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LCA: Addressing the failure of open sourceLCA: Addressing the failure of open sourcePosted Jan 18, 2012 16:35 UTC (Wed) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654)Parent article: LCA: Addressing the failure of open source
I am not sure this is a problem of presentation only.
Maybe it's just there is now a need for more open source projects targetting general purpose applications. Very recently, I wondered a few minutes on which project I could try to help if more time was available. (Yeah, I know I was dreaming.) Well, I was hesitating between a Unix kernel security for technical fun and KMyMoney for pure usefulness as a regular user. Maybe we simply need to put more work on end-user applications.
(Fun mode ON)
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LCA: Addressing the failure of open source Posted Jan 18, 2012 17:27 UTC (Wed) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]
If you want to focus on end-user applications, KDE is a good place for you :-)
Especially, with mobile devices, apps and so on in mind, Plasma Active ( http://plasma-active.org/ ), is one of the most significant projects we currently have in FLOSS. It's basically using the plasma libraries, known from the KDE desktop, to build the user interface, apps and widgets for mobile devices like tablets etc.
Alex
LCA: Addressing the failure of open source Posted Jan 18, 2012 19:07 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Are there shipping devices?
LCA: Addressing the failure of open source Posted Jan 18, 2012 20:43 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
Yes. The GTA04 can run plasma-active.
See here: http://blog.the-leviathan.ch/?p=308
and is shipping. See here: http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04
(yes, this is still under development so it isn't perfect yet).
LCA: Addressing the failure of open source Posted Jan 24, 2012 20:36 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] The GTA04 is a motherboard replacement for the Neo Freerunner or the Openmoko Neo 1973. Therefore you need such a device to install the new motherboard. I hope they get beyond having such a rarefied audience.
LCA: Addressing the failure of open source Posted Jan 25, 2012 0:41 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
True, but you can still buy the Neo Freerunner, and you'll see at the link I posted that you can order a complete phone (not sure how many they have parts for, but > 0).
Yes, I hope they/we get beyond such a narrow audience, but you have to start somewhere, and making cases is *hard* (though there have been small successes even there e.g. http://www.shapeways.com/shops/slyon)
LCA: Addressing the failure of open source Posted Jan 25, 2012 0:57 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] Best of luck - we really do need this.
LCA: Addressing the failure of open source Posted Jan 18, 2012 21:45 UTC (Wed) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]
Maybe I misled you. KDE or Plasma Active may have some hack value indeed, however, by citing KMyMoney, I wanted to focus on the "money" part only.
This is a useful personal finance application, for... *personal finance* (to me at least). Maybe that's where the effort should go now: finance apps, office apps, administrative file management for... (whatever is useful for the general public), geographical apps, education, etc. There are several already, but nothing that can be as bullet proof (and varied) as for C programming, network file transfer, etc. I am even sure these things could have some hack value if only engineers could figure easily on themselves what is truly useful.
LCA: Addressing the failure of open source Posted Jan 27, 2012 16:31 UTC (Fri) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]
> Maybe it's just there is now a need for more open source projects
> targetting general purpose applications.
+1 And we need to collaborate better. There are oh so many "lite" applications and applications that got started over and over, many in the same problem domain. If developers would collaborate more on projects rather than whipping up yet another unfinished thing and then moving on we would be SO MUCH further. I've met this many times working on some project where someone comes a long sees some detail they don't like and then goes off on their own. Getting people to contribute commonly has gotten easier with better distributed development tools - but we haven't made any progress on the human factor. And I have no idea how to approach that problem.
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