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Disclaimer: I am by no means a GPL fanatic. But nonetheless I think I can help to answer your question.

The biggest component of the GPL that RMS and the fans of GPL like is the same thing that made Microsoft incorrectly call it a "cancer". The GPL basically says that if you take the source code to a GPL program, make changes, and then distribute the binary, you are obligated to release the source to whomever you released the binary. In addition, you must release your new source under the GPL license, which gives the new users of the source the ability to distribute the code for free, even if you do not. This does NOT mean you can't sell it, or that you have to give away your program free at all. It just means that the first person you sell code to has the ability to give it away.

People misunderstand the GPL because they see companies like Red Hat and Mandrake giving away almost all of their products off of FTP sites. They could, if they chose, only sell their CDs. The CDs, though, must have the source code for every GPL program on them. If they don't, they need to make that source code publicly available (like on a web site). If someone were to buy these CDs though, they have every right to take the GPL programs off the CD and redistribute them, for whatever price they want.

Some of the other licenses you mentioned do not require that the source code be released when code is used in another program (called a "derivative" work). This appeals more to closed-source companies that want to take advantage of open-source products without releasing their source code. I'm not as familiar with the specifics of each license, but I'm fairly sure that the ability to keep source closed applies to BSD, Apache, and Artistic licenses.

One more note about the GPL. One can distribute closed source programs that use GPL code, but the code must be seperated. A good example of this might be a program like the GIMP (image editor) with proprietary plugins. You can ship both together, since the GIMP is self-contained, and your plugins can still be closed-source.

In addition to the GPL, the LGPL (Lesser General Public License) exists but is not recommended by RMS and the gang. It's used primarily for libraries and allows closed-source products to fully contain the LGPL code. Library designers use this because they want their programming code to be used with commercial products. An example of this is wxWindows, a cross-platform C++ GUI library.

So basically the main reason that some people like GPL programs is that it does somewhat "promote" open-source, by requiring programs that use it to remain open-source for everyone. It's among the most restrictive and wordy licenses, you are correct, but I'm not familiar with any open-source license being completely challenged in court.

Hope this helps.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

See http://film.gimp.org - You can build 16-bit/channel gimp today, with some patching/tweaking.

Gimp 2.0 will use the GEGL image processing library which has more generalized support for data types and color spaces.

I haven't followed the progress on this in a while (no longer in the industry), but AFAIK development rolls on.

-Isaac

Well, Lisp isn't really based of anything, at least, not off of any other programming langauges. It is based on the concept of the Lambda Calculus, which is something of a way to describe programs in a mathematical way. Or, something like that. <g> Honestly, I've never gotten a great definition of lambda calculus, but I'm content that Lisp is cool. ;-)

Now, as to why you haven't heard of it before, my guess is because you are either not a University Computer Science graduate, or you haven't branched into functional programming. Most universities will cover it at least very briefly in some sort of programming languages class, though rarely do they do it justice.

As for functional programming, it's a programming paradigm, like imperative or object oriented programming. It tends to be very powerful, often makes use of constructs which are terse (fewer lines of code to do the the same thing than required in other langauges) and generally makes extensive use of recursion.

Lisp is very interesting, however. Even though it is usually thought of as a functional language, it actually provides excellent support for functional, imperative, and object oriented programming. In fact, many people think the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is one of the best Object Oriented Programming implementations available. It was also the first object oriented langauge that was standardized (by ANSI or ISO, I don't remember for sure which one).

It's also been around for a while. In fact, Lisp is one of the oldest programming langauges still in somewhat common use today. (The only older language being Fortran, which predates it by about 5 years, as I recall.)

If you've never had any experience with functional programming, I strongly encourage you to investigate and study[1] it a little, even if you never really use it, because you will learn a great deal about programming in general for your time invested.

Now, as for what applications have been written in it, the canonical example is GNU Emacs. At it's core, Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter, and most of the editor is then written in Lisp.

While applications that are written entirely in Lisp are perhaps not as well known, one of the most common places to find Lisp is as an extension language for other programs. Here are a handfull that make impressive use of Lisp:

The GIMP uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp for it's Script-Fu, which can be used to programatically execute anything that can be done by hand.

