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See my comments here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/looking-back-on-noemail-at-6-weeks/comment-page-1/#comment-441324

And here: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/2008-ibm-predicts-five-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications-read-more-ibm-predicts-5-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications/comment-page-1/#comment-441613

And here: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f

And here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f

And a related back-burner open source project by me (being passed by): http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

And by others: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
"The Internet, electronic mail, and the Web have revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate - their mass adoption is one of the major technological success stories of the 20th century. We all are now much more connected, and in turn face new resulting problems: information overload caused by insufficient support for information organization and collaboration. For example, sending a single file to a mailing list multiplies the cognitive processing effort of filtering and organizing this file times the number of recipients - leading to more and more of peoples' time going into information filtering and information management activities. There is a need for smarter and more fine-grained computer support for personal and networked information that has to blend the boundaries between personal and group data, while simultaneously safeguarding privacy and establishing and deploying trust among collaborators. The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. ..."

First, note that my reply was to a post that claimed that "[t]he FLOSS community hates to pay money". I wasn't writing about how much, but I gave some evidence (not definitive, but some) that this wasn't true.

Second, the link that you posted seems to be about the much larger super set that includes the KDE-related Nepomuk. I don't understand the full stack, not even the subset or implementation that includes the KDE-related technologies. But if you check out the page about the pieces released as open source, you will see that they claim that not the whole project is open source, and Nepomuk-KDE (the project that was asking for funding) is only one part. I haven't found many references, but an article on KDE news gives some pointers and explanation. So I think that your comparison is not accurate. The larger project includes many implementations and lots of research. Now we are talking about a single implementation that is more or less done, but needs features and bug fixing.

Third, I wasn't the one setting the milestone. Sebastian Trüg, the lead Nepomuk developer did, and he claimed it was a reasonable amount to "secure long-term funding for Nepomuk". I guess that if he started the fundraiser on September of 2011, and he finally joined a regular company on February 2012, it was enough to live with some dignity during some months (he was working for Mandriva previously, and it seems the financial troubles of the company forced him and other employees to work without a salary). I don't know about the living expenses in every corner of the world, but I can tell you that in Spain, I would be terribly happy if I could dedicate myself to work full time on my favorite project for 3000€ before taxes per month. If I'm not mistaken, many programmers are working here for about 1200€ per month after taxes, maybe even less. With a 23% of people unemployed, I don't expect salaries to be much higher in some time.

You mean the stupid animations that allow you to switch desktops in a flash and make Windows 7's "rad" desktop look like a poor wannabe?

Yeah, that one. ctrl-alt-up/down/left/right was always faster for me without a stupid animation.

Or the full-blown office package, complete with a project management application that is completely lacking in OpenOffice.org?

Why would i want to use an office package from a project that has a habit off toppling it's well established and proven paradigms? LaTeX is enough for me, thankyouverymuch.

Or do you mean the ontology-based (A.I.) desktop search?

AFAICS Nepomuk is not a KDE project but one with many participants (of which no one seems to be the KDE project). KDE only implements it.

On my laptop, my Mandriva ("mandreeva") runs Nepomuk semantic ontology-based file archiving and search on KDE.
This is real innovation.
Definitely not impressed with Gnome 3. From what I saw, there wasn't anything much there except nice cosmetics, which your post confirms. Besides, I still think Gnome eats too much visual space.
Nah. Sticking to my KDE.

Semantic sense for the desktop: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21840/?a=f
Goals and objectives of the Nepomuk project: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Project+Objectives

Personally, I find KDE to be a much more polished, integrated, and comprehensive suite than GNOME.

I agree--and it's why every time I've tried KDE I've abandoned it and gone back to XFCE or Gnome after a few days.

"Ugh, kmail sucks, I'm gonna use Thunderbird... KOffice still blows, gotta set it to open files with (Open/Libre)Office instead. Konqueror? Fuck no, Firefox or Chromium or Opera, anything but that piece of crap. Amarok is so damn slow and bloated, need to find another player, not many QT options, guess I'll use a GTK solution..."

And so on, until I'm barely using any QT apps and almost no apps at all that integrate well with KDE, and all the while KDE seems to be mocking me for not using its integrated apps, most of which I hate.

If you like its default apps, fine. If not, all that work to make a tightly integrated DE and apps is just a bunch of useless bloat and features that only half-work if you don't do things exactly the way the devs want you to. I don't even like any of its competitors that much, and I really want to like KDE because it looks nice and has a few nice features that the others don't, but it's hard to justify using it if you don't run a single k* app.

My KDE experience usually involves a good number of GTK applications, too. For example, my core browser is Google Chrome or Firefox (both GTK), I use Thunderbird for e-mail, and I definitely use exclusively LibreOffice. KDE is not an all-or-none decision ... you can (and should) pick applications based on how they work, not whether or not they were developed by the same working group.

Now, that said, much of KDE is under active development, and this is the real deal. It's worth retrying KDE applications every now and then to see how they are doing. For example:

• rekonq, a Konqueror-like browser built on Webkit, is actually pretty damned usable. Not compatible enough to be an only browser, but adequate for most things. If browsers weren't so central, I'd probably use it a lot more.
• kmail has made significant integration and feature-set advances in the last three KDE versions. The whole KDE PIM suite has, actually. That team deserves a pat on the back; if I actually used a PIM application (instead of GMail's web interface) I would definitely use it.
• kopete, KDE's IM client, is great. It has definitely surpassed Pidgin for a while in my book.
• The koffice ... er, Calligra Suite team has been doing a tremendous job. It's one of the fastest-advancing open-source product that I know of, and each release brings it more into mainstream. I eagerly await the day they gain the full LibreOffice feature set, as I feel their design choices, UI, and approach are all superior. They just aren't there yet, last I checked.

