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GNOME GUI Software

Gnome.org Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt 329

Posted by michael from the power-of-the-purse dept.
tempest303 writes "In order to help improve integration between apps on the Gnome desktop, Gnome.org is offering bounties for the completion of a variety of integration tasks. Bounties range from $15, for submitting new .ical files for Evolution 2.0's multiple calendar view, to $2500 for allowing synchronization between Evolution's addressbook with Gaim's buddy list!"
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Gnome.org Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt More

Gnome.org Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt

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  • Nice but (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grennis ( 344262 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:43PM (#7538546)
    Doesnt the open source model succeed by encouraging people to collaborate and work together? It seems to me that this bounty concept will only motivate people to hide information from each other and work against each other in the name of money.

    • Re:Nice but (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Spider[DAC] ( 129824 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:48PM (#7538579) Homepage
      Actually, its on a tight timeframe, the rules state that it has to be officially accepted into CVS, follow clean code and be nice.

      People may cooperate, but unite behind one front-man.

      This means that a lot of hacking will go on in the shadows, then pour out "when its done", Just like usual. Since the code has to pass the module maintainers eyes, form and correctness will be ensured.

      Overall I think this is a great incentive. (Compare this to Abiword and the patchbounty, for example )

      • Not a bad idea... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by BrokenHalo ( 565198 )
        This could be a model for getting much-needed projects off the ground if there were some mechanisn for individuals to contribute to a "bounty fund".

        If I had the money, I would offer a bounty to anyone who could come up with an equivalent of EndNote that works seamlessly with OpenOffice (I would happily pay for the package if they produced a version for Linux) or a bounty to anyone who can come up with an interface as easy-to-use as SPSS for any of the existing (powerful but hard-to-use) statistical progra

    • Re:Nice but (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Daverd ( 641119 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:49PM (#7538585) Homepage
      Well, once they actually release their code and claim the money prize, their code is now open-source and anyone can look at it. It only motivates them to hide their work until the point where anyone uses it. But I think it's the same way in the current (unpaid) model of contribution... individuals' work is generally not available to anyone until they release it.

    • Re:Nice but (Score:2, Interesting)

      by pVoid ( 607584 )
      I agree.

      Even more distrubing is that this is basically making slaves out of developers: who gets the bounty? the first worker to submit? What happens to the 340 other people who started working on this?

      I thought there were laws against this kind of labour.

      • Re:Nice but (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Haeleth ( 414428 )
        Slaves? Is there someone rounding up innocent developers, nailing them to seats in front of computers, and giving them sound beatings if they don't work on these projects? I don't see any mention of that.

        If you want an analogy, think of it as like a lottery. You can't enter expecting the money. If you don't like the idea of your work being wasted, then don't enter.

      • Re:Nice but (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Malcolm Scott ( 567157 )
        RTFA...

        At the top of each bounty item, in the little header, there's a link to a bug in bugzilla.gnome.org. If you intend to work on a bounty, please add a comment to this bug registering your intent to work on it. That way, if multiple people want to work on the same task, they can more easily find each other and collaborate. Please do not close this bug; it will be marked FIXED by the contest organizers when the prize is claimed.

        In the case of multiple submissions for the same bounty, the judging pa

    • Re:Nice but (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Money isn't the root of all evil. The code will end up open source and that's what really matters. It's a nice little bonus for younger programmers who need some cash. Though it isn't going to feed anyone's family, it's a great bonus to get certain things done that need to get done.
    • here it comes- gnome.org needs work done really bad, but the free people who are doing their work only want to address the fun stuff, like making another web browser. Perhaps 'free beer' open source can only get you so far, then you need to start offering some form of incentive.

      Makes perfect sense to me. After all, if you are doing work for nothing, why the hell would anybody do the stuff which isnt fun or interesting?

  • Great initiative (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikeCapone ( 693319 ) <skelterhell AT yahoo DOT com> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:46PM (#7538560) Homepage Journal
    It's all good and well to program for love and pride, but these rewards will help the project move over some of the less glamourous problems.

