Eirik Bakke's Ultorg (SIEUFERD) is amazing and inspirational research, and I'm glad to see that it's finally available to the public after 17 years. It's one of those things that really makes you sit up and take notice of how much better our everyday software could have been.

However, I wouldn't be willing to try it under proprietary-software terms. Last week, I was thinking about eliciting open-source software with the Ultorg look and feel from an LLM, thus replicating Bakke's HCI research and enabling other HCI researchers to build on it, which won't be possible under a proprietary license.

My notes on Ultorg may be of interest; you can

  git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git

and read sieuferd.md (5200 words).

The introduction:

> Eirik Bakke’s [SIEUFERD][0] (or, as he sometimes spells it, SIUEFERD) is a really interesting and promising generic database frontend, a “schema-independent database UI”. The elevator pitch is “a new kind of graphical query interface [with] the power of SQL but the ease-of-use of a spreadsheet”. (Unfortunately, he forgot to implement the DDL part of SQL, just doing the DML part.)

I can highly recommend Bakke's 5-minute talk on it from 10 years ago at https://vimeo.com/173726371.

Previously used it and it's AMAZING given you have data stored with good practices, e.g. with unique IDs that are consistent among many databases/sheets. I found it's easier to begin with Ultorg's usecase in mind than to migrate existing files to fit its use.

And I do agree with the criticisms mentioned in the thread. Ultorg is solving a lot of problems of data organisation and context awareness, so starting a business with a perpetual license would be awesome.

Guess I just don't wanna lose access to the tool once I have all the tailored files and fail to pay again.

Should mention that Eirik is a joy talk to and will quite possibly accommodate you. All the best to him.

A small desktop app that is a subscription rubs me the wrong way.

Question: Is there any way to customise the interface like add extra buttons, for example to export an invoice?

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