Toward the end of my time at Novell, I was looking into a browser sync system for the GNOME Online Desktop. As I am a lazy hacker, the ideal solution at the time for me would have been for Google to open source its nice browser sync extension and then adapt it to the online desktop myself. I tapped my contacts inside Google to see if open sourcing it was in the cards. It wasn’t.
When I saw that the extension was being discontinued (and slowly-but-surely being replaced by Mozilla Labs’ Weave) and that it wasn’t immediately open sourced, I was furious! I planned a blog entry raking them over the coals, how could they abandon a perfectly useful piece of code, blah blah blah. It never happened, because I suck at blogging (remember, me=lazy).
Imagine my pleasure today when I came across their announcement open sourcing the extension. I hope people can take the code — mainly the Mozilla folks for Weave and the GNOME folks for online desktop — and more quickly build a high quality system. I am still looking for a way to sync my extensions between browsers!
And because false hubris is a cornerstone of this blog in addition to self-deprecation, I’d just like to say that it’s wonderful to see that the “additional pressure” I alluded to in my email has finally succeeded in ending the 11 month closed-source tyranny that began when I first heard of this extension last July. While I can’t prove that I single-handedly open sourced the extension, I know it to be true deep down in my heart. Hooray!