2012 July 07 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for July 7th, 2012

Nokia Forks

Published by Robert Pogson July 7th, 2012 in technology. 27 Comments

Chuckle. M$ effectively took over Nokia and is driving it into the ground. Fortunately a lot of their laid-off staff are competent to use FLOSS in a new venture. Like Phoenix, rising from the ashes, Nokia is being reborn as Jolla and flying on the wings of FLOSS. M$ should not have expected the discarded workers to just sit down and do nothing. Now, Nokia and Phoney “7″ will have even more competition. I wish them luck. The field is already crowded but MeeGo/Linux or Tizen should perform even better than Android/Linux because it’s native code.

“A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for "dinghy"), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of "directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities."”

see Ex-Nokia staff to build MeeGo-based smartphones | The Verge.

- Robert Pogson

Evolution of Thunderbird e-mail Client

Published by Robert Pogson July 7th, 2012 in technology. 57 Comments

Any project as durable and feature-laden as Thunderbird is bound to create or be facilitated by differences of opinion. The choices of paths to follow are many:

pour more resources into Thunderbird,
just maintain Thunderbird,
develop a web-application that does the same things,
…

Mozilla has decided to freeze the features and concentrate on web/cloud stuff. That annoys some who have grown to depend on Thunderbird, particularly those with many e-mail accounts. Thunderbird makes sense for its ability to concentrate those accounts in one application.

That move may put pressure on the using community to contribute more to Thunderbird or the community may disperse to other clients or web-mail. We shall see. I would bet a FLOSS application like Thunderbird with tens of millions of users will live on in one form or another indefinitely and may well grow. I would not be surprised to see its functionality appear as a web application sooner or later.

Mozilla To Stop Innovation On Thunderbird – Muktware.

- Robert Pogson

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.