Ted Haegar of Novell Open Audio fame is doing a great job addressing some of the points I raised earlier this year about the podcast. Not only is he managing to keep up his jet-setting lifestyle but in between jaunts to all four corners of the world he is managing to interview some really great Novell people like Jason Williams on the future of iFolder.
iFolder for those who don't know is an easy to use file synchronisation tool. Unfortunately iFolder is one of those (all too many) Novell products that is brilliant in concept but hasn't quite made it when it comes to execution or industry uptake. A good analogy to describe iFolder would be that of an Olympic high diver from a small ex-Soviet block state attempting a dive that would surely win the gold but because of lack of preparation, brought on by the fact they couldn't afford to practice full-time and instead were milking cows, they just don't quite pull it off when it counts.
What do I mean by this? iFolder 2 was nice but it was heavily tied into Netware, offered only a Windows client and had a restrictive usage model. iFolder 3 promised to fix these shortcomings but instead (prior to version 3.6) it seems to have lost its direction and paid the price for certain architectural decisions that in hindsight are questionable. In both cases the potential was there but the focus and determination to pull off the task seemed to wane as time progressed.
It would appear as if internally Novell realised this and drew iFolder development to a halt for a period of soul searching. This is all well and good but it needed some indication to the public (i.e. the open source users) that this was happening. Conventional business processes can afford to go silent as customers are only expecting news about the next big release. In the open source world I am afraid user expectations are slightly different, we (Joe public) are interested in developer progress right down to every SVN commit. The reason why this is the case is simple, an open source project's biggest proponents and knowledge base is its users, more precisely the users interested enough to join the mailing lists and follow the developers blogs.
Why are these users so important you may ask? Because when it boils down to it these are the people that are going to sell Novell products better than Novell's marketing department could ever hope. The people in these communities are typically the ones with a great influence on corporate purchasing decisions, and even when they can't they have a knack of getting the products used anyway. So when Jason Williams talks about balancing the 'corporate' and 'open source' worlds of iFolder he'd better be careful because it indicates that maybe he does not understand or appreciate how closely these two worlds are interconnected.
Novell respect your users and they will respect you. Please in the future if a project is off the tracks and needs some alone time to think about life just tell us. Robert Scoble of ex-Microsoft fame was very good at this and it gained him the respect of nearly everyone, even ardent Microsoft bashers. Do not treat your open source projects and users as second class citizens, sure they may not pay the bills like the corporate cats but they will be your biggest supporters when you get things right and won't threaten you with lawsuits or a migration to Microsoft when you are wrong.
Oh and Ted and Jason, in the future don't throw the term 'Web 2.0' around in the same sentence as AJAX and Ruby on Rails, they are definitely not at all semantically related and if iFolder is done right it can be so much better than all of those things.