Autodesk, the makers of the industry leading CAD software AutoCAD use their own dialect of Lisp, called AutoLISP, for programming and customising the AutoCAD software.

Siag Office is a free small, Open Source, and very impressive, Office Suite making extensive use of Scheme. (SIAG == Scheme In A Grid). It includes a very cool Spreadsheet program, as well as others, and is highly customisable.

GnuCash makes use of the Guile library to provide Scheme as an extension and scripting language for the application.

Speaking of Guile, Guile is the official extension language library of the GNU project. Using Guile to provide Scheme scripting, you can add support for scripting and extensibility to any application. Guile is used in many applications including GnuCash (mentioned above), the SCWM Window Manager, the TeXmacs editor (integrating Tex support into an Emacs like editor), and many others.

One last example is the Sawfish Window Manager, which seems to be among the most popular Window Managers around these days. It makes use of an Emacs-ish philosophy, having a very small core program, including a lisp interpreter, and implementing most of its feature set on top of that with lisp.

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of applications written in, or making use of, Lisp, however I think everyone here will prolly recognise a few names there. ;-)

[1] If you're interested in learning more about Lisp, I strong suggest you take a look the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The full text is available online at the link here, and it is one of the best books ever written about Computer Science. It's also used as an early CS text book at MIT.

Right.

Like most people here, I hate the really heavy sites, those that use endless graphics, multiple columns, those f***ing annoying Flash animation ads, etc, aian.

Consider that no small number of 'web designers' use The Evil Empire as their base of operations, and probably use Back Door, err.. Front Page as their page creation engine. (Personally, I prefer emacs or vim. Oh, yeah.)

Most of the graphics don't have alt tags because these people making eye-candy sites expect the persons at the receiving end to be able to see the damned thing.

I agree that the basic technological premise is good, however, how do they determine 'color depth'? What makes #00558F more or less than #55008F? Do they CMYK or HSV the images? (If so, I know a certain GPL software project that could use such code. :)


Windows.. Good for targeting rocks.

You can try the slow-loading FAQ.

It's a bunch CORBA component stuff. Bonobo itself is a component architecture, but the distribution appears to come with lots of handy tools. But I've never heard of it either, I'm just checking out the FAQ. But it's a good bet that if you love your interfaces, you might want to check this out. And if you think your code should communicate the old fashioned way-- by just calling a function, goddammit-- you'll want to take a miss. Personally, I'm sick enough of all these C/C++ attempts at component and interface design, I'll probably just ignore this too.

but lets set the minimum requirement as needing a 500MHz PIII or better and at least a Geforce2 or Radeon. Anything cannot be considered an innovation

All those first-person shooters seem to be innovating off each other ;-)

or cutting-edge in any way...Unless it meets those requirements, it's not breaking new ground.

Not everybody has US$2500+ to spend on a mobile system that meets those requirements. US$100 for a Game Boy Advance system buys you an awful lot.

C'mon, now...the GBA raises a sub-NES quality game system to sub-SNES status now.

Bull. GBA is as powerful as the Super NES ever was, and it's easier to code for because of good C compilers for ARM (the Super NES's 65c816 is very NOT C friendly). It's even more powerful because GBA includes sprite scaling and rotation, which required Super FX acceleration on Super NES. We're talking 3DO or Saturn graphics here.

I saw people playing one of those ancient Atari 2600s a while back (ATTN: 70% of slashdot readers werent even born when these things were in use...so stop talking about them, they're DINOSAURS) -- it gave me a headache just looking at that awful blocky crap

Atari 2600 had backgrounds of 2 colors (out of about 16) per scanline and 40x100 pixels. It also had only 128 bytes of RAM and half a scanline's worth of VRAM. Heck, it was just barely Tetris-complete[?]. GBA, on the other hand, has a 240x160 display with 511 simultaneous colors and sprite scaling and 384 kilobytes of RAM.

