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Gnome.org Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt
tempest303 writes "In order to help improve integration between apps on the Gnome desktop, Gnome.org is offering bounties for the completion of a variety of integration tasks. Bounties range from $15, for submitting new .ical files for Evolution 2.0's multiple calendar view, to $2500 for allowing synchronization between Evolution's addressbook with Gaim's buddy list!"
Doesnt the open source model succeed by encouraging people to collaborate and work together? It seems to me that this bounty concept will only motivate people to hide information from each other and work against each other in the name of money.
This is very interesting concept, image someone setting up a bounty server for free software (in general) where people could donate money to bounties on any free software project and hackers could claim the money ones they've solved it.
If there is one clear area where microsoft leads the field its application integration. Obviously the centralized control make this much more achievable.
In the long-term it may be more effective to build a high-level API to allow this integration. Perhaps some kind of built in RDBMS with a well defined schema for commonly shared application data. Several static tables to provide an area for common data (Contacts, Favourite websites/ftp servers etc) plus an extensible area for application specific data.
If the open source community had a well-defined process (shock horror!!) to request changes to the schema we could begin to provide the kind of application integration currently on offer by MS.
Integrating Gaim with Evolution is great but surely a strategy for integration email clients with IM clients in the general sense would be much more valuable.
Definatly a move in the right direction though!
According to IRC (ergo, its a rumour) Novell donated 25k to Gnome Foundation to setup this. Gnome Foundation then organized it and push it along with doing the screening and judging.
I didn't do this, now did I?
The downside of course is the only big Fondations (Apache, Gnome, etc) have money to spend because they get it from the industry (like Intel, IBM,...)
Small donations are the way of the future!
A fund should be set up where people can donate money that would be allocated to bounties, and they could either select on which task they want their money to be allocated to drop it in a pool of ressources that would be allocated through some kind of more or less democratic process (secure online polls/surveys?)
As far as I know this thing doesn't exist in the open source world. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I think this would be a great initiative. I'm not a programmer, but I use Linux both at home and at work.
Often, I find little annoying quirks with no immediate fixes, usually this sort of inter-operability issue.
I'd LOVE to be able to post up my concern with $10 or so, and see if more people would be willing to pitch money towards it, to motivate some programmer.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
...an adaptation of the Open Code Market idea. I'm glad the open source community is exploring more and more ways to make a living while creating free software.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
While there is no doubt that Gnome is visually attractive, has there been any empirical evaluation of Gnome from a human-computer interaction perspective, i.e. a usability study? I've certainly never come across any such testing in relation to Gnome, which is worrying.
I know this is likely to be modded as a troll, but...
It sure looks like Gnome 2 has been basically trying to turn into OS X. I remember asking on gnome-devel and gnome-list, back in the pre-Gnome2 days, why things like button order were changing between 1.4 and 2. After a lot of hemming and hawing the final answer seemed to be "because Apple does it this way, and they're known for user friendly design". The hoped-for Evolution + Gaim interoperation looks to be a clone of the way iChat and Mail.app work together. Looking through the bounty list, a lot of the UI stuff strikes me the same way.
Don't get me wrong; I think OS X is the best user interface available. But if they are not trying to do anything original, why don't they just close up shop and tell folks to "just buy a Mac"?
#DeleteChrome
Evolution's contact editor allows you to annotate a contact with the dates of their birthday and anniversary. However, these dates don't automatically copy themselves into your calendar...you won't see them when you glance through your schedule, and an alarm won't fire to warn you of a friend's upcoming birthday...Clearly, this is a travesty."
Indeed it is a travesty. And a travesty that exists between Apple's Address Book and iCal apps as well. You can get round it using software like Birthday Shifter, but this really ought to be in the main app's functionality.
Cheers,
Ian
This is just a variation of the Street Performer Protocol: People pool their money to fund the scarce CREATION of a unique work they want put into the public domain (rather than paying for artificially scarce COPIES of data).
--
Power to the Peaceful
It's a philosophic thing, a Zen thing: one should not use resources too much beyond the minimum which would solve the problem. This has nothing to do with sparing, it's more like ecological thinking...
:-)
Even if you can afford a powerful machine, using minimal programs is l33t. This does *not* mean working without graphics, or editing in hex. Really not.
It means being simple and honest, and not being vain.
Like Yoda, for instance.
My time isn't free. I've had to spend a lot of money to get my education, as well as a lot of personal time I could've been using towards something else. As any economics student could tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
This provides a nice feedback mechanism that allows non-programmers to reward programmers for "filling in" and doing what the non-programmers wanted to be done. It's a natural balance, and I consider it progress in how opensource is developed. One of the few sustainable ways we could keep Linus Torvalds working on the kernel 40 hours a week is by having IBM, Red Hat, et all contributing to his work, just like Red Hat employs Alan Cox, or any number of other examples.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
As others mentionned, this sounds a lot like the Open Code Market idea that has been discussed here previously.
:)
For $25k, Novell just bought amazing publicity. Perhaps an Open Code Market could attract such financing?
Big companies could even offer matching funds to any/certain types of OS software, letting users direct where the money goes. This would not only help finance and promote projects, but publicize the company and the Open Code Market.
