Slashdot Mirror

I'd think it was pretty simple:

Sure if you only look at it superficially. You also have to deal with all the uncertainty of what is a derived work or not. Obviously the FSF would like it to be as broad as possibly but there isn't much hard case law to back either way so that uncertainty is something that a commercial company is not going to want to put up with.

if you give someone the binary, you make the source code available to them.

Until people complain that you aren't supplying the source in the form they want and they start a huge stink about it. And that's just a single example and there are many others.

The title is wrong. Is not appropiate to say that KDE SC may use OpenGL 3. Is KWin, the window manager (KDE apps don't call OpenGL directly). KWin can be used in other desktop environments, and other window managers can be used in KDE.

The title is wrong. Is not appropiate to say that KDE SC may use OpenGL 3. Is KWin, the window manager (KDE apps don't call OpenGL directly). KWin can be used in other desktop environments, and other window managers can be used in KDE.

I personally like the idea of having tabbed windows, however in support of your argument it's worth noting that KDE 4 already supports arbitrary drag-n-drop grouping of apps into named taskbar buttons: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3864

Or isn't the GPL considered open anymore?

Not if you want to write commercial software on top of it, which is what Nokia wants to enable.

I know the terms of the GPL and LGPL, thank you. I simply think it's unfair to make Riverbank look like the bad guys and Nokia the saviours. Riverbank provided superb Python bindings for a long time and Phil (the guy behind PyQt and Riverbank) offered great support for GPL-users on the mailing list. PySide has a long way to go to offer a comparable experience (just read the blog post on PySide of the main PyKDE developer)

Totally serious question: do you guys really use emacs (or even vi, etc) to write code rather than a modern Studio/IDE?

Yes. The typical reasons (aside from Luddite tendencies and comfort) include

1. that our text editors are extensible, so that you don't have to switch to a completely different program (with a different interface) to edit SQL instead of, say, JavaScript (granted: Eclipse does both of these; I don't think any "Studio" program does)
2. that they (Emacs especially) are extensively customizable, so that things that bother you can be changed
3. that they are extremely cross-platform (more so even than Eclipse because more so even than Java)
4. that they were designed with the keyboard in mind, so they're easier on the hands (if you get over the "holy crap I have to type Escape (vi) or Ctrl-Alt (Emacs) all the time!" thing)
5. that they've been around for a long time, so that most of the bugs are gone and many many add-ons are available (quick, does Eclipse do Icon? Maybe it does, but it's been supported out-of-the-box by Emacs since at least 2001.)
6. that they integrate well with other tools in ways that sometimes surpass even an IDE's integration: I'm sure you can sort text in any IDE, but can you pass it to sort(1), use all the options and speed thereof, and replace the text you sent with what you got back? It's C-u M-| in Emacs.
7. that they've always been free (and Free).

Some people have been using such editors for longer than the modern IDEs have existed, and so are so good with them that it would take a very long time to recoup the investment of switching (if we even take as given that there will be a lasting net benefit).

This site lists several people who sell open source laptops in the Netherlands

http://tuxmobil.org/reseller.html

If they did and and stopped, maybe they didn't just sell enough.

Actually Zepto Computers sell barebones computers from Compal all over Europe.

And there are these companies recommended for Germany -

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3400

Some of them are US based but will ship. If they'll ship to Germany, there's no reason why they won't ship to the Netherlands.

Those ODM contracts that forced people to install Windows on every machine if they wanted to install it on any of them have been changed. That's why you can get Dells with Freedos or Linux.

Exhibit B: Webkit. Apple forked khtml and now there are several browsers for windows, linux browsers are based off it. Nothing bad has happened, and I think we can all agree that webkit is a darn fast browser engine.

You mean when they tried perfecting the fine art of embrace-extend-extinguish on a GPL product?

Trying not to troll here, but you need a lesson in history. You probably weren't around during the flamewars caused by apple's effective lock-out of the KHTML team from their improvements (no access to their VCS without and NDA(!), dumps of huge patches along with safari releases).

Ultimately their policy backfired, as other further forked WebKit and didn't submit their improvements upstream -- most notably Nokia, whose fork runs on millions of S60 devices.

So in the end they "opened up". And maybe some would s/extinguish/undermine/. But saying "nothing bad has happened" couldn't be farther from the truth. No, it was not a smooth ride.

So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary: How many open source projects does Microsoft participate in? Yes I agree that Apple does try to lock you into their hardware, and that sucks, but they're not being completely evil.

This is just my opinion, but Microsoft are little kids compared to Apple on the evil scale. The combined lock-in of hardware and software is generations ahead the evilness of Microsoft's lock-in strategy. And then there's this last thing.. the unbelievable manipulation. Whenever I watch the crazed reaction of audiences during Steve Jobs' keynotes I get a sudden feeling of Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate..

