Interview of Etenil

Etenil is one of the Movim’s main developers, and one of the biggest contributors. He donates his spare time and experience to the project for more than a year now.

Vincent: etenil, Who are you?

etenil: I am two different persons. Guillaume has been a professional web developer for four years, he lives in London and is 27 years old. He got to know the Free Software philosophy by seeing weird mentions about “GNU” in is first distro (mandrake), and has been a Free Software activist ever since, and the FSF member #6635 . Etenil is a smug Unix user who lives in a cave somewhere with EMACS and keeps a whip with him.

Vincent: When did you join?

etenil: More than a year ago, but gitorious won’t tell me the exact date :/. I read a piece of news about Diaspora that also mentioned Movim, so I popped up on the chatroom but there wasn’t much activity there. I went back a month later and I saw there was no change. By chatting with one of the users, I discovered that there was only one inexperienced developer. At the time I had other projects of my own, but my profile was too useful to movim for me to ignore, so I contacted Edhelas and told him straight-away “Now there’s two of us.”, and here I am.

Vincent: What is you role within the project?

etenil: I am one of the two core developers of Movim. Since I have some experience in middleware thanks to my project of PHP framework, I naturally took on the project’s structure and I’m quite the grease monkey of the team.

I also applied my past experience for the project’s logicstics, for instance by defining release procedures and quality checks during the merge process so that the code has always been read by at least two persons.

I’m also the official whipper of the project and custodian of Movim’s standard issue nailed whip in order to punish developers that produce bad code .

Vincent: The project has evolved a lot in a rather short time. How do you see Movim’s future?

etenil: This is a complex question. Movim has indeed progressed a lot faster than what I expected, but we often face issues from technical constraints that come from our choices (e.g. PHP and XMPP), I think we’ll make it eventually, but it’ll take a lot longer than if we had written our own protocol from scratch.

But Movim isn’t a typical project. Technical superiority won’t be enough in the long run, and we need to benefit from a network effect so as to attract a critical mass of users for the project to live on. Eventually it will come down to a communication battle rather than technical. Fortunately, we have a very fine communication manager who does a great job .

Vincent: Decentralized social network projects are blossomin all over the Internet nowadays. As a developer, what advice would you give to improve interoperability?

etenil: Interoperability won’t be a problem. The fact is that no one wishes to inter-operate. Projects that chose to roll their own protocol won’t want to change to a more generic and more complex one like XMPP. And adding extra protocols would prove a heavy work and their maintenance nightmarish for developers who don’t care much for other protocols.

In my opinion, Movim can just use XMPP gateways, this way we won’t have to worry about other protocols at all. But we have to be aware that eventually the de facto standard will be that of the biggest project.

I also think that we should have an optimistic view of all this. We all are Free projects and share the same goals. So there’s no real competition. It’s better to see it as a big melting pot of experimental social networks out of which the best one will appear. Diversity has always been a great strength of Free software no matter what some people think, and all this activity is very healthy.

Vincent: What desktop environment do you use every day?

etenil: I’ve liked XFCE since the first time I tried, but GNOME2 was very very good, so I never stayed with XFCE. Fortunately, GNOME3 gave me the perfect excuse to final get down to it. Please note that Linus Torvalds copied on me about this .

Vincent: Thanks a lot for your time .