“Tracker is a powerful desktop-neutral first class object database, tag/metadata database, search tool and indexer. Tracker is also extremely fast and super efficient with your systems memory when compared with some other competing frameworks. It consists of a common object database that allows entities to have an almost infinte number of properties, metadata, a comprehensive database of keywords/tags and links to other entities. It has the ability to index, store, harvest metadata. retrieve and search all types of files and other first class objects.”
Sounds like a filesystem. From what I can tell, you can get the exact same thing with ext3, extended attributes, and a file indexer.
I had the same thought. Why would they use a database for this now that standard Linux filesystems are finally getting proper implementations of extended attributes? They should support that incentive, not fight it..
extended attributes still aren’t indexed – and it’s quite hard to do this in a way that ensures that the index is always up to date in a “reuse fs attributes” scheme.
on beos/bfs, you could ask for “all mails that are from between today and last week, sent to the email address [email protected] and larger than 60kb” and get a response from the filesystem in 1 or 2 seconds – with 100% reliability.
So current xattr implementations are still crappy, with no inodes for the attributes? I guess Reiser 4 does this better than the rest then, because there the attributes are files, so they have the same capabilities as other files (same size restrictions, monitorable inodes).
That can be done above the filesystem level with an indexer, albeit at slightly lower reliability (or so says the BFS creator). I wouldn’t mind seeing a query system built into ext3, although I don’t see that happening any time soon.
embedded mysql? esh. I’d rather they used embedded firebird, it was built for that task.
too early to tell if this will be interesting or not. currently most of the interesting ‘first class’ objects are unsupported (index/search wise).
Hi,
Im the author of tracker.
I would love to use firebird too (from my Delphi days it was the best!) but it does not have full text indexing like embedded mysql.
In fact embedded mysql is the only *embbeded* open source database that has it.
mm use lucene for full text search on firebird, its 1000* more powerfull than mysql full text search…
mysql full text search uses myisam tables only, thus you get no transactions etc
mysql full text search has some other drawbacks.
Tough competition with beagle already becoming entrenched on Linux desktops, and Google Desktop search on Windows. I like the tag/metadata ability though (once it’s done). Would be nice if beagle implemented that. We might then be able to finally do away with a hierarchial file system along the lines of GLScube (which sounds cool, but something that works on top of the filesystems we already are using on our computers would be better).
Tags and metadata is already done for all first class objects.
Is this using something like Leaftag? I think that is one of the most under-hyped bits of software… especially the nautilus integration.
Fingers crossed for 2.18
Cool! Looks promising. Are you planning on supporting Thunderbird emails in a future release? That would give it a leg up on beagle, which only supports Evolution.
BeOS file system and… BeOS Tracker :o)
Oh yeah, is there a trademark infringiment going on here? Will the Haiku project have to protect the Tracker trademark?
While it does seem to greatly resemble what Tracker does from a distance, and has the same name, the reality is that unless Be, Inc. got careless in their “About BeOS” dialog, Tracker doesn’t seem to have been trademarked, or at least there’s no indication of that. Thus, it doesn’t look like there’s a trademark dispute possible, because it was never that much of an issue. In a similar vein, Explorer isn’t visibly registered as a trademark by Microsoft, either, and for likely the same reason: the name needs to be distinct enough before it can be trademarked, among other things. Both “Tracker” and “Explorer” are too commonly used (at least by themselves) to be trademark material, and they are common words. Please, though, let’s not get involved with how “Windows” got trademarked
Common words in english cannot be trademarked. Tracker is one of those of course – its too generic to belong to any one company.
I didn’t realise BeOs had something similiar called tracker.
It would be kind of nice, if you wouldn’t mind, if you could change the name of your product. It’ll only cause confusion in the long run.
If any of the “BeOS for Linux” projects ever get far enough along to run Tracker, or if Tracker was ever ported to Windows and your product also ran on Windows, you’ll cause a lot of bother.
It’s a bit like Firebird and O/S Interbase vs Mozilla. Firebird (database) was there first. A BIG stink happened and ultimately Mozilla backed down. I can see BeOS users getting angry about this product. I have no idea if there is enough momentum still to cause you a big headache. Worth considering anyway.
I would if there was an open source product called tracker with which it conflicted. But BeOs tracker is closed source and the OSS clone is called OpenTracker and its a file manager which is completly different.
The Firebird database trademarked the Firebird name so Mozilla had to comply.
I still feel words like tracker are too generic to be owned exlusively by any one company.
Be Inc. open sourced Tracker’s code back in 2000; OpenTracker is one such derivation of that code, keeping quite close to the original.
You’ll also find that Haiku has “Tracker”, which shares code from them both.