    Consolidation is important in the Linux world; if coders spent more time on it instead of creating new competing apps (not that there's not a place for that), the world would be a better place.

    • Re:Great initiative (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tronicum ( 617382 )
      It is important to have competition inside the linux community as well. If there would be only one Desktop, it would result into an monoculture the M$-world.

      It is a nice idea to setup bounty on OSS as the developers get an instant reward on their work.

      The downside of course is the only big Fondations (Apache, Gnome, etc) have money to spend because they get it from the industry (like Intel, IBM,...)

      • Re:Great initiative (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MikeCapone ( 693319 ) <skelterhell AT yahoo DOT com> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:58PM (#7538632) Homepage Journal
        The downside of course is the only big Fondations (Apache, Gnome, etc) have money to spend because they get it from the industry (like Intel, IBM,...)

        Small donations are the way of the future!

        A fund should be set up where people can donate money that would be allocated to bounties, and they could either select on which task they want their money to be allocated to drop it in a pool of ressources that would be allocated through some kind of more or less democratic process (secure online polls/surveys?)

        As far as I know this thing doesn't exist in the open source world. Correct me if I'm wrong.
        • I think this would be a great initiative. I'm not a programmer, but I use Linux both at home and at work.

          Often, I find little annoying quirks with no immediate fixes, usually this sort of inter-operability issue.

          I'd LOVE to be able to post up my concern with $10 or so, and see if more people would be willing to pitch money towards it, to motivate some programmer.

        • Re:Great initiative (Score:4, Insightful)

          by mnemonic_ ( 164550 ) <jamec@u m i ch.edu> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:34PM (#7538842) Homepage Journal
          Of course it would be sad if tasks only got done because of bounties...

          • Why would that be sad? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @09:45PM (#7539757) Homepage
            My time isn't free. I've had to spend a lot of money to get my education, as well as a lot of personal time I could've been using towards something else. As any economics student could tell you, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

            This provides a nice feedback mechanism that allows non-programmers to reward programmers for "filling in" and doing what the non-programmers wanted to be done. It's a natural balance, and I consider it progress in how opensource is developed. One of the few sustainable ways we could keep Linus Torvalds working on the kernel 40 hours a week is by having IBM, Red Hat, et all contributing to his work, just like Red Hat employs Alan Cox, or any number of other examples.

        • Re:Great initiative (Score:3, Informative)

          by tsmoke ( 455045 )
          There are at least two projects that are similar to what you are requesting:

          LinuxFund.org [linuxfund.org]: From teh FAQ: Issuing development grants for projects which may not be suitable for commercial or volunteer efforts but which will enhance the long-term vitality of the Open Source. All projects we fund will become Open Source. To be more clear, the projects that we aim to fund are the development and the
          documentation of Open Source.

          Pubsoft.org [pubsoft.org]: They seem to do something similar.

          Of course, I'm sure the FSF wou

  • Interesting concept (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daserver ( 524964 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:46PM (#7538566) Homepage
    This is very interesting concept, image someone setting up a bounty server for free software (in general) where people could donate money to bounties on any free software project and hackers could claim the money ones they've solved it.

    • Bounty server... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Hanzie ( 16075 )
      Mod parent up.

      I think this is a great idea. You think of something you really want, go to the bounty server and give it a price. If other people think it's worth kicking into, it'll add to the donation pot.

      I think you've come up with another way to make money with free software.

      The donators could also choose which licenses they'd accept the software to be released under.

      This would also be interesting to try out with closed-source software. See how many donations are available.

      I guess with the closed

      • Re:Bounty server... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by pVoid ( 607584 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:30PM (#7538822)
        While I applaud your enthousiasm, I think this has very little chance of actually working.

        Why? because of a very dangerous thing called "scope-creep". I freelance, and get small contracts (< $20k). I've worked in big contract shops before, multi million dollar software being designed and implemented a la carte for our custommers, and yet, despite all that experience in large shops, it's extremely difficult with even the smallest project to first nail a solid technical spec document, and then to stick to it.

