I’ve read every tweet and nearly every comment on Reddit, Lifehacker, and other blogs, and the message is clear: the world is ready for better Linux software, and a better instant messenger. People are encouraged by Synapse and looking forward to it’s future. No pressure, right?

Huge HUGE thanks to everyone who has reported bugs, helped with troubleshooting/triaging, and shared their feedback in the conference room and on the forums. Synapse is still an alpha product so there have been plenty of problems, and quite frankly I’ve been a bit overwhelmed :). All the help has been great.

Lots of bugs have already been fixed including better icon support when running under KDE, support for proxy servers, and eliminating many many crashes.

The first user-contributed plugin was just merged in, adding preview for wikipedia urls (Thanks goto!):

You can also now add multiple accounts, just note support for this is still a bit rough around the edges.

So what’s next? First I’d like to make absolute sure that nobody will find Synapse less useful than other open-source products. In addition to fixing all the open bugs in the tracker, the plan for this week is to focus on implementing two major features:

1. Logging and a conversation history browser.
2. Linked Accounts aka transports/gateways. This will make it possible to communicate with friends on other networks, so if you’ve been holding off on switching to Synapse because most of your friends haven’t switched to XMPP yet, hang tight!

I’d also like to add official packages for other distributions very soon, starting with openSUSE and Foresight. If you can help with either of these, please let me know! Big thanks to trontonic for working on ArchLinux support.

There’s been great international interest in Synapse as well. So far members of the community have offered to translate Synapse into Russian, French, Italian, Ukrainian, and German… so making Synapse translatable will be a major short-term goal as well.

Once all this low hanging fruit is taken care of, we’ll be switching gears back to new innovative features. We’ve got a few things in mind, and would love to hear your ideas on the forums.

Challenging the status-quo is never easy. If you’re looking for a fun and exciting project with tremendous potential to get involved with, I hope you’ll consider joining us and help make the vision reality.

Today I’m extremely happy to officially announce the project I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s called Synapse, and while it may look like just yet another instant messaging client, it’s actually much more than that.

The web has changed a lot over the past few years. Web applications now offer rich user experiences and beautiful interfaces, video has has become ubiquitous, the ability to mix and match content from different sources is now not only easy, but widely accepted by companies that would have once sued you for doing so. Most importantly, more and more of our daily lives continues to move into the “cloud”.

With all the focus on the web, a lot of people have been dismissing desktop operating systems as nothing more than something required to run a web browser. Unfortunately, Linux, which has suffered from unpolished UI applications for a while, has been hit especially hard by this trend.

Even though there have been lots of exciting advances to the platform (Mono, DBus, Cairo, Gstreamer, KDE4, etc.), few developers focus on supporting Linux, and Linux applications rarely receive the same polish and attention to detail as web applications.

Although it makes me unpopular, I’m not ready to give up on Linux software development. I feel strongly that there’s a place for both web and desktop applications, and exciting opportunities for integration between them.

The state of instant communication and collaboration, especially on Linux, has been stagnant for many years. In fact, there have been few advances since IRC, which was invented in 1988 – nearly 20 years ago.

For the most part, we’re still limited to expressing ourselves using only plain text. Image sharing and file transfer rarely work, we can’t make voice/video calls, there’s been little to no integration with the Web, and a lack of innovation all around.

Sci-Fi movies have been envisioning amazing communication tools for years – tools that appear infinately flexible and act like magic.

The goal of Synapse was to see if it was possible to bring this magic to reality.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke

History has a tendency to repeat its self, so my first step was to determine why other similar projects have failed to foster innovation. One of the failures, in my opinion, is the desire to be multi-protocol. If any new feature needs to work everywhere, the result is often that it works poorly everywhere, or not at all. What we’ve seen with many projects is that they implement only the lowest common denominator across everything, and then stop there.

Just as Apple understood when they decided to throw away OS9 and switch to something new that was designed from the ground up to do exactly what they needed, having a solid base is extremely important. Fortunately, there’s already a mature, open, and all-around wonderful chat protocol out there: XMPP.

Although I suspect this will be one of the most controversial features, Synapse is designed to only support XMPP. If this upsets you, relax and hear me out.

Unlike any of the legacy proprietary networks, XMPP is an open and distributed system. Anyone can run their own server and communicate with people on any other server. In addition, the “X” in “XMPP” stands for “Extensible”. Any piece of the protocol can be extended without breaking compatibility with software that doesn’t understand the extension. This is a perfect fit for Synapse because it means there’s never anything stopping you from implementing your great idea.

Many people will say that this all sounds great, but that it doesn’t matter if nobody else is using it. Standard chicken-and-egg problem? I think there’s already proof that it is possible to overcome this. Skype appeared out of nowhere and now has millions of users. XMPP can do the same, it just needs an awesome client that offers features nobody else has, just as Skype offered working voice chat when nobody else did. And of course, XMPP already has a huge head-start thanks to Google. Remember, Synapse can talk to any other XMPP server/client, including Google Talk.

