Good Stuff

I like to hear about some of the new stuff for KDE: Desktop changes according to geo-location? Very neat! OpenChange, the “Samba for Exchange”? Much needed!

That’s good stuff – exciting and useful with clear potential.

Confusing Stuff

Confession time: I don’t understand what the hell Nepomuk is. Here’s the main page – front page – description:

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.

Um, ok?

Here’s the “Project Summary“:

NEPOMUK aims at empowering individual knowledge workers to better exploit their personal information space and to maintain fruitful communication and exchange within social networks across organizational boundaries.

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations. This solution is called the Social Semantic Desktop.

Blah blah blah. Who writes this stuff? The acronym is horrible as well. Whoever wrote this might be far more educated than I am, but probably has much more boring weekends.

So please break this down so people can understand why they should be excited about “the social desktop”. Pictures and/or video preferred.

What does NEPOMUK bring to the desktop? Is it a button? An application? A search engine? A tasty dessert topping?

A sort of a start

If I follow about 4 links I eventually end up at Discover Neopmuk As a User, which is a good start but a bit hard to find and not as compelling as it could be. (It looks a bit out of date.)

This is an example of where I would like to see more effort put into the PR end of KDE. Instead of defending 4.0, move on and break down and hype up some of these new features! They are worth talking about – and they are worth explaining to potential users.

I would wager that the vast majority of current users only have a very vague idea (if any) of Nepomuk, and that potential users have no idea whatsoever. I also wager that fully half of those who DO know about it think it is “Neopunk”, and is some sort of new desktop theme.

In other words, sometimes you need to stand up for what you know is right, regardless of consequences, simply out of self-respect. Campaigns like Document Freedom Day give the opportunity for such self-reaffirmation, and I would support them for that reason alone, even if more practical reasons did not exist as well.

The latter document is an informative read, and Bruce Byfield has an insightful take on the situation in his article “Selling GPL Exceptions isn’t Exceptional“.

What Lies Beneath

Although the actual specifics are fairly interesting in and of themselves, I’m more interested in an underlying theme, one that Mr. Byfield astutely hits upon here:

Both supporters and opponents of the FSF sometimes seem to have created a set of straw figures to react to. The supporters have done so out of uncritical respect (if not downright hero worship) of Stallman and the FSF, and the opponents for propaganda, but the results are surprisingly similar. For both, Stallman and the FSF are ethically and morally uncompromising — admirably so, for supporters, and naively, dangerously so for opponents.

I often wonder how it is that RMS, a person who expends considerable effort to explain himself precisely is so grossly misrepresented? (Quite a bit moreso by his opponents, I should say. In my humble opinion, Mr. Byfield is bending over backward to present both sides in the same light here.)

It is a favorite tactic of some to paint a caricature of Free Software supporters in general, and RMS in specific, as uncompromising unrealistic “zealots” with only the barest understanding of how the “real world” functions. Yet even the most casual examination of FSF articles and actions refutes such a notion.

Thus I return again to my point that the vocal anti-Free Software critics are either ignorant or malicious.¹ The FSF is quite good at laying out its philosophy in great detail on its website. You don’t have to sign an NDA or anything.

¹ The sadly necessary disclaimer:  I’m not suggesting there is no valid criticism out there, just that people who play the “zealot” card, ridicule RMS or the FSF for “hypocrisy”, or enage in other such fact and logic-free fallacies are to be dismissed with scorn.