new years resolutions .. for other people

new years is upon us! it's the time when many sit down to make those lists of "new year's resolutions". granted, most such resolutions get forgotten by the time the hang-over has worn off on jan 1 ;) but it's a nice sentiment. so here are two of my new years resolutions ... for other people. i have my own list, but it's mine; a boy needs his privacy at some level after all...

the first resolution is for all those people who have become successful in business during and/or after their involvement with kde. there are a number of tasks within the organizational mechanics side of kde that need people with management experience. things like facilitating developer meetings, helping author planning documents for the e.V. ... sadly, what generally happens is that people who benefited tremendously from their involvement with kde, be it personally, professionally or both, tend to get busy with their new "important" business lives and forget about where they came from.

the resolution is thus this: think about what you can give back to the project with your honed business and management skills.

my second new year's resolution is for everyone who writes software that can store configuration in a directory service. yes, i'm looking at you kolab, samba, asterix (ok, so it's a nasty bit of perl scripts in that case ;), pam_ldap, etc... i'm also looking at novell and red hat with their pet directory solutions.

listen up: one place where microsoft is kicking our ass, and not gently at that, is in the integration they offer at the directory level. it's trivial to set up a directory based log in system that also houses your groupware log ins ... or pretty much any other bit of their software stack.

on linux? it's a pain the ass (which means our rump is doubly sore: once from microsoft's boot and once from trying to configure our own systems). where is the coordination between these projects? why is it that integrating kolab with a samba ldap system is arcane black magic that requires manual maintenance?

c'mon, this isn't rocket science. it just takes some very basic goal setting ("a coherent directory strategy in the open source world that is sys admin friendly"), some basic communication and a bit of work.

if we don't do this, we're only hurting ourselves. if we don't have a kolab with good samba directory integration by the time kontact is running on win32 and macOS with kde4, we'll have 'earned' the right to be called incompetent. and why should people behind kolab (to pick on them for a moment ;) do this? because it will expand their user base dramatically. it's good for everyone. well, except microsoft.

so, if you know someone who might benefit from adding either of the above 2 resolutions to their own new year's resolutions list, please forward them this blog entry.

happy new year everyone! =)