Technology

Remembering Gerv Markham

July 28, 2018 By Benjamin Kerensa

Gerv Markham, a friend and mentor to many in the Mozilla community, passed away last night surrounded by his family.

Gerv worked at Mozilla for many years working in a variety of capacities including being a lead developer of Bugzilla and most recently working on special projects under the Mozilla Chairwoman.

I had the pleasure of working with Gerv in the Thunderbird community and most recently on the MOSS Grants Committee as one of the inaugural members. Between these two areas, I often sought Gerv’s mentoring and advice, as he always had wisdom to share.

Anyone who has been intimately involved with the Mozilla project likely engaged Gerv from time to time, although much of his work was behind the scenes but nonetheless important work.

I think it goes without saying Gerv had a significant impact on the open web through his contributions to Bugzilla and various projects that moved the open web forward and he championed the values of the Mozilla manifesto. All of us who knew him and got the opportunity to collaborate were rewarded with a good friend and valuable wisdom that will be missed.

Thanks Gerv for being a friend of Mozilla and the open web and you will be surely missed.

Ubuntu Mobile and Desktop Success Zooms Out of Reach

April 5, 2017 By Benjamin Kerensa

I had predicted long ago that Unity and Ubuntu Mobile would fail and fail it has, mostly because Shuttleworth ignored signals that were there from the community and industry for years and continued to dump a fortune into a fight that could not be won.

While Shuttleworth has made it clear that mobile is not in Canonical’s future, he also has not been clear about the future of the desktop other than to signal the move back to Gnome. So I’m going to drop another prediction out there and say that I believe Canonical will entirely abandon the Ubuntu Desktop in the coming years because, like mobile, has almost no chance of sustainable profits. So far as a desktop OS, it has not been able to compete proprietary operating systems like Windows and OSX. The simple fact is game and app developers are not flocking to Ubuntu to port over major apps and games from OSX which continues to leave a major gap in the Ubuntu Desktop that forces even the most die-hard Linux enthusiasts to dual-boot or have separate hardware with a competing OS on it.

I definitely wish this were not the reality and wish, rather than doing this expensive moonshot on mobile, that Canonical had invested that money into bringing mainstream apps and games to the desktop. That said, the future for the cloud and server space continues to be very bright for Canonical and is the bread and butter of the company. That is great news because where the desktop and mobile has failed, there continues to be great success and progress and that is key to the survival of Canonical and the Ubuntu Project.

Ultimately, I think the endgame for Canonical will be to focus on what it does best, which is enterprise server and cloud area and leave the desktop to community contributors and slowly reducing headcount of staff working on the desktop.
I still hope that Canonical will prove me wrong on desktop and finds some way to attract mainstream developers because we really do need a consumer viable Linux desktop and nobody has been able to achieve that yet so for now Ubuntu Mobile and Desktop have Zoomed out of reach of consumer and commercial viability.

Glucosio Named Top Open Source Project

March 18, 2016 By Benjamin Kerensa

Last year, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and my life was pretty much flipped upside down for awhile. One thing I immediately set out to do was to find software, preferably open source, that would help me get on track and have an improved health outcome.

There was a lot of software out there but I did not find any that aligned with my needs as a person with diabetes. Instead, I found a lot of mobile apps and software built by companies that put profit first and were not driven by the needs of people with diabetes.

Right then I came up with the idea to start an open source project that made cross-platform apps (iOS, Android, Desktop, Web etc) with the focus of improving the health outcomes of people with diabetes and supporting research. But there were already two great open source projects out there like Nightscout and Tidepool, so why start our own?

Simply put, I wanted to do something different as I’ve seen this great divide in the diabetes community where not only are things like communities, podcasts and advocates divided around what type of diabetes a person has, but also the two open source projects out there were focused only on people with Type 1 diabetes. This is problematic because Type 2 diabetes is left outside of these intentional Type 1 diabetes circles when we should be working together to solve both types of diabetes and pooling our resources together to advocate for an end to both types of diabetes.

