RDF: Abiword and Calligra

Over the last few years I've been fortunate enough to hack on Calligra and Abiword, adding support for the RDF/XML that can be stored as part of an ODF document. Both suites can also interact with each other, allowing RDF to move over the clipboard along with the text content.

There are some things abiword can do with RDF that Calligra currently can't. These include highlighting the parts of the document that have RDF associated and initial support for capturing relations between things in RDF. Such relationships from RDF can give back to the user right off the bat. For example they can be useful for navigating the document by semantics, moving from a child to their parent, or the cat to it's owner. RDF also opens up document computing to other possibilities like navigating by time rather than by the linear sequence of pages.

I am currently looking to do some more development around ODF. It would be wonderful to do some more indepth hacking on either project as they both have a very nice, welcoming, open source team behind them. If anybody knows of some sponsored hacking floating around for these tools, please get in touch :)

I recently committed a small change to Calligra to move back to using intrusive reference counting for some non graphical RDF objects. While Calligra can use marble to allow editing locations from RDF, I used marble at a level in the calligra stack that isn't optimal, so have to shift that to a plugin to allow it to be easily accessible to distribution builds.

CRUD, metadata, indexing and Trees, please

For those in Australia who want to hear about libferris and doing interesting things with data using a everything is a file paradigm then you might like to drop by OSDC later in November and LCA in Brisbane in late January 2011. Both of these events will include a session with me talking about not only strange but also hopefully interesting and useful things you can do with your data using libferris.

Examples include mounting flickr, facebook, youtube, gstreamer et al. Just "cp" your image to upload. With gstreamer just "cp" from the camera on the n900 to your web service of choice. And heavier data manipulation like interfacing with SQLite and XQuery to get at any data the filesystem exposes such as these web services, berkeley db, relational data, dbus, running applications, composite files etc. I might also throw in some ODF processing such as using document forms to edit postgresql databases through virtual documents. Though what is in the main talk and what is in the post amble at the pub is yet to be delineated.

Meritocracy, Fate Or Anarchy

Many folks on a higher pay grade than mine tout that open source thrives as a Meritocracy. In this model, folks who are interested enough create a project and release the source under GPL/Whatever and if the project is "good" or "gooder" than other ones it has more merit and will advance to become more widely used etc. One interesting counter point to this made by Alain de Botton in his TED talk where if this rise due to merit, then things also sink due to it. Alain is not talking open source, but if we switch to that context, then if your project is not becoming successful, or you are struggling, then the Meritocracy eye balls would see that since you created the project, by implication you are scum.

During such talks of open source, I have to remove myself from the direct discussion. My hubris is not quite up to the task to extrapolate my situation, be it good or bad, to the larger context.

However, I have seen other people who have single handedly created fairly complex projects over many years only to have large corporate sponsorship arrive for other offshoot or fairly recently created projects. In this case I often wonder that it really doesn't seem that merit has much input into the funding decision. Of course, some will say that to talk about open source and funding is crass, if you like to do it then you will regardless of the open fingered gloves and dynamo powered netbook. But seriously, if a project gets 5-10 full time paid developers, are you confident you can "compete" with that, for 6 months, 3 years, 10 years? Or is it the case that more or less your project has been swept under the bridge by a corporate funding decision you were not even aware was happening?

Another good example of this is the Linux distributions who want a project for "Y" and decide to create a solution themselves rather than trying to adopt something that a committed developer has been working on for years. In some cases the "owning" the code can be more important than reuse, and most often the code is released under and open source license. But this be a fairly vicious demotivator for folks who were writing the existing "Y" solutions.

The specific examples of these sorts of things that I've seen over the years have led me to wonder what sort of model open source really follows. It does seem that Fate or Anarchy are most close to the process at times. Fate particularly coming into play when a developer is at a conference and happens to bump into the guy who works at a company who might be funding a project in a similar area soon. This angle has implications for open source conferences and CFPs in general. If you are not living in Europe or the USA then you will have a lesser exposure to conferences in those spheres and to some degree your project will have less chance of success, no matter what the code does or how well. While many conferences have a travel budget, where you are living will be a factor in whether your project Y or somebody else doing Y2 will get to talk.

Unfortunately these thoughts do not really have a strong conclusion. I thought I'd throw it out there a long with a few TED links to try to brighten up some a few folks who might have read about open source as a meritocracy and started to feel gloomy. Another interesting and related TED is by Dan Pink.
And all ya'll might like the metated which lets you grab talks from a single link source. Its really just an XML file with direct links and metadata, so if your downloader doesn't like it, emacs and wget are your friend.