I wish you all the best with your Tracker, even though a name change would suit me too
Don’t be silly.
> I would if there was an open source product called
> tracker with which it conflicted.
What is “Open” Tracker then? Scotch mist? Tracker is Tracker. OpenTracker is just a version of it. You also have LocaleTracker, Tracker.NewFS, etc. Go over to BeBits.com and tell me how mant Tracker related items you can find if you search for “Tracker”.
“Open” Tracker is the name of the Distro, Tracker is still called Tracker, libtracker.so is still called libtracker.so. If you believe otherwise, you are foolish.
> The Firebird database trademarked the Firebird name
> so Mozilla had to comply.
Maybe, but if they did it was after the fact. It wasn’t trademarked prior to that.
I would also be careful. Tracker was a trademark of Be Inc. Some one might feasably still own that trademark and might sue you. Access more or less killed YellowTab by extorting money out of them (allegedly) and they were paying royalties to them, so god only knows what they’ll do to your project.
Let’s face it, in a court of law it could go either way, but BeOS has been using the term Tracker for far longer than you have. Your product does the same thing – it indexes metadata and allows searches upon it in a database query style. The filemanagement is a side issue. BeOS’s Tracker just happens to do that as well.
Jamie,
Having just been directed to an interesting thread on what seems to be your Journal, it now transpires that “Tracker” was in “implicit” trademark (as opposed to Registered trademark) of Be Inc – now owned by ACCESS. As previously mentioned, ACCESS is not adverse to taking legal action.
So, it seems that Jonathan Thomas is wrong 😉 Its the difference between (R) and tm it seems. Top have a tm you don’t need to register it. You just need to be able to prove prior use.
You may not need to register it legally, but you do need to indicate you’re using it as a TradeMark by (TM) which denotes it’s a common-law trademark, whereas (R) is only legal to use if you’ve legally registered it. I don’t recall Be, Inc. ever putting (TM) next to Tracker anywhere at all, so the ability to claim it as a trademark is limited, at best, as a result. When you don’t make a claim to it and don’t defend it for too long, you lose the option of claiming it.
My last name is “Thompson” by the way
Oh, I’m in the process of registering a trademark for my own project at this time, and it is currently in the “published for opposition” phase of the process.
The status of Be’s trademarks:
http://haikunews.org/1072
http://haikunews.org/1073
or to sum up:
“Once again, no trademarks were even applied for Tracker, a word Be documentation seemed to claim had.”
I dont feel threatened by this at all.
Again, reading the same thread on your blog, Jamie, you will notice that this we de-debunked. The guy who wrote that article commented on it.
Jonathan T: I think you’ll find that it was a Trademark none the less. It was a name that Be would have protected by prosecution if they had still been around in that capacity.
It’s a moot point now anyway. Jamie seems to have agreed to re-name the product formerly known as “Tracker” to MetaTracker, and also re-name the shared lib from “libtracker.so” to “libmetatracker.so”. Well done Jamie, you are a true gentleman!!
I think that name is a very good choice.
Not only does it remove any future conflict with my beloved BeOS/Haiku, it also is very descriptive of what the code does.
Tracker tells you some thing is kept track of, but what is not that clear.
OpenTracker tells me that the code is open source, atleast I now know I can look at the code to see what it really does. (PS. I am still trying to understand the code to add my own extensions.)
But MetaTracker! Now there is a name to make it easy to realize it tracks MetaData. I almost wish the Haiku team thought of it first.
While Tracker, Explorer, Finder etc are likely not trademarked or protected, nor was Windows (in any sane sense) and that got a completely different name Lindows product into court.
While Haiku & BeOS live on as opensource and are still in use (atleast here), I would wish other opensource projects to show respect, otherwise we might see all sorts of projects stomping on taken names.
wow, it’s getting busy in the indexing department. beagle, kat, strigi, glscube, tracker – just a few which are available. poor users… 😉
The problem with the BFS approach is it requires great care to be usable in a multiuser system. In order to ensure index correctness, a BFS index stores a reference to the one thing about a file that will never change in its lifetime: the vnode id. The consequence of this is that it essentially allows direct access to the file which can bypass fs security entirely. Thus such an approach isn’t realistic in a system like Linux without some rather extensive modifications, which is likely why the trend is more towards a database on top of the FS style approach, though this certainly doesn’t prevent one from using extended attrs and then creating an index based off the contents of those.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 2.0; U; AvantGo 3.2)
Somebody mentioned that beagle already does what tracker is doing, and this is true, and due to Novell’s investment it is more integrated. But the big difference is that tracker is very small, and very fast.
Tracker uses only 3~6 mb of ram, where beagle uses 60 mb just sitting there.