And since I'm giving away business advice... it seems to me trade associations would also be a good funder for many targetted projects (I imagine that would be a good way to get funding for things like accounting systems, specialized database packages, etc...)
Someone please try those ideas out. I'd much rather make a living selling code that will be open
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Unless your clients can specify the requirements formally (and if they can do that, why don't they just write the program themselves in a functional language?), there's always room for a lawsuit. Thankfully, society has developed a mechanism for extremely low-cost, high-speed lawsuits: binding arbitration.
So what happens is the Client submits their signed spec (possibly after refining it with the Developer) and payment to a knowledgable (capable of understanding the spec) and trustworth neutral party: the Arbitrator. The Arbitrator signs the spec and then passes it on to the Developer. When the Developer thinks the project is done, they demonstrate it (possibly using signed code) to the Arbitrator, who then decides whether it satisfies the spec or not. If so, the Arbitrator pays the Developer and passes the code onto the Client, otherwise the Arbitrator corresponds with the Developer to work towards completion. If the Developer gets hit by a bus before the project is complete, the Arbitrator gives the payment back to the Client.
(Obviously the Arbitrator can get a percentage of the payment, a fixed fee from either party, or do the work pro bono.)
Er, maybe, but :
a) Gaim doesn't have an addressbook. It has a buddy list. That's a very different thing. Some buddies won't even have email addresses associated with them (which I guess is the key they're using).
b) Gaim and Evolution were developed separately. Gaim won't be using any shared addressbook until it's a neutral standard, I'd guess, with multiple implementations (KAddressbook/Evo) working together.
c) Integration of what EXISTS and WORKS NOW is infinitely easier than inventing a completely new address book standard, getting Evolution to use it, Gaim to integrate with it etc. This can be done (in fact *is* being done right now, I'm watching it happen) in a matter of hours, not months or years.
The free software idea imo works perfectly... to a certain extent.
What's different now is that specific things are expected in order to fit in a clearly outlined project plan.
Meaning: you have to walk in line. That's something you generally don't do for free. Hence the bounty.
Still I think this doesn't show a deficit, neither does it say anything about socialism - or in what sense the OSS is or should be socialist in nature. If it wasn't for all those "egotistic" flags already planted, we wouldn't have this discussion in the first place.
It just shows a clear limit to what you can expect people to do for free and when you have to offer incentives.
And that is something every government that is to an extent socialist in nature (not talking about failed communist/totalitarian experiments, talking about most western countries) takes into account as well. You're on the wrong track. It's not a weakness, it's a strength.
We should be glad there's a limit to what people do freely. Even if that makes running projects and governments more of a hassle.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Not only is this important -- I think it would really make a whole lot more sense if KDE, Gnome, and everything else shared a lot of common file locations. My mail in Evolution and KMail should be stored in the same place by default without me resorting to strange mbox/maildir symlink hacks. My Evolution and KAddressBook should use the same files, so I don't need to manually sync them. It doesn't make any sense that they aren't.
I get the sense that 2004 is going to be an extremely important year from a usability perspective, and it will determine whether or not Linux succeeds on the desktop. 2003 brought us the great applications that caused me to switch from Windows to Linux in the first place. Now we need to bring them together for Joe User.
I switched from Gnome to KDE recently. Why? Consistency. It sounds silly, since Gnome prides itself upon the consistency of the user interface and the comprehensive Human Interface Guidelines. But KDE has a very nice predefined widget set. While I hate to dredge up the file selector, it's consistent whether it's embedded in K3B, in my file manager, or an open/save dialog; while some people have gripes with Qt, it's an extremely elegant toolkit that makes it ridiculously easy to derive new widgets. I can right-click an image in Konqueror, and save it directly to my webspace via FTP or WebDAV because all the file selectors take advantage of my kioslaves. They're both powerful in different ways, and if they could find ways to leverage both environments' strengths in one another, Linux would be absolutely unstoppable.
So your solution is that the free software community should just give up, throw in the towel, and buy Macs? Nice try, salesbot. I've noticed that every time someone mentions a new open-source project, there's always at least one mac zealot telling them to "give up, you'll never be as good as Apple". Thanks a lot. I'm sure everyone here appreciates your patronizing attitude and total disrespect for other people's OS choices. You complain that Microsoft has a monopoly, yet you discourage others from creating their own software, instead trying to strengthen Apple's own mini-monopoly position (as Bill Gates Sr. said, "Apple is Microsoft's 'mini-me'"). It's obvious from the arrogant attitudes of mac users on these boards that if Apple ever gets more marketshare, they'll be just like MS, monopolistic, predatory, dishonest, and aggressive.
You don't seem to even realize that your suggestion transforms the Free Software community from a strong, vibrant, creative, community into a bunch of mass-market consumers, do you... I use a Mac, and I'd NEVER try to convince open-source coders to give up and jump on the bandwagon. They're the good guys. We're not. They have ethics and are working to make the world a better, freer place. I bought a Mac because I wanted to make porn DVDs from pirated downloads and because PowerBooks look cool. If the GNU people want to create something free for the world to benefit from, only the most hardened astroturfer would try to stop that progress and replace it with sales for Apple. Shame on you.