Fabrizio Balliano

Many blogs talked about that in the latest 2 days, while a was taking a break, but I can’t stop myself for writing a headline about this news from ars technica.

I hope that this unification idea will go on and complete successfully, it should happen for many other projects, I also hope that this will be taken as an example of the right direction for companies that want to work with open projects (ok Apple is not a saint…)

UCK and reconstructor are both good software to create a customized Ubuntu derivative.

I’m working hard on UCK in these days thus you can expect big changes soon, but I’m also a user of reconstructor and I can do some considerations, in this post I’l talk about the next UCK release so maybe you can think that something I’m saying is wrong but that’s because you’re still working with the old UCK.

• UCK is bash scripting, reconstructor is python GTK. For some things UCK is easier to script and customize because many users know bash, less know python
• reconstructor does many things that UCK doesn’t: gnome environment customization, alternate cd customization are just two examples
• UCK can used to automatically generate ISOs without user interaction
• UCK has a nice support to install language packs and customize gfxboot language selections
• reconstructor has a nicer GUI also if it’s GTK only, UCK GUI can be used within CLI/GTK/QT environment thanks to dialog/zenity/kdialog but we can’t build complex UI with those tools

So what are the conclusions? Both projects have the same goals, both have a common part of code that could be reused.

The next UCK version will bring a good set of small scripts that everyone can call to do every single task of a remastering, thus my thought is that UCK should concentrate on the back-end scripts and reconstructor on the GUI. I hope for the future that reconstructor could drop his back-end scripts and use UCK’s ones, working together to bring better software for everyone.

If you want, check out the development version of UCK.

Reading my latest post someone can say

hey you started many projects but what did you do for the fragmentation problem you’re talking about?

That’s absolutely right!

Something like 3 years ago we started the Knoppix italian community, after some time (maybe 1 or 2 years, I can’t remember) some other guys started another knoppix italian community, we told them they should join our project becase our was already known and active but nothing. We continued with our project for a bit but, monitoring the others’ work we found it was good and we decide to close ours to make users join the new one.

This is a good defragmentation I think, I don’t care about the 10 euro/month for the adsense banner on my site, I care about the idea, what’s the goal? 10 euro/month or the spread of knoppix? IT HAS TO BE THE SECOND!

Our website is still there just for reference but it’s read-only, hope we did a good work, I think so.

I feel this as a big problem in Italy because of my involvment in some free projects, I don’t know if it’s the same in other countries but I can imagine that’s pretty the same situation.

A free project is created starting from an idea of a single person, some other joins, some other say “hey I want to do this instead of this” and create another project. What’s the result? The failure of at least one of the projects.

It’s absolutely sad to see good projects dying because people can’t find common objectives and work together!

If you come second, don’t impose your ideas, join the community and work for it, if you really want to contribute put down your own pride and work for the free software, not only for yourself and your name!