By RangerRick, on June 25th, 2007
So recently, Planet KDE has had a huge number of posts about the Windows and Mac ports of KDE and I just wanted to put in my $0.02.
I'm the primary (or at least, most public) person working on the Mac port, and I am also employed by an open-source company, and I would just like to say I agree with Aaron's sentiment. I am both a Mac supporter and an FLOSS supporter and while I can't speak for the Windows port, I can say that I have no intentions of the Mac port trying to take anything away from the community nor from open-source software as a whole.
There are large parts of the Mac community who had no idea open-source software existed for a long time, but things like Firefox (and heck, Safari's KHTML heritage) have made it much more prominent, and have driven large numbers of people to try out things like OpenOffice, Ubuntu, and KDE and see that there really is great free software out there, which is not only free as in beer, but gives you the freedom of knowing that you will always have access to it in the future without vendor lock-in, private APIs, and restrictions.
Since I first started porting KDE to Mac OS X I've seen a lot these types of arguments, and in the end, it has always appeared that everyone wins when software is available on more platforms, whether those platforms themselves are free or not. As an anecdote, when I first got KOffice ported, one of the first "thank you"s I got was from some folks who study the bible and have macs, and loved KOffice's support for bidirectional languages. Microsoft Office on mac had no support for Hebrew, and KDE made it possible for them to do their research on their own computers.
...but I digress. Ultimately I do the port because I use and like macs (as well as Linux systems), and because KDE applications have a lot to offer. I like KDE, and I wanted to be able to use it everywhere, not just when I'm on my Linux boxes. That said, it's even better if my work is useful to other people, and it grows the community as a whole. My intentions started with "scratching an itch" and if it turns out that no one uses the Mac port but me, I'm fine with that. I know that won't be the case though, there are a huge number of people who are interested in it, and hopefully they will be able to join the community and make it even better.
On the other hand, I don't know how to solve the issue of culture clash. There are certainly large parts of the Mac community who are ignorant of the Open-Source Way™ and who expect a lot for nothing. We run into those types of folks in Fink pretty regularly, and if we can, try to educate them, but it's not always possible. The most I can hope is that they don't bother the folks in the greater KDE community too much. But hey, there are also very large parts of the Mac community who are very open to the ideas of free software and if we're lucky, we can grow the community even stronger.
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By RangerRick, on June 23rd, 2007
If you have not seen the announcement yet, OpenNMS 1.3.3 was released. It includes lots of bugfixes, as well as a start on separating out the native C code so that packaging a pure-java release of OpenNMS will be easier. We hope to have that wrapped up by the 1.3.4 release.
I've released 1.3.3 into 10.4 Unstable, as well as the new iplike package for PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, I had to remove OpenNMS from 10.3 because the 1.3 series requires Java 1.5. I will probably go back and revert 10.3 to the latest 1.2 version, just so that something is available still.
I also spent some time reworking the OpenNMS front page to be more useful for finding information. It was a pretty big mess of random links without much navigation to help people get to the info they need. There's still more to do, but it's definitely easier to figure out where to go now. The only problem is, enough people can actually see the link to the demo site that the demo site is hitting tomcat's maximum connection limits. <grin> Hopefully that will get fixed up shortly, but hey, at least people are taking the chance to try it out now. 🙂
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By RangerRick, on June 10th, 2007
I finally had some time to finish up new KDE/Mac builds. They're current as of a few days ago, and should be finishing seeding shortly.
You can find out more on downloading them here.
There are still a ton of rough edges, but I see a lot of the groundwork kdelibs cleanup that's been going on has helped the mac builds too. Konqueror actually works pretty well, with https even! Some stuff has regressed however, it looks like a lot of the pretty SVG work that's gone on in kdegames has made things look a little goofy. Bits of KOffice work enough to actually do something interesting with them. fish:// still doesn't work, but I think that may be true on Linux as well. 🙂
Anyways, as always, bang on them and let me know what you think.
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By RangerRick, on June 8th, 2007
So we're in the process of trying to get OpenNMS 1.3.3 out the door. There are still a few bugs that are considered blockers but for the most part trunk is looking pretty nice.
One of the big things that's getting a lot of attention is packaging. I've autoconf-ized iplike and we're going to do other work to get all of the native code out of the main java build as much as possible. Not all of that can happen in the 1.3.3 timeframe, but at the least we want to chop things up so there's only a single opennms RPM, and then platform-specific packages for only the native code.
That should make updates considerably easier, and open up the door for nightly builds and other spiffy stuff. W00t!
Also, a reminder: I'm going to be in San Francisco this week, at WWDC. See you there!
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By RangerRick, on May 21st, 2007
I finished packaging the latest OpenNMS in Fink over the weekend. It's now split into 2 packages -- opennms (the main OpenNMS code), and opennms-pgsqlXX (the PostgreSQL database-specific code).
You can now use OpenNMS with any version of PostgreSQL you like, just install the proper pgsql entry (after optionally dumping and migrating your data), start up the proper version of postgresql, and you're set.
Also, I spent some time figuring out how the Debian packages are built, and updated them to 1.2.9 in the OpenNMS APT repository.
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By RangerRick, on May 17th, 2007
So I started my new job with OpenNMS monday, and after the requisite "help us clean up the support ticket queue" work that any newbie should be forced to go through (grin), I've been trying to get the latest OpenNMS release working in Fink.
I must admit, despite the fact that 1.3.2 came out in January, I'd been putting off updating it because they it had been converted to maven. Now, maven is awesome. However, it's not very compatible with the "build offline" way that packaging works in Fink -- not to mention a number of other packaging projects.
I've figured out the magic to make maven treat a downloaded tarball of dependencies as a repository, and have everything building/working now. (Yay) I'll put it in Fink tomorrow, after some testing, but it's looking good.
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By RangerRick, on May 10th, 2007
So that was quick.
It turns out I got an offer I couldn't refuse. In an odd twist of fate, I will be working on the OpenNMS code base, for the third time. (This one's the charm, right?)
I will be doing community-facing stuff, as well as helping out with all the little things anyone has to do at a very small company. I get to do what I love, which is: a little bit of everything. 😉
Thanks to everyone for their support, I guess I'll see you folks in #opennms on Monday! (OK, technically I'm already there, but man, that's not as poetic.)
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By RangerRick, on May 9th, 2007
So along with some other folks, I was laid off from my job at Raritan today. Although I'm disappointed to be leaving a stellar group of people to work with, I'm heartened by the outpouring of commiseration (and job offers!) from everyone. Thank you so much!
If you know of anything interesting for a Perl/Java/Mac/Open-Source/Geek kind of person, let me know. And check out my resume while you're at it. 😉
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By RangerRick, on May 1st, 2007
Apple has been kind enough to give a number of folks in the open-source community (including us Finksters) tickets to WWDC for the last few years, and this year I will finally have the opportunity to take them up on it.
If you're gonna be there, let me know and we'll figure out how to meet up. It's always great being able to meet people In Real Life that you've known online for years. 😉
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By RangerRick, on April 19th, 2007
So I've been sitting on this for some time while I made the plans, but it is now officially official, I'm going to be speaking at aKademy 2007 in Glasgow! I'm really looking forward to meeting all the folks I've only talked to in IRC before and really get a chance to hang out with the amazing KDE developer community.
If you'd like to get together, just drop me a line and we'll figure something out.
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