Category Archives: Web 2.0

What Google+ is missing

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When Google + was announced I was very much excited at the prospect of using a more open social network that would also bring something different and refreshing to everyone. I do not really like Facebook. It’s not just their privacy policies, or the never stressed enough notion that if you’re not the customer then you must be the product -that also applies to Google +- it’s the website itself. I grew increasingly frustrated of Facebook, I got tired of what I consider to be a lack of elegance (the violet to indigo-blue palette is getting old) and a constant will to confuse users in pushing them to reveal more and more personal data.

For sure I do use Facebook, I am “on Facebook” just like many other people. But I also use Google Plus and Diaspora. While Diaspora aims at being something really different and relies on a fundamentally distributed model, it is in its infancy and I will not discuss it in this post. I will focus on Google + instead.

I had big hopes for Google + and still do. I still believe it is a better built, more powerful and less harmful service than Facebook, but I also believe that while any service has shortcomings of its own its operator/owner tends to correct them over time by bringing in more features for instance, something Google does not seem to be doing, hence my points below:

  • Tastes and colours should not be discussed as everyone has his or her own tastes and yet… I still like Google + much more than Facebook for that matter, however, something seems not all right in Google +: could users customize the look of their page(s), or are they condemned to the everlasting white background? (on the other hand you could point out that simplicity in design never hurt anyone).
  • Profiles: it’s amazing how hard it is to see someone’s profile. For this Facebook tends to be much simpler and clearer, Why can’t I just access someone’s profile in one click, instead of searching its own activity feed?
  • Sharing and circles is probably what Google + does best, although in many ways it was a Diaspora’s concept that was itself hinted in the discussions around the DISO concept (the early days of a distributed social network) but there is something, specifically about sharing, that I do not understand: sharing beyond circles, such as sharing on Twitter or StatusNet, let alone on Facebook is not possible. I know about the hack for identi.ca and twitter that works by sharing with one specific profile but why would I want to share that with this probably sympathetic, yet unknown person? The most surprising part of this is that neither Google, nor Twitter, nor Facebook, seem to be willing to provide that feature (the same goes for sharing from Twitter, StatusNet and Facebook to Google +). This issue alone, to me, is a major one, and I am pretty sure it’s the same for many people. Because of that posting on Google + is somewhat of a solitary exercise; you have to repost specifically on Google +.
  • More distributed content : obviously Google does perform data mining on the content we share on Google + and any of its other services, that’s not news to anyone. But while Google does handle data portability seriously (a big plus!) it might benefit from enabling some sort of “sandboxes”, that is, private spaces that could be self-hosted, yet easily connectable to the “central” Google + network. This would also allow many people to both feel more secure and enrich the overall content aggregation scheme; you would be able to use Google + as a content transport layer in between “pods” or peers and still using the big social network itself if you want to.
  • A Google Wave like timeline : as people become increasingly aware that their past posts and interactions can be monitored, reused by others or simply by and for themselves, an easy to use timeline, something completely missing on Facebook, might be useful and fun to use.
  • A professional page or job search as well as other specific services might also be useful; but it seems that Google + is very much like other services launched at Google: an experiment first, a product afterwards. I am usually fine with this approach, but Google + needs attention and extra features if it wants to stay and grow instead of being dumped and filed such as Google Buzz was. I really hope that won’t be the case.

A few thoughts on innovation

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I was invited the other day to a conference about innovation in the information technology sector. There was nothing remarkable about that event, except perhaps that it led me to voice an opinion I held for years: I do not understand what people are really talking about when they talk about innovation, at least in software, that is.

It might be odd to write this, but if there’s any concept that’s both fuzzy and dangerously misleading in the software industry, that would be innovation. I have read for many years and listened to people explaining how to “stirr and create innovation” in a company or in a community. Maybe these words have been used for lack of a better term; but I still don’t see how you can create innovation. I think you might be able to stirr it somehow, as it’s already a humbler verb. But frankly, can someone out there tell me what does innovation mean in the software world?