Tracker is also very fast. I think changing the database for a “faster” one is pointless when it is already this fast.
Tracker can already be used with nautilus, and through its command line interface.
If you use ubuntu, go here to try it out:
http://www.madman2k.net/article/19/#p2
(the tracker enabled nautilus section)
Linspire guys agreed to change the name for money.
It’s just like the office thing. The trademark is Microsoft Office, because office by itself is a common word. There is OpenOffice, gnome office, koffice, and other “office” packages. If Be inc trademarked anything it should have been BeOS Tracker, so the names don’t collide. As Tracker is just a name for a project, not a trademark, there is no problem using it like that.
Untrue. A company I worked for wanted to use the name “Navigator” for a chauffer work rotering and planning package. They were not concerned about Netscape – different field of business, but they did worry about Garmin. Luckily, Garmin didn’t chose to do anything and they got away with it. Navigator is just as much a “generic” term. Just because you “get away with it” doesn’t mean it is right.
Besides, look at Firebird. Mozilla caimed it was a different field, but Firebird database won over because they were there first. At the end of the day, it baint about whos bin doint wht to who, tis bout who’s bin there longest. Tracker, ala BeOS, sets a prior claim. INAL, but should a dispute go to court, BeOS would legitimately win IMO.
” “get away with it” doesn’t mean it is right.”
It’s right to use the name. It’s a common world, not one you invented. What makes your product different from others is what is prepended to that name, like Microsoft to office, or BeOS to Tracker.
“Besides, look at Firebird. Mozilla caimed it was a different field, but Firebird database won over because they were there first.”
Firebird is a composed world, an invention, not a common word. It’s a different case.
“but should a dispute go to court, BeOS would legitimately win IMO”
Then OpenOffice,NeoOffice,StarOffice,GNOME-Office should all change name because there is already a Microsoft Office.
I’ve been staying out of this… I’ve been negotiating on the LiveJournal instead.
Jamie is being extremely reasonable, adult and helpful about this issue of name. Kudos to him for not taking the Mozilla/Firefox slant on things. I understand it must have been a bit of a hammer blow to the head, but I think everyone will benefit. I can see synergy between Haiku and MetaTracker in the future – MetaTracker could handle indexing of non BFS volumes, for example.
>What makes your product different from others is what is prepended to that name, like Microsoft to office, or BeOS to Tracker
Not true. Any company worth their salt would defend such a trademark when faced with a competing product using a similar name.
>Firebird is a composed world, an invention, not a common word. It’s a different case.
No, it is a “composite” word. It is no more composed than Lemongrass or automobile. Firebird has been used to describe a Car, a childrens toy, an RDBMS and (briefly) a browser. However, go look at Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/firebird and you will find that it is a real animal. It is the same as calling your product Pidgeon or Sparrow.
>Then OpenOffice,NeoOffice,StarOffice,GNOME-Office should all change name because there is already a Microsoft Office.
No, and this is your mistake. Those products all use distinct names. If Microsoft (and look into this – they are _always_ careful to refer to Office with the word “Microsoft” outside of the context of Office specific pages on their Website) called their product “Office”, THEN it might be a problem.
Jamie doesn’t want to change the name. So what, we’ll leave it at that.
Now I’m sure Jamie wants it to be successful. SO successful in fact, that people will Google for it. Then what? Lo and behold all these BeOS results come back! Oh my gosh! That’s not what they were searching for! It’ll give exposure to our beloved BeOS, and they will pass off this linux attempt as the digging for info goess past the 5 minute mark.
Jamie’s loss, our gain. The question then comes up, “What’s in a name?” Apparently Google has helped us define what tracker truly is, and not what this “project” wants to be.
Overall, I suggest changing the name. You may like it, but whoopty frickin doo dah, the world knows tracker differently, and it’s too late to change that.
This is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Nope I have sort of agreed to change it slightly as a compromise to make it appear a little bit different and to avoid conflicts.
It makes sense not to have libraries or header files that will conflict so these will pe prefixed with “meta” in my tracker product.
Officially the name of my tracker product will now be “Meta Tracker” but as the name “tracker” is used everywhere (in the source, cvs, mailing lists etc) it will unofficially still be okay to call it “tracker” (but only for shortness and convenience!)
Nice! I do like MetaTracker. Sounds like it’s “above” tracker. And really, I think it’ll help in Google searches. I think that overall was my main point. 🙂 It’ll help push it along when folks look for it, and not get encumbered with BeOS Tracker results.
Isn’t a tracker a software used for creating music?
*runs and hides*
No. The Amiga tracker programs were always Xxxx Tracker, where Xxxx is a word like “Pro”, “Sound” etc.