If you want the best graphics, get GIMP, WinGIMP, or Photoshop. If you want the best animated 3D graphics, get a DVD player. If you want gameplay and don't want to waste money, get a GBA.

maybe next time they will use the gimp ;)

GTK+ features a very nice feature of keyboard-bindings-on-the-fly. Simply move your mouse over the menu item (without clicking it), press the desired key combination - and there you have it. Wish to erase the combination? Move the mouse above the menu item, and press Del.

Which leaves 127 typeable characters (C-space C-a C-b C-c C-d ... { | } ~) and 127 more with the Alt key (C-M-space C-M-a ... M-| M-~). What if you have more filters installed than 254?

And still, how do you bring up a contextual (right-click) menu from the keyboard? (In Windows, it's Shift+F10 or the key between RWin and RCtrl.) Seeing as how some apps stuff most of their interface under contextual menus, this can get in the way.

>>Back on topic: will qt free edition (or xfree86)
>>ever be ported to windows 9x?
>Probably not in this lifetime.

YM "not by Trolltech." Qt Free is GPL and can be ported. XFree has already been ported to NT, and there's a good shareware X server from Microimages called MI/X. I don't think it would be that hard to get Qt Free running under Win32, or does Qt have some technical issues I'm not aware of that one of its biggest competitors that has been ported to Win32 doesn't?

"write one, run anywhere" widget set

Java Swing, Tcl/Tk, GTK+, Allegro... The field is already crowded.

Also, it's obvious that the author doesn't really know what he's talking about because:

1) - There is a version of GIMP that has been ported to Windows. 2) - There is a TuxRacer version for Windows.

Also, I tend to think that the apps on linux mostly suck when you are using linux as a desktop. Server applications are where linux shines, and if you were going to run something like apache webserver, why not just use the linux version on linux, or the windows version on windows?

Anyways, I think this could be an interesting project, but it's no holy grail to get people to start using linux apps since the applications for Windows are usually superior. It's the OS that everyone hates, not the applications (well, some of the applications too.)

There already is a port of GIMP to Win32... look here.

It'd be possible to fix the icon with a GTK+-based (but not PHP) paint program called GIMP. It even runs on Windows.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

It'd be possible to fix the icon with a GTK+-based (but not PHP) paint program called GIMP. It even runs on Windows.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program)... Does GNOME have any comparable programs?

Errr... yes! Pan is probably the best free newsreader for any platform, Evolution is an incredibly well-integrated mail, calender and addressbook program, and Balsa is a very decent more lightweight mail reader. For office programs, Gnumeric is way more advanced than KSpread, Guppi (still in CVS) is one of the only serious free graphical data analysis tools, GnuCash is very polished, and Dia rocks. Graphically, Sodipodi is shaping up very nicely, gPhoto rules, and the GIMP integrates better with a GNOME environment than with KDE. And then there's XMMS (the best mp3/ogg/mpeg/divx Linux player), Grip (the best CD player/ripper combo) and GStreamer for multemedia; there's GnomeICU, Gabber, Gaim and X-Chat for messaging; there's Gnapster for file-sharing; and there's more useful utilities (e.g. Bug Buddy), system utilities (e.g. Red Carpet), and panel applets than you could shake a stick at. And I know I've missed out quite a few more (Gnome-DB, Oregano and Dr. Genius have just spring to mind - and, yes, Galeon, which rocks and is now my primary browser). In other words, GNOME is hardly short on applications.

If anything, I've often found it to be the other way round. While Konqueror rules, and KWord is much better featured than AbiWord (though I personally dislike the interface), I think where KDE usually excels is in the underlying desktop core, rather than the applications. But that's just my opinion.

PS Sorry for ranting.

The GIMP can load TIFFs (though for Debian, grab 'gimp-nonfree'); it can also export to PostScript, so TIFF->PS is there.

David.

All right. So I'm supposed to read this "LICENSE" file that came with the program. But I'm an experienced Linux/BSD/Solaris/whatever user. So I just type "./configure" followed by "make install". I haven't read the license for this program at all.

Granted, some programs do have "click-through" licenses, but most of these are non-GPL, and then few GPL ones that do show the license use Windows installers (one such program is the pre-compiled Gimp for Windows). If you expect me to hit "I agree" on your web page, I likely can find the file by browsing your FTP server directly. If I never reached the license agreement page on your web site in the first place, does it bind me?