And so Glucosio was born with the vision that an app was needed that benefits both people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Not focusing on one or the other, but instead giving equal energy to features that will benefit both types. Our vision was that this new open source project will unite people who have Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes or know someone who does to contribute to the project and in turn help accelerate research for both types while at the same time helping those with diabetes keep track of things that affect their health outcomes.

Last year was a lot of work for the entire Glucosio team. We worked hard to build awesome open source software for people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and we pulled it off. Glucosio for Android is the first of our diabetes apps you can download today but we also have Glucosio for iOS and Glucosio for Web and an API for researchers that are all being actively worked on.
It is our hope to also have a cross-platform desktop app (OSX, Windows and Linux) in the future as more contributors join to contribute.

And this week, we were excited to announce that Glucosio following in the footsteps of some pretty stellar projects like Docker, Ghost and others has been named one of Black Duck Software’s Top Open Source Projects of 2015.
If you are interested contributing some code, documentation, design, UX or even money (to the Glucosio Foundation) to the effort of helping millions who struggle with diabetes worldwide, we’d love to have your support but you can also spread the word about our project by tweeting or sharing our project site or connecting with us over social media.

Glucosio in 2016

December 31, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

Happy New Year, friends!

Our core team and contributors have much to be proud about reflecting on the work we did in the past few months. While there are many things to be proud of, I think one of the biggest accomplishments was we built an open source project and released a product to Google Play in under four months. We then went on to do four more releases and are growing our user base internationally on a daily basis.

We have had an astounding amount of coverage from the media about the vision we have for Glucosio and how we can use open source software to not only help people with diabetes improve their outcomes but further research through anonymous crowdsourcing.

I’m proud of the work our core team has put in over the past few months and excited what the new year has in store for us as a project. One big change next year is we will be formally be under the leadership of a non-profit foundation (Glucosio Foundation) which should help us be more organized but also have the financial and legal structure we need to grow as a project and deliver on our vision.

I’ve been able to meet and talk with third parties like Dexcom, Nightscout Foundation and many others including individual developers, researchers and other foundations who are very interested in the work we are pioneering and are interested in partnering, supporting or collaborating with Glucosio.

One exciting thing we hope to kick off in the New Year are Diabetes Hack Days, where organizers around the world can host hack days in their community to get people to come together to hack on software and hardware projects that will spur new innovation and creativity around diabetes technology. Most importantly though, we are very excited to launch our API to researchers next year so they can begin extracting anonymized data from our platform to help further their diabetes research.

We also look forward to releasing Glucosio for iOS in the first quarter of 2016 which has had a lot of interest and been under development for a couple months now.

In closing, we would like to invite developers, translators, and anyone else to get in touch and get connected with our project and start contributing to the vision we have of amazing open source software to help people with diabetes. We’d also ask you to consider a donation to the project, which will help us in our launch of our iOS in Q1 of 2016, and help us more rapidly produce features by offering bounties via BountySource and expand into a more mature open source project.

Remembering Ian Murdock

December 30, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

There is clearly great sadness felt in the open source community today after learning of the passing of Ian Murdock who founded the Debian Linux Distribution and was the first Debian Project Leader. Ian is the “ian” in Debian and Deb, his then-girlfriend (Debra Lynn) for those not familiar with the history of the naming of the project.

I was fortunate to meet Ian Murdock some years ago at an early Linux Conference (LinuxWorld) and it was very inspiring to hear him talk about open source and open culture. I feel still today that he was one of the many people who helped shape my own direction and contributions in open source. Ian was very passionate about open source and helped create the bricks (philosophy, vision, governance, practice) that power many open source projects today.

If it were not for Ian, we would not have many of the great Debian forks we have today including the very popular Ubuntu. There is no doubt that the work he did and his contributions to the early days of open source have had an impact across many projects and losing Ian at such a young age is a tragedy.

