Wim Vander Schelden has written a detailed guide to building e on Fedora 10.

Since the source was released, there has been quite a bit of progress with lots of outside contributions. Adam Vandenberg has been putting in a lot of work on the build environment on the windows side, and Andrey Turkin and Roman Lisagor have been hard at work on getting the Linux version up and running.

As you can see on the screenshot, it now builds and renders on Linux. Getting the build up and running still takes quite a bit of hand holding, and lots of minor issues will have to be corrected before it is usable for daily work, but if you are familiar with Linux, get the latest source and join in and we will soon have a working release.

As of today, the source of the e text editor is being released. This is the first step in the transformation into an Open Company.

Note that this is not just handing the development over to the community. I am still, and will continue to be, the main developer. Development of the editor will continue and it will still be fully supported in the future.

What the release means is that you can never risk ending up with a product that is totally abandoned, that many more eyes will be there to find and remove bugs, that companies and individuals can themselves add features only they need for inhouse use and that the community can help speed up the development of e and hopefully free me up to work on the more innovative features (of which there are many in the planning stages).

The Open Company License

The source is being released with a clear and very permissive license. It is essentially the well known BSD license with a single extra clause:

I think that too many of us have been in situations where we had to review huge multi-page licenses, with no chance for understanding all it’s implications short of being license lawyers. By basing the Open Company License on a simple and well understood license, it is hoped to make community involvement much easier.

While the addition of the extra clause means that the license can no longer be termed an Open Source License, it is ideal for the open company. It is essentially an issue of mutual respect. If I fully respect your ownership, you will in return respect my right to make a living.

Linux version

There has been many questions about whether the release of the source would make it possible to build a Linux version. The answer is yes. The source does build under Linux, it just needs a Linux version of the ecore library which will be released shortly.

The editor could not have been build without the support of a lot of open source projects (most notably wxWidgets). So to give back, the Linux version will be totally free (as in beer).

So play with the source, and join us in the forum if you have any questions.

The promise of Open Source

The Open Source movement has shown that loose groups of people, each working of their own accord on whatever they feel is important or interesting, can create great software. Not only has this worked for small hobby projects, but also for huge well known projects such as Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice.

It used to be hard to imagine that anything serious could be build without the creation of large hierarchical organizations. But if one thing has really been shown in these recent years, it is that self-organizing groups in many cases can outperform traditional organizations.

There is a lot of talk in the community about the various freedoms that open source confers. But beneath all this there is a titillating promise of an even more fundamental freedom. This is “the real freedom zero”:

If you do not have this basic freedom, all the others are really irrelevant.

The central dilemma of Open Source is, and has always been, how to make a living doing it. And so far all the proposed solutions seems to have been a surrender of the right of the individual to choose his own work.

Whether the idea is to create a company that offers support, or maybe go to work for a big company that has an interest in improving the product, you will always end up with a boss who has the final say in what you should work on. Of course you might be lucky that it (at least for a time) overlaps with what you are passionate about, but the decision is out of your hands.

Very very few people are in a position where someone is willing to pay them for just following their passions and doing whatever they find most rewarding. For most people (if they even have had the opportunity to find their passion), this has to be delegated to a hobby they can do in their free time, while they make their living in a day job.

Is this really what we wish for? Working all day in more or less boring jobs to bring bread on the table, and then only hacking on what you are passionate about in your precious free time, where you should really be with friends and family.

You could say that this must be how it is meant to be. How could it be otherwise, when the commonly inferred meaning of the word “work”, is to be doing something you don’t really want to do, to make a living? And isn’t this how it is, and always have been, for everybody?

But this is ignoring the long history of the human race. If you look to anthropology you will see that we spend the overwhelming part of our history as tribal bands of hunter-gatherers, where nobody really had the means to force others work for them. Indeed many tribal societies have been found where the whole concept of “work” is non-existent. They simply don’t have a word for it.

It was not until the agricultural revolution, that it really became possible for individuals to amass a surplus of resources, which made it possible to pay (and force) others to work for them.

There is a very good case to be made for the fact that we are not very well evolutionarily adapted to work for others (with others yes, but not for others), and we only have to look around us to see that it causes a lot of misery. This was what Thoreau alluded to when he stated that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.

So this brings us back to the freedom to decide our own work. How do we make this titillating promise become reality? How do we make it possible for individuals to freely work together, just working on what they personally find important, while still making a safe living?