Exhibit B: Webkit. Apple forked khtml and now there are several browsers for windows, linux browsers are based off it. Nothing bad has happened, and I think we can all agree that webkit is a darn fast browser engine.

You mean when they tried perfecting the fine art of embrace-extend-extinguish on a GPL product?

Trying not to troll here, but you need a lesson in history. You probably weren't around during the flamewars caused by apple's effective lock-out of the KHTML team from their improvements (no access to their VCS without and NDA(!), dumps of huge patches along with safari releases).

Ultimately their policy backfired, as other further forked WebKit and didn't submit their improvements upstream -- most notably Nokia, whose fork runs on millions of S60 devices.

So in the end they "opened up". And maybe some would s/extinguish/undermine/. But saying "nothing bad has happened" couldn't be farther from the truth. No, it was not a smooth ride.

So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary: How many open source projects does Microsoft participate in? Yes I agree that Apple does try to lock you into their hardware, and that sucks, but they're not being completely evil.

This is just my opinion, but Microsoft are little kids compared to Apple on the evil scale. The combined lock-in of hardware and software is generations ahead the evilness of Microsoft's lock-in strategy. And then there's this last thing.. the unbelievable manipulation. Whenever I watch the crazed reaction of audiences during Steve Jobs' keynotes I get a sudden feeling of Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate..

"However, competition is good. If one of the distros clearly sucks, that's a waste, but otherwise, it becomes a bit like GNOME/KDE."

However, competition is good. If one of the distros clearly sucks, it becomes a bit like GNOME/KDE.

There, I fixed that for you ... ;-)

Unfortunately, that's what they said about Vista, too.

No, what's unfortunate is not that Microsoft feels this way, but that KDE feels this way. Microsoft has a beta product that people are generally happy with (Windows 7). KDE has a released product that many people hate (KDE 4.x). I don't need to say that KDE is open source, and that things were reversed just one year ago, and all the other obvious trolls. I do however want to remind us that KDE doesn't really need users at all. I have been using KDE for years and I've stuck with the 3.x branch while the 4.x branch is developing, but more and more often I feel pushed away. If it is simple usability reports that they are not interested in or other little things that add up in the KDE community. I think that they are really forgetting what is KDE.

I repeat that I am a KDE user, but as KDE 3.x is being made obsolete I am looking for a new place to go. it's a shame because I love Kate, Konqueror, and Kontact especially. KDE 4.2 betas are beautiful and work like they should (Aaron Siego is a genius, what he has done with Plasma). But the developer community is scaring me away.

In all fairness, "best" is one of those things that is in the eye of the beholder. When KDE 3.5 was the latest, GNOME was still "the best" for many people.

True enough, but with enough resources, I think you could have reasonably expected to conduct use-case oriented productivity test and a feature count on KDE 3.5 vs. GNOME, and be reasonably confident of KDE coming out on top back then. I'll be surprised if that's the case by the time 4.5 gets here.

Please elaborate, without using mailing list threads where these core developers get flamed endlessly because people don't like something in KDE 4.

I can't (be bothered) because what you see as devs being flamed is what I see as concerned users/developers voices being rejected on the basis that they're flaming.

Horrible?... How so? I ask because the release process is mostly unchanged since KDE 3.5, where apparently it worked well. What do you think has regressed since then?

I wasn't comparing to 3.5 here. I was comparing to the de facto standard for FOSS releases, which is to make something reasonably stable and feature complete, and certainly ready for reasonable third-party development and deployment testing, before you tag it as a beta, never mind a .0 release. Yes, KDE PR tried to do damage control when users expected more from 4.0, but it was hardly enough to counteract such a huge step away from the usual release methodologies.

No offense but this is a troll unless you have something in particular that you're talking about.

Offense taken. You should not refer to people as trolls just because they do not cite sources or write a thesis for everything point they make. This is slashdot, and my post is personal opinion, not a thesis. More importantly, you should bear in mind that users have been telling KDE it was going wrong for a LONG time, and have been ignored. Why on earth is the burden of communication on their side, rather than the developer's side, at this stage. Users like Linus and myself are far beyond waiting for a reasonable response now, and are simply voting with their feet.

But since you did ask sincerely... what I was referring to here is a) the fact that APIs were largely hammered out en route to each release rather than being specified up front with the bindings developed in parallel b) the lack of python APIs and documentation; c) the belated API availability (of any flavor) in distros that prevented people actually porting apps; and c) the unclear, outdated, and generally flakey instructions on techbase for setting up and updating a 4.x environment. As a particularly bad example, a tutorial on writing plasma widgets in python was only posted on 18 Jan THIS YEAR. Techbase had a gap for this for a long time. I'm pretty sure there were other issues too, but I don't recall all the details (nor do I wish to at this juncture frankly).