In general terms, I would define innovation as the big and small changes constantly leading to a change of the art in any given field. I think that’s pretty much what one usually understands by that word. So why could this not be applied to software? Precisely because software is rarely -if at all- the result of big changes happening all of a sudden and by accident. Software development usually happens at an incremental pace, whether openly so (think about the agile development practices) or even when there’s a structured corporate environment favoring traditional code reviews and quality assurance processes through stable product development cycles. Software is not produced by accident. Software is the result of process, and in theory accidents do not happen there. In fact, I could also point out that incremental changes or a period of technological incubation might be observed right before the emergence of almost any given technology. Take the medieval rudder for instance: it’s been rumored to have been imported in Europe around the 12th century by Chinese ships, but there are tracks and evidence of previous try-outs by European sailors and shipyards to design wooden rudders and articulate them with a complete mechanism. Similarly, it is hard to say how “innovation” happened in the sixties when the U.S. decided to send manned flights to the moon, but the wave of small and not so small innovation that was the result of this huge project is still visible to everyone (think of the Tefal pans, among many other things).

Thus there are, I think, two points that need to be highlighted: First, innovation does not happen all of a sudden if the field of software field and more generally ICT. It is a set of processes that ultimately lead to new software, or software that’s supposedly not as bad as the former state of the art. Second, what’s unclear is how -to quote several people I listened to- innovation “happens”. It sounds sometimes that innovation is a mystery or the philosophers’ stone that require care and secrecy to happen. Yet in the software industry, it does not work that way, for all the marketing and bells and whistles that come out of software vendors do not brush aside the fact that even inside these corporations software development is a set of very well defined, but non-public, processes.

Innovation is not a mystery and I don’t think that you can track how it works. You can assume that a certain set of circumstances and an environment letting people code start-ups emerge and Free & Open Source Software projects grow will ultimately translate into something that someone, whether a journalist, consultant, politicians or venture capitalists will call innovation. Anything else besides that, innovation sounds more like vapor and magical boxes. This should probably express what I feel about software patents, by the way.

One last thing: Innovation is different than progress. Progress is usually applied to fields that do not necessarily belong to science or technology; it can be more a perception and may concern society as a whole. Yet the interesting thing is that while progress seems to be an even more elusive term than innovation, you can actually tell progress from regression or stagnation: people perceive it almost immediately, however relative it sometimes may be.

Enjoy the beginning of the Holiday season!

October wrap-up

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This was quite a busy month. I was happy and exhausted by the LibreOffice Conference which went despite my immediate perception quite well. When you’re part of the organizers you tend to see all the small and not so small things that go wrong, and regardless of what the other participants notice or experience, you end up feeling that it’s just not as good as the others see it. Be it as it may, I would like to thank all the participants to the first LibreOffice Conference. It’s been very moving and heartwarming to see all of you, after a year of adventure and perils we have gone through. I would also like to thank all the organizers of the LibreOffice Conference, the community volunteers of France who made it possible, Sophie, Marie-Jo, Christophe, Jean-Baptiste, our hosts, La Cantine and the IRILL, and our sponsors. Among them, a special mention should be made to the Paris Region (Région Île de France) with whom we announced several exciting news. It’s all in the press now but I think that these announcements highlight how far we have come in one year. More importantly, it also shows how a Free Software community can work as it should, that is, with diverse contributors and a variety of stakeholders in a sustainable fashion. Of course, all this is far from being built and all the dots are not being connected. This year will therefore be exciting as we will continue to build and grow our community further.

I would like to come back shortly on two of the announcements we made, regarding the porting of the LibreOffice platform (not the interface) to iOS and Android, as well as LibreOffice OnLine. While these two projects are at various stages of completion and have different requirements they help to show not just the vitality of our community, they also shed some light on how we manage to embrace a bazaar-like approach to development and think about what I call our “development ecology” (which some could really translate into development strategy, but I think it’s more subtler than that). What you see through our online office suite project and platform porting announcements is that we are taking some great care in doing something paradoxal with respect to our stated intent to change the codebase as much as possible: we keep our codebase intact. Note that we do change, upgrade, clear and trim the codebase, but we do adopt a singular codebase approach where the code used in LibreOffice OnLine, and the underlying code on iOS and Android will essentially be the same than the one inside the LibreOffice Desktop suite. In other words, we do not release a product here and something completely different there, even if in the future, a specific work on the interface for tablets will have to be made (we won’t use the existing interface on these as it would not make sense).