The Way it Ought to Be

One, not very optimal, solution could be starting your own one person company, producing and selling proprietary software (as I and many others have done). This ensures that you are the only one deciding what to do, but it also has several problems.

First of all you are only a single person. This means that you have to do all the work, also the work that you don’t find interesting (but you might find it important enough to want to do it anyways). Also, you are yourself a liability to the company. If anything happens to you, everything stops (as it happened for me when I had some family issues that meant development stopped for several months).

Second, there is still a fundamental disrespect for your customers, who in a very real sense are also taking part in the company. They get a locked down product which they cannot study, or modify beyond what you have explicitly provided for. And while they may be doing a lot of activities that are hugely beneficial for the company (offering support on the forum, word of mouth, sending bug reports, etc..), they get no real reward for their efforts.

Fixing the product issue, is fortunately quite easy. Just give the users the source of the application. Then they can study and modify it to their needs, and if they want to, share their modifications with each other. A simple release form can make them share the ownership of the changes with the company so that they can be included in future versions (without making them loose any rights).

The Open Company

The real question is how to make the users real participants in the company. There is a lot more to be done than just coding. Everything from support to design and marketing could in principle be opened up to free participation. Obviously there are some things where mistakes could have seriously adverse effects on the company, but this is where it would be appropriate with levels of certification (maybe shown kind of like stackoverflow’s badges).

Imagine you had a company like this. Totally open. No concept of bosses or employees. Anyone could join in at any time, doing whatever task they found interesting, for whatever time they found appropriate. How could you possibly find a way to compensate them fairly?

The key is in a technology called Trust Metrics. In essence this is a technique for rating each other, but with the key distinction that the way ratings are calculated makes cheating ineffective. This is a new technology, which has not been applied for this purpose before, but it has already proven itself as the underlying principle behind such well known technologies as Googles pagerank and the certifications on Advogato.

By basing the compensation on continuous rating by your peers, it becomes possible to start out by just participating a bit in your free time, and then gradually, as your ratings increase, spend more and more time on the project. It may eventually come to fully supplanting your day job, becoming your primary source of income, or you may choose to just keep it as something you do on the side. And not only can nobody stop you from participating, there is nobody who can fire you either. This makes it a far more secure way to make a living, where your status is solely dependent on your own ability and effort, rather than on arbitrary decisions from some superior.

You could question the fairness of being rated by your peers like this, but keep in mind that the way it is done in companies now, is pretty much completely opaque, with some boss judging you in a pretty much arbitrary manner. At least here you will have full disclosure of why and how you are being rated. Also, it is not completely unprecedented. There are companies like W.L.Gore, which for decades has used peer ratings as the sole basis for compensation. But they have obviously not been open for free participation.

Making It Real

Throughout time, many people have brought up more or less utopian plans for ways to make a living. But if they are never realized, it really amounts to nothing more than hot air. So to make this real, I am putting my company (from which i currently make my living) on the line. Over the next few months I will gradually be transforming the company of the e text editor into an Open Company.

Since this is an established company, which already has an accomplished product and a large userbase, it has a good base to build on. Therefore the transformation will have to be done step-by-step:

1st step: Releasing the source

The source will be made a available, so that users can study and modify the application for their own needs. If they want to contribute their changes back, they can submit them for review. To discourage piracy, a tiny but essential core (also containing the licensing code), will be kept private (at least until users reach a certain rating). This will gradually be followed by a similar opening of the rest of the company (web site, documentation, bug tracking, etc..)

2nd step: Building the Trust Metric

The basic infrastructure will be set up so that participants can start rating each other. The algorithms and code will be released as open source, so that they can be studied and discussed (and used by others). It will probably need quite some time and tweaking before we reach a fair balance.

3rd step: Compensating Participants

All income in the company (minus operating expenses), will be passed through the trust metric and distributed to participants.

The Future

Throughout the entire process, I will be blogging about the experience and the individual parts of the transformation. This is kind of a grand experiment, but my hope would be that it can inspire others to either join in and participate, or form their own open companies, so even more opportunities are created.

The end goal is to make “the real freedom zero” a reality. Creating a future where everybody has the opportunity to find (or start) one or more open companies in alignment with their passions, and make a living doing what they love.

If you want to participate in this, join us on the forum, and help us shape the future.

