The Mugshot team at RedHat has been working deep underground and making great progress as described by Havoc’s latest announcement. I first learned about what they’ve been up to a few weeks ago when Bryan Clark contacted me to get feedback on his Big Board project.
He showed me the Big Board mockups, and we talked a bit about them.
My first impression was just how much this all looked like Gimmie. Bryan said it was on purpose, and that they were using a lot of ideas from Gimmie.
This raised some questions from me…
Why isn’t the Mugshot team just contributing to the existing, open Gimmie project? Instead they’re developing something from scratch completely in private. Both hope to tightly integrate the Web into the existing desktop experience by allowing access to all the information stored on remote sites. Both are Gtk+-based and written in Python.
Why didn’t anyone tell me they were working on a Gimmie clone? We could have worked out some of the more difficult problems together, instead of reimplementing the same things. Common APIs for accessing Web-based data like GMail contacts, LiveJournal friends, or Flickr photosets (for example) could have been created. This would have been a first for any desktop platform.
Does tying the ideas in Gimmie to a Web service provided by RedHat justify a new project? I find the idea of storing profile data on a central server pretty interesting, and I would gladly have taken patches to support it in Gimmie. If anyone had asked, that is.
Why haven’t I received any code contributions back in any way? The team obviously knows all about Gimmie — they’re reusing some code. Worse, when I first spotted this in the Mugshot code repository it was being illegally relicensing under a custom “Mugshot Client License”. It’s now only illegally relicensed under the GPL from the LGPL, I believe, though it’s hard to tell from the repository layout.
Why hasn’t anyone stepped up to publicly support the ideas in Gimmie? It could have been a strong motivator for contributors to have well-known people like Havoc or Bryan express our seemingly shared belief in integrating the desktop with the Web. That a team at RedHat has been tasked with implementing it lends credence and momentum. This kind of public support sure would have made life easier for me.
Instead I’ve been working by myself to have the ideas in Gimmie accepted by the community. It’s never been easy as an outsider working in my free time. It has meant a large amount of effort to implement a baseline of existing GNOME desktop features to ease adoption. That effort and community building has taken precious time away from implementing my vision of a truly Web-friendly desktop, and I could have used some help.
… This all made me very upset. Bryan couldn’t understand why. Didn’t I want all the ideas I’d been working on for over a year to be ripped off without credit, attribution, or contribution?
No, as it turns out.
What I want is for RedHat to work with me to accomplish our common goals. And I want to avoid more of the massive duplication of effort the Mugshot team has already committed in private.
But in the weeks since we talked I haven’t received answers to any of my questions. Nor have I received any code contributions, or been contacted in any way really.
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I understand why you ‘re upset, but it could be very wise and clever to forget your pride for a little moment and ask joining their team. Then you’ll be able to explain and spread your idea of community (http://www.beatniksoftware.com/blog/?p=55).
I love Gimmie, but I think it’s not enough mature for everyday use. So, from my user point of view, it would be a great thing if there is a big team behind Gimme/Mugshot/Whatever.
And maybe a day, I will have some time to help you too…
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Excellent questions. Although, LGPL section 3 allows relicensing under the GPL.
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Why isn’t the Mugshot team just contributing to the existing, open Gimmie project?
They didn’t want to and they don’t have to.
Why didn’t anyone tell me they were working on a Gimmie clone?
They didn’t want to and they don’t have to.
Does tying the ideas in Gimmie to a Web service provided by RedHat justify a new project?
They don’t have to justify what they do to you.
Why haven’t I received any code contributions back in any way?
They didn’t want to and they don’t have to.
Why hasn’t anyone stepped up to publicly support the ideas in Gimmie?
They didn’t want to and they don’t have to.
You’re not in a position to insist these people do anything.