        Now this is when I'm dealing one on one with the client, over phone etc... Imagine what this scenario would be like on an online forum...

        Unmanageable to the nth degree, methinks.

        • First off, I agree with you. Putting this system onto a bounty server would be very hard to work, if not impossible.

          Perhaps it might be possible to change the system, and let it adapt?

          The first purpose of the bounty server is open source projects needed. It would be pretty simple to implement it. Then, as the closed-folks move in and take advantage, they'd have to conform to the rules of the new playground.

          For large and complicated stuff, it definetly wouldn't work that way at first. And a good thing

        • Binding Arbitration! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Vagary ( 21383 )
          Unless your clients can specify the requirements formally (and if they can do that, why don't they just write the program themselves in a functional language?), there's always room for a lawsuit. Thankfully, society has developed a mechanism for extremely low-cost, high-speed lawsuits: binding arbitration.

          So what happens is the Client submits their signed spec (possibly after refining it with the Developer) and payment to a knowledgable (capable of understanding the spec) and trustworth neutral party: the

      • Re:Bounty server... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Saeger ( 456549 ) <farrellj@nOSPam.gmail.com> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @08:10PM (#7539349) Homepage
        I think you've come up with another way to make money with free software.

        This is just a variation of the Street Performer Protocol [firstmonday.dk]: People pool their money to fund the scarce CREATION of a unique work they want put into the public domain (rather than paying for artificially scarce COPIES of data).

        --

      • I have been designing (architecturally, i.e. in my head) a system for distribution of royalties and bounties for some time now. I believe that such a system could revolutionize not only open-source development, but many hertofore altruistic creative/intellectual property creation related tasks.

        The basic idea behind a royalty server is to slowly collect dependencies between intellectual properties and attempt to draw commercial distributors (through public guilt and ridicule, if neccessary) into sharing

    • Re:Interesting concept (Score:3, Informative)

      by debrain ( 29228 )
      This is what I thought collab.net [collab.net] was created for, but that seems to have died. This idea is also represented, in a representative form, in Transgaming [transgaming.com]'s voting system. It is a fantastic idea, as you have presented it, and I hope it comes to fruition.
      • I'd mod you +1 Informative, but have no points.
      • I often thought of working collab.net when it first appeared... the problem was the amount of buerocracy involved in the system, the amount of work put up by the developer which at any time could fail, and the whole process starts over.. Here's my thoughts:

        1. More along the lines of slashdot would work better, with moderators scoring out the good and the bad.

        2. Then a pot of sponsers can be setup once the issue closes.

        3. After sponsership closes, then a functioal specification is written by potential de
        • Hmm, this got me thinking. I think a /. moderation approach would work great.

          Any number of projects could register with the site and supply a Pay Pal account. All the regiestered projects would be put into category such as Net->MUA or Audio->MP3->Player, etc.

          Now, users can register with the site and donate money. For every dollar, they are given one voting point that they can vote any registered project. On the first of the month, the totals for all projects are shown, and then those proje

    • Re:Interesting concept (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Sleuth ( 19262 ) *
      Have you seen the RentACoder [rentacoder.com] web site? Seems like they've done it already. Check out the
      open bid requests lists in the upper right...
    • That could be open to litigation.

      I mean, what if the rules aren't always clear?

      This wouldn't be a problem if the bounty were small, but what if bounties got to be in the five digits?

      My point is, who's writing the rules? Who's determining if an entry has met all the criteria?

      • I would imagine the money would be put in escrow so that those who funded the project could verify that the end result wasn't a hackjob.

        If 5,000 people put $10 toward fixing X, but the result is that X is only partially fixed according to the subjective judgement of those 5,000 people, then each contributor should be able to take back a certain percentage of their money from the pot before payday. Such a chargeback should stay on your record though, so if you're just a bait'n'switch cheapass your money wo

    • It's been done. Twice.