All that said, legacy networks will likely be supported through server-side transports that translate other protocols into XMPP, but if Synapse is truly successful, I’m confident it just wont matter.

Synapse is a very new project. I’m confident that it already offers a few compelling features, but overall isn’t groundbreaking in its current state (and is certainly not bug-free). My hope is that Ive succeeded in expressing my long-term vision, and can interest other people to join the project.

Pre-built packages are available for Ubuntu, with support for additional distros on the way. If you want to get involved, or just want to share your ideas, you can join the conference room or post on the forums.

I look forward to your feedback!

Download Synapse »

As it turns out, the reason was very simple: they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Yesterday it was announced that Qt 4.5 will be available under the LGPL.

I’ve been working on a project recently using Qt/C# and have been very happy with the combination. The bindings are called Qyoto, and available as part of the kde-bindings package. On Ubuntu, the Qt bindings alone are in a package called libqyoto4.4-cil (no KDE dependencies). The Qyoto developers have been fixing tons of bugs lately, so I’ve been building packages regularly from SVN and posting them to my PPA.

(That would be me in the green)

Looking around, I only found windows-only C# examples that used dnsapi, so I wrote a quick wrapper around glibc’s libresolv library.

http://gist.github.com/27591

$ gmcs -out:srv.exe -unsafe srv.cs
$ ./srv.exe _xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com
20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com
20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com
20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com
5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com
20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com

The code could be easily modified to support other DNS record types too. I think this would make a good addition to the Mono namespace somewhere.

The res_query() function is extremely annoying to use, and the documentation is almost non-existent. If there is a more modern API that I should be using instead, please let me know.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/firerabbit/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/firerabbit/ubuntu intrepid main

Please let me know if you find them useful!

Note that these packages are unofficial, if you have any problems, please let me know directly. Do not file an ubunu bug.

Also, here’s the diff against the pkg-mono repository which is currently at v1.9.1.

Licensing issues have always surrounded Qt. The GNOME project was started partially because at the time, Qt was closed-source and there was a need for a free software desktop. Today, Qt is dual-licensed: GPL and commercial, so KDE is certainly a free software desktop just as GNOME.

However, the GTK/GNOME library stack has one major difference: it is LGPL. Why does this matter?

Commercial development. Now, please don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of free software and the GPL, but there are certain situations where GPL is not an option. A example is an ISV with a flagship free, open source product who wants to sell customizations to businesses. These customizations would likely contain code to access proprietary internal systems, and are just not something this ISV would be able to release to the wider world.

Nokia, Trollltech, and mobile development

After hearing about Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech, I started thinking about why they bought them, and what their plans are.

My initial thought was (written from Nokia’s point of view):

Wow, the iPhone is a very nice phone – and a very nice software platform, people love writing iPhone applications. Right now, most of our phones are based on Java Mobile or Symbian, which nobody really enjoys. We could try to write our own new platform, but that would take a lot of time… and hey! There’s this thing called Qt which is arguably just as good as Cocoa, and already has a lot of developer support. Let’s buy them and adopt it as our future phone platform, and build a great community of both open source and commercial developers.

Then I realized there’s a serious flaw with this theory: Nokia has maintained Qt’s dual-licensing model as-is.

Qt is now the only mobile phone platform that costs money to develop with.

Sure, Apple and other companies charge a per-release fee to digitally sign your application, make it available for download, etc… but Qt is different. Qt licenses are sold on a per-developer basis. But that’s not the worst part:

You must purchase a Qt Commercial License from Qt Software or from one of its authorized resellers before you start developing commercial software. The Commercial license does not allow the incorporation of code developed with the Open Source Edition of Qt into a commercial product.

Qt is the ONLY framework I can find that forces you to shell out before you have a single line of code written. This completely prevents developers from experimenting, and makes the platform unreachable to individuals and startups. You’re either all in or all out – there’s no middle ground.

Let’s compare that to other mobile platforms:

Note I’m only comparing platforms that anyone to publish software. BREW doesn’t count because you have to form a business deal with the carrier to make apps available (Verizon “Get it now”, etc.). Also please let me know if you have any additional information to add to this table – companies seem to go out of their way to make this information extremely hard to find.

Qt is unique – no other platform works this way. With this sort of pricing structure, Nokia Qt phones will never see the type of developer interest that we’re seeing with the iPhone and Android.

But Nokia certainly knows this, so why not change things? It’s hard to say – maybe they aren’t excited about the cell phone industry becoming more open, maybe they think they can make more money off of a small number of Qt licenses than thousands of developers under the iphone model. And how does Maemo fit into all this?

Qt is a really great toolkit – it’s a real shame to see its potential squandered.

You may have noticed that almost everything here applies beyond the mobile realm too. KDE is the only modern desktop platform out there without a free commercial SDK. I suppose it really is the true free software desktop.

It managed to line up the two shoes and box you see here trapping itself, then went around in circles until it’s battery died.

Sadly, this Roomba has hated life from the very beginning. The day after I got it, it forced it’s way under my couch scratching it’s self up and eventually getting stuck.

