Communicating With Freedom - Part II - Quibble Breathing New Life Into LibreJS
In Part I we spoke about Quibble, a communication tool that will be widely available in the future and is already ready for use (it's around "beta" phase now - whatever that says regarding quality/stability).
"I know JavaScript can be a bit of a minefield when it comes to developing fully Free software," told us the developer (or one of several) of Quibble. "That said, packaging the CLI tool or extension directly into the Quibble application once it’s complete seems like a strong approach - it would even help prevent anything malicious from running or spreading through chats! That’s probably the direction we’re leaning toward now. More broadly, we want to bring as much user freedom as possible to the web space through this project, and we’re glad to contribute to this essential tooling as we work toward a public beta release of Quibble later this summer. Quibble will support all platforms, and we might even get it to run in the browser entirely - so that no download is needed - sorta like how some IRC clients work. As a result we're using the LGPLv3 for everything in this codebase, but we might license part of it up as time goes on this summer."
So a beta of Quibble might be available within weeks or months. More on that later in the series.
"Currently working to update the CI/CD pipeline for testing," we got told, "and can probably get a package published before the end of the week - should time continue to allow 😅" (that was last month).
"I’m happy to share more details," we were told, "or hear your thoughts now, or as things progress!"
Anyone can participate or get involved, as development is done "in the open freedom".
"I had some extra time and managed to finish a few pre-beta releases," the developer added days later. "The new tool is now live and published as version 0.0.6 (I had to bump the version a few times to iron out some CI/CD pipeline quirks)."
You can check out the releases here:
- NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/librejs-cmd
- JSR: https://jsr.io/@rockenman1234/librejs-cmd
- Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/rockenman1234/librejs-cmd
As of 3 days ago we can see "bump to 0.0.18".
Development seems to have been very rapid, with many/most files changed this past week, several as recently as yesterday:
This is something that other projects too will be able to use, reuse, get involved in etc.
"Everything seems to be running smoothly so far without many issues," we got told. "Please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might be interested in helping revitalize the LibreJS project! My long-term goal, as I mentioned before, is to eventually embed some of this code into Quibble as a safety tool. Best, and happy hacking :-)"
Notice how work on one thing led to thousands of lines of code added to a mostly dormant (but nevertheless important) project. █