Shane Fagan

Ive been looking forward to this game for months now its looking good and is on linux. Have a look its really scary though. http://www.amnesiagame.com/

I was thinking about this issue a lot. Games have a hard time on Linux with multiple sound architectures, different package management systems and not many ways to deploy their app easily. So the answers to these are use pulse audio, make a few different packages for different distros (which is expensive) or just deploy it on Ubuntu (which would piss off other distros) and deploying it at the moment is hosting it on your own website as a download.

In maverick we are getting a marketplace in the software center to sort out the deploying part and i presume thats going to have a centralized payment system so thats good for the game developers. My idea is that we can take this further. My idea is make something like like battle.net or steam (kinda).

Ok for those who don’t know steam is the payment management and distribution system for games and battle.net is just a payment management system for blizzard’s games.

So we have an SSO and now a marketplace, distribution and centralized payment system for maverick. Why not expose some info to games developers? The info that is needed depends on the game but if its something like WoW you would need the account info and if they paid for the game to log you in.

The idea is kind of a win win situation, the user wins because there is no login and its a simple system to handle everything for them and the developer wins because he doesn’t have to code a complex login system and he gets the payments handled too.

Thoughts?

Ian Howl +1!

Hey all I just thought id give a little update about my Quickly Vala template. Firstly the code is here.

I have the project stuff mostly working but its no where near what the python template is yet. At the moment its just one main window (I dont have the preferences or other windows that the regular quickly projects have) a simple run to compile and run the project’s code. At the moment if you use other libraries other than gtk+-2.0 and gmodule-2.0 and the auto imported glib you have to edit the run.sh file manually and add “–pkg “. This isn’t the greatest system but the problems with vala’s package imports is hard to get around. Ill look into it better later.

So the create and license should be working at the moment and instead of running “quickly run” you go ./run in the project directory.

Oh and no get text support just yet ill fix that sometime this week.

It still hasnt been pushed to the main quickly directory as its not quite ready yet but progress is being made.

If you want to help out you can email me or message me on #quickly on freenode IRC. If you know Vala well id be happy for the help.

Update: Initial gettext support is added now so it generates a pot now but isn’t being used in the code properly yet im working on that now though. Also there is a big bug with it getting every string in the Vala code for translation and if some of them are translated it would break the project.

Also I made a bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/quickly/+bug/626315 add to it if you have any features I should do or find any bugs.

I was looking back on my previous posts about Adobe needing to open source stuff and I wondered…..

Was I being too hard on Adobe just because Google are so generous?

The perception is that every company can do what Google does and open source everything they can and even go as far as to buy other companies to open source their products.

Adobe three core products
1. Flash
2. Creative suite
3. PDF

Flash is an open specification but to open source the client and the encoders would mean it might reduce the current and future revenue that might come from it. Flash may seem bad/unstable/horrible/down right useless now but historically and currently its on nearly all of the computers in the world. Even though HTML5 is going to nearly take away every thing that Adobe pioneered for the web I still think they are good for gaming on the web and the DRM is what some content providers want for their video and audio. It is also one of the best ways to make rich cross platform applications which I believe is on par with Java. So I don’t believe that Flash is dead yet I think it is going to need a big switch in direction.

So I think there are business reasons for them not going “full whack” open source so they can keep control of the Flash platform (preventing non Adobe forks of the platform and encoders which is where the money is) it is an open specification but its very hard to make a compliant implementation.

As for its other products:
PDF is an open specification (just like what they did with Flash) and is starting to be used everywhere. Adobe still has the most complete readers and editors but the others aren’t that bad.
(The PDF situation is comparable with the Flash situation but Flash is a lot more complicated to do and Adobe will always have the best products for doing things with Flash)

Creative Suite is really really really good and its such a shame that its not on Linux and I don’t think they will ever open source this. I don’t think that Adobe would live if they didn’t have the Creative Suite to themselves.

