 libattr1:i386 libavahi-glib1:i386 libcairo2:i386 libdatrie1:i386
libdbus-glib-1-2:i386 libdrm-intel1:i386 libdrm-nouveau1a:i386 libdrm-radeon1:i386 libdrm2:i386
libgconf-2-4:i386 libgconf2-4:i386 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 libgif4:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386
libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa:i386 libgnomevfs2-0:i386 libgtk2.0-0:i386 libjasper1:i386
liblcms2-2:i386 libllvm3.0:i386 libnspr4:i386 libnss3:i386 libnss3-1d:i386 libpango1.0-0:i386
libpciaccess0:i386 libpcsclite1:i386 libpixman-1-0:i386 libsqlite3-0:i386 libthai0:i386
libx11-xcb1:i386 libxcb-glx0:i386 libxcb-render0:i386 libxcb-shm0:i386 libxcomposite1:i386
libxcursor1:i386 libxdamage1:i386 libxfixes3:i386 libxft2:i386 libxinerama1:i386 libxml2:i386
libxrandr2:i386 libxtst6:i386 libxxf86vm1:i386 openjdk-7-jre:i386 openjdk-7-jre-headless:i386
Suggested packages:
libglide3:i386 libgnomevfs2-bin:i386 libgnomevfs2-extra:i386 gamin:i386 fam:i386
librsvg2-common:i386 gvfs:i386 libjasper-runtime:i386 liblcms2-utils:i386 ttf-baekmuk:i386
ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp:i386 ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp:i386 ttf-arphic-gkai00mp:i386
ttf-arphic-bkai00mp:i386 pcscd:i386 libnss-mdns:i386 sun-java6-fonts:i386
fonts-ipafont-gothic:i386 fonts-ipafont-mincho:i386 ttf-wqy-microhei:i386 ttf-wqy-zenhei:i386
ttf-indic-fonts-core:i386 ttf-telugu-fonts:i386 ttf-oriya-fonts:i386 ttf-kannada-fonts:i386
ttf-bengali-fonts:i386
Recommended packages:
xml-core:i386 libgnome2-0:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
icedtea-7-jre-jamvm:i386 icedtea-7-plugin:i386 icedtea-netx:i386 libacl1:i386
libatk-wrapper-java-jni:i386 libatk1.0-0:i386 libattr1:i386 libavahi-glib1:i386 libcairo2:i386
libdatrie1:i386 libdbus-glib-1-2:i386 libdrm-intel1:i386 libdrm-nouveau1a:i386
libdrm-radeon1:i386 libdrm2:i386 libgconf-2-4:i386 libgconf2-4:i386 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386
libgif4:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa:i386 libgnomevfs2-0:i386
libgtk2.0-0:i386 libjasper1:i386 liblcms2-2:i386 libllvm3.0:i386 libnspr4:i386 libnss3:i386
libnss3-1d:i386 libpango1.0-0:i386 libpciaccess0:i386 libpcsclite1:i386 libpixman-1-0:i386
libsqlite3-0:i386 libthai0:i386 libx11-xcb1:i386 libxcb-glx0:i386 libxcb-render0:i386
libxcb-shm0:i386 libxcomposite1:i386 libxcursor1:i386 libxdamage1:i386 libxfixes3:i386
libxft2:i386 libxinerama1:i386 libxml2:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libxtst6:i386 libxxf86vm1:i386
openjdk-7-jre:i386 openjdk-7-jre-headless:i386
0 upgraded, 52 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 56.9 MB of archives.
After this operation, 116 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?Y
Next tell Ubuntu that I want to use the 32bit Java plugin using a simple update-alternatives command:
reed@sputacchio:~$ sudo update-alternatives –config mozilla-javaplugin.so
There are 2 choices for the alternative mozilla-javaplugin.so (providing /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so).
Selection Path Priority Status
————————————————————
0 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/amd64/IcedTeaPlugin.so 1061 auto mode
Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 2
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-i386/jre/lib/i386/IcedTeaPlugin.so to provide /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so (mozilla-javaplugin.so) in manual mode.
Then I tried to load Firefox and realized that the icedtea plugin is not active. Firefox 64bit evidently doesn’t load the 32bit plugin. Next step: try to find a binary build of Firefox. No luck with that, I wasn’t able to find it anywhere online… I even searched it using Bing, how desperate. Someone on IRC mentioned that Firefox has some multiarch stuff… whatever, doesn’t work for me today.
