openSUSE shows how to promote a release

Mar 14, 2013 GMT

Over the years, I've written and talked several times about how free software projects should approach journalists. At times, I've been able to single out publicists who do an especially professional job, including Jennifer Cloer of The Linux Foundation and Sally Khudairi of The Apache Foundation. However, mostly, I've spoken in the abstract. I never had a detailed example to offer -- until last week, when Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE's community manager, contacted me about the new 12.3 release.What makes the efforts of Poortvliet' and the rest of the openSUSE marketing team stand out? To start with, he contacted me with a link to DVD images six days before the release. By contrast, if the...

Should I donate to KDE?

Mar 08, 2013 GMT

Normally, I evaluate free software projects in terms of the functionality they provide. However, with many projects experimenting with crowdfunding, increasingly I find myself looking at them the way I would a non-profit to which I am considering donating. I want to know, for example, how much of the money a project collects goes towards administration, and how much goes to project activities -- in other words, if the money it receives is being well-spent.This is the perspective from which I approached KDE e.V's financial statement for 2012 -- I wanted to do a spot-check on how well KDE was run in case I decide to donate to the project.KDE e.V. is the non-profit organization that...

Consumer and productivity computing

Feb 28, 2013 GMT

I'm not sure when I started. But in the last six months or so, I've been making a distinction in my mind between consumer and productivity computing as a means of clarifying my thoughts about desktop interfaces.This is a distinction that hardly needed to be made in the first twenty years of the personal computer. Each workstation was released with the largest hard drive, the fastest video card, and the largest amount of RAM available, and was used for every task that users had. For years, laptops were less powerful, but that had to do with convention and the limits of miniaturization more than anything else; besides, it was accepted that you gave up some of the power for the convenience...

Review: Biella Coleman's "Coding Freedom"

Feb 23, 2013 GMT

Studies of hacker culture are rare. Serious studies untainted by hype are rarer still. For both these reasons, E. Gabriella Coleman's Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking is a welcome contribution to the subject. The result of over a decade of participant observation, Coding Freedom may not always be a precise survey of the free and open source software (FOSS) communities, but at least the resulting map bears some resemblance to the territory it is supposed to represent. For that reason alone, it has met a friendly reception since its publication early in 2013 (appropriately, under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license).Coding Freedom is...

"I'm looking forward to seeing your code"

Feb 14, 2013 GMT

When a non-developer criticizes free software, sooner or later a developer will respond with, "I'm looking forward to seeing your code," or something similar. It's a reflex response, but one with increasingly less validity today.Fifteen years ago, such a response made sense. Non-programmers were a minority in free and open source software (FOSS), so expecting someone to reinforce their criticism with code seemed reasonable. The chances were that the person making the criticism could reply to the challenge. They might not get their code accepted if they had annoyed too many people in the project or lacked connections -- those being the limits of the FOSS meritocracy -- but they...

Rethinking the Office Suite

Feb 08, 2013 GMT

I've spent much of the last week exploring the recent releases of Calligra Suite and LibreOffice, and listening to the unlikely rumors of a Linux version of Microsoft Office. I haven't concentrated on office suites so intensely for years, and, as I examined Calligra Suite's and LibreOffice's very different layouts and approaches to productivity, I found myself thinking: What should a modern office suite consist of?That isn't a question you hear any more. The great days of innovation in the office suite were the early 1990s. Since then, ideas about office suites have stagnated. Oh, Microsoft Office introduced the ribbon interface, and Google Docs has made collaboration and syncing files...

GNOME Gets Formal, Public Usability Testing

Jan 31, 2013 GMT

By definition, usability testing is difficult in free software. The reason is obvious: usability testing typically requires face to face observation of users, which is hard to arrange when most developers are interacting remotely. That's why Aakanksha Gaur's recent blogs about GNOME 3 usability caught my attention -- to the best of my knowledge, the last major usability study of GNOME took place twelve years ago, although small, informal studies have been done since.Gaur is graduate student studying interface design at the National Institute of Design in Bangalore, India. She is also currently an intern in the Outreach Program for Women, mentoring under Allan Day. With Day's assistance,...