So my conclusion is that Adobe aren’t too bad really they could be a lot worse and a lot of their decisions are very understandable in my opinion. I think that we hold all of the large companies to the shining example of open source that is Google (and Sun before the acquisition although Oracle contribute a little they don’t have anywhere near enough open source “street cred” that Sun had towards the end).

Well I was sitting at home and I thought hmmmmm .deb isn’t very obvious what it does couldn’t it be .install or something easier to figure out at first glance? I know that people don’t exactly see the .deb files but still if a third party software developer ships .debs and the user doesn’t have a clue until they double click in the hope it does what they want.

And why do we have a Debian directory for packaging Ubuntu applications really shouldn’t we use Ubuntu instead or use an install directory or something?

Names are important and if you look at things like file extensions even on Windows and Mac you would see some problems in the naming of extensions. On Windows you have .exe files and .msi files for application installs and for Macs its .dmg from what I remember. So none of us have an extension that makes it easy to know what the files actually do.

So whats stopping us from doing it better? It really shouldn’t take too many patches to change the names and it would make things a little bit more obvious at first glance for people who are new to the system. (or well the .debs maybe the other thing is just a vanity thing)

Oh and I thought I should update everyone on the progress of getting the funds together for my new computer im on €25 so still a long way to go so please help id really appreciate it all the info is here.

Ok my computer is making this really bad sound that means the fan is broken. The sound came and went a few times but its not stopping now. I cant get any work done because I get a headache listening to it. Its a broken fan obviously from the sound but its old anyway and really crap.

Im trying to get things done like changing the interface for updates of the software sources program to the specifications of the design team (which is almost done by the way and is in a branch) and make a quickly vala template (started but not anywhere near done) for this ubuntu release cycle.

Just so people dont think im trying to cod them out of some money heres a video.

Id like to get this computer from zareason. So thats my goal $ 799.00 or € 617 if I cant get that much ill figure something out or just get a different computer for cheaper.

So if you can spare a small bit of money id be really appreciative.

Donate

EDIT: WordPress strikes again it ruined the donate link so I had to do it like any normal link so its fixed now ^
EDIT 2: I fixed some bad writing on my part sorry about that.

Why oh why do we always have to be at war about the small things? Technology is such a hard place to be at the moment with many mine fields and cold wars going on for so long. Copyrights, patents, closed source vs open source software and just politics harming development.

Its just business its not personal so its really a war between business and ideals.

So for the first battle is open source vs closed source when you want to make money.
So you open source the code now you have some serious problems with piracy people using the software without paying. So I have to ask how exactly do you make money and keep the code open?

The only code I can think of thats open and makes money is the id software engines that are used in many of the worlds biggest games. The way they do it is they ship older versions as free software and only charge for commercial use of the engines and don’t ship anything that can be used without extra code being written. So then other games a few of them probably are in the repo at the moment use this great engine for free and its awesome that id software do that. The problem is they only ship the older versions of the engines and keep the two newest proprietary and open source them when it gets old. So its only semi open source but still the best example of selling open source software at the moment.

The other side of the coin is the idea of shipping a free product and offer support services around it. This is the Ubuntu model of doing things and is nice but in the sort term doesn’t make money because it requires building a community and a need for those services.

So back to the war how can a multi-billion dollar product succeed if all the code is open for people to exploit?

Patents are a known issue with software development at the moment for companies and community development efforts alike. My opinion on this is that patents for technologies other than software is ok but when people file dumb generalized patents and sit on them is what is wrong at the moment. People are so afraid to write creative code and do cool things with computers because they are so afraid of a patent troll coming in and suing them out of existence.

The last thing id like to rant about is politics. Politics is something that is very funny to me and is something that we have a lot of problems with in the open source movement. In particular Mono has been a big topic over the past few years. Ive had long chats about mono and im guilty of doing some miss informed posts and had great conversations that cleared up some things about the issue for me. The result is that im not against mono because its creation by Microsoft or anything but because it takes up a lot of space on the cd for not many applications. If you want to use mono I don’t mind I think the only thing holding it back is the politics. On a personal level I prefer python or vala for apps that I make.