I had a great time at SCALE, here’s a wrap-up of some of the things that went on:

• The first day had two tracks all about open source in healthcare. Speakers included Scott Shreeve (co-founder of Medsphere, and founder of Crossover Health) who gave a very motivating talk about the importance of transparency in healthcare, and how open technology can revolutionize the U.S. system (or current lack there of). A marketing executive from Medsphere spoke about the company in general. Christian and Fred Trotter didn’t go easy on him, asking many direct questions about Medsphere’s past attacks on the open-source community and the lawsuit against the founders and unknown members of the community who downloaded the then-release source code. The guy basically knew nothing, I hope Fred will post more information on GPL Medicine or his blog in the coming days.
• Due to a miscommunication, the GNOME event supplies box didn’t make it out. We made a late night run to Kinkos and printed a huge banner, posters, and fliers. Thanks to Rosanna Yuen for her help on IRC figuring out what was going on (sorry for coming off as a stalker!), and to everyone who worked on the GNOME Marketing Materials. The “Happy People” poster was a big hit.
• A group of developers and community members from Foresight Linux were at the booth next to us, it was great to meet and talk to them. Conary is a very interesting package management system, and I certainly plan to learn more about it.
• Since we didn’t have the computer from the event box, Christian brought in his dual display quad-core desktop. He has both of his monitors rotated 90°, and we’re fairly sure that more people came by to talk about that than GNOME. By the end of the conference, the Gentoo folks across from us had done the same with their case-modded strangely mouse-less computer.
• On the second day of the expo, Jeff Schroeder (another fellow GNOME volunteer) and the Foresight folks got there before us, and didn’t have the computer’s password. They asked the Gentoo guys for a Live CD so they could reset it. They asked what operating system the computer was running, and after hearing “Ubuntu”, their response was “FAIL SAUCE”. Of course, their Live CD completely failed to boot so Jeff got a Live CD from the Ubuntu booth which worked perfectly. He returned the Gentoo CD. Ehm, what was that phrase? Ah yes…FAIL SAUCE.
• While standing at the booth, I got a random message on AIM. Since there was nobody coming up to the booth to talk to me at the time, I thought I’d try to engage this person in Linux conversation, which sadly fell on deaf ears. Here’s the log, what do you think? Pedophile trying to cover his ass, intoxicated cop, Chris Hansen, or really a clueless highschool student?
• Christopher Blizzard from Mozilla as well as a few other people expressed interest in my D-Bus Javascript bindings, so I’m going to try to find time soon to answer everyone’s email on the dev-platforms-linux mailing list, and get an initial release out there. If anyone is interested in helping out, please let me know. The bindings make it possible for XUL application and extension developers to interact with D-Bus services, allowing for deeper integration into the Linux desktop.
• It was incredible how many companies in the expo hall were there promoting closed-source proprietary software. I was especially irritated with the folks from Promise, who didn’t even understand why someone might possibly want an open/free API for querying health information of their RAID hardware. Ironically, their booth was next to OpenBSD and across from the Free Software Foundation.
• There was someone from HP trying to raise awareness about their commitment to linux/opensource. I’ve been very impressed with their open-source printing/scanning software (scanning over the network using XSane works!), so I was happy to see them support SCALE. However, the web interface on the neat little linux-powered NAS device he had on display is not open source, I hope this changes in the near future. Also, although I wasn’t told anything specific, I’ll be watching the news for an announcement about HP laptops preloaded with Linux later this year.
• I had a good chat with one of the Inkscape developers. One of my questions was if there were plans to use a docking library instead of having so many floating windows, and was very surprised/impressed when he showed me that it had already been implemented, and is coming in the next release! Although I’m not an artist myself, it is exciting to see free graphics software continue to improve, the next release will be a big step. Now if only GIMP would hurry up and follow suit…
• The booth to our right was run by a family business called RANDR that develops and maintains open-source business software. Very cool to see what they’ve been able to accomplish, check them out!
• Thanks again to one of the guys running the PostgreSQL booth for letting me borrow his laptop power cable!
• A single person recognized the Toorcon t-shirt I was wearing on the second day of the expo.
• Lastly, I direct your attention to this photograph which perhaps depicts Sun’s true commitment to Linux.

While I absolutely had a great time, I found that very few people hadn’t heard of GNOME, and there wasn’t all that much to say to most people about it. Common questions were people wondering what’s coming in the next release, how to properly pronounce “GNOME”, and of course, why choose GNOME over KDE.

Running a booth and being involved in projects is absolutely the best way to get the most out of conferences, and I look forward to having a project of my own to show off at future expos. We were also tossing around the idea of having a hacker booth with bean bags chairs, music, and soft lighting, etc. where people can work on stuff and learn about open source software development.

Photos from Jordan and Kevin.

I’m heading down to LA tonight for SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo. I’ll be volunteering at the GNOME booth in the Exhibition Hall, so if you’re in the area, stop by and say hi!