This “universal” approach makes sense not just for “market growth” and adoption, it has two benefits. The first one is to pool the resources as much as we can, because maintaining millions of lines of code here while maintaining a million of new and different lines of code there would not require around 3 hundred developers; it would actually require 3 thousands of them. We thus keep the codebase as a coherent whole (hence Rob Weir’s confusion answered by something like “just pull the git”) while we will enjoy in the future the second benefit of being able to make changes (and even important ones) in one codebase, thus replicating the changes for the online version at the same time as they will be made available in the desktop or the tablet version.

Exciting times are ahead. Stay tuned!

Starting 2011 : a progress report on LibreOffice

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Now that everyone is back from the Holiday Season the LibreOffice mailing lists and repositories are again bristling with activity. In fact we did progress in several ways and I would like to give a brief update on what we did and what we’re working on now.

  • The Document Foundation has joined the OpenDoc Society. The OpenDoc Society is an international community (based in the Netherlands) that promotes the use of open standards such as ODF and helps various initiatives related to open standards. I think it illustrates our unwaving commitment to ODF -despite what you might have read around the Internet these past weeks- and you should expect more news to come about our commitment to ODF in the coming months.
  • LibreOffice RC3 has been released; will we be releasing the final version soon? Suspense! In any case, give it a shot, and bring us your feedback!
  • By now you may have noticed that we do indeed have a new and beautiful website. I would like to thank everyone who worked hard on it. In fact since the Steering Committee of the Document Foundation wanted to improve the clarity and the organization of the work around the website it has decided to appoint a team of four persons who will effectively further the development of our website, each of these persons being responsible of one specific area: content, site design, user experience and site administration/infrastructure.
  • While we have a final draft of our Community Bylaws we hadn’t implemented them. Part of the reason was a lack of time, and part of the reason was that we felt that until we hadn’t properly incorporated our foundation we might have been led to amend them for legal reasons. Yet some people pointed out that we could at least start to implement them and progressively enact them as to enable a clear governance and leadership of the community. It’s a good point. So we started by appointing the first Membership Committee, while the Engineering Steering Committee will be formalized very soon.  The Membership Committee is in charge of managing our contributors, who in turn have the power to elect the Board of Directors, run as candidates for various roles, etc. It is in fact this process that defines the fabric of our community, and it’s therefore a crucial one, for almost everything else will depend on contributors running our project.
  • Much in the same way we were lacking a trademark policy. We were really missing one, with people coming to us asking for the permission to use our logos and names and also a few people misrepresenting themselves as LibreOffice or the Document Foundation. Here’s the stable draft; we’re waiting for legal reviews on it.
  • We also started to work on the incorporation of the Document Foundation. As we have chosen to incorporate an actual foundation in Germany, the process will take time, effort and money. We will keep you posted on this.
  • We will be present at several shows soon, throughout the world: the FOSDEM in Brussels and the SCALE in southern California: come and visit us!
  • Last but not least we just received the news that the former “OOoAuthors” team who was writing quite a lot of good user documentation for OpenOffice.org has changed its name to ODFAuthors, working now on manuals and documentation about LibreOffice as well. Congratulations folks, we look forward working with you !

Radical Innovation is needed for GNU/Linux distributions

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There’s a certain movement these days in the world of GNU/Linux distributions.  I think we are experiencing one of these moments that starts with a question that has been asked and heard many times -should distros differentiate themselves in order to survive? & aren’t there too many distros out there?- and ends with a much more serious question: Innovating in the world of GNU/Linux. Rest assured this is not going to be that sort of rant where we conclude that “Linux is the copycat of other OSes” just like we will not, in fact answer the question of the pretendly too many distributions or their differentiation. That is, I will not really answer these questions; and the reason I won’t is that I think these are all bad questions that either miss the point or show a certain lack of understanding of  FOSS and GNU/Linux in general.
I guess by now all of you have heard of Mageia, the Mandriva fork. But these news overshadowed something else that is a developing situation
elsewhere and matters perhaps even more: OpenSuse.