Next step of a desperate man: install some i386 browser. I tried with chromium in order to avoid messing up with my system, no luck (broken package):
reed@sputacchio:~$ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser:i386
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
chromium-browser:i386 : Depends: xdg-utils:i386 but it is not installable
Recommends: chromium-browser-l10n:i386 but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
reed@sputacchio:~$
Bit the bullet, tried messed up with Firefox:
reed@sputacchio:~/bin$ sudo apt-get install firefox:i386
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
firefox-globalmenu:i386 libcairo-gobject2:i386 libcanberra-gtk3-0:i386 libcanberra-gtk3-module:i386 libcanberra0:i386
libdbusmenu-glib4:i386 libdbusmenu-gtk4:i386 libgtk-3-0:i386 libltdl7:i386 libnotify4:i386
libstartup-notification0:i386 libtdb1:i386 libvorbisfile3:i386 libxcb-util0:i386 notification-daemon:i386
Suggested packages:
latex-xft-fonts:i386 firefox-gnome-support:i386 libcanberra-gtk0:i386 libcanberra-pulse:i386 librsvg2-common:i386
gvfs:i386
Recommended packages:
xul-ext-ubufox:i386
The following packages will be REMOVED:
firefox firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support
The following NEW packages will be installed:
firefox:i386 firefox-globalmenu:i386 libcairo-gobject2:i386 libcanberra-gtk3-0:i386 libcanberra-gtk3-module:i386
libcanberra0:i386 libdbusmenu-glib4:i386 libdbusmenu-gtk4:i386 libgtk-3-0:i386 libltdl7:i386 libnotify4:i386
libstartup-notification0:i386 libtdb1:i386 libvorbisfile3:i386 libxcb-util0:i386 notification-daemon:i386
0 upgraded, 16 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 23.1 MB of archives.
After this operation, 4,423 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
There are some packaging issues there too, something is off. Firefox looks ugly, like it’s missing some GNOME integration and, most importantly, doesn’t load any of the plugins. So, back to square one.
I’d expect eehyrtving to go on for a while, anyway. On the Kaffe/Classpath/gcj/cacao/IKVM/JamVM/* side the future development will happen with a chance of strongly collaborating with Sun on shared code.On Harmony’s side, probably not so much, though eehyrtving is possible there in the future. Nothing, except current policies, prohibits ASF from working with/on GPLd code. And policies are always up for debate.
The night we launched the OpenStack Foundation there was a global celebration around the world with user groups throwing parties, having talks and pizza and drinks. Our initial idea was to send prepaid VISA cards to all of them but we soon realized that not every country or shop in the world accepts them. While we were trying to figure this out, time to ship anything around the world shortened so much that the prepaid VISA option faded out. Next option was to use Paypal… oh boy, what a mess Paypal is when you need to send money to Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and other countries. Paypal is not an option in some countries. Bank wire transfer are way too expensive and slow. The last option is the good old wire transfer via services like Western Union, MoneyGram and others.
At this point I got fascinated by BitCoin, though and I wanted to learn more about it, again (since last time I checked it was around 3 years ago). I added the BitCoin PPA to my new Ubuntu machine, and installed the BitCoin client. So far so good. I’m now trying to figure out how to buy the actual coins. A quick DuckDuckGo search reveals that I can exchange them with locals with cash. Interesting, but I’ll pass. The other option is to buy online via market exchanges like BitExchange. The problem is that I don’t care about anonymity, I need just to go to a site, put coins in a virtual shopping cart, checkout with a credit card … can’t find a way to do it.
I bit the bullet and I signed up for MtGox, one of the largest market exchange for BitCoin. It works like a stock trade market: you place your offer to buy BitCoins for a price and other members of the market decide whether to sell you or not for that price. In order to operate you need to add funds to your account. How? No credit card option, lots of ways to send cash and bank transfer to Japan or Europe … or use Dwolla, which requires another account. Dwolla sounds interesting too but at this point I give up. I’ll give BitCoin another shot some other time.
You know you can purchase Bitcoins by making a cash deposit at any major US bank, right? There are a number of different companies that offer that service.
I didn’t know that: do banks sell BitCoins directly? That’s interensting. I still would need to walk to a bank, it’s not very immediate but it’s better than what I saw so far. Can you give me more details please?
