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Usability attention for Free/Libre/Open Source software projects. Very valuable, and these folks have a good format. See also: Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement.

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Gmane is a mailing-list-to-news gateway. News here means good old USENET news, accessed via NNTP. Mail-to-news gateways have been built before, but gmane is interesting because it is bidirectional—you can post via usenet and have it funneled into the mailing list. You can also read and post via a the web using a threaded interface (example) or a blog-style interface (example) complete with RSS.

Gmane is focused on communications about free software, but it's also the most comprehensive cross-media threading system I've seen. The world will be a better place when conversations can start in email, move into mailing lists, web forums, and blogs, and provide access to the whole thread from any entry point.

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A short story about the creation of SourceFire, a company that sells a proprietary GUI admin tool for an open source network intrusion monitor system whose development it leads.

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WebNote is an online note-taking program. It lets you create a tableau, where you can create and edit notes in various colors. You can interactively drag and resize notes, make whatever edits you want, and then save the tableau.

What makes WebNote amazing is that it's web-based. Try it here. The coolest upshot is that you can use WebNote as a collaborative workspace like a Wiki, but giving users more powerful visual hints in the form of colored notes arranged in space.

Still, while I think the idea and code is neat, I'm not sure this is that valuable as a standalone application. I think these notes are most useful as annontative elements on an existing, larger piece of content. In particular, I think it would be a useful piece of interface in a writing workshop. Readers could position notes around a document in order to share questions and suggestions.

Another cool idea would be a collaborative whiteboard space. Here it would be most interesting to combine the annotated tableau with some sort of periodically updating interface. Maybe the notes slide down over time, and fade into a regular blog. But when something is important, you can make a big note and put it right on top. Perhaps a few people can share this and use it as an efficient way to share bits of more and less transient information during the workday. Or you could use it for your own note list. If something important is about to slide off screen, just drag it back to the top of your attention!

It doesn't do most of this stuff yet, but luckily, WebNote is open source too. An inspiring piece of interface work.

[via Napsterization]

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Hackers of the world: try our code, fix our bugs!

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In the space of five months, John Roberts started a software company and delivered its first product to thousands of potential customers—a process that could easily have taken years. His secret? Open-source development.

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There are some great observations in this overly long essay.

One interesting trend is the shift of value away from software and toward the network effects surrounding software-based services. What this means is that while the software of ebay or amazon or orkut is fairly easy to clone, each of these businesses has its competitive advantage in the scale and involvement of its user base. The advantage is not in writing software, but in developing self-sustaining communities that invite and reward effective participation. This is dependent on software in roughly the same way that good cities are dependent on the layout of public spaces, roads, parks, transit networks, and buildings. Given enough money, you could clone all of these aspects of a city, but your clone wouldn't have any life until it was full of people constantly occupying the physical space and gradually reshaping it to fit their own lives.

In other words, skills now crucial in making software aren't taught in The Art of Computer Programming. If you want to make software, read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, or better yet, A Pattern Language.

There is also some grist for the prediction mill in this essay. Here are mine:

• Microsoft will ship open-source software within 10 years. Leading up to this point, they will transition to a business focused primarily on helping people find and use content (including software) created by third parties. Their software margins will crumble during this time period, but they may be able to sustain a profitable software business by driving quality up and cost down due to explosive growth in the number of devices that use software.
• Some interesting stuff is going to happen when people start figuring out how to commoditize network effects. This problem will require figuring out how to make software more responsive to user intentions, and less brittle at the mercy of incompatible formal interfaces. The driving forces in the next generation of programming systems will be social, not technical.

Entrepreneur, philanthropist, and ex-cosmonaut Mark Shuttleworth has an article about his experience funding the development of SchoolTool, an open source school administration system. Mark first attempted to develop this software by funding a dedicated team, which failed as the developers pursued shiny geeky projects instead of producing working software. To counteract this problem, he will fund multiple, separate teams that collaborate over the internet. This will have two major effects on the project. First, the different teams will keep each other in check—focused on developing working parts of the software because other developers depend on them. Second, the separate teams will be forced to have their discussions on public forums like mailing lists and wikis. This will open up the development process to input and criticism from other developers and customers, as well as build a body of explicit knowledge that will help the community sustain itself without overdependence on the original team.

This seems like a good strategy and I hope that it continues to serve SchoolTool well. But I want to propose another approach: funding the surrogate customer. Open source projects can really take off only when there is a balance of management-style leaders, hardworking programmers, and conscientious end-users. It is the nature of open source that any individual need not fall neatly into one of these boxes, and one may indeed be all three—a person truly scratching his own itch. Mark's approach seems to start with getting some good programmers and building extra support for the leadership. But can we also go the other direction, funding the creation of users?

I think here the philanthropists can take a lesson from commercial software development. Most software development companies have dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) teams, whose job is to test the software being delivered by the development team and find bugs. Really, the purpose of QA is to serve as a surrogate customer—to keep developers in check by complaining the way a customer would, but before you've actually sold anything. Because QA staff are employed, they are also distinguished from regular customers by their willingness to work patiently with developers to sort out problems; they have a stake in the software's success.

This same relationship happens with the best users of open source software. When a user really wants a project to succeed because it will make her own life easier, and she knows she can contribute fruitfully to the project, she will be more patient and generous. If in her use of the software she finds a bug, she may not only report it, but report it in detail. She'll add an explanation of her motivations for using the software in this way, descriptions of workarounds that she's found, and an explanation of the ultimately desired behavior. Software developers can often fix a bug without much of this background information, but a thorough bug report is distinguished from a trivial one by its ability to trigger Aha! moments in the developers' minds. The most valuable bug reports both elucidate real project requirements, giving developers a more accurate direction, and pin that direction to an actual living person that the developer can truly help. They help developers stay effective.

This leads to an interesting question: if we had bags of money, could we ensure this benefit to an open source project by simple paying people? If we buy these surrogate customers for open source projects, how much faster can a project get rolling? How much better will their software be? In other words, is it worth it? Perhaps another philanthropic ex-cosmonaut will help us find out.

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now to see if I can manage a second international trip in September…

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Soon ubiquitous wireless networks will span the earth, and the internet will finally finish prying world culture from the cold, dead hands of the information intermediaries.