In a nutshell, OpenSuse has been breaking away very slowly from its main sponsor, Novell, for about 2 and a half years. The first visible sign of this -which really was a weak signal nonetheless- was the decision taken by the community to switch back to KDE as their preferred desktop instead of Gnome. Of course, just like Mandriva/Mandrakesoft, Suse had always been more KDE oriented than  Gnome. Yet Gnome is where the business, the stability, and theenterprise applications are supposed to be found, and on Gnome lied Ximian, the Groupwise integration etc. Then the OpenSuse folks started to open a brainstorming plan in order to define a new strategy for OpenSuse, apparently independent of what Novell was planning to do or sell with respect to that. This strategy brainstorming session ultimately reached its conclusion a few days ago:

https://lite.co-ment.com/text/lNPCgzeGHdV/history-version/RE3kSeg3LGI/

As you will see, what OpenSuse intends to be is a general-purpose, desktop oriented distribution; which means at the same time that nothing will change in its actual orientations and that it even departs from its usual enterprise polish it always had had. But what this also means is that we will not see OpenSuse or Suse on handhelds or tablets or any other new markets. This is a significant information, especially if you see that whoever will buy the Suse part of Novell in early 2011 might not be able to have its own way if  it does not take the time to engage with the community: The OpenSuse project seems to be very autonomous and not at all ready to fall into whatever new goals any future sponsor might want to achieve. And if it takes a fork to dot it, there’s the Mandriva case.  But always remember that OpenSuse has a very strong userbase and market share, although it’s been declining ever since 2009. What will be interesting nonetheless will be what the future owner of the Suse brand will want to do and how it plans to innovate. OpenSuse can be a general-purpose distribution; the user base is there, but the value might be hard to create if there’s no real business story to tell behind it.

Back to Mandriva / Mageia now. It’s perhaps to early to say anything about Mageia, except they seem to be made of some pretty skilled  people; and that’s usually not the kind of engineers you find easily on the market. They claim to continue what Mandriva as a distro was good at, only in a better way, and without the perceived historical failures of the past management teams.

Interestingly enough, I think Mageia is bad news for Mandriva, and it means that Mandriva should find an innovative business model and acquire/change to a new focus. Let me explain. Reading the Mageia website and going around the Internet, here’s what I understand:
- Mageia realizes the need to be a linux distro for other kinds of
terminals (tablets, handhelds, etc.)
- Mageia has crafted two strong bulletpoints in its storytelling that DOES hurt Mandriva starting today: Mageia “is” Mandriva, since it is
made of the engineers who have coded Mandriva ever since a few years; second, Mageia is “better” since they understood what “is wrong”: the management of Mandriva. (Nobody ever found anything to complain about Mandriva as a distro, it’s still one of the best on the market).
- Mageia is soon to “take over” the market: everyone on the forums  seem to dig Mageia; and in a sense, it’s what the Mandriva community and the French FOSS community was expecting.

If the last claim sounds bold, think again: what is the value of having a Mandriva desktop outside of a corporate support contract (same goes for a server) now that there’s Mageia? The way to create value for Mandriva is to depart from the traditional all-purposes distribution model (which still does not mean they would have to “cut” the actual distribution) and innovate first at the distribution level, and then, if possible, go up the ladder by growing a very skilled technical team able to innovate as an operating system, either by contributing upstream again, which it hardly does anymore these days, or innovating on the user experience just like Ubuntu does and is now clearly intensifying as a strategy.

In the case of Mandriva and Mageia, what might become interesting to watch is the potential race between the two twin-distributions; one is now almost an empty shell, deprived of its developers, and the other one has developers but no resources. In any case, it’s time these two get a real shot at innovating, for the sake of the entire Free and Open Source Software ecosystem.