freezes

freeze 'frEz [v] to make extremely cold cold.

it's well below zero again here in Calgary. snow everywhere. ice. february. as i contemplate where spring is, my mind wanders back to a couple weekends ago:



Chinaman Hat island is visible in the background, and my mom is on the left.

while in the Islands i had a lot of time to chat with various people. one bit of conversation that has stuck with me was an exchange with Bill Weinberg from OSDL where he noted that if we (the open source desktop efforts) simply chase after our closed source competition trying to match them feature for feature, look for look, technology for technology in a madcap race of cloning that we will certainly fail as we will be doomed to an unwinnable position of following. we need to lead and to innovate.

another bit of wisdom came from Maddog as we walked across the Ala Wai canal. he said he's impressed and hopeful given the efforts we've made up to this point. but then he said something that truly made me think about the stakes involved. he said that if the open source community loses on the desktop (e.g. we abandon it or never break through into significant double digit market share) we will almost certainly eventually lose across the board. the open source desktop must succeed.

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freeze 'frEz [v] to cause to become fixed

3.4 is now in feature and visible string freeze (with the exception of docs, which aren't frozen until the end of the month). now is the time to work on bugs, regressions and performance. spent much of last night sqashing kicker issues. slow work, to be sure, and more of it to do.

this is the time in a release when it becomes woefully apparent that some improvements will get punted to the next version, in this case KDE4. i already know where kicker will be heading in KDE4. there is a lot of work to be done there.

after 3.4 is released but before 4.0 devel starts, besides the usual bug fixing, i'll be working on FreeNX. research on some KDE4 efforts is coming along nicely in the meantime, and will continue as well. i'm really excited about both the 3.4 release which has had some seriously great work put into it as well as what will follow.