Monday 27 July 2009
Why I did write Gnote?
By hub, Monday 27 July 2009 at 18:27 :: Gnote
Because there are so many misconception about why I wrote Gnote, I think I should clarify a bit as my original announcement wasn't clear. This is to follow up on a question that was asked to me this morning where said person, who will likely read that and probably recognise thyself, had said misconception.
I wrote Gnote to answer two questions:
- How can I have Tomboy functionality on my custom openSUSE image I made for my EEE PC, that will fit the 2GB? I don't have room for Mono on this. For what is worth, back when I tried to put a distro on it, the only distro that would fit out of the box on this EEE PC was Eeedora, a Fedora based image for the EEE PC, but that only did provide XFCE. Since I wanted GNOME, it ended up not being that useful as I didn't have a the Fedora tools to actually regenerated a custom one. None of the other did fit on 2GB, including the Mandriva Flash I had from GUADEC, Ubuntu's own, etc.
- Is it easy to port a C# application to C++?
The second question helped me to answer the first question.
I decided that since I'm advocating Free Software, there was no reason to develop behind closed doors. I just kept it silent for the first weeks of coding, as I actually wanted to have something that works, but it was, since day 2, on gitorious. For the rest, you all know what happened: the anti-Mono crowd took it as their victory, started FUDing, etc. Barely nobody asked me why I had written that code, compared to the many that actually thought I was supporting their cause. But that's how the internet work.
The worse part is that I seem to be have been the target of hateful messages and comments from a certain number of people who found that writing code is hostile, while they blessed Tomdroid and Conboy which both take a different approach to a similar problem (kudos to their respective authors, I find Conboy fitting well on my N800, even though any typing is like torture).
And if you still think I hate Mono think again. I worked for the company that pushes Mono (and still wish I was), and I was using Tomboy on all the Linux machines I had (and to be fair I was surprised of the number of people who actually told me they had never used it because it was Mono based... looks like this didn't stop me as I had been using it for as long as I have the laptop I'm typing this on, circa Dec 2005).
Will I continue Gnote development?
Even though I'd love to have help, I definitely will maintain it as long as I can. The next release will have a boatload of features and fixes, including D-Bus support, etc. It is all in git. One has to admit the pace as slowed down recently because I have been working on other things, including AbiWord and Niepce.
Will I port another application?
No. But if a somebody is willing to hire me for that, please, feel free to contact me, I'll see what I can do.