It's like the legal print found at the bottom of most web pages under titles like "Terms of Use." Slashdot's parent, OSDN, has such a legal section. But given the headlines are on top of a page, who reads the legal stuff on the bottom?

Now IANAL, but I doubt the GPL nor most web sites' terms of use would hold up in court. You can not be bound to what you do not have to read.

If,say, Adobe produced a pay-per-usage based Photoshop, theres a good chance they could cut piracy way down, as people like me who only occasionally need that powerful of a graphics program wouldn't need to be intimidated by the $600 up-front price.

Remember, if you don't need Photoshop's prepress capabilities (and bloat), you can always run GIMP on your GNU/Linux, BSD, Darwin, or UNIX box or WinGIMP on your winbox. It's a nice tool for web graphics (more powerful than Paint Shop Pro), and it's both free and Free.

If,say, Adobe produced a pay-per-usage based Photoshop, theres a good chance they could cut piracy way down, as people like me who only occasionally need that powerful of a graphics program wouldn't need to be intimidated by the $600 up-front price.

Remember, if you don't need Photoshop's prepress capabilities (and bloat), you can always run GIMP on your GNU/Linux, BSD, Darwin, or UNIX box or WinGIMP on your winbox. It's a nice tool for web graphics (more powerful than Paint Shop Pro), and it's both free and Free.

that's why people think Windows is so great, they don't know how good it is be to be free. I am Empowered by my Linux system far more so that I could ever expect to be using any MS WIndows products.
I try to explain this to people all the time, that, Although you pay lots for your computer, MS OWNS YOU, if you're runnig windows.
Perhaps they (the normals) are best influenced by just plain calling Microsoft EVIL in a televised interview. EVIL is a nice term to cover MS without going into NDA pressures, software development, and the open free flow of information.
Linux is the start of a Utopian world. As we all pool our resources together, instead of looking to "protect" innovation under the guise of "intellectual property", soon the world will be fully automated, and we can all sit around and Doodle with great open source software like Gimp and Blender .
I hope the world can see MS as it really is, a company trying to pull wool over their eyes with outright lies and deception. I hope the guy at MS who said all this stuff gets some help, his view of the world is either seriously warped, or he has a serious lack of personal integrity lying to the world like he did.
I fear that many people will discount what the Redhat guy was saying because he was wearing a silly read hat on his head in the interview. they'll think to themselves "what's windows? that reminds me, I need to call my ISP to ask what kind of illegal operation is going on there!"

They didn't mention that pango should bring gtk a better text widget. Pango should supply a text widget that actually has horizontal scroll bars, and better performance.

Umm, what makes you believe that Pango has anything to do with any of the stuff that the new text widget does better, other than stuff involving, well, displaying text in various languages?

Hopefully it will make it easier to make a html widget for gtk / gnome

You mean a widget such as GtkHTML?

Pixar's products supported platforms
Nothing real
Jig

As far as apps in the porting process, Maya is being ported to Linux (should be ready for SIGGRAPH) and the batch renderer is already available, Softimage XSI is being ported (a beta was shown running under RedHat 6.2, last SIGGRAPH users meeting).

Also several studios have worked on porting there on stuff to Linux or enhancing Linux apps. Most notably, the work that Rhythm and Hues have done on the Gimp, and studios like PDI porting there stuff to Linux, and Hammerahead among others:

Gimp for film

So it's allready happening.

Save $600 (100%) off the retail price of Photoshop by giving up prepress capabilities (which are not necessary for web or game graphics). Try WinGIMP. Sure, it takes an hour to get used to, but so does Photoslop.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

I don't know if i'm supposed to feel bad about laughing at that gimp artist commercial

That "gimp artist" commercial didn't have anything to do with GIMP, did it?

The important thing to remember is that all of the recommendations fit together. You can take just one (simple design, comprehensive unit testing), apply it to your work, and see some benefit. If you use all of them together, the interactions will give you more benefit.

If you avoid the tenets of 'simple design' and 'reduce complexity', you'll have lots of trouble testing things. You'll spend lots of time debugging complex interactions between components.

