Havoc: Firstly, thank you for the kind words about Gimmie. I also think it is pretty interesting 
Secondly, I’m sorry I missed FUDCON. I had never heard of this event before. I had certainly never heard that Bryan was going to present work similar to Gimmie there. Nor did I see blog posts or project pages afterwards. In fact, when Bryan approached me a few weeks ago, he asked that the screenshots and design pages for Big Board be kept under my hat.
The point about Gimmie code being used in BB was simply to point out that those working it have intimate knowledge of Gimmie’s codebase. I was not trying to imply that BB was a fork of Gimmie’s code. If only! A fork would have at least meant sharing code and resources.
Regarding Web services, I’ve been explaining that this is the vision for Gimmie to several RedHat people for quite some time now. Jonathan as far back as December ‘05 at the OSDL Desktop Architects meeting. Bryan many months ago on IRC, when he expressed interest in Gimmie, and was first getting it running and playing around with it. I would have talked with you about it at FooCamp ‘06, but you were pretty negative on the prospects for the Linux desktop at the time. I should have blogged more publicly about it and laid down a clear vision, I suppose.
Of course you could have seen the work-in-progress state of Gimmie’s Web services integration if you had ever run it. Visible placeholders for Friendster people, Flickr photos, GMail contacts, etc have been there since the first release at GUADEC ‘06. Of these only the GMail contacts integration has been implemented so far, unfortunately. Trying to build a community to keep the project afloat and working to support the massive variance and instability between Linux distributions has taken up a lot of my non-work project time.
Lastly, I don’t buy the argument about the difficulty of merging the two projects. You say yourself that the BB codebase had just begun a few weeks ago. The designers, managers and developers knew about the vision and internals of Gimmie. You could have reused the existing code, or architected your code for reuse by Gimmie and others. You chose not to.
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I’m a happy gnome-user, and I have been for some years. I started with gnome 1.2, if my memory serves me right. Back then it was crap. Utterly crap. Now, it’s rapidly getting great. I think it is, because gnome developers has the courage to try and fail, but mostly because the developers collaborate. I have followed the development of Gimmie, and the concept really blew my mind. When I read about BB today, I see the same concept. The same overview of the users tasks. It’s great. But Gimmie started as a desktop app, and BB as some obscure sort of desktopwebapp-glue. Promising glue, but at this stage, obscure. Maybe Gimmie and BB should merge. Maybe not. But please, think of me. The happy user. I really, really appreciate the work all you guys put into Gnome. It makes my work-day easier.
Don’t let me down. Continue to make great software that makes me happy.
Please.
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What are the architectural changes we should make so Gimmie can reuse our stuff? Or, what are the pieces of Gimmie code that we should be using?
You have a vision for these questions, but I don’t see it yet. What would help me is specifics.It’d be good to start a thread on that on some mailing list, so we can get more of a conversation going. Point me to the list if it’s one I’m not on already.
Just raise specific technical or design issues and we’ll work them out.
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Alex, it’s people like you that make me VERY ANFRY!!! You’re tone of voice suggests that the BB developers MUST use your code because they have some similarity with your little project. Why can’t they write their own code according to their own vision of how they see things. It’s like saying that KDE should cease to exist because GNOME already has most/all of the same functionality. Open source software can only become better through competition not lack thereof. You seem to suggest that the only way the gnome-panel will be replaced is through your code base. I hate to break this to you but Gimmie isn’t all that nice and at this point it’s only one idea. I also have my own project that I am working on to replace the current panel. I have decided not to share my thoughts at this time because of people like YOU!!! I know that once I do you will attack it in the same way that you have ATTACKED BB and that is just plain sad for everyone. It would have been much nicer to hear words of encouragement from you for the BB project but instead you resorted to ATTACKS.
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@Havoc: You can subscribe to gimmie-list@lists.beatniksoftware.com. Where does BigBoard devel discussion happen? I’ll try to come up with a list of concrete recommendations after I learn the Mugshot code a bit more.
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BB is on the Mugshot google group, or I guess on desktop-devel-list or gimmie-list. Everyone involved will be on all of those.
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How do I browse GMail contacts with Gimmie? I just have a greyed-out button…
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@Used: You need gnome-keyring-manager installed, and the libgmail python library installed. If you restart Gimmie, and double-click the Account Settings entry, you’ll be prompted for a user/passwd.
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Please don’t get to web-servicey on Gimmie. KISS. It does what it does (replacing the panel) very well at the moment. At the very least, make any webservices additions optional.
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I don’t really see the big problem here. So gimmie had a good idea and a set of goals it tries to achieve. RedHat starts up a new project that shares some of these ideas and therefore they either have to use the gimmie code base, or at least they have to keep you in the loop because you thought of the same ideas?
One of the major assets of free software is diversity and having several applications giving the same features is quite common. Your recent posts just reeks of “omg lawl redhat stole my ideas”, while some free software zealots would probably just say “great! I hope it turns out good”.
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Kriberg,
I would rather say that the very big major asset of Free Software is that the code can be reused. And from a social and productive point of vue, it should be reused.Competition is great, when the projects have slightly different goals. But for now, let them see if their goals are enough different to split their path.
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kriberg: I don’t think anyone’s worried about “stealing ideas.” The concern seems to be that Big Board is diverging from Gimmie when they (arguably) could be contributing to it or working on common code to be re-used by both projects. Alex thinks that combining efforts would be better *for the community*, while Havoc disagrees.
I think everyone involved shares the same goal (produce the best possible desktop), and the current disagreement is just about how to get there.
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Sorry, that last post was me, not kriberg.
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