Thanks.

• Every year I read four or five magazine articles claiming that this year will be “The Year of the  Linux Desktop.” Every article so far has been wrong, but I’m starting to think that this year and coming years will be “The Year that Millions of Users Switched to Linux and Didn’t Even Realize.” After Dave Richard’s talk last year in Boston, I realized that there are some governments and large offices using Linux, but I just didn’t grasp how many. This past week I spoke to a few people about the topic, including Sebastian Faubel, a few employees of the South Tyrol Free Software Center, and others. All of them spoke about the push to switch to FOSS for financial reasons and how Linux is now being used in places that one would never expect.
• If we want this year to be the year of the Linux then we need to start developing differently. Linux needs to stop being the domain of geeks. We need to start targeting older users who are intimidated by computers. This means that we need to stop making assumptions about what users do and don’t understand. We need to focus on simplicity and usability.
• It’s a critical moment right now. As crazy as it sounds, lets stop focusing on 99% of all computer users. Sure, they’re important- and we definitely shouldn’t do anything to stop them from switching- but they’ve already had their “Year of the Linux Desktop.” Lets focus on the remaining 1% of all computers- some of the computers found, lets say, in government offices. We can get Linux installed on them if we develop with those computers in mind.

Many thanks go to the GNOME Foundation and Canonical for sponsoring the hackfest and to the South Tyrol Free Software Center for organizing and hosting it.

I’ll see you in Bolzano!

Ubuntu’s DVD downloads need to be updated. Right now anyone who clicks on them will start downloading Hardy Heron.

A few highlights:

1. It’s very easy to extract (or log) lots of useful information on the desktop. However, to date, no one has actually succeeded in doing anything useful with that metadata.

2. People have developed successful user interfaces for very specific types of metadata. (E.g. F-Spot, Rythmbox, etc.) Perhaps the approach that Zeitgeist should take is to develop totally separate user interfaces for browsing web bookmarks, local files, and other types of documents. After perfecting each user interface separately, we can slowly merge them into one application.

As much as we’d like there to be one user interface that works for everything, there are differences between different types of documents that we can’t ignore. (For example, users usually have many websites in their history which can make the small number of important local files in their history seem to be less significant.)

3. Stick to well-defined use cases and make sure to justify code that you write.

On a different note, I just heard an amazing lecture by Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) this evening. Overall, the past week at Weizmann has been truly wonderful- I love the lab I’m working in and the entire place is growing on me fast.

Unfortunately, sleeping (somewhat) does take priority over open source projects I’m working on, but that doesn’t mean that everything will have to wait until Amos De Shalit is over. I do plan on continuing work- especially on Feedgeist- but it’ll have to be done at a slightly slower pace.

RepRap 1.0 Darwin

Here’s the description from the website:

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown above – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend…

Has anyone built a RepRap before?