This week was my first week as an employee of the OpenStack Foundation. I’m Technical Community Manager, still helping the OpenStack project succeed by helping the technical contributions. The difference is that my salary is now being paid by the newly formed OpenStack Foundation instead of Rackspace. Most of the people I worked with more closely at Rackspace are also at the OpenStack Foundation: Lauren, Mark, Jonathan and Thierry and we’re also hiring more people.
The main thing that changed is my laptop: finally I got rid of that heavy brick I used to carry around and now I have a slick, top of the line Dell XPS 13, the Project Sputnik one, powered by Ubuntu. Oh, what a great machine. I love it already. It gets noisy some time but I believe that’s because I had to run java applets in the past days. I’ll post more details about how I set it up later on. Good times.
I’ve been kindly invited to give a keynote to openSUSE Summit in Orlando and I just got off the stage after delivering it. The slides and my notes are below. The video I took during the keynote is on YouTube (and embedded).
openSuse keynote: The lessons of Open Source for the Open Cloud
Thank you Suse community for having me here today. It’s my turn to wake you up today, so let’s start. I want to start by telling you that we have accomplished a mission
The mission to build a wholly/holy free operating system for servers and desktops is accomplished. I believe the Free/Libre Software and Open Source (FLOSS) movement has conquered the datacenters, replacing proprietary systems everywhere. This is good, right?
While we were busy winning over the proprietary Unix, proprietary databases etc things changed. We’re in the middle of a radical change of how we think of computing. Cloud and mobile computing have emerged as radically new things. And for the first time ever, Open Source implementations are not lagging behind, quite the opposite. Open source software is opening new paths, not just building on top of a fully laid out Unix or the standard C libraries. Open Source is where a lot new things are happening regarding cloud and mobile computing.
While I believe in mobile computing the Open Source principles are fairly easy to adapt, cloud computing poses a whole new set of questions for the movement.
We’re missing a paradigm to interpret and define open-ness in cloud computing.
In the minutes we’ll be looking at lessons learned during +25 years of Open Source and how those can be adapted to define the Open Cloud and at what we can do to see this idea materialise.
Enabling innovation
First of all I’d like to recognize where we stand, in terms of achievements of the past 25 years. I think we’ve done great so far.
When I started working on Open Source and Linux the system was 5 years old, GNU tools had been around for 10 years. To convince customers to buy our Linux distributions I had to start from scratch.. Well, Linux is made by smart people around the world, loosely coordinated by a Finnish dude wearing sandals. Unbelievable, right? Their objections are probably familiar to you too right? you may have been in one of these sales meetings.
If I passed that first step, I had to show that our small team of 10 people could support them… and that opened a whole new set of problems… You can imagine how fast our little startup could close a deal Today’s meeting are more normal, Dilbert style.
Look around today how things have changed.
Today nobody asks ‘Does it work?’ but they ask ‘how fast can you get it here and solve my problems’. And to start a new venture, developing free software is one of the mainstream options.
We won! GNU and Linux have taken over the proprietary systems they were designed to take over. Open Source has even opened complete new ways to do things, think of Big Data and NoSQL … all ideas empowered, enabled even, by the freedom to tinker that comes with free/libre software. It’s the freedom to make, the freedom to innovate.
Our way of developing software has won, too. You know that dude with long hair and long beard from Boston that started a movement, loosely coordinating hundreds of developers around the world? Turns out, he started something very big, much bigger than an operating system “like Unix but better”. His idea to ask the best brains in the world to help produce the best software possible and share the results together, is good for companies too. They get new products much faster, better performing, they get marketing, support you name it…
Business schools have studied how we make software, companies have learned that what we have been doing since the 90s. Now a whole new line of research focusing on how firms around the world pool in resources to develop new products faster and share the benefits. They call this ‘Open Innovation’, we call it ‘The Open Source Way’.
When you started working on open source, were you expecting that your work would spur such radical change? To be honest, I’m still surprised but I was hoping for it, I’m a dreamer
Let me give you an example of how ‘Open Innovation’ the open source way worked for OpenStack, the project I work for. The project started two years ago, NASA and Rackspace were trying to solve the same problem: they needed an operating system that run on top of an entire datacenter. Virtualization is not enough once you reach the ‘HUGE’ scale. Once your virtual servers start to be thousands, thens of thousands you start loosing track of what runs where and you have all sorts of other problems. NASA and Rackspace found each other by chance and decided to pool their resources. Rackspace had a very good object storage system (now known as SWIFT), NASA had a promising prototype of a virtual computing engine (known as NOVA). Deal done. Time 6 months and look at the spectacular growth in number of active developers per month: that’s comparable with the Linux kernel (not in quantity, but in slope). The amount of companies joining it, the partners in the newly established OpenStack Foundation.
