][ stefano maffulli

It’s good to read on Palamida weekly reports that the GNU Afferto GPLv3 is being adopted at a fast pace, after I asked OSI to approve it. Considering that Google is passively opposing its adoption, I think that 95 projects is a good start. Now Funambol is in company of other high quality projects, like Clipperz and Wavemaker and with SourceForge supporting the Affero license, I think that there will be more. I’ve just updated the Trove category for the Funambol-related projects, where I could, but I advice other maintainers to do the same with their projects (and then move to the new Funambol Forge, which has cooler features than SF ).

I have the suspect that this is just the beginning and that AGPL will become as popular as the other two FSF licenses, the GPL and LGPL.

The new Funambol Forge opened registration to new members. It’s based on Collabnet, as other big free software projects like OpenOffice.org, NetBeans.org, java.net and eBay Dev. I feel comfortable and in good company

Funambol has a very big community with lots of people that contributed to the project over its many years of life. Its legacy is vast, made of 3 mailing lists spread in 2 SourceForge projects and one Yahoo! Group, one main project on OW2, many other contributed projects in the most disparate places (SF, GCode, self hosted), web pages of the free/libre version on the .com site and much more. All this deserves to be in one place. In a binary world things should be easy: move from point A to point B, delete duplicates and you’re done. But real life is harder because of one commandment of community management:

thou shalt not upset your community members

Changing a website can be very upsetting. You must give your users a good reason to change because it’s not just a matter of updating bookmarks. Your community members will have to register into a new system, change their habits, learn a new user interface, adapt their email filters.

I believe that the new discussion services on Collabnet are a fairly good reason, as will be the use of subversion (expected in July). Be delicate, be gentle and involve your community in the process.

Three projects have already decided to move in the new Forge: the SoGO Connector, the Google Connector and the Jajah Connector have a new house. I hope that more will join us in the next weeks.

I realized that it’s true what they say about email clients: they all suck. Some suck less, some (the majority) suck more than a Dyson vacuum cleaner.  Mailing list archives are important for communities because they represent their collective knowledge. Having all archives all in one place is definitely better than having to redirect people to google search to find answers or tips.

I had to redirect a few thousands email messages from a mailbox archive to the new Funambol Forge discussion system.  Evolution allows redirect as does also Mail.app, so I thought it would have been banal: CTRL-a to select all messages, menu / redirect and that’s it. Wrong: both applications cannot apply the command to more than one message at the time.  Scripting the action seemed too much work, so I reverted to using mutt, the email client that sucks less (as its motto says). Load the mailbox (mutt -f mail.box) select/tag all messages (hit the key T), apply the command to all tagged messages (hit the keys ;b), write the destination address and wait for smtp to do its job. After a couple of hours the postfix server was done. The past archives of Funambol mailing lists are in the archive of the new Forge. Great: the new discussions are ready to roll, on Monday.

As Funambol community manager, one of my duties is to know such community. It sounds simple, but since lots of software is involved to gather this knowledge things get less simple. I need to dive into apache logs and I decided to use my good old friend Postgresql. If I could, I would put everything in a database The problem is that I also need to rapidly prototype reports to transform data into information for the board. To start navigating the data, I first followed this nice tutorial to load apache logs in PostgreSQL. Connecting the database to NeoOffice was more difficult, mainly because there is no native PostgreSQL driver in NeoOffice and PSQL JDBC page is confusing. Anyway, after trial and error, I found out that on Leopard OS X 10.5 you need JDBC3 for your PSQL version 8.3 (I used the dmg packages). To install the driver I followed the instructions provided here. Now I can start diving in the logs and prepare some reports. The board will be happy soon and I’m glad I’m on my way to better knowledge of this community too.

Only real hackers consider improving what everybody else thinks is already optimal. At Funambol we like to do just that and we decided to improve the iPhone user interface:

Funambol, the company that is known for putting the “fun” back in the mobile business, today released a high contrast user interface for the widely used iPhone, making it more fun to use and more accessible to select customers.

