OH at OSCON

OSCON is the largest conference containing the broad open source community, so it’s good to see plentiful OpenedHand appearances at this huge event.

First up at the Open Mobile Exchange was Jenny Minor on Handwave to Hardware: A Product Story Bit by Bit, the story of how Vernier created the LabQuest from product concept to shipping product (24,000 units and counting!) in 18 months - all based on Poky Linux. Later that afternoon Dave Neary and I gave a impromptu 10 minute brief on GNOME Mobile - what it is, who’s using it and how to get involved.

On Thursday, Ted Gould was kind enough to mention Clutter in his talk, ‘Ubuntu Desktop Technologies’, which, despite the title, was about all the cool technologies you can use to build apps for any upto date GNOME based distro, so it was lovely to have Clutter included in that mix! Slides here - Clutter is on slide 14.

On Friday Tomas and I gave our presentation on ‘Clutter: Breathing Life into User Interfaces’ (slides, example code). The talk was well attended and there were plenty of questions before and after, so it will be interesting to see if some more Clutter based projects start appearing over the next 12 months.

At some point Ken Gilmer was cornered by Shaun Powers of Linux Journal for a video interview about the BUG and Poky. Nice one Ken - we love Xeyes too

Like any big conference at least half the value of OSCON is the hallway conversations, catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones. The Redmonk gatherings were great to meet friends old and new, as well as the always weird Sun party - this year in a (carpeted) hotel car park, featuring outsize trike racing, and inter-project sumo wrestling. It was fun to be part of, and we look forward to taking part again next year.

OpenedHand World Tour continues

Øyvind Kolås will be talking about GEGL today at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Wrocław, Poland.

Samuel Ortiz will be discussing the OpenMoko project at LinuxDays 2008 on the 21st May in Geneva.

We’re hiring

Lots of fun things happening at OpenedHand at the moment, so we’re looking for some more people to fill out the team. Currently we’ve got six open positions;

• Junior Kernel Developer
• OpenEmbedded/Poky Engineer
• Clutter Application Developer
• Senior UI/UX Designer
• Junior Designer
• Student Intern

If any of those take your fancy or you want to find out more then please visit our employment page.

GTK+ Hackfest in Berlin

We are proud to be one of the sponsors of the GTK+ Hackfest in Berlin. Whether it’s planning the vision and future of GTK+ (more info), the Windows backend (X2) , Cairo and fonts, gtk# and WebKit, or general discussion, it’s great to see such attention paid to one of the cornerstones of the GNOME and GNOME Mobile platform.

The hackfest also coincided with the 6th anniversary of the release of GTK+ 2.0.0 so congrats to all the GTK+ contributors. Also a big thank you to the organisers of the hackfest for putting together a successful event.

Poky 3.1 ‘Pinky’ released, and a new Poky website.

Poky, our GNOME Mobile focused platform build tool, has been receiving much love and attention with OH towers of late, which has lead to the lovely new Beaver powered Poky website which coincides with the latest 3.1 ‘Pinky’ release of Poky platform builder.

As always there are plenty of new features in the new release, but what I’m most excited about is the ability for Poky to generate standalone SDKs together with a plugin for the Anjuta IDE which integrates the SDK, QEMU machine emulator, GDB remote debugger, and OProfile profiling tool. This means that device manufacturers will not only get a superb platform builder to tailor a Linux system for their device but also get some great tools to help stimulate 3rd party development (or porting) of applications on their device. There’s a screencast of the plugin in action which gives a good demo of the features and more info at the project page on the OH Laboratories site.

The new website features a new logo, the beaver mascot, new screenshots and also the new Poky Handbook - we’re just putting the final touches to a printed version of the handbook which will be available soon.

Clutter 0.6.0 released

Just a quick note to point out the 0.6.0 release of Clutter. There is tons of juicy technical stuff in the release notes but some highlights include an new improved event handling system, scriptable interface definitions, and more GL features made nice in the shape of initial support for FBO’s and an abstraction of GL shaders. The Clutter Blog also covers the release and has some movies of Clutter in action.

Open Source at CES

CES, the largest consumer electronics show in the world, held every year in Las Vegas, has just wrapped up. Sadly I’m wasn’t there, but luckily Doc Searls has been at CES keeping track of Linux and Open Source stuff at the show. As usual there are more Linux based devices that you’d realise or that many press outlets (save Doc and a few others) would let you know about. A smattering of devices from ‘Oh, so it runs Linux’ files; Motorola’s settop box and RAZR2 V8, iRobot vacuum cleaners, Dish Networks VIP722 PVR, a whole host of Intel MID devices.