So what do you all think? Love is a battle field and so is technology. Oh and I haven’t written for a while so hopefully im not too rusty

EDIT: I removed the word piracy because its not really pirating if the code is out there. Its in the spirit of open source to share and use the code. What I meant really here was if you are charging for software in the per copy ideal and you open source the code who will pay for it.
Oh and doctormo made a great blog post at the same time that answers a lot of the issues I bring up about business so have a read here.

I thought I should give a rundown of my 3 favorite mailing lists.

Ubuntu devel discuss there always seems to be some weird stuff discussed here its just one of those lists that gets a good mix of people talking.
Ayatana this is the ubuntu design mailing list and its crazy busy but always interesting.
WHATWG making the web better.

Hehe I finally got updated to wordpress 3 and I made a new look have a look if your interested I did it really quickly. Its just the new default wordpress theme with a few changes.

Well theres a lot of buzz around the iPad, Android (on tablets) and palm’s OS on HP computers. So what do we (Ubuntu) have to do to make a good touch OS interface?

1. Big buttons
Not everyone has tiny fingers and its hard to close/minimize/resize a window if the buttons are really small.

2. Gestures
Apple have done this right with their new mouse and with all their touch interfaces. We have nothing like this yet but Synaptics is working on this.

3. On screen keyboard
There was some talk about this at the UDS.

4. Integration
The thing at the moment is that none of the main apps in the Gnome desktop (I dont know about KDE on this) arent at all suitable for touch. Apps like Gwibber are ok because its just a textbox and a few buttons but when you look at applications like evolution that have very complicated interfaces you have lots of problems.

5. Speed
If you look at the specs of the touch computers coming up the are fairly low spec. We figure pretty well here we are fast but some applications arent. Firefox is a prime example of this it takes 10 seconds to load on my computer and that is way too long (Ok my computer is fairly bad but its better than most of the touch devices coming). Open office, Gimp and Gwibber are also good examples of apps that dont load all that fast.

6. Content
This is where we fall down we have music but most of these pads coming up are best used for reading books and playing little fun games just like the iPad. Of course you could say you can get lots of ebooks across the internet but most of them use DRM so we cant view them. And we do have lots of cool little apps but none of them are suited to this environment.

With Unity I think Ubuntu is heading in the right direction in terms of interface for touch but will we address all of the issues above very soon I cant say, maybe we will be ready in 2-3 years for the big time in this space. I cant wait to get my hands on a Ubuntu touch device though.

2010 so far has been awesome.
1. Ubuntu 10.04 was released and its the best Ubuntu yet.
2. Google released WebM (Vorbis+VP8).
3. Steam began porting their engine to Linux.
4. WebGL and other HTML5 technologies are gaining ground.

What all this means is the barrier is lowering and lowering for full open source adoption. With all these great technologies in the browser and on the desktop that support our open source efforts we can rest assured that regular users can move away from proprietary software. Oh and porting steam to Linux lowers the barrier to moving to Linux so although its proprietary software itself it helps users to not get regressions from moving and we should be very very happy about any help we get.

The innovations in web technologies support everyone but mainly this support helps Linux.
If everything on the web is inter-operable then why pay for an crap OS? If all the awesome innovations happening is open source how can Microsoft compete? The answer is even with all of its money Microsoft cant compete long term and with this web innovation happening no one should pay for an OS.

The challenge to Ubuntu is to leverage web apis on the desktop but build fantastic desktop applications for the times when you aren’t connected. Integrating the web into the Ubuntu desktop experience is the challenge for the next 10 years.

Leandro mentioned Sheldon’s favorite Linux based OS. One of my favorite TV shows from years ago mentioned Ubuntu Warty back in the day. The video is a nerd fight about which is better Ubuntu or Mac OS.