However, if you decouple things, test aggressively, and use simple and sane interfaces whenever possible, you'll have less difficulty. It's not a magic bullet, but simplicity really is a virtue in this case.

Finally, the idea that change is always more expensive in the future is a very pervasive belief in software engineering. I'm not so sure. I can't back it up, but I'm willing to bet that projects like the Gimp, Mozilla, and even Apache have spent or will spend more on their ground-up rewrites than they would have spent refactoring and simplifying. (Heck, I'd pay money to get a set of unit tests with a web browser!)

I have no way to prove that. Then again, that CS professor who said "It will cost more to change things in the future" couldn't prove it either, and I know he'd never worked with requirements that changed every two months.

At least in the software I'm writing where I can use XP, it's helping.

--

Peck of Penguin Picasso's The Linux Pimp

GTK+ is already on WintenDOS 9x/NT. See also WinGIMP.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

Why is everyone so convinced that Linux has to be prettied up, promoted, and made palatable to the masses?

Because the masses have money. Companies like money. Companies that see the prospect of money in Linux on the desktop are more likely to publish Linux ports of their video games, write Linux drivers for their hardware, and offer Linux-compatible ISP services and online media.

I like Linux game, Linux drivers, and Linux compatibility. Any more questions?

There are many more reasons why even the most hardcore, non-gaming, free-software-only Linux user still benefits by "Linux for the masses", though. You may complain that Red Hat is aiming for a Linux distribution a 3 year old can use... but they're not taking away our Perl interpreters and ssh daemons to do it, and eventually that 3 year old may grow up and spend a little time playing around with the compiler himself.

The other thing that's "vital for desktop acceptance" is an office suite of the caliber of MS Office 2000, which isn't going to happen unless they decide to port it.

Of course it isn't. Free software developers could never produce any sort of useful desktop software on their own, certainly not any office programs. That stuff is just too complicated for a bunch of hackers. Why, where would they even start?

or, you can find it at:

http://www.gimp.org/win32/

Like the article said, it's not up to date, but it's still sweet for when you can't use Linux (I use it at school to do all my graphics for Computer Science).

1. It's too early to criticise The Gimp for not supporting JPEG2000 because the JPEG2000 image standard has not been finalised. To quote the Final CD from the official JPEG2000 website,

• "anyone implementing software according to the description available in this FCD, risks not being compliant with the final JPEG2000 International Standard (IS), which is due to be published some time in 2001 as IS15444-1.

2. Another important issue (stated here) is that the royalty-free fee-free JPEG2000 patent licenses may apply only to conforming implementations. One such requirement of conforming implementations is to have copy control implemented including methods

• 1) To protect access to the image
• 2) To identify the image, source or owner in a secure way that cannot be removed by unauthorised parties.
• 3) To indicate integrity (images that are not allowed to be edited).

It is not clear how the patent holders will interpret these requirements for open-source implementations that want to use a GPL license (as for Gimp) which requires the whole software to be modifiablefor any purpose, potentially in ways which could violate the conformance requirements.

--William

It looks kinda like this. The only difference is that the text is right below "GIMP" now and says, "VERSION 1.2" (no longer saying "Gnu Image Manipulation Program" at the bottom).

• Natural brush types ala Painter Another example w/screenshots is at Wet Dream by Raph Levien.
• TrueType support through the Freetype plug-in (separate install)
• Whither film support?

Otherwise, the GIMP is coming along nicely - very well done! My only gripe is a bug under Solaris that's a show-stopper.

• Natural brush types ala Painter Another example w/screenshots is at Wet Dream by Raph Levien.
• TrueType support through the Freetype plug-in (separate install)
• Whither film support?

Otherwise, the GIMP is coming along nicely - very well done! My only gripe is a bug under Solaris that's a show-stopper.

Check out the Gimp Splash Screen History, funny stuff. Wonder what the splash for 1.2 looks like....

You can download it here.

You can download it here.

Speaking for my company (a games company) if we released a game which was only "fairly fast" we wouldn't last long ;)

When a game of Tetanus (a popular Tetris clone) first starts, it is quite literally running at two frames per second. Two! The graphics are simplistic but easy to parse. But once Alice makes lines, it starts speeding up until her brain explodes.

