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Simon Wardley
on Wed Jun 13 2007 18:09:57 GMT+0100 (GMT)
So, Zimki is a really cool software project - the kind of thing that everyone in the office enjoys working on, from the eagle eyed developer putting in extra hours at the weekend to the marketing guy who can't contain his enthusiasm at the trade show. But, it is a software project, which makes it very hard to predict exactly how long all the elements are going to take to come together. Some of the elements are running a little late, and we're very worried about rushing them out - it's important to us to make sure everything is done properly in terms of our federated grid. To quote Brooks in The Mythical Man Month:
"The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save–burned in one part, raw in another."
Our parent company have even commissioned a major industry report on what we are doing and the future direction of this market. Alas, this won't be ready in time for OSCON. With so much still to be done, with this report to be published and some final decisions to be made on licensing, we've been asked to hold back on our plans for Zimki at OSCON.
What does this mean? Well, it means, for now, we won't be having such a big presence in Portland this year, and we'll not be doing the Open Source just yet. Does this leave us with egg on our faces? A little, but we'd rather do it right rather than just right now. And to thank everyone for their patience, we're also going to hold off charging for tokens making Zimki completely free to use.
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