      I don't recall the names of either of the sites now, but several years ago there were at least two 'free software bounty' web sites, with slightly different models. One provided for people to propose projects and have others bid (promises of) money on the solution (increasing the pool for high-demand projects), the other (as I seem to recall) was a little more structured and the project requests were submitted with a predefined bonus by the submitter.

      I guess it never caught on ver
    • Isn't that what collabnet's sourcexchange [collab.net] was about? It failed due to lack of interest.

      There seems to be another similar service [opensourcexperts.com] up and running now however.

  • conference (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    damnit, im at the conference right now and i started on the gaim/evo bounty earlier, and of course its one of the 2 posted on the front page

    thanks slashdot ;)

  • What an excellent idea... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by D-Cypell ( 446534 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:54PM (#7538612)
    If there is one clear area where microsoft leads the field its application integration. Obviously the centralized control make this much more achievable.

    In the long-term it may be more effective to build a high-level API to allow this integration. Perhaps some kind of built in RDBMS with a well defined schema for commonly shared application data. Several static tables to provide an area for common data (Contacts, Favourite websites/ftp servers etc) plus an extensible area for application specific data.

    If the open source community had a well-defined process (shock horror!!) to request changes to the schema we could begin to provide the kind of application integration currently on offer by MS.

    Integrating Gaim with Evolution is great but surely a strategy for integration email clients with IM clients in the general sense would be much more valuable.

    Definatly a move in the right direction though!
    • Well you are quite right: kde does it extremely well but not with gnome or other WMs, and this is not achieved within gnome either.
      But wouldn't something like that imply some sort of middleware that does the dirty work? Something of an API between X and the window manager (uck! too many layers!)
      I guess that's part of the reason behind freedesktop.org though, and I'm not sure it would be that simple to implement in the short run.
    • Hmmm.... maybe we could call it a "registry"?

  • Sssshhh... (Score:2, Funny)

    by mattjb0010 ( 724744 )
    Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. We're hunting integwation features!

  • Slashdot GNOME Logo (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sebol ( 112743 )
    Slashdot's gnome Logo is outdated

    The current gnome logo is more than 1 year old.

    This is the new one:-
    http://gnomedesktop.org/images/topics/gnomenew.png [gnomedesktop.org]

  • Slashdot GNOME icon (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:00PM (#7538649)
    Maybe the GNOME Foundation should offer a bounty for changing the old Slashdot GNOME icon.
    Plueeeease, it can't be so difficult, can it?

    rubinstein
  • So, the "communist lefty hippy" types are happily beavering away on whatever takes their fancy (some odd pointer relocation optimisation, or whatnot :-)

    And the mercenary potential-captains-of-industry types suddenly see pecuniary advantage in the OS stuff. Perhaps they'll even stay around afterwards.

    Good idea :-)

    Note - for the humour-impaired, neither characterisation is intended to be taken too seriously...

    Simon.

  • Finally better LDAP support (Score:3, Informative)

    by Rheingold ( 2741 ) <wcooley@nakedape . c c> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:15PM (#7538731) Homepage

    I've been wishing for better LDAP support in Evolution (and MUAs in general), and wrote up a page on my Wiki about Writable LDAP Addressbooks [nakedape.cc]. Looks like they've got at least on covered.

  • Sounds like... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Stile 65 ( 722451 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:21PM (#7538768) Homepage Journal
    ...an adaptation of the Open Code Market [slashdot.org] idea. I'm glad the open source community is exploring more and more ways to make a living while creating free software.

  • Gnome human-computer interaction evaluation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by torian ( 409642 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:24PM (#7538777)
    While there is no doubt that Gnome is visually attractive, has there been any empirical evaluation of Gnome from a human-computer interaction perspective, i.e. a usability study? I've certainly never come across any such testing in relation to Gnome, which is worrying.

    • Re:Gnome human-computer interaction evaluation (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      While there is no doubt that Gnome is visually attractive, has there been any empirical evaluation of Gnome from a human-computer interaction perspective, i.e. a usability study? I've certainly never come across any such testing in relation to Gnome, which is worrying.

