Hi Everyone

I'm sure you've heard the news: Moblin and maemo are merging! We are taking the best pieces from these two open source projects and are creating the MeeGo software platform. Both teams have worked for a long time to support the needs of the mobile user experience - and MeeGo will make this even better. We want it to be fun, focused, flexible, technically challenging and ultimately, something that can change the world.

We all use mobile devices every day. The power and capability of handhelds has reached astounding levels - netbooks have been a runaway success - and connected TVs, tablets, in-vehicle infotainment, and media phones are fast growing new markets for devices with unheard of performance. Our goal is to develop the best software to go with those devices. The teams behind maemo and Moblin have plenty of experience and even more ideas on how to make things better - and together we will create something special.

So what does this mean for Moblin and its community? It's a huge opportunity. There are some changes (and those are always scary), but I think they are all for the better. Things will quickly shift to the new site, but from a technology point of view, migrations should be smooth. Especially if you are an application developer; everything you have done so far should continue to work - and with Qt and its development environment there are even more and easier options available to develop new and exciting apps for MeeGo.

The MeeGo website is still evolving - you'll run into a few "coming soon" pages as we pull all the content together and get things ready for our first project release in the second quarter. But there's already a lot to see - and a community to join! Please take a look - and come back often as we approach that first release.

We really want to hear from you. Be in on IRC, on our developer mailing list, or through bugzilla. MeeGo is an open project and it will be successful through its developer community. It's my personal goal to make sure that we can all together be successful. And have fun.

I invite you to join us at meego.com.

Imad Sousou

Director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center
(and now also co-chair of the MeeGo steering group)

From a business standpoint, it does make a lot of sense to merge these 2 projects, now let's see if the merge can be handled smoothly technically speaking... might not be as easy as it sounds.

Feeling that the market has reached a point where my project finally makes sense, I'm proud to introduce you to my new baby : allmyapps, the first linux app store designed to help users find and install new applications on their Ubuntu Linux system.

To fully understand this project, you need to know that I'm a long time Linux user and evangelist. I started using Linux in 1998 (with a slackware) while still in high school and I've always been convinced that Linux would find its way to the desktop sooner or later. There are 2 factors in particular that make me think that this time has come:

• Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth's vision is, by far, the most important point. In my opinion, the biggest reason of the Linux Desktop relative failure til now is lack of willingness from the major Linux players. Let's face it... who, today, really works to make the Linux Desktop a reality? Red Hat? They purely and simply abandonned this market. Novell? They only considers the enterprise desktop... The only company really working towards making the Linux Desktop a reality is Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth (its founder) being committed to put the Linux Desktop into everybody's hands. And it's not only words! In the past months, Canonical has hired usability experts, desktop experience engineers... and the company is really working, both technically and commercially, to make the Linux Desktop happen. Unlike everybody else, they're not waiting for the market to move but are working to make it move!
• The netbook opportunity. Did you see the laptop market last year? People are fond of netbooks: 14 millions of netbooks were sold in 2008, with around 30% of them preinstalled with Linux! For the first time, normal people (unlike you and me) are using Linux and loving it. Do not trust the rumor that says that the return rate is higher with linux netbooks as it is simply not true. Linux price and versatility is a strong asset when it comes to run machines with low spec and sell them at a low price. Netbooks are a great market opportunity for the Linux desktop! For the first time, "normal users" are buying machines with a Linux pre-installed on it.

With the rise of the netbooks, more and more users today are confronted to a linux desktop. While using the system in itself is not a problem for most users, I've experienced that people tend to have a problem when it comes to finding new applications to install on their system. On the contraty to Windows systems, Linux systems historically have a very easy, quick and reliable installation mechanism, thanks to their centralized repositories and their associated package management systems. The only drawback of this mechanism is that it is different from the one users are used to on Windows... and it's a big drawback because users are getting lost... and lost users quickly turn into angry users! And the last thing you want is your users becoming angry! With allmyapps, we want to address this very specific issue.

I will probably not be blogging much about allmyapps on this blog. If you want to follow the development of allmyapps, I advise you to subscribe to allmyapps' blog. I will continue to write posts on my personal blog (this blog), I already have a few posts waiting about web application debugging / profiling and web application performance tuning... so stay tuned!

To conclude this post, I just wanted to say that we will be attending Recked in Amsterdam on monday 26th of january (today!) and then FOSDEM in Brussels on february 6th and 7th. If you'll be there too and want to meet, just leave me a comment!

For those of you who don't know what is Freelance Business Club, it is the first social network dedicated to IT freelancers (and their clients). It's a new concept which aims at easing the recruitment process of IT freelancers, it has been pioneered by Arnaud Coulondre (see his fbc profile) and Florent Daversin and I personally came onboard a bit later, after the launch of their website's beta version (you can see my own profile here).