Read the rest of the press release with the working screenshots on Funambol for iPhone.

To confirm that Jobs got everything (not!) right, Sybase jumps on the iPhone bandwagon for enterprise users.

Sybase on Tuesday said it’s adding Apple iPhone support to its suite of mobile middleware, making it possible to access IBM Lotus Domino or Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers through a secure environment.

May I just add that Funambol can already be used to connect Domino and Exchange servers to iPhone?  There is also an open Code sniper bounty  to develop a plugin to connect only to Lotus Notes client.

* Of course I pity Jobs for not respecting user’s freedoms.

The GNU Affero General Public License v3 is now officially an ‘open source’ license, approved by the Open Source Initiative.

Funambol started the approval process of the best license available to protect copyleft, and business based on it, from predatory practices. Fabrizio (Funambol’s CEO) celebrates the sweet victory on his blog mentioning the ’strange’ coincidence of Google caring only for GPL. For Google the ASP loophole is the key to their business, while they don’t like the A of Affero.

It’s a good day for all the companies that use the AGPLv3. I found some like Wavemaker, OSSDiscovery, Colosa and I wish Palamida started tracking AGPLv3 adoption too (Update: Blackduck Software already tracks AGPLv3 adoption). Here Funambol’s full press release with quote from Wavemaker’s CEO and Eben Moglen.

Update (thanks to Andi Zink):  Doug Levin’s post contains more software licensed under AGPL.

I made an experiment last Friday at the Italian Girl Geek Dinner: I grabbed the latest JAM email client that supports sending photos and I used it to report from there using the new service Twitxr.  Twitxr is like Twitter allowing short text messages but adding one image and a simple form of geotagging.  I setup my Twitxr so that I could send all my comments and pics to a special email address from which they would also be forwarded also to twitter (whose stream is included also on this blog’s sidebar) and my Facebook (Flickr is also supported, but I left it out for now).

I found out that the keyboard of the Nokia N60 I used is good enough to write short twits and that the quality of the pics is acceptable to describe what is happening.  The battery of the phone ran out faster than I expected. Giulia suspects that the JAM version I was using had a bug (I’ll check this with Edoardo later this week).

I had fun at the dinner, I liked Sarah’s speech: the girl has a clear vision, I found her very inspiring, definitely a person to folllow. We’ll have to find more occasions to do things together, since she is a mobile geek

The question everybody asks: How many guys were there?  I’m waiting for  the video in intruders.tv.

Even if I don’t have an iPod (and I won’t buy one … I’ll tell you why one of these days) I’ve asked Funambol’s community to translate into English an article by Luis Medina written in Spanish. Paulo Sergio Lopes Fernandes and German Viscuso contributed the translation.

I liked the article not only because it’s a good hack, but mostly because it demonstrates the importance of being able to tinker with the hardware you own. You should always be able to improve, evolve, fix whatever software comes with any device. While we wait for Apple to open up its system releasing its awaited SDK, here is a good read for you iTouch users and Fedora 8 (easily portable to other GNU/Linux distributions).

Synchronizing contacts iPod Touch - Evolution

This guide should also work if you are using an iPhone although… no guarantees.
How to synchronize contacts from my iPod Touch and Fedora 8?

1. Register at myFunambol

2. Install syncevolution

# yum -y install syncevolution

3. Configure syncevolution:

Continue Reading »

I’ve just received from Funambol’s Engineering a request for a Symbian developer. announcement remembering that I became Funambol’s Community Manager after reading Roberto’s blog.

Here is the announce:

The development team is looking for a motivated, highly-technical Symbian developer with excellent development and problem solving skills. You will join a dynamic team responsible for the development of the Funambol client on the Symbian platform. The successful candidate will join our Client Software Team in Pavia(Italy). The candidate must have good knowledge of C++ and a genuine enthusiasm for software development. This is a unique opportunity to work in Italy for a fast growing Open Source project.

Apply here. Good luck.