I believe we, the free software and open source movement should be very proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. We, as a movement, should take a moment to sit back and appreciate what we’ve achieved in the past 25 years. Our principles, our way of doing things, has made OpenStack possible.
VIDEO THING: On my three, you’re going to yell “Welcome OpenStack” and I’ll record it on camera, ok?
Celebrate the achievements of our movement and let’s move on: we need a way to define openness for the next generation of computing.
The principles that gave us GNU and Linux were designed in a time when Unix was the dominant paradigm for computing: terminals and later client/server. One processor, one operating system. A world made of ‘computing products’.
In the late 80s and 90s, when Stallman started the GNU project and Torvalds started Linux the there was a world made of computing ‘products’. Today we’ve added computing ‘services’ to the mix.
Cloud Computing blurs the lines of what is a ‘user’ and what is a distribution and copies of software. Porting the Free Software definition from a product to a service is not simple but we can try.
How to define the Open Cloud
Let’s have a look at the free software definition, simple and elegant. Software is free/libre when it comes with:
0 freedom to run for any purpose
1 freedom to study how it works
2 freedom to make copies to help you and your friends (and charge for the act of making one)
3 freedom to distribute modified copies
We have now understood all of this, for computing products. It makes sense: software comes on a CDrom, a USB stick, downloaded,…whatever, you take something and you run it on your machine.
Now look at services you consume over a network: do you Run the software? If you consume a platform as a service, do you need to study the details below or just the APIs it exposes? The APIs are free to study, usually. Make copies? You don’t need to really to: if you need more capacity you buy more of the service. Do you really want to modify services? Maybe you want to be able to add features, ok … but does it make sense to use a service if you need features it lacks?
Don’t get me wrong: these freedoms are crucial, necessary even, but not enough. Computing services are radically different, the use cases are so much different. For example:
Data for example is out of the picture in the Free Software Definition. Let’s be concrete and take an example: San Diego Super Computing Center stores petabytes of data every year for its users (astronomers, physicists, etc). They need a storage and archival system that deals with that scale. Their users don’t … let me say better: can’t deal with that scale. The physicist running an experiment can have a few machines and disks to analyze a few terabytes locally but when it comes to handling large quantities of data, and backups, the single lab would have huge costs to run its own storage/backup system. So SDSC came up with an OpenStack Swift cluster where users can drop files at will. Now if those users want to stop using SDSC services and move somewhere else, in theory they can. They run OpenStack Swift, they have the 4 freedoms, the can replicate the cluster somewhere else or have someone else run the cluster for them. But their petabytes of data will be very hard to move across clusters. These guys know the format in which the data is stored into, so you can argue it would just be a matter of time…
That’s why I maintain that the four freedoms are important but data in the cloud changes everything and Scale changes everything. Keeping this in mind, we can start defining the Open Cloud.
We can take from the basic principles that guided Stallman in his definition of free/libre software. The 4 freedoms were designed to help developers help each others to innovate faster and help users get better tools for their tasks. Those are good things, they brought us to were we stand today as we saw before.
We can write principles for the Open Cloud that map the same ideals: respect the users of the service, enable innovation (or don’t reinvent the wheel).
How do you respect the users? Leaving them free to come and go in and out of your computing services. Nothing more or less than the freedom to run the software for any purpose, study, make copies and modify them. How can you come and go from a cloud service to another?
So here is the first thing that’s important to define an open cloud. We’ve got data on one side, and we’ve got functionalities to transform and manipulate that data, in the cloud as services.
The format of the data must be an open standard. Interfaces/APIs are another crucial piece of an open cloud, these must also be an open standard.
The other thing is that you need to enable Open Innovation, create vibrant communities and business friendly ecosystem.
The issue is that a uniform definition of Open Standard doesn’t exist but I like the one maintained by the FSFE. An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is:
subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves;
free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model;
managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.
And that’s how you respect your users. How do you enable innovation? Creating vibrant communities and large, business friendly, ecosystems.
It’s important for an open cloud to focus on both aspects: guarantee user’s independence from a particular implementation of a service and a vast business ecosystem that implements its open standards.