All of these apps are more or less interchangeable though. You can use them just fine on GNOME. The core KDE experience is (in my opinion) kwin, the KDE Plasma Desktop (and associated Plasma widgets), the Dolphin File Browser, Nepomuk, and the KDE System Settings Suite. These are the core KDE features that one would choose to use. One can use primarily GNOME applications on top of these technologies and still be subscribed to the KDE user experience.

http://www.semanticdesktop.org/

My own limited attempts in that direction:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

Nepomuk (there are versions for the three main OSes) and other semantic desktop technologies are working on that. All you need is a tracker to index them and a RDF database.

http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop

Uh, I should probably link to Nepomuk, as Mandriva's Smart Desktop riles on it. Nepomuk is " Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations."

Now, when will I hear big buzzwords like "ontology-based management" in Gnome?That's right...Never. They're not cutting edge. Never were, never will be...

From: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
"The Semantic Web holds promises for information organization and selective access, providing standards means for formulating and distributing metadata and Ontologies. Still, we miss a wide use of Semantic Web technologies on personal computers. The use of ontologies, metadata annotations, and semantic web protocols on desktop computers will allow the integration of desktop applications and the web, enabling a much more focused and integrated personal information management as well as focused information distribution and collaboration on the Web beyond sending emails. The vision of the Semantic Desktop for personal information management and collaboration has been around for a long time: visionaries like Vanevar Bush and Doug Engelbart have formulated and partially realized these ideas. However, for the largest part their ideas remained a vision for far too long since the foundational technologies necessary to render their ideas into reality were not yet invented ? these ideas were proposing jet planes, where the rest of the world had just invented the parts to build a bicycle. However, recently the computer science community has developed the means to make this vision a reality: ..."

Once you start to understand http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/some of the things in the pipeline for KDE beginning with 4.0, you start to get that tickling sensation in your stomach. There's no other desktop out there with that kind of potential.

http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

The last is my own start towards one, building on years of other work in an RDF-like direction, but maybe there is no point in competing with Google?

http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

The last is my own start towards one, building on years of other work in an RDF-like direction, but maybe there is no point in competing with Google?

The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop (I've worked on) is intended to be something like this, but in Java and more decentralized.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

NEPOMUK is another such social semantic desktop system.
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/

The Nepomuk Web site wants to make me chew my own arm off.

ha, good one.

Why why can't researchers spend 15 minutes thinking about how to convey the importance and excitement of what they are trying to do in terms of practical examples.

There are some, but they are not very elegant:

http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/UsingNepomuk
http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/UsingDropBox
Or check out the KDE stuff:
http://nepomuk.kde.org/discover/user
also in cute little moving pictures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8oavLQeAjM

The Nepomuk Web site wants to make me chew my own arm off.

ha, good one.

Why why can't researchers spend 15 minutes thinking about how to convey the importance and excitement of what they are trying to do in terms of practical examples.

There are some, but they are not very elegant:

http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/UsingNepomuk
http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/UsingDropBox
Or check out the KDE stuff:
http://nepomuk.kde.org/discover/user
also in cute little moving pictures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8oavLQeAjM

Remembering where files that you last accessed or other forms of this type of organization shouldn't be part of the filesystem at all. It will only make things go slower. If the main problem here is that people don't remember where they saved their files (a la PEBKAC) then there should be something that should be mandatory for open file dialogs (in gnome(gtk2) or kde(qt3/4) - a recently accessed file tab. Hell, if you want, you can even have it remember all files that were last accessed in a small db if you want to make it desktop environment-wide for all programs to access instead of only finding the files accessed by that specific app, but i think that would be overkill.

Anyways. Shittleworth should remember what the Linux kernel is, and that it shouldn't be designed around stupid peoples preferences. (yes, i've been using Linux since the mid 90s so I'm no anti-gpl troll). Nepomuk is an interesting project to check out. As for making a filesystem that does all this stuff by itself - not worth it.

If you mean "tag" as the kind of a "post-it", like the tag for a picture or a file, then you are only talking about a little part of semantic web. Actually, semantic web is more complex than just tags joined to "build an ontology". It is based on several ontologies combined, and most of all, the use of a language that allows me to stablish semantic relations, which will allow me to do semantic queries like "what are other books this authos has written and are related to other investigations I'm doing now". If you want to give a try to a Semantic Desktop, the Nepomuk project http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/ (IBM, HP, SAP, Mandriva among others, are participating) is building a very interesting solutions, PSWE is the desktop application (Eclipse RCP based) and have Nightly builds http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/download/, KDE is also working on having a semantic desktop, with colaboration from Nepomuk. One of the authors of Nepomuk, Leo Sauermann, did Gnowsis http://www.gnowsis.org/ from where some ideas were taken.

If you mean "tag" as the kind of a "post-it", like the tag for a picture or a file, then you are only talking about a little part of semantic web. Actually, semantic web is more complex than just tags joined to "build an ontology". It is based on several ontologies combined, and most of all, the use of a language that allows me to stablish semantic relations, which will allow me to do semantic queries like "what are other books this authos has written and are related to other investigations I'm doing now". If you want to give a try to a Semantic Desktop, the Nepomuk project http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/ (IBM, HP, SAP, Mandriva among others, are participating) is building a very interesting solutions, PSWE is the desktop application (Eclipse RCP based) and have Nightly builds http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/download/, KDE is also working on having a semantic desktop, with colaboration from Nepomuk. One of the authors of Nepomuk, Leo Sauermann, did Gnowsis http://www.gnowsis.org/ from where some ideas were taken.

There is research going on in Europe in the area of next-generation PIM and collaboration. One project is the networked social semantic desktop, there's a workshop about the topic in November 2005: http://www.semanticdesktop.org/