I did not want to go open about my thoughts until I saw the closing post by Atul. As with any event, there are both good and bad things about FOSS.in, some specific to the “new format” and some about the way the event was organized. I attended FOSS.in for the forth time and the good thing is that it introduced me to most of free software developers I know today.
One extremely bad thing about FOSS.in/2008 was that all the attendees and speakers were given a CD that contained proprietary software from VMWare. A friend of mine did try to show his discontent by returning the CD at the kit distribution desk, but the organizer/volunteer at the desk seemed completely ignorant of what he really meant by returning the CD. I did something that was equally useless by dumping the CD in the trash can at the VMWare stall.
This year’s FOSS.in had a new format that was introduced through the not-so-friendly “omelette post“. The focus of the event looked overly bent towards the geeky side and it also became the cause for the lower turnout from the newbies. I felt that there was a lower turnout from the developer community too, but the organisers would not agree with me here 
The event also turned out to be far more India focused than its predecessors. It is good to highlight Indian contributions to free software, but there should also be a stage where selected projects can speak and find new developers in India. Anyone who can motivate new developers to contribute code to Kernel, Mozilla or GNOME is much better than an Indian who gets on to the stage showing some code that few in the audience understand.
One other thing that the omelette post mentioned are the “low hanging fruits”. These low hanging fruits are the way most of today’s developers get introduced to contributing to free software. I do agree that it’s difficult to name more than ten Indian free software developers that the world knows, but I do not see how ignoring the low hanging fruits can contribute to it.
The workouts are a good idea - apart from getting a few bugs fixed they also help new developers to contribute code under the guidance of an existing developer. They make it easier for the contributors to jump a little closer to the “core” of a project. The results also seem encouraging and I only hope that the participation would increase in future.
It is extremely difficult to organize an event of this scale and the FOSS.in team has done a great job with it. There definitely has been an extremely high amount of planning that went into the changed format and the way things were organized.
Overall, it’s another FOSS.in, another huge effort by the team and a bold step towards the new format - the results of which will only be known over some time.
The release announcement from spicebird.com.
Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and intergration among its components.
This release of Spicebird adds the following functionality:
- Chat with friends on services like Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber
- Add iGoogle Gadgets to Spicebird
- Disable the applications that are unused
- Access Google calendar
- Experimental support for managing blogs
- Available in more than 10 languages
- Basic set of add-ons
- Import data from Thunderbird, Outlook and Outlook Express
For a detailed desciption of this release, see the release notes.
Before you start using it, please understand that it’s still a beta product. However, it is stable and I have been using the alpha versions for all my e-mailing and calendaring needs for more than 6 months now.
The Spicebird team is happy to announce that the next Beta of Spicebird will be released on the 20th of November, 2008. Over the next five days, I will keep blogging about the various things that the Spicebird team has worked on to make Spicebird 0.7 more stable and better set for the later releases.
The next release has been round the corner for quite a while, here is the current status
- 7 bugs blocking the release (code)
- 5 of the 7 bugs already have patches up for review
- The other two being a build bug and another in calendar that we are struggling to reproduce!
So what’s left before the release?
- Setting up the addons repository (it’s already up there, but needs some testing and a good theme before the formal announcement)
- Making sure spicebird.com works fine in IE6 (It is an embarrassing and silly bug that was always there - we only use the standards compliant Firefox here)
- Some last-minute style improvements to Spicebird
- Finally, decide on a release date!
Recently Siva gave an update on Spicebird 0.7 - A few bugs were fixed after his update, a few more are assigned and already have attachments on them to be reviewed. The following gives a summary of the latest state
Apart from the pending patches, Sunil working on importing from Thunderbird/Lightning and Siva on importing mail and addressbooks from Microsoft Outlook did a wonderful job and are currently testing their work.
About 25 bugs were fixed over the last week and among them is the “0.7 cannot read calendars from 0.4″. The next release of Spicebird - the 0.7 is round the corner. About the release schedule, it’s a few blockers and a little testing thats needed, which could take upto 10 days.
We are also working on getting the addons site up and port the most-used thunderbird and calendar addons to Spicebird. We already have Enigmail, Nostalgy, Minimize to Tray and GMailUI and are working to have many more for Spicebird Beta 0.7!
Today I bought a new bike hoping to use it for a few kilometers every day - fifteen to start with. These few kilometer I hope would give me some physical excercise, save a little on my everyday carbon emissions and ofcourse save a little money for me - the fuel is pretty expensive these days
Yes, I bought a Firefox Target and apart from the good reviews and the color combination, I like the brand! Its too early for me to review it, but I would soon do it. The first thing I did after purchasing it is to ride to office for a photo.
It cost me about 11,000 INR which is less than my two months spend on gas, but is pretty expensive considering how a bike is precieved in India.
By prasad | September 26, 2008
http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.24/
Empathy is a Telepathy framework based instant messaging client and its inclusion into GNOME 2.24 means that Telepathy and related libraries will be available on most linux distributions by default. That will make the life of Spicebird easier in the linux world
By prasad | September 22, 2008
Last week we had exciting time fixing many bugs on Spicebird - some of them crashers, Sunil committing his work on blogging and the new calendar-theme.
Starting with the 14th of September, the nightly builds have been randomly crashing on windows which a lot of users reported. The fixes were committed on Thursday and made their way to the Friday’s nightly builds. Apart from this few other smaller bugs were fixed through last week.
The calendar had a pending theme update, which was meant to make it more desktop friendly ofcourse not compromising on the visual aspects of it - more updates to the calendar usability are waiting!
By prasad | September 17, 2008
Today Ashok committed a patch on the Spicebird trunk that adds support for short-date formats in the e-mail listing. The Mozilla platform does have API and necessary enumerations to request short date formats, but underneath the implementation was missing and all it returned was the same long date format which looked like “Thursday 12 June 2008 08:51 PM”.
That was what we used in Spicebird earlier. Now, with the landing of this patch we have many different ways of showing the date
- Just the time for today’s messages
- Yesterday and the time for yesterday’s messages
- Mon…Sat and the time for other messages of this calendar week
- Day of month and the month for messages in this calendar year
- Day of month, month and the year for rest of the messages!
The formats are ofcourse localizable and the corresponding upstream bug is #455498.
I am Prasad Sunkari,
co-founder of