Alex : I just wanted to quickly respond here to the points that you raise. First, Bigboard is not some huge skunkworks project; it's a prototype with slightly more than one person working on it for slightly more than one month, with all the source code in an open repository. And before we put any code down, we showed mockups and talked about our ideas at Fudcon.

But it's the fact that it is a prototype -- a place for us to try out our ideas, see what they look like on the screen live, and show them to others -- is why even now it's premature to worry too much about how it relates to Gimme. We didn't feel comfortable going to you and asking you to take let us take Gimme, require users to have an account on an unstable web service, add a hard dependency on a unstable custom canvas library, and redo the user interface to use these dependencies, in the process stripping away most of the polish you've added to Gimme. Maybe you'd have agreed, but I wouldn't have, if it was my project!

A common library for writing panel-like objects in Python and GTK+ would be possible, but I really don't see a big value there. It's not a lot of code and adding a common dependency would mostly be another hurdle to users trying Gimme or Bigboard out. The goal here isn't to have the minimal number of lines of code, beautiful architectural diagrams, and a coherent story about how things fit together from the start. Let's get the ideas out, see what works, what doesn't work, and where we we want to go. The architectural diagrams can be added later.

And because Gimme and Bigboard are both written in Python and GTK+, if the consensus ends up being that Bigboard isn't total crack, taking the good parts of Bigboard and integrating them into Gimme won't be a big deal.