Update: First step is complete. The source has been released.

Here is a screencast with a tutorial on creating your own bundles in e. It uses the todo.txt format as example, which is a simple plain text todo list format created by Gina Trapani, and shows how to add highlighting, commands, completions and snippets.

Creating your own bundles is quite easy in e. The documentation on this is still very limited, but the original documentation on the TextMate bundles format all apply (we just use JSON rather than the apple plist format to define Languages and Preferences).

The resulting bundle has been put on ebundles and can be installed from the bundle manager.

The latest update adds an extension to the snippet format, so that you can pipe the contents of individual tabstops through shell commands. This makes it possble for snippets to be far more interactive.

The syntax is pretty straightforward. Here is a simple example that allows you to directly evaluate ruby code:

 ${1:ruby code|ruby -e "print eval STDIN.read"}

If this snippet is bound to the tabtrigger “ru”, then pressing ru[TAB]1+2[TAB] will result in 3 (without leaving any trace of the intermediate steps). Very handy for doing quick calculations without having to do a mental shift and since you have access to the full language you can do far more than simple arithmetic.

The equivalent snippet for python would be:

${1:python code|python -c "import sys; print eval(sys.stdin.read())"}

The commands are not limited to just reading from stdin. They have access to all the standard environment variables, plus a few snippet specific ones:

• TM_SNIPPET : contains the entire snippet
• TM_TABSTOP_n: contains the contents of the individual tabstops

This means that you can make snippets that react on quite complex input from the user. Here is a simple example of a snippet that draws a box in a user defined size:

${0:Draw box ${1:10} times ${2:10}|"$TM_BUNDLE_SUPPORT/starbox.rb"}

It works with the following script placed in the bundles support dir:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

width = ENV['TM_TABSTOP_1'].to_i
height = ENV['TM_TABSTOP_2'].to_i

height.times do
  width.times {print “*”}
  print “\n”
end

The content is piped to the command at the moment you tab out of a tabstop. The one exception is tabstop zero (the ender tabstop). Since this completes the snippet, the piping happens on entry. In the above snippet, this is used to replace the entire snippet text with the user defined box.

This extension of the syntax is currently specific for e. But if it sees enough use then we can hope that it becomes supported in TextMate as well.

Since publishing the Regular Expression Tutorial, I have received a lot of request for making the accompanying cheatsheet available in a more tangible form. So here it is on mugs and mousepads:

The release cycle for e is pretty fast, with new updates coming out every one or two weeks. All updates are announced on the forum, but if you are not a regular there, it can still be hard to keep track.

To help on this situation, user Charles Roper has made an rss feed tracking the e updates:

http://feed43.com/e-texteditor-releases.xml

Add it to your feed reader and you will get automatically notified when new updates are released.

The latest updates of e has added support for remote projects. This means that you can open an ftp site directly in the project pane and use it as if it was a local project.

In earlier versions of e, this could also be approximated with various shell plug-ins, but having it as an integrated part of e removes the reliance on external tools and gives a much nicer user experience. Implementing this features was also an opportunity to re-architect and improve a part of e that had gone a bit stale while the rest of the editor had evolved. The new underlying project framework is very flexible and extensible, and will allow for a lot of new capabilities in the near future.

To open a remote project just select ‘File/Open Remote Folder’ on the menu, create a new profile and press ‘Open’. The remote site will be opened in the project pane, and you can interact with it as if it was a local project.

You can also open remote files and projects directly from the command line. You just have to give it the path i url format:

e.exe ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/dir/file.txt
e.exe ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/dir/ (remember trailing slash for projects)
e.exe ftp://username:password@ftp.mydomain.com/dir/ (with login)

The remote projects feature is still very new and currently only supports the ftp, but support for protocols like sftp and webdav will be available soon.

After a long beta period, e is finally coming out of beta. It has been quite a ride. We have had a pretty crazy release cycle with updates coming out weekly (and often twice a week). So I really appreciate all the users who have followed the releases and pushed both me and e to improve with their enthusiasm. Special appreciation goes to all those users who chose to register even though it was still in beta.

Coming out of beta does not mean that development will slow down. The 1.0 release is a stable base to build on and I have a lot of new (and unique) features in the pipeline. I will probably start having a bit longer between releases to focus on some larger features.

And before I get drowned in requests again. Yes, a linux version is in the works