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I wanted to wrote a comment to bryan’s blog but didn’t in the end. I just wanted to say that YOU are right on the spot. What RH is doing here is everything but good community work. Remember when Novell went underground with their xgl and compiz stuff? People where shouting and crying because of that…
Anyway, gimmie is much more usable than the big board will ever be I think. Giving the opportunity to integrate web apps you use any way *optionally* is nice I think, but building something entirely around this concept and even loking it into a redhat server thing feels bad… Best think is bryan’s call for “join us, gnome community”… Perhaps *they* should re-join the GNOME community now
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When I first saw Big Board this morning, it actually struck me that it was more similar to Dashboard than Gimme, but obviously it owes a lot to both.
I do think that it’s a real shame that this isn’t being done out in the community, and if they’re building on top of Gimmie it looks even more bizarre a decision.
I tried Mugshot a little while ago, and it really looks to me like a solution in search of a problem. In many ways, I fear Red Hat are doing what Eazel tried to do with Nautilus, and tying the GNOME desktop hasn’t been a successful strategy in the past. I guess this is their attempt to make Mugshot more relevant to people.
Brian: of course, they’re not obligated to do anything you mentioned. But, it would be much more polite and in the community spirit if they did some of those things willingly, especially if they’re working on Gimme-based code. It’s simply good manners, and I think Alex is well within his rights to feel upset.
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I also support you and gimmie. you are right to be disapointed.
redhat in _this_ case is wrong (or simply not smart)
instead to call the gnome community to join them, they should say the reverse : to join the gnome community.
not good PR here.
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@James: Thanks! I’ve struck out the “illegal” bit after reviewing the LGPL.
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I’m just saying that if you wanted people who use your code, like Mugshot, to send contributions back, to support you and so on, you should have specified that in the license. You chose LGPL, and they’re following those terms. If you wanted something more you should have said so when you licensed your code.
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@Bob: It really has very little to do with licensing, and the reused code in question is small and easily replaced. It has more to do with being a respectful member of a community, and the social implications of developing open source projects.
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This is unfortunate, and while they’re certainly under no obligation to contribute to Gimmie, it feels like a lot of wasted effort to just start yet another project like this without sharing ideas and helping to solve the hard problems earlier in the development.
So far, we have the GNOME panel/main menu, Gimmie, SuSE’s Slab, and now Big Board. It seems to me that the best thing, if you want to actually help GNOME, is to work on something that already has buy-in by some groups, rather than invent a new system that really kind of feels to me to largely be a promotional thing for Mugshot (and I still haven’t really figured out why Mugshot is beneficial to me, but I may just be missing something).
In the end, not all of these projects are going to end up being the new interface for GNOME. One of them might, if there’s enough buy-in, and maybe having lots of choices will give everyone new ideas, but I still wish that the alternatives were developed more in the open. Gimmie has been, and Gimmie has even evolved over time to better meet people’s actual needs (like going from a panel replacement to a panel applet).
As Alex points out, there are a lot of hard problems, and I think it would be nice if everyone could sit down and work them out. That doesn’t mean all projects have to be condensed, but more open communication and collaboration on the hard stuff can only benefit everyone. And especially these days, we need more of that. There’s been a few cases of “open source-friendly companies” spending too much time developing large things in vacuums and then aggressively pushing them when they decide the world is ready to know about them.
I realize this is going to happen from time to time, and I realize that not all projects can begin open, but I think when a project is this big and has this much impact on the desktop and comes from a group of influential open source developers at a big company, being open and working with other projects in some form early on is important and can only help everyone involved.
It’s late and I’m rambling.
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I think this behaviour (of big companies, Novell did the same) just sucks.
I hope you (Mugshot and Gimmie) can find an agreement and work out something together!
Best of luck.
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That sucks. Quite frankly, I’d much rather use Gimmie because it’s more open. I dislike it when big companies such as Red Hat and Novell do this because they have the power to easily shove smaller projects like Gimmie out the way and tell the world how great their product is because it’s backed by a big corporation.
P.S. Gimmie is great. I use it as a main part of my desktop
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This comment about Havoc’s blog posting is interesting:
http://www.j5live.com/?p=348#comment-17659It argues that intergrating Gnome with web services such as flickr is *worse* than propriertary software. A good read.
