Development

KDE Bodega

"App" stores are all the rage these days, with everyone from Apple and Amazon to mobile phone carriers and free software projects trying their hand. KDE's Aaron Seigo recently announced Bodega, which is a platform for publishing and distributing digital content of various sorts. Bodega is initially targeted at Plasma Active, KDE's touch-device-friendly mobile user interface, but making it more widely applicable is definitely on the agenda. The first version of Bodega actually shipped with Plasma Active 3 in mid-October "and people are, indeed, using it", Seigo said.

Bodega goes beyond just serving up "apps", as it is meant to handle anything that can be delivered over the network, including books, music, artwork, services, and, yes, applications. Plasma Active's "Add Ons" application uses the Bodega client code, which is based on lots of KDE-specific libraries and frameworks. The server, on the other hand, doesn't use KDE or even Qt, but instead uses node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis, none of which are particularly KDE-related. One would not normally expect to see a program like that as part of the KDE repository.

But the whole project—client and server—is being proposed for inclusion into the KDE project. Seigo addresses questions about the server side in a blog post. He notes that the recently adopted KDE Manifesto makes it easier to see why Bodega makes sense as a KDE project. In the past, it was more difficult:

But, using the Manifesto and the related Principles of a KDE Project, he makes a convincing case for bringing all of Bodega into KDE. "Now it is quite straight-forward; we simply have to ask, 'Does it push forward KDE's technical agenda, and does it meet KDE's documented principles and commitments?'"

Bodega is organized around storefronts, each of which can give a different view into a collective pile of content items, organized using tags. The example Seigo uses is the KDE project itself, which could run one Bodega instance that would allow each sub-project to have its own "catalog" (i.e. storefront view). That catalog could contain items from the common pool and items that are specific to the sub-project, along with content from elsewhere on the net (e.g. free e-books from Project Gutenberg).

Purchases are made using a points-based system, which is modeled on online video game stores. Those points can be earned in a variety of ways, or they can be purchased via credit card. Importantly, there is no requirement for pricing the items at all. Free (as in beer) Bodegas are definitely part of the plan.

The existing client integrates well with Plasma Workspaces, Seigo said, and an HTML 5 version is likely. Right now, the client can install applications (via PackageKit), Plasma packages, e-books, and wallpapers, but it can be extended to install other kinds of content.

In addition to putting Bodega out for review, and possible inclusion into KDE, Seigo is, of course, looking for more contributors. There is a fairly extensive, if rough, "to do" list on the home page, which is one place to start. He is also interested in feedback, naturally.

Since Bodega is free software, one of the first complaints heard was about the color name. In this case, though, the complaints may be somewhat more than just bikeshedding. Evidently, depending on one's location, "bodega" can mean anything from a small mini-market or grocery store (likely in a Spanish-speaking area) to a winery to a cheap place to drink and get drunk. The latter is an association some would rather avoid. While that meaning is used in several places in Europe, there was not any huge push to change the name—at least yet.

More substantively, Josef Spillner suggested two possibilities to add to Bodega: services and physical goods. Basically the idea would be that Bodega could streamline delivery and payment options for people to sell or share different kinds of physical goods. In addition, services like online storage or ownCloud synchronization accounts could be integrated into Bodega.

Both of those ideas seemed plausible to Seigo. In fact, work has already been done on integration with ownCloud. Physical goods have requirements like shipping and inventory management that certainly could be added, though they are likely to be further out, he said, "but i won't exclude it as an idea for the future".

Overall, Bodega is an interesting vision of a free software marketplace. It is clearly targeted at many different kinds of uses, for lots of different projects and, perhaps eventually, companies. While it ticks the "app store" checkbox for Plasma Active, it is aimed far beyond just that.

Comments (11 posted)

Quotes of the week

— Jon Masters

— Android 4.2 reference manual

Comments (7 posted)

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

It's official: the GNOME project will be dropping the GNOME 2-like fallback mode in the 3.8 release. "We've come to the conclusion that we can't maintain fallback mode in reasonable quality, and are better off dropping it."

