Midgard follows Ubuntu's synchronized release schedule, and releases packages for that platform, but otherwise we have little to do with the distribution. Still, I found the following in Mark Shuttleworth's Jaunty Jackalope announcement interesting:

Another goal is the the blurring of web services and desktop applications. "Is it a deer? Is it a bunny? Or is it a weblication - a desktop application that seamlessly integrates the web!" This hare has legs - and horns - and we'll be exploring it in much more detail for Jaunty.

This echos quite well with our plans to take Midgard much further than just the web. As Everaldo often reminds me, Midgard may soon become very interesting to developers of desktop and mobile applications. What we provide to them is:

• A simple object-oriented persistent storage library
• Bindings for Python and Mono in addition to the C library
• Ability to use either SQLite or a "proper database" thanks to libgda
• Replication capability, with XMPP support on its way
• D-Bus signals for inter-process notifications of I/O events

And on top of all this, Midgard comes with a pretty efficient MVC framework for PHP. This means that the desktop applications can be coupled with a nice social web service, all built using same storage and replication mechanisms. Replicated, peer-to-peer applications could be a free software answer to the risk of cloud taking control of your data.