Some of us still want gameplay, not graphics. If we wanted graphics, we'd be playing GIMP or POV-Ray.

What used to be a simple layer stack in GIMP 1.x, which is combined using layer modes (Normal, Combine, Difference, ...) will, with the help of GEGL, become a rendering pipeline which can be thought of as a tree of layers which is viewed from its root. The nodes of the tree are operators with an arbitrary number of inputs and outputs. These inputs and outputs access rectangular regions of pixel-data, the edges of the tree. Each edge (comparable to the layers we have now) can hold its data internally as pixels, vectors, text or whatever and only needs to provide a well-defined interface so it can be plugged into the rendering pipeline. A similar approach will be used for the operators: Simple functions like color corrections or blur filters as well as affine transformations and more complex effects are possible.

So, the rendering pipeline becomes much harder to explain in simple terms. This new model, however, yields great flexibility and power. You can have an image that contains both pixel-based portions and vector scalable portions. These objects can then be modified at any time. So, unlike current GIMP, text could be added and then later changed. This is truly useful for speeding up many uses that people have for the GIMP, but it also makes for more new uses.

--neutrino

• It will use the GEGL, or Generic Graphics Library for pixel manipulatio
• The rendering pipepline will be tree-based instead of a simple stack
• The program itself will become much more modular in design -- Model View Controller
• Plugins and app will communicate via CORBA
• Generally more flexible -- possible integration with vector-based tools and video editing capabilities

Also, you should see the code as it stands in the 1.x series. It is obvious that the program has evolved to its current state and was not designed to this point.

--neutrino

Can you elucidate on this "whole new structure"? Or is not enough about it known yet? Taking a look at the information at

http://plugins.gimp.org/gimp2/doc_components.html it says:

libgimpwidgets: core-independent widgets used e.g. to build libui widgets (similar to gimp 1.x's libgimpui)

but I really cannot stand it when graphics programs change drastically and add "functionality" (on the level of the user interface) that replaces other things that I'm used to. For instance, I really liked PSP3. I really did. (OLD, old stuff we're talking about here.) But I coulddn't stand PSP4.

I'm reasonably sure the GIMP guys are smart enough not to change things around too drastically, but it's a concern of mine, since I really enjoy working with and playing with The GIMP as it is. I don't want to have to update to a newer form that I really don't like to get the latest neat things.

Just a concern of mine.

Personally I think the native GTK+ port to win32 is cooler than the CYGWIN one. You don't need an X server. Granted GNOME would be a huge task to port since you don't have the POSIXness. Check out the Gimp and GTK+ ported to Win32.

Nothing is. You might try GTK+ for Windows, available from the Win32 GIMP site. Or if you prefer scripting languages, try Tcl/Tk on Windows.

[Qt is] truly Free, so you can port it yourself if you want to. There's a lot of Unix-only Free software, I don't hear you moaning about how GNOME only runs on Unix.

But this means you have to do the work of porting Qt. The work of porting GTK+ is already mostly done.

Or to put it another way: Qt makes a fellow choose two out of three from the set {free software, available now, available on both Windows and POSIX+X11}. Until the WinXFree86 team figures out how to work around 16-bit code in Windows 9x GDI (XF86 pretty much works in NT), those three attributes are available in GTK+.

There is a windows port!

Ever since Tor Lillqvist (sp?) ported GIMP to Windows, I've never used Paint Shop Pro.

... haven't found any for Linux. The GIMP opens and resaves and from what I can tell so does ImageMagik

Remember kids, use that preview button.

I'm going to have to disagree -- GTK support under Windoze is definitely quite good.

Check out GIMP under Win95/NT/etc/blah/blah. I'll admit it used to be a little flaky, but now it works very well.

[Missing symlinks] are causing far more difficulty than the fact that X and Win32 GDI are completely different.

Tiddly-day, especially when one considers that the GIMP toolkit (GTK+ & Co.), allows one application to be written for X and Win32 with minimal OS-specific code.

It depends upon what you consider to be "better". The Gimp is certainly better than any graphics program that is available at the same price point. Many other similar situations can be found, but Gimp is the best example.