Antifeatures

In preparation for LCA, I’m going to be giving my new Antifeatures talk a few times to smaller local audiences.

The first is going to be today in Boston (apologies for the late notice!) at Northeastern University at 11:45 and it’s being hosted by the ACM chapter there.

The second one will be at my alma mater Hampshire College in Amherst this Friday. A draft flier (ignore the unpluralized "antifeatue") is below.

/copyrighteous/images/hampshire_talk_2009_flyer-small.png

7 Replies to “Antifeatures”

  1. Free software can have anti-features too, but for different reasons. Try apt-cache show mail-notification and you’ll see that SSL/TLS support is disabled. Sure, the reason isn’t financial, but rather licensing issues, but the end result is the same thing: The hands down best IMAP checking GNOME applet for Ubuntu is useless for some subset of people.

    And that has been argued over (and over. and over. and over.) for 3½ years now on launchpad – https://bugs.launchpad.net/mail-notification/+bug/44335?comments=all with the original author marking it as WONTFIX (because he believes that that linking GPL code against OpenSSL is fine), Ubuntu packagers saying: “No it’s not!” and users saying: “That sucks! We want something that f’ing works!”

    And it’s not even possible to compile it yourself any more without manually hunting down source code because libeel2 was removed from karmic. sigh.

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