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Well Gimmie, for me, has been one of the first things that I have used and thought, “Wow, this is the way it should be.” But for instability on my Feisty Fawn setup, I would not even use the Gnome panels.
It is extremely disappointing to see the RH team not collaborating. Obviously their overall goals might be different, but there is a large overlap in terms of the needs of both projects.
Please do not give up on Gimmie. It is gaining fans and momentum. It is a rare thing – desktop innovation – and I can’t wait for it to be ready to run my Gnome desktop.
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Calm Down!
RH has the right to do as they please here because its highly experimental stuff and they need a free hand to experiment with especially as the end product might well suck – are you sure you want to take the same risks with Gimme?
On another note, you should stand up more for your project because regardless of what anyone else does if your work is better then the others become irrelevant.
Take a look at what *little me* is doing with tracker vs big corporate Novell’s Beagle – I am winning the war here because my stuff is turning out to be better designed so the moral of the tale is “even the smallest person can make a difference” and the great thing about open source is “size does not matter” so you wont get overshadowed by bigger companies.
So my advice is to forget what the big boys are doing and concentrate on making your own stuff rock.
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@Jamie McCracken
I’m one of the people rooting for you! I can’t wait for the day that tracker gets included in Gnome proper and we can finally say goodbye to the old “organize-by-folders” mentality… Tracker in Gnome, good intergation from applications like F-Spot, Rythmbox, etc., the world will be sweet again
@orph
For me, the future of Gnome docking will be made from the foundations of Gimme, gnome-dock, awn, and possibly kiba. Keep up the good work!
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Welcome to OSS land, isn’t that exactly what they says it gives you? Do whatever you like and do not have to “contribute” if you do not like to? Fork if you like and do silently ignore the OA if need should be? RedHat wants just one thing making money and be the “number” one. And they probably like to see themselves as “the good open source corporation” against the evil empire…
I fully can understand your dislike, but you have decided to go the way you like and they would not share it with you.
Regards
Friedrich -
After checking out what Gimmie is and what that other thing is, I see virtually no connection. They are conceived from different principles and most of the commenters seem to have completely missed the point. It’s not about start menus, or desktop integration. It’s about making the line between what is on your computer and what is on the network (ASP solutions) to disappear.
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I just wanted to note that I find the righteous tone of some commenters unnecessary. No one asks for grief on their own web log.
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[[off topic, don't read if you don't to---]]
Hi,
I’m using the Gimmie packaged on Feisty Fawn and I just wanted to thank you; it’s very interesting and incorporates everything I love about the Mac OS X interface in a very different and GNOME-like package. Of course there are a few things mainly keyboard focus issues–eg., if I type then search automatically, rather than having to move my mouse into the text box, clicking, then search and not updating when new programs are installed unless I restart Gimmie but I know these’ll be fixed one day. They’re very minor.I’m not quite sure how to use tracker yet (b/c of the difficulty of nautilus integration currently, I guess I’ll wait till GNOME or Ubuntu integrates it) but I know it’s extremely promising.
Thanks to the both of you (and other) developers for doing all this great stuff for GNOME and the free desktop.
C -
HP has a history of doing that kind of crap, remember the Inti (http://sources.redhat.com/inti/) project fiasco ?
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I think it is unfair to say it was developed in private. There is an open wiki and mailing list and I believe Big Board was a culmination of discussions held at the last Boston GNOME summit. A lot of people did not “get” mugshot at first and so I think they just dismissed it and didn’t join in which is why Havoc’s post sounds like something brand new. The fact is what you had was a bunch of developers who just stuck their heads down and did what they do best, develop. They weren’t looking at the politics or trying to map out a mine field of peoples personalities. They just wanted to push the envelope and had the resources to do so. If gimmi and mugshot get embroiled in some sort of emotional flamewar I think I will lose faith in the GNOME community. There are issues to work out, certainly but it is not something that should become a quagmire for GNOME.