Closing remarks
The issue is complex and definitely needs more thoughts. Stallman had it very simple: he needed to build a new operating system, like Unix but better. There was a model to follow, standards to implement like POSIX and C. GNU and Linux and much more software distributed as Free Software was imitating and improving upon existing software, at least initially. The guiding principles were easy to understand and communicate. His principles spread fast crossing the border of software.
Open Source is not behind the proprietary leader, we have a good chance to build the largest clouds based on our principles of respect and innovation. The race just started. Amazon Web Services was launched in 2006, it’s only 6 years old. Eucalyptus was first released in 2008, OpenStack in 2010 like cloud.com. Open Source implementations have a very good chance at taking the lead in cloud computing.
That’s what we’re trying to do at OpenStack Foundation. You can join it as an Individual Member.
We may not have a moral authority that will keep the definition for Open Cloud, like the FSF and the OSI have done for the world of computing products. It’s up to us to keep an eye on the companies we work for, helping them to understand that staying close to the principles that made Open Source ubiquitous is good for them, also in the world of computing services.
We’ve made it: we changed computing once. Now we just have to do it again. Thank you
The discussion held a few weeks ago at Community Leadership Summit around how to ‘measure’ open source projects were very interesting. There was even a keynote by David Eaves during OSCON about the topic (well worth 15 minutes of your time, watch it below).
There are many people comparing different open source projects, I keep seeing blog posts trying to extrapolate complex concepts from too simple facts. For example, it’s hard to evaluate if an open source project is growing just by looking at the total number of commits per week: when number of commits slow down it may mean that the codebase has reached maturity, not necessarily it’s a sign of diminishing interest. Other simple facts visible on github like the number of followers, forks or ‘watchers’ may not mean much if the developers of that project don’t use the ‘social’ features offered by github.
To measure the “growth” of a project I usually look at a whole bunch of numbers and trends (more importantly) like the total number of committers over time, total new committers over time and also things that are not code-related traffic on mailing lists/forums, websites, google searches, activity on bug trackers as indicators of growth of a community. The total number of commits is more meaningful when taken as one element of ‘livelihood’ of a project (is it still maintained?) but it needs to be integrated with other elements to avoid making mistakes.
I’m sad to read that finally Mozilla Foundation realized that Thunderbird is a lemon: Mitchell Baker announced on her blog that “continued innovation of Thunderbird is not a priority” so its evolution will stop and putting the project in ‘maintenance mode’. The Foundation will only provide for security fixes starting from November 2012 and leaving the future evolution of this free software email client to ‘the community’.
As I wrote on G+, I never liked Thunderbird. There is no email client today that I like: they’re all based on very old concepts developed at the time when people had to deal with few messages per week. The only innovation I’ve seen in email came from Google’s Gmail, with the convenient conversation view and with the great integration of chat and addressbook with Circles. Gmail is not the email client I use: I never bought into that sort of convenience. I always wished that somebody would develop a new, modern, email client for my desktop.
With Thunderbird at its sunset and GNOME Evolution its only viable substitute, I’m starting to despair. I have some hopes on Geary, Yorba Foundation’s new email client.
Our purchasing decisions are telling Apple that we’re happy to buy computers and watch them die on schedule. When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values?
I see lots of excitement within the GNU/Linux communities about the new, stable Skype. It makes me sad: it’s the worse kind software to be excited for. It’s designed to spy on you, it has a proprietary protocol, the software itself is badly designed, poor UI and lacks of many features compared to others. What’s more, using software like Skype that is not interoperable with other voice/messaging systems allows Microsoft to push in it creepy features like advertising next to your personal conversation. The network effect created by Skype is bad for humanity, we should treat Skype as a necessary evil and work to make people aware of reasonable alternatives.
I’d be much happier if I saw communities cheering for the alternatives. For example, I wish Canonical added a xmpp/jingle service to its One product (and I’d love to pay for it). I wish the community knew that Google allows federation in its Google Talk service: you can reach your friends that use Google.com from your own jingle server. These are the things that we need, more than yet another proprietary protocol and software to take away our options.
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://maffulli.net/wp-content/uploads/getbutton.png){kind=small}
Gabriel are discussing. 
Today’s meeting are more normal, Dilbert style.
I’d expect eehyrtving to go on for a while, anyway. On the Kaffe/Classpath/gcj/cacao/IKVM/JamVM/* side the future development will happen with a chance of strongly collaborating with Sun on shared code.On Harmony’s side, probably not so much, though eehyrtving is possible there in the future. Nothing, except current policies, prohibits ASF from working with/on GPLd code. And policies are always up for debate.