Comments (130 posted)

Matplotlib 1.2.0 released

Matplotlib 1.2.0 has been released. It is the first version of the Python 2D plotting library to support Python 3. Beyond that, it adds support for PGF/TikZ output, 3D trisurface plots, streamplots, new features for Tripcolor, boxplot, colorbars, and contour plots, and more. "After months of hard work by a veritable army of contributors, I'm pleased to announce the release of matplotlib 1.2.0. This is the first time we've released without the assistance of John Hunter, who is sorely missed. I hope this is at least a small way to say thanks for all of his great work."

Full Story (comments: 3)

Open Letter from the Hildon Foundation Board to the Maemo Community

Tim Samoff has penned an open letter to Maemo and MeeGo community members on behalf of the Hildon Foundation Board, a new entity hoping to pick up the role vacated by Nokia when the company switched to the Windows Phone platform. "It is the Hildon Foundation that will oversee the transition of the Maemo Community away from Nokia and into the hands of the community. Of course, the Foundation is also very concerned with ongoing development within both the Mer and Nemo projects, so facilitating their future is also quite important."

Comments (3 posted)

The Shumway open SWF runtime project

The Mozilla Research blog introduces Shumway, a new, open-source Flash runtime. "Mozilla’s mission is to advance the Open Web. We believe that we can offer a positive experience if we provide support for the SWF format that is still used on many web sites, especially on mobile devices where the Adobe Flash Player is not available." Source is available on Github.

Comments (30 posted)

Development newsletters from the last week

• Caml Weekly News (November 14)
• Haskell Weekly News: Issue 250 (November 7)
• Perl Weekly (November 11)
• PostgreSQL Weekly News (November 11)
• Ruby Weekly (November 8)
• What's cooking in git.git (November 9)
• What's cooking in git.git (November 13)

Comments (none posted)

Phipps: Stop patent mischief by curbing patent enforcement

At InfoWorld, Simon Phipps responded to Richard Stallman's WIRED essay on limiting the effects of software patents, via a counterproposal that he says will "adjust the system so that these patents cannot be used to harm the software industry, which to date hasn't needed patents to drive innovation." Phipps' proposal is to "make software patents only enforceable against implementations of standards where the patent was declared in the standards process. All other software contexts should become off-limits for patent enforcement." Nevertheless, he said, there will still need to be other measures to completely fix the software patent mess. (Thanks to Davide Del Vento)

Comments (51 posted)

Seigo: ending the cults of personality in free software

On his blog, Aaron Seigo has a thoughtful look at the role personality cults play in free software. Why should we worry about what Linus Torvalds runs on his desktop, he asks, as it is just one data point—one that gets hugely inflated because of who Torvalds is. "Let's step to the side and consider this from a different angle: Imagine that someone made Linus' perfect desktop environment. Something that satisfied him entirely and which he could happily talk about whenever he felt like it. Would that environment be interesting and useful for the general public, or would it be something great for kernel developers and grumpy-heads like Linus? It could go either way, really, because (once again) the fact that Linus liked it would not be useful information when held in isolation by itself."

Comments (71 posted)

Mena-Quintero: A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

Longtime GNOME hacker Federico Mena-Quintero reflects on the kinds of complaints that occur frequently in and around free software communities. In a sharply worded blog post, complete with animated cat GIFs, he looks at some history, and adds a bit of ranting about complainers, bloggers, journalists, and so on. "We think, "good riddance" when someone threatens to stop using Gnome. (And our next thought is probably, poor people in the next project, who are going to suffer this person soon.) [...] All of those poisonous people are relatively easy to brush away. The crazies. The slashdot hordes, the peanut gallery. We make names for them — we encapsulate them, give them a name, go up one level of abstraction, take a gulp of Pepto, and move that named entity into a mental /dev/null. But they leave some residue."

Comments (235 posted)