tola - free software

BBC Radio 4 on Open Source

tola — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:15:21 +0100

MJ Ray points towards a BBC Radio 4 programme on Open Source by Paul Bennun.

I've just listened to the programme and it contains some wonderful ideas about how software is unique in the world, being a collection of ideas rather than a collection of physical components. It's an insightful, well balanced exploration of Free and Open Source software and how it is a social rather than technological phenomenon.

I particularly liked a quote from Nick McGrath, Head of platform strategy for Microsoft in the UK.

"We don't compete with the Open Source community, that would be like trying to compete with the weather".

Second Life Client Open Sourced

tola — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:45:32 +0000

In my fourth blog post of the day, Linden Labs has Open Sourced the client for Second Life in a blog post entitled Embracing the Inevitable.

Linden Labs always said that Open Sourcing the code was part of the long term plan, I remember an interview on LUGRadio a while back. It's a shame it's only the client and not the server-side code, but they say they are staying open minded about that. One step at a time.

My dream (as I described in March) would be a distributed system where anyone could set up their own server. It would use web standards and would just be like a collection of 3D web pages in X3D. It might be difficult to attain the same kind of user experience you get with Second Life, but it would be a great extension of the web.

Update: I've started a wiki page posing the question "What would be required to create a 3D web with a similar user experience to that of online virtual worlds like Second Life?". You can log in with username:iwontspam password:ipromise or start a new account. I'd value input.

Open Standards and Free Software are making me OS-agnostic

tola — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 11:58:15 +0000

I use three different operating systems on a daily basis - Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux - yet my data is always the same and I often use the same applications. Here's what I use on a regular basis:

Task	Open Standard(s)	Free Software Application(s)
Email	IMAP	Thunderbird
Calendar	iCalendar over WebDAV	Mozilla Calendar
Contacts	LDAP	Thunderbird address book
Documents	OpenDocument	Open Office
Music	Ogg & MP3 over HTTP	VLC Media player
Pictures	SVG, PNG, JPEG	The GIMP, Inkscape
Code	Subversion	Eclipse & Subclipse
News	OPML, RSS, Atom	Thunderbird news reader
Chat	Jabber & IRC	Gaim

Sometimes I'll use an OS-specific app if it provides a better experience, but still uses open standards. For example, I use iCal, iChat, iTunes and Address Book on the Mac with iCalendar, Jabber, MP3 and LDAP respectively (I know, MP3 isn't entirely open). I can easily chop and change which application I use, or even use different ones at the same time because my data is stored in such an accessible way.

Although I believe that desktop Linux is very important and Ubuntu is my first choice of OS, what's more important is the open standards it uses for managing data. Free software won't fend off proprietary software by building a better desktop, it will win by making the operating system a user is running almost irrelevant.

What I'm working towards at the moment is hosting all of my data across web servers and having a web application to manage each type of data. That way I can access my data on any device with a web browser - including my phone and Internet tablet. I've had a web server at home for a couple of years now which I store some of my data on.

Web applications I've been using include:

Horde IMP
GMail
PHPiCalendar
Google Calendar
Google Docs & Spreadsheets
Ampache
Flickr
Gliffy
Trac
Gregarius
Google Reader

Some of these are hosted by companies, some are hosted on my own server, but what's important is that they use the same open standards.

One of the aims of Moya is to create a home server which manages all of these types of data and provides a web interface, making the client operating system irrelevant.

Google Web Toolkit Open Sourced

tola — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:01:04 +0000

Google have released the latest version of the Google Web Toolkit under the Apache 2.0 License. The Google Web Toolkit is a toolkit for creating "AJAX" web applications by creating a Java application, then "compiling" it to JavaScript and HTML.

I've always been quite interested in the toolkit, but "compiling" Java to JavaScript always seemed like a novel but messy idea to me. However, after to listening to two podcast episodes by its creators, I've become more interested.

It seems that the choice of the Java language is purely based on the tools available to create applications with that particular language. The GWT is for creating cross-browser JavaScript and HTML user interfaces without having to worry about browser quirks, using existing powerful development tools. You can use any server-side language to generate the JavaScript & HTML once you know what needs generating, so GWT could easily be used in conjunction with PHP, Python et. al.

Something I particularly like is the philosophy of not forcing you down any particular design path, but supporting as many as possible. For example, if you happen to be using the Model View Controller design pattern, GWT would be brilliant for creating the "view" part, and you could use something else for the Model and Controller parts. Or you could not use Model View Controller at all. Also, you don't have to use the whole toolkit, you can use just parts of it, the components are designed to work independently of one another.

