joe shaw

On Alex’s recent post about Gimme and Mugshot, Jamie made this comment:

Take a look at what *little me* is doing with tracker vs big corporate Novell’s Beagle - I am winning the war here because my stuff is turning out to be better designed so the moral of the tale is “even the smallest person can make a difference” and the great thing about open source is “size does not matter” so you wont get overshadowed by bigger companies.

I agree with the core sentiment — even the smallest person can make a difference — but Jamie can’t write a single sentence without trashing Beagle and twisting the situation into something that isn’t even remotely true. I am sick and tired of his constant Beagle bashing.

First, Jamie tries to position himself as David to Novell’s Goliath. Well, guess what? Novell employs exactly one person to work on Beagle. Me. The rest of the contributions — code, wiki updates, documentation, translations, bug reports — come from a community of volunteers much larger than “little me”. In fact, last year around this time I thanked over one hundred people by name who had contributed at that time. Yes, Novell has a vested interest in the project, and yes, you can say that is why SUSE-based distributions ship it. But Novell’s massive corporate pressure isn’t the reason why it’s shipped in Fedora, in Ubuntu, in Debian, in Gentoo, in Mandriva, in Foresight, in Arch Linux, in Linux Mint, and on and on. Stop spreading FUD.

And what’s all this about a “war”? I find that statement to be incredibly alarming. I have always been forthcoming about Beagle’s weaknesses and Tracker’s relative strengths — a courtesy that you, Jamie, have never shown me or Beagle. I suspect this hawkish mentality is the reason why you consistently and constantly badmouth Beagle and pimp Tracker relentlessly, to the irritation of many.

But perhaps most upsetting is Jamie’s perpetual misinformation campaign about what Beagle was and wasn’t designed for. In a comment elsewhere he spouts off this nonsense:

What that means is you can use tracker to store tons of metadata, do desktop tagging, cross reference and cross query all your metadata and provide a next generation integrated desktop. Beagle can not do any of that as its not designed for the task.

Ridiculous. Beagle has extracted, indexed, and stored metadata from data sources and documents from day one, and allows users to search any of it. Documents in Beagle are all referenced by URI, so cross-referencing them is trivial. Beagle integrates with existing metadata stores like F-Spot’s tags and Nautilus’ metadata (emblems and notes) instead of reinventing the wheel as a centralized, all-singing, all-dancing universal metadata store. It’s harder and more work to do this, but is more past- and future-proof and the right architecture. I would love to see the “next generation integrated desktop” and Beagle is certainly not a barrier to that.

Jamie, you’ve never once posted to our mailing list, touched anything on the wiki, been involved in any design decisions, or submitted any code. You’re ignorant of how Beagle was conceived and why. Simply put, you are not qualified to say anything about how it was designed. Stop doing it. You can share your first-hand experiences. You can argue relative weaknesses and merits and share your opinions on the matter. But stop acting like you’re an authority on Beagle, and stop spreading misinformation.

It’s normal for multiple projects to try to solve the same set of problems — you and I obviously don’t see eye-to-eye on a number of technical issues — but let’s discuss the merits of each project and not perpetuate negative perceptions through a pointless “holy war”. I’m always accepting of constructive criticism about Beagle, and I would welcome it from you. But the key word is “constructive.”