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Alex seems already to have received a fair amount of support here, so I’m just going to add my own voice to the cacophony to say that I agree with you. Some people seem to have fixated on what Red Hat is obligated—legally, as far as I can tell—to do, and I think that that misses the point entirely. I think what Alex is talking about here is polite behavior in a community. A good neighbor does not walk into your garage and take your lawn mower because he needs it, even if he is legally allowed to do so. A good neighbor asks to borrow it; a great neighbor then returns the lawn mower with a full tank of gas without having to be asked to do so. I know the metaphor is weak, but I’m sticking to it.
Nice work, Alex. Stiff upper lip and all that. ^^
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The bottom line for me is that there’s no clear way these projects are in fact the same thing or could be combined while preserving the core ideas being tried out in each one.
If other people do see such a clear way, then let’s see it – that’s all part of the prototyping process. Draw a picture, or say “this file can go over here and we put this patch in here and that’s how the code will now work.” Better yet, show us the code, though that isn’t required.
In the meantime, it’s just people saying “one is a panel/sidebar/dock thing, the other is a panel/sidebar/dock thing, so it’s the same” – or something. Frankly when Bryan told me Alex was freaking out a few weeks ago, I was more surprised than anything else.
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The only really solid complaint is the “why didn’t they tell me so we could make common API” one. They wanted control, but if they’d “contributed” by muscling in and taken your project in directions you didn’t want, or forked it, you would have had an even bigger gripe. Given that, the rest of your complaints are “it would have been polite to go the extra mile”.
I think you both owe each other an apology, if you’re interested in making nice; and if not, the community will survive.
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I followed up here: http://cgwalters.livejournal.com/
Doesn’t seem like pingback is working so doing it manually.
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@orph
Havoc has stated that he doesn’t see much overlap and that BigBoard is just a prototype so don’t be so worried about intentional offense. Just talk to him directly now that you have his attention.@Havoc
I think you’re missing some things. While the GUIs might be quite different, both panel/sidebar/dock implementations share many of the same concepts. So *if* it’s possible for some low level unification to happen (even with SLAB), it would be a good thing and help unify the GNOME platform (think GNOME 3.0) and allow for other types of panels suitable for other types of environments (e.g. cell phone-sized screens).Here’s a question for both of you. Couldn’t something like tracker be used as a common backend and common plugin interface? Before you dismiss this out of hand, consider this. There’s no reason that temporary data or people couldn’t be considered files plus metadata in a virtual file system. This would allow for other types of entities that you didn’t even account for such as IP telephony (with directory and usage status support) integration to be instantly available for all panel objects in their personalization/people sections once the appropriate tracker plugin is created.
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I have to say it really pisses me off that you claim some kind of private conspiracy on our (and by our or Red Hat you really mean me) part. I first approached about Gimmie and how we could work together back in the begining of February. I tried to learn about what you were doing and start working together on your mailing list… oh but wait you don’t have one. Then during our conversation Jeff Waugh offered to set it up for you on gnome.org which you had never done because you thought it was too difficult. Where is the Gimmie mailing list? I don’t know what the issue was setting it up, but there still isnt’ one. How do we contribute? Do I have to hunt you down on IRC every time?
Here’s our mailing list, anyone can join and participate
http://groups.google.com/group/mugshotHere’s our wiki where all the Big Board information is online and updated, anyone can create an account and begin working there
http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/So tell me Alex, what was the Mugshot team, and by that I mean me, supposed to do? Should I have tried calling your cell phone? Is it my job to hunt you down so we can start trying out some ideas we have?
I was open from the begining, I even have our first IRC chat logged if you don’t remember how I was trying to get hooked into the Gimmie project (to which there is no way to participate unless you can find orph on IRC). The fact that you are trying to make me look like some kind of idea stealing, project stomping, backstabbing asshole pisses me off to no end and I appreciate you actually being honest about what happened.
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Tracker is even more experimental than Gimmie, so I see no good reason for that.
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