Re: GWeather suckage

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 05:10, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> Hey,
> 	I think setting up weather.gnome.org would be the trivial part, to be
> honest. Resolving the questions around whether we actually *should* do
> this is more tricky e.g.:
> 
> 	* Traditionally gnome.org has supplied software not services. Do we
> want to move into the services arena ?

Some software needs data from the network to work; providing data that
makes our own software work isn't really what I'd consider a service per
se.

> 	* If we do weather, surely we want to do stock quotes, news etc.

Not necessarily. News is typically easily available parseable via other
people's RSS, and stock quotes are also fairly trivially available for
the major markets. Weather, OTOH, is difficult to get globally and
usefully. [If someone can point me at one site that has everything, or a
weather equivalent of RSS, I'm happy to be corrected.]

> 	* Who pays for the bandwidth ?

Very good question. 

> 	* We would need to ensure we were rock solid legally before opening it
> up - we couldn't just write a script to parse yahoo.com and hope they
> don't notice.

Of course.

> 	* If we did set it up, how long would we be talking about supporting it
> for ... 5 years ?

However long we felt like. It'd be just the same as the current
situation- all our old software can break at any time. 

> 	* Before some GNOME distributors could ship the software which used the
> service, they may require some guarantees around availability and long
> term support. Would be be prepared to give such guarantees ?

The only GNOME distributor who has had a problem with the current
situation is Sun. If Sun wants those guarantees, they need to provide
the resources for them. Otherwise, I'd presume GNOME services would be
the same as GNOME Software- to quote the GPL, "BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS
LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE
EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW."

:)

Luis