      Don't worry so much. [gnome.org]

    • Re:Gnome human-computer interaction evaluation (Score:5, Informative)

      by LNX Flocki ( 459790 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @07:15PM (#7539070)
      There has been a usability study two years ago. It was funded by Sun and based on Gnome 1.4 - this study is the base for the Gnome HIG and Gnome 2.x
      It would be interesting to do a follow up on that test though and see what has actually been implemented since.

      By the way, the study can be found here [gnome.org]

    • Re:Gnome human-computer interaction evaluation (Score:5, Informative)

      by dominator ( 61418 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @08:22PM (#7539393) Homepage
      Sun spent a bunch of time and money toward usability studies and such, which ultimately contributed toward the GNOME "HIG" (Human Interface Guidelines). More info available at:

      http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ [gnome.org]

      There's a wealth of information under there. The Sun studies, conducted in March 2001, can be found here. [gnome.org] I wouldn't be too "worried" if I were you.

    • I'm not trolling, just criticising. Every time I've used Gnome for a while, something happens (I imagine it is something I do but for the life of me, I can't say what) and then it becomes horribly tweaked, e.g., I'll try to sign in and all I get are bunches of error message boxes. I don't have that kind of issue w/ KDE. Maybe I use it wrong ... but in terms of usuablity, I think it would be way more useful if it was less fragile.

    • Well, there was a usability study done by Sun. If I recall correctly, through much user testing, they discovered that the subjects (all sun employees) having to choose between 20 different clocks and having to navigate through really cluttered menu's (some of which had duplicate items) presented usability problems.

      Supposedly Sun had folks trained in HCI doing this study. But I'm a little skeptical, as many of the worst designs a good HCI person would be able to spot without doing any user testing (they sho
    • I reccomend you head on over to Ars [arstechnica.com] . They've posted a review of gnome 2.4 and it's compliance to the HIG. Looks very nice, actually, especially with respect to useability for people with disabilities, and also with support for multiple languages. So it looks like the newer gnome builds are aiming for (and apparently hitting) useability compliance standards.

  • What about icalshare.com? (Score:5, Informative)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:24PM (#7538779) Homepage
    No need for the $15. Head off over to icalshare.com [icalshare.com] instead. It's an excellent resource for shared calendars, and I'm making use of a few from there (using Apple's iCal).

    Cheers,
    Ian

  • I know this is likely to be modded as a troll, but...

    It sure looks like Gnome 2 has been basically trying to turn into OS X. I remember asking on gnome-devel and gnome-list, back in the pre-Gnome2 days, why things like button order were changing between 1.4 and 2. After a lot of hemming and hawing the final answer seemed to be "because Apple does it this way, and they're known for user friendly design". The hoped-for Evolution + Gaim interoperation looks to be a clone of the way iChat and Mail.app work tog
    • Maybe GNOME is targeting people who want Mac OS but can't afford Mac hardware.
    • The stupid thing about it is that whilst the button order Apple uses *may* be better in their usability tests, this is in the Mac environment where Apple can enforce consistency.

      In a typical Linux desktop however, all of the non-GTK2 apps have the Windows button order. This includes things like all KDE programs, all GTK1 programs, Mozilla, OpenOffice, closed-source programs for Linux etc.

      What is more confusing, a slightly less intuitive button order which is consistent across all apps (and incidentally t

    • Right down to the flaws... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @07:33PM (#7539167) Homepage
      A happy OS X user here, but this one [gnome.org] certainly rings a bell:

      Evolution's contact editor allows you to annotate a contact with the dates of their birthday and anniversary. However, these dates don't automatically copy themselves into your calendar...you won't see them when you glance through your schedule, and an alarm won't fire to warn you of a friend's upcoming birthday...Clearly, this is a travesty."

      Indeed it is a travesty. And a travesty that exists between Apple's Address Book and iCal apps as well. You can get round it using software like Birthday Shifter, but this really ought to be in the main app's functionality.