That said, I think the circumstances around Ian’s death are quite concerning as we have seen the tweets he made. I do hope that if Ian suffered excessive force at the hands of the San Francisco Police Department that justice will eventually be served.

I hope that we can all reflect on the values that Ian championed and the important work that he did and celebrate his contributions, which have had a very large and positive impact on computing.

Thank you Ian!

Openly Thankful

November 20, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

So next week has a certain meaning for millions of Americans that we relate to a story of indians and pilgrims gathering to have a meal together. While that story may be distorted from the historical truth, I do think the symbolic holiday we celebrate is important.

That said, I want to name some individuals I am thankful for….

People

Mozillians

Lukas Blakk

I’m thankful for Lukas for being a excellent mentor to me at Mozilla for the last two years she was at Mozilla. Lukas helped me learn skills and have opportunities that many Mozillians would not have the opportunity to do. I’m very grateful for her mentoring, teaching, and her passion to help others, especially those who have less opportunity.

Jeff Beatty

I’m especially thankful for Jeff. This year, out of the blue, he came to me this year and offered to have his university students support an open source project I launched and this has helped us grow our l10n community. I’m also grateful for Jeff’s overall thoughtfulness and my ability to go to him over the last couple of years for advice and feedback.

Majken Connor

I’m thankful for Majken. She is always a very friendly person who is there to welcome people to the Mozilla Community but also I appreciate how outspoken she is. She is willing to share opinions and beliefs she has that add value to conversations and help us think outside the box. No matter how busy she is, she has been a constant in the Mozilla Project. always there to lend advice or listen.

Emma Irwin

I’m thankful for Emma. She does something much different than teaching us how to lead or build community, she teaches us how to participate better and build better participation into open source projects. I appreciate her efforts in teaching future generations the open web and being such a great advocate for participation.

Stormy Peters

I’m thankful for Stormy. She has always been a great leader and it’s been great to work with her on evangelism and event stuff at Mozilla. But even more important than all the work she did at Mozilla, I appreciate all the work she does with various open source nonprofits the committees and boards she serves on or advises that you do not hear about because she does it for the impact.

Ubuntu

Jonathan Riddell

I’m thankful for Jonathan. He has done a lot for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, KDE and the great open source ecosystem over the years. Jonathan has been a devout open source advocate always standing for what is right and unafraid to share his opinion even if it meant disappointment from others.

Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph

I’m thankful for Elizabeth. She has been a good friend, mentor and listener for years now and does so much more than she gets credit for. Elizabeth is welcoming in the multiple open source projects she is involved in and if you contribute to any of those projects you know who she is because of the work she does.

Glucosio

Paolo Rotolo

I’m thankful for our lead Android developer who helps lead our Android development efforts and is a driving force in helping us move forward the vision behind Glucosio and help people around the world. I enjoy near daily if not multiple time a day conversations with him about the technical bits and big picture.

The Core Team + Contributors

I’m very thankful for everyone on the core team and all of our contributors at Glucosio. Without all of you, we would not be what we are today, which is a growing open source project doing amazing work to bring positive change to Diabetes.

Others

Leslie Hawthorne

I’m thankful for Leslie. She is always very helpful for advice on all things open source and especially open source non-profits. I think she helps us all be better human beings. She really is a force of good and perhaps the best friend you can have in open source.

Jono Bacon

I’m thankful for Jono. While we often disagree on things, he always has very useful feedback and has an ocean of community management and leadership experience. I also appreciate Jono’s no bullshit approach to discussions. While it can be rough for some, the cut to the chase approach is sometimes a good thing.

Christie Koehler

I’m thankful for Christie. She has been a great listener over the years I have known her and has been very supportive of community at Mozilla and also inclusion & diversity efforts. Christie is a teacher but also an organizer and in addition to all the things I am thankful for that she did at Mozilla, I also appreciate her efforts locally with Stumptown Syndicate.