I'm still not sure that "AJAX" web applications are the best solution for software as a service in the long term, but they're certainly the best technology currently widely supported, even if you have to deal with browser quirks to ensure compatibility.

Novell to drop Hula

tola — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:46:30 +0000

I'm very sad to hear that Novell will be dropping Hula and withdrawing the lead developers. They claim there is no market for the product, but I know that a lot of people (including me) have been looking forward to a first official release for a long time. Perhaps this is just a result of their recent cosy relationship with Microsoft.

The Hula Project is (was) an email and calendaring server with Googlesque web interfaces which was set to rival Microsoft Exchange. I was particularly interested in the CalDAV support for calendaring and LDAP address books. The problem was that it has been in development for so long and other projects have sort of filled the void.

I'm sad that the Hula Project has lost it's commercial sponsor and I now can't help but feel that it was given away in the first place because it was considered to be of no commercial value. But I hope that this is only the beginning. I hope that the open source community can now adopt this project and it will live again, perhaps under a different name.

Migration to Free Software

tola — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 13:12:35 +0100

I think that the key to making people comfortable with changes in the software they use has a lot to do with familiarity. If you put someone in front of the most user friendly operating system in the world but they're used to something else, they will find it difficult to operate. People get surprisingly attached to ways of doing things, and can feel quite uncomfortable with the idea that they no longer need to press the "Start" button to turn off their computer for example. When I first used an Apple Macintosh computer it took me five minutes to figure out how to open the CD-ROM drive because the eject button just wasn't where I expected it to be. It wasn't that the button was in a counter-intuitive place, it was in fact on the keyboard with all the other controls. My problem was that I was just used to the eject button being next to the CD tray.

Usability studies show that people usually don't use software in the way in which it is designed to be used. I've never met anyone who upon installing a new piece of software reads through all the documentation thoroughly before launching into their shiny new application. Be it through lack of time or simply lack of interest, most people just fumble through and as long as they can achieve the tasks they need to they don't really mind whether they're doing it the way the programmer intended. And why should they?

This method of using software seems to work pretty well for a lot of people a lot of the time, but where it falls down is that people build misconceptions and bad habits. While they can achieve what they need to, they can come to lack an understanding of the underlying technology behind what they're doing. This means that even the slightest change in the user interface can cripple their productivity until they figure out the "new way" of achieving the same task.

So what's all this got to do with Free and Open Source Software? Joe Public the average computer user is not particularly keen on change. Once he's figured out a way to do something he doesn't really want to re-learn how to achieve the same thing in a different way. This is why he is often willing to pay a premium to hang onto the the old way of doing things, even if the alternative is better.

If you want to try out Free Software for the first time or you want to introduce it to a friend, you don't have to be brave and wipe your hard disk to install a whole new operating system. There are lots of ways of dipping your toe into the sea of Free Software without ending up feeling like you're drowning. For someone who has never used a personal computer that wasn't running a copy of Microsoft Windows, a GNU/Linux desktop can seem a bewildering and alien world and they can be put off for life. Perhaps a better approach is a gradual migration rather than a straight switch to a whole new system.

A great place to start is the Mozilla Firefox Browser (www.mozilla.org). Whilst technically still in beta, you will find that this stand alone web browser from the Mozilla Foundation is much more stable and less bloated than the more commonly used Microsoft Internet Explorer. It also boasts features like popup blocking and tabbed browsing which once tried you'll never want to live without. The best thing about Firefox is that it will run in Windows, Mac or Linux so you can try it on the operating system you already use and if you come to switch to a Linux desktop at a later date, you'll feel right at home.

If you get on well with Firefox you might want to try out Thunderbird, also a Mozilla project. Thunderbird is a mail and news client like Outlook Express and has built in spam filtering and a spell checker. There are also other Mozilla projects to try out like Chatzilla, an IRC client and Sunbird, a Calendar application.

Perhaps the obvious next suite of applications to try is Open Office (www.openoffice.org), a free and surprisingly fully featured alternative to Microsoft Office or Lotus Smartsuite. Open Office has native versions for Windows and Linux and can be pursuaded to run in Mac if you want to have a play. The developers of Open Office have done their best to make it compatible with proprietary document formats so you can still use all your old Microsoft Word documents and you can also save documents in PDF format to distribute to other people.

All of the above Free Software projects encourage open standards, can be obtained free of charge over the Internet and come under an Open Source license of some description. So give Free Software a try, you have nothing to lose.

Ben Francis