      Cheers,
      Ian

    • "Looking through the bounty list, a lot of the UI stuff strikes me the same way."

      Humans don't like to do a task in many different ways, because we are lazy(case in point: Perl and its TIMODOHI(or whatever they call it) method). Try to make something different for the sake of 'innovation', but not really making tasks easier for us is *not* good.

      Right now, desktop environments *need* to learn and mimic ideas from established UIs(Mac, Windows) so they can reach the same level and stop playing catch-up. The
  • See my previous post [slashdot.org] for more details. This could be the future of OSS.
  • I'm willing to give $100 to anyone that can create an interface between Mozilla, Evolution, whatever to an exchange server runing in proprietary MAPI mode, so that i no longer need to use Outhouse to read my email at work.

    • Re:MAPI Bounty (Score:4, Funny)

      by omega9 ( 138280 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @07:08PM (#7539036)
      Ximian Connector: $69 personal use license.

      http://www.ximian.com/products/connector/ [ximian.com]

      Of course, I'll sell you one for $100 and pocket the $31 if it makes you feel better.
      • Requires exchange 2000 and only works with webdav turned on. Bought one, it was no good for me as it turnes out our exchange server was version 5 or something.
    • MAPI really means 'MAIL API'; its the API that apps wanting to talk to a mail program use.

      Exchange is simply a MAPI implementation, using some secret RPC mechanism that is almost a reference 'how not to write a distributed application' design. I guess it is probably documented in the NDA-only, RAND-licensed settlement protocols, but that is no use whatsoever.

      Maybe we could use OLE automation to talk to outlook, and bridge into the exchange database that way. That is probably what the WindowsCE synchonisat
      • This is something that M$ should be forced to reveal under the terms of their settlement.

        But i think you are on the right track, while it would be great to break the rpc protocol and create a native adapter, i'd personally be willing to run a proxy on a windows box (i'm forced to run windows and use outlook anyway). or even better yet, run the proxy under wine.

  • Why synchronization?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:56PM (#7538955)


    Wouldn't have been more easy for Evolution, Gaim and other programs to share a single addressbook?!




    Learn from KDE, where Kopete is now dumping it's own contact list in order to share the same Kaddressbook with Kontact, KMail and any other KDE program.




    Why making things more complicated instead of making them simplier?

    • Good point, centralisation of data is always the best idea. But if I saw one more K in that last post I think I would have flipped out.

    • Re:Why synchronization?! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Sunday November 23, 2003 @05:04AM (#7541166)
      Wouldn't have been more easy for Evolution, Gaim and other programs to share a single addressbook?!

      Er, maybe, but :

      a) Gaim doesn't have an addressbook. It has a buddy list. That's a very different thing. Some buddies won't even have email addresses associated with them (which I guess is the key they're using).

      b) Gaim and Evolution were developed separately. Gaim won't be using any shared addressbook until it's a neutral standard, I'd guess, with multiple implementations (KAddressbook/Evo) working together.

      c) Integration of what EXISTS and WORKS NOW is infinitely easier than inventing a completely new address book standard, getting Evolution to use it, Gaim to integrate with it etc. This can be done (in fact *is* being done right now, I'm watching it happen) in a matter of hours, not months or years.

    • Not only is this important -- I think it would really make a whole lot more sense if KDE, Gnome, and everything else shared a lot of common file locations. My mail in Evolution and KMail should be stored in the same place by default without me resorting to strange mbox/maildir symlink hacks. My Evolution and KAddressBook should use the same files, so I don't need to manually sync them. It doesn't make any sense that they aren't.

      I get the sense that 2004 is going to be an extremely important year from a usa

  • YES! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kuzb ( 724081 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @07:04PM (#7539012)
    FINALLY, someone out there is getting the idea! You can't eat a "thank you", and while the amounts paid may or may not be worth the effort put in, it's something! Great incentive.

    With even a little bit of cash out there for developers to earn, projects like gnome can go a lot farther, a lot faster IMO. My hat is off to you guys at gnome.org!
  • Hi there.