What was interesting is that this seems to be the first year that truly open devices started appearing. Our friends from OpenMoko were there, as were Dash with the Dash Express a GPS based on the OpenMoko hardware. (NB, like Doc, I’d like to give kudos to OpenMoko for running Linux on the laptops on their booth).

Also it would seem Buglabs were one of the hits of the show (they were nominated for Best of CES by C|Net). Their hardware looks really cool with the BUBbase and BUGmodules adding near infinite possibilities for creative usage. I really liked this photo from Doc of Angel Roman’s setup (Angel is a Buglabs engineer), featuring a Lenovo X61 running (Ubuntu) Linux, a Nokia N810, and a Motorola (Linux based) ROKR phone, and the BUGbase and modules (on the left).

Software above the level of a single device

Tim O’Reilly has repeated (the very repeatable) quote from Dave Stutz,

“Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come”

This line came at the end of Dave’s parting letter to Microsoft, after he resigned to become a winemaker. I’ve always loved the quote and struggled to understand what it might mean for (open source) software and device development. Tim’s canonical example is three way system of iTunes Music Store (web service), iTunes (PC based software), and iPod (hardware).

Of course the level of integration Apple are able to achieve is made somewhat easier because they control all three layers and have no interest in providing interoperability. In this light Dave’s quote always makes me stop and think about the many devices that are or could be in my home that don’t communicate or work together. Fileservers, laptops, PMPs, cameras, phones, PVRs, game consoles, stereos, all create, store, or consume various types of media. Yet they don’t all talk to each other or even use the same media formats. It doesn’t seem likely that consumers will get all these devices from a single company, hence cross device & manufacturer interoperability has to be the way forward.

For non-networked devices, such as typical PMPs and cameras the laptop will be the integration point, and for Linux, applications such as Rythmbox, Banshee, and F-Spot do a great job of storing, cataloging, and annotating various media. All three work above the level of one device by integrating with web services and using existing media sharing protocols.

Increasingly all devices will become networked and the problem gets significantly harder. I might want to browse photos on my camera via my the computer attached to my TV, or listen to a podcast I downloaded to my laptop on the stereo in the kitchen.

The UPnP standard is aimed to allow applications and devices work together with little or no configuration. We created the GUPnP project to help make software that uses UPnP as easy as possible. UPnP won’t solve all the problems - there’s always the danger that a manufacturer will have a bad implementation, or try to embrace and extend, and there is always DRM to raise it’s ugly head. But UPnP offers the most comprehensive system for connecting these devices together.

Already there are many devices that support the UPnP standard, and hopefully, now that GUPnP has stabilised, we start seeing more use of UPnP in Linux applications, so that one day my house might truely be humming to the sound of software above the level of a single device.

Linux for consumers

Havoc Pennington has a great post, Linux for Consumers, pointing out that it’s non-desktop devices that have the best chance of getting open source software, and in particular GNOME, into the average users hands; Nokia / Maemo Tablets, OpenMoko, OLPC and more tenuously the Kindle, and Android (neither of which are fully open source, yet).

“For years now I’ve complained about the term “desktop” - an evil word that blinds us to more interesting opportunities to use free software in consumer-facing products……..if a free software OS gets in front of a substantial number of consumers, it will be in the form of these new and different products, not in the form of a strictly traditional desktop operating system.”

I would recommend reading the whole thing, but, as you would expect, I agree with the main sentiment. As Havoc points out there is also the Zonbu, gPC, and EeePC, providing alternative visions of what a limited purpose, net centric, desktop client might be. The downside, as Havoc points out, is

“…they are all running one-off, hacked-up software that’s specific to the hardware……If this type of thing catches on, eventually there’s significant consumer benefit if the software is “hardware independent” and there’s a relatively stable platform used by as many people as possible.”

I think the challenge for Zonbu, gPC, and EeePC is that building from a common stable platform, rather than one off hacks, is just the first step. For long term success and progress, the contribution to and joining of the wider community is the best way forward.

I think this was the challenge that Maemo, OpenMoko, and OLPC platforms faced at the respective starting points and through their development. All three projects use the same underlying GMAE platform, but manage to provide a unique user experience for their target use and audience. And they all find ways of contributing back to and being part of the core GNOME project while each building their own independent communities and contributors. This is an inexact science and certainly there’s things we could all do better, but I think these projects are all on the right track.