“FLOSS” (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), and “FOSS” (or F/OSS, Free and Open Source Software).
I attended the Floss Unconference fest yesterday at Manchester Conference centre (a location I had planned to use for BarCampManchester2 due to their ability to do overnights and excellent warren like structure).
The event was reasonable but not well attended, which was a shame. It needed about another 30 people to feel more busy and active. Not quite sure why people never came out for it…? But to be honest I only spotted it by hearing a tweet from Teknoteacher. Anyhow, at the end of the day there were lightening talks and I jumped at the chance to talk about software which really needs to be developed on Linux. I’ve adopted this post to apply to most Floss type things…
First up…
- What happened to Say my name desert? The developer moved to announcefy but frankly its a downgrade and I’m just about to uninstall it because they’ve been talking about plugins for yonks and they still don’t exist. Instead I just installed Call Announcer which seems to do what I want, but we’ll see…
- In the same vein, locale what happened? I’ve switched to the hyper geeky Llama which operates based on radio cell towers so in theory it shouldn’t eat so much power as locale. But to be honest I’ve not really had time to mess with it and tweak it.
- Rescue time is great but the Linux client is hell to install and run. But to be fair at least their is one and the developers do recognise it. This fits perfectly with the quantified self movement and needs more development effort!
- Widgets on Ubuntu need a rethink… Screenlets have been very quiet in years. Although to be fair, OMG! Ubuntu might have a solution to put KDE widgets on to Ubuntu.
- I mentioned data portability apps and what I was thinking about was the state of web pipelines such as Conduit, Yahoo Pipes and If this then that. If this then that has certainly kicked up the dust in this area but I really want to see more focus here, specially in the FLOSS community
- The home server market is still there and slowly growing, but still theres no real traction in the FLOSS community it seems. Microsoft stopped innovating too which is perfect time for the FLOSS community to get a leg ahead. Someone shouted out about some project, but later when questioned admitted it was vaporware right now. If/when Amahi finally shift to Ubuntu I may switch to using that, because thats the best I can find.
- Why can I not find a Google Tasks application? Right now I’m using the Webframe widget (hence my bug bear with widgets) but it doesn’t cache for offline support, so its not a good solution. I hear Gnome 3.4 has a webOS style system, so you can run HTML5 apps natively but right now all I can find is stuff about Waylands which runs apps in a web browser. On the Unity front there seems to be some traction… If only Tasque or Tomboynotes would sync with Google Tasks!
I’m sure theres plenty more but these are my thoughts right now…