    Let me introduce myself: I'm grandma, I'm dumb.

    After having flamed a bit about Linux only being for those who are into Linux as opposed to Apple/Windows being for the vast masses who don't give a fuck, I was told that indeed Gnome was THE distro for the stupid (me).

    Three days and 78 downloads later I'm still not closer to a functioning Gnome.

    What's so hard - conceptually - about an installer that you know, just installs this shit and be done with it?

    Ye gods, I really begin to doubt any linux p

    • What's so hard - conceptually - about an installer that you know, just installs this shit and be done with it?

      go here:

      www.ximian.com

      It has an installer you just run, it downloads and installs everything you need to run Gnome. Plus it installs RedCarpet for you, which will let you easily install additional software and keep your current software update.
    • What Linux distribution are you using? Red Hat, Fedora, and Debian should all give you a functioning GNOME desktop by default. The rest of them generally have it as an option during installation. If you're downloading 78 files to install GNOME, you're doing it the wrong way.
      • OK, thanks for the reactions!

        See, I'm on OS X and have installed Darwin. That's where I'm at.

        I've already asked some questions to the darwin-gnome usergroup, but to my great surprise no answers yet. (I was really polite :-)

        So I guess so far I've been really stupid about this, expecting an integrated desktop came with what's needed to make it work. The Gnome website and manuals don't really say anything about that. Guess it must be genetically aquired knowledge ;-)
        It's now become a longer term project and


  • What's more important than the money, though the money is fun, is to combine this with some form of contest-winning award that people can proudly feel happy about and can use it to bragg and boost up a CV if they need to show some objective evidence of expertise or something.

    Make it a contest; contests are fun, and issue some prize certificates.

  • Publish Your Calendar WITH JICAL (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AELinuxGuy ( 588522 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @11:28PM (#7540183)
    I just happened to have given a presentation at our LUG about group calendaring with Evolution (and every other iCal compatible software - like Apple iCal, Outlook, KOrganizer, Mozilla Mail) using a slick program called JiCal [sourceforge.net]. Here is a link to the presentation text [24.123.247.26].

    We use this method of automatically publishing our calendars via SSH to a web server at my office and, thus far, it has worked flawlessly. Perhaps somebody can use JiCal as the backend for this bounty?

  • Financing an Open Code Market... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by danharan ( 714822 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @11:35PM (#7540214) Journal
    As others mentionned, this sounds a lot like the Open Code Market [slashdot.org] idea that has been discussed here previously.

    For $25k, Novell just bought amazing publicity. Perhaps an Open Code Market could attract such financing?

    Big companies could even offer matching funds to any/certain types of OS software, letting users direct where the money goes. This would not only help finance and promote projects, but publicize the company and the Open Code Market.

    And since I'm giving away business advice... it seems to me trade associations would also be a good funder for many targetted projects (I imagine that would be a good way to get funding for things like accounting systems, specialized database packages, etc...)

    Someone please try those ideas out. I'd much rather make a living selling code that will be open :)

  • Where is Jabber? (Score:5, Informative)

    by axxackall ( 579006 ) on Sunday November 23, 2003 @02:11AM (#7540753) Homepage Journal
    Four IM-related bounties and all of them are for Gaim, the open-source IM client, which primary protocol is AIM, which is proprietary one, rather than XMPP/Jabber, which is "pure" open-source. What a shame on Gnome!

    I understand that Gaim supports XMPP, but it does as for a secondary one. For example, when it starts it request you to login to AIM.

    Why not support Gossip or even Tkabber instead? Why Gaim?

    Well, if you think it's just a flame war about IM clients, then take this:

    In addition to three GAIM-related bounties, the fourth one is "purely" related to AIM protocol: Handle aim: links in Epiphany. When I read this I begin thinking that Gnome management team has been sold out to AOL. Otherwise why wouldn't the include also Handle JID: links in Epiphany.

    What's wrong with Gnome team?

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