My role in FBC, was to turn their beta version into a full-featured 1.0 version, which, I think, we achieved. Objectives were to lay the foundations for :

• Stable, predictable and maintainable software architecture
• Scalable technical architecture
• SEO efficient website (with the precious help of our beloved SEO master Sacha Pavan, creator of BankExam)
• Easy internationalization
• Integration with 3rd party webservices (Scribd for online CV visualization in our case)
• Easy integration of the new graphical chart (which I find awesome and was designed by Léo Robin)
• Implementing a performant, business focused and highly relevant search engine for FBC.

I'll probably use this blog to develop further what I did for FBC regarding each of the above points as I think it might be of interest.

Just for fun, I took some time to compare version beta and version 1 of the website and here are the results using SLOCCount:

Stats for version beta

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
php: 13258 (96.75%)
sh: 446 (3.25%)
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 13,704
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 3.12 (37.49)
(Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 0.83 (9.91)
(Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 3.78
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 422,018
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).


Stats for version 1.0


Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
php: 7556 (99.84%)
sh: 12 (0.16%)
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 7,568
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 1.67 (20.10)
(Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 0.65 (7.82)
(Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 2.57
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 226,241
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

I was impressed (not to say proud ) of the 45% decrease of the number of lines of code although version v1.0 has more features than version beta. Too bad SLOCCount doesn't take HTML or JS into account as I think results would have been even better... What's interesting also is that, given the number of lines of code found, sloccount uses the COCOMO model (a software cost estimation model) to "reverse estimate" the project main figures. For v1.0, according to the model, we should have spent 7.82 months with an effort of 20.10 person-month (that is 2,57 developers), to finish v1.0.

In reality, it took us almost exactly 3 months (we began on August 1st) to release v1.0 with 3 resources (among which 1 was not full-time, so let's say 2.57 resources to ease the comparison). Of course, comparison does not stand as v1.0 was not built from scratch and there was code (mainly the business layer) that was already developed for vBeta. But given the major overhaul of the code we did, I still think that releasing v1.0 was a very honorable performance!

But enough analysis already! Let's now have some beers and drink to FBC v1.0 before the first bugs appear

Santé !

Being an IT entrepreneur, expect my posts to be mostly about Internet and Technology, like many other blogs around here I must admit ! That being said, I still had to find a slogan for this blog... After having thought about it a little, I finally made up my mind on 'Imagination and Execution' as I think these 2 words summarize well what IT is all about.

I see IT is as a free world without limits, where your imagination is not bound by physical laws that prevent you from doing this or that... nothing is impossible in IT. Being an engineer in IT is a bit like being Superman in the real world But this "power" comes with high responsibilities. Indeed, if you're free to do whatever you like and there's no "predefined rule" to guide you, then it means you can do wonders... or real crap!

'Imagination and Execution'

These are the 2 magical words in IT. More than in any other field, imagination and execution determine what you'll end up with. And they are tightly coupled because at the end of the day 'Execution' is the real limiting factor of your 'Imagination'. Both are needed to succeed: 'Execution' without 'Imagination' and you'll end up with a working but non differentiating product. On the contrary, 'Imagination' without 'Execution' and your great idea will never come to life...

So this is it, please welcome my new blog 'Imagination and Execution

Cheers!

Some of you noticed that I'm a little bit less reactive these times on savemyconf, that's true and it's because I accepted working as a CTO on another cool project. It means that most of my time in august and september is dedicated to Freelance Business Club, a social network for freelances in IT that has a lot of potential. They are currently in beta and my role is basically to technically turn this beta into a v1.0 version, a very good experience! For info, the new version will be released in end october...

And here's my new business card:

Don't you find it pretty ?

Obviously, working for Freelance Business Club slows me down a little on savemyconf, but development on savemyconf goes on! More about that soon...

At this point (alpha), it is a bit rough around the edge and all functionalities are not yet fully implemented but you can already do basic stuff like registering one or more PC (up to three), save their apps and reinstall them.

The idea behind this alpha release was to get a first version out so that I can get early feedback from my friends. Still, if you are an 'unknown' friend, I'd be delighted to know your opinion so don't hesitate to send me your feedback by using the contact link on http://www.savemyconf.com or by leaving a comment on this blog.

I hope you'll find this alpha version promising,

Thanks a lot!

What is SaveMyConf ? Hint: conf does not stand for conference (I would really have no clue how to save your conferences !) but rather for configuration. That's it, SaveMyConf will help you save your configuration. Concretely? You'll have to wait a few more weeks to find it out. Wanna speculate about what it is? Leave it in the comments and i'll tell you if you're hot or cold

Stay tuned to this blog and you'll know more about SaveMyConf and my progress. Thanks!