Well there are definitely "alienated groups" but who are you talking about specifically?

Here, I'm referring to the kde-artists people who were invited to contribute ideas for 4.x in a forum. They came up with good ideas, developed them, designed mockups, voted on their favourites, etc., only to have the site disappear into thin air one day, and for KDE developers later to use some of those ideas, claiming them as their own. I'm sure this wasn't intentional; maybe people just mentioned these things and devs picked up on them without conciously realising it. A lot of "creativity" works that way. It's also possible (though unlikely) that the exact same ideas occurred to developers without them ever being influenced by the originals or people who'd seen the originals. Even so, this was badly dealt with. Finally, some of these ideas were made official, but never really implemented. If they were going to b

One year after Nokia bought Trolltech, they've released Qt as LGPL. This positions Qt and KDE in an excellent position for cross-platform application development for FOSS *and* commercial projects. KDE libraries were already licensed under LGPL. This means the entire stack is now LGPL.

In the mean-time, Qt Creator, an IDE for developing Qt applications, has been announced. This will be all you need to write cross-platform applications with Qt.

Qt Jambi (java bindings for Qt) will also available under LGPL. Qyoto (mono bindings) and the other bindings (Perl, Python, Ruby) will be able to make releases under LGPL now.

These are exciting times!

And really, why use WebKit? Sure, its a decent rendering engine but no better than Gecko or the other OSS rendering engines

Really? Gecko is on par with webkit? KDE's benchmarks for the top rendering engines beg to differ on this (and these tests were done just a month ago). Off the top of your head (without using google) can you name a OSS engine that isnt a fork of KHTML or Gecko? Gecko is nice in the fact it complies pretty well with w3c standards, but in terms of performance, it has a ways to go to be up there with khtml/webkit. So why use webkit? Because you spend less time waiting for pages to load. If you don't like fast speeds, I'm sure I can refer you to other software tools that will allow you to fully "optimize" your cpu's usage :) .

Here are two pages with some fancy animated SVG.

page transitions

spiral clock

and a very heavy javascript test (try it in IE hehehe)

If you do not like flash, There is a lot of nice SVG around. All of these examples work well under Firefox 3.0 or Opera 9. Perhaps also on other browsers. It took SVG a long time (spec is from around 2000), but it is seeing more adoption now.

I'm not much of a fanboi, but Apple contributed a few interesting things to OSS, used today in most Linux distributions :

- the Objective-C front-end to GCC, essential to GNUStep
- Bonjour (aka Rendez-Vous), although most distributions have switched to Avahi.
- Lots of patches to konqueror's back end (the same as Safari)
- Darwin, by itself quite significant and in particular allowed the development of the hfs+ driver in Linux.

There are other examples.

I would not say that the overall attitude that KDE development team has towards end users (and therefore usability) helps. As examples, there are quotes by developers such as KDE doesn't need users, it needs contributors and launching KDE 4.0 and completely failing to get across that it should have been called KDE 4.0 alpha 1.

Even if a KDE user were to propose changes with UI mockups, etc... I rather doubt that few KDE developers would be receptive to them. From the developer's point of view there's no problem at all because their application is entirely usable. The user's changes just amount to one person's opinion against another's instead of a measurable goal (a bugfix) and a developer doesn't have to overhaul their application just on someone's else's say so.

Perhaps if KDE development team sets up some usability studies to identify problems that would be a first step, but given their current attitude towards users it seems unlikely that that'll happen.

Really? One guy?

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3535

People with openSUSE 11.0 can just click here to run the one click installer or go to http://news.opensuse.org/2008/07/29/kde-41-released-with-opensuse-packages-and-live-cd/ (or KDE developers)

Nope. However, Konqueror also has a new bytecode-based JavaScript interpreter known as KJS/Frostbyte, which hit trunk in time for KDE 4.1 and also gives some nice performance improvements. (It was actually merged into trunk several weeks ago, at about the same time as Squirrelfish was announced on the WebKit mailing list. I suspect it may actually predate Squirrelfish.)

KDE developers did state that.

Quote:
# KDE 4.0 is only expected to be used by early adopters, not every KDE 3.5 user (and IMHO KDE 4.0 shouldn't be pushed onto other user types like planned for Kubuntu ShipIt [btw said to have only 6 months support for its packages]).
# KDE 4.1 development will not require the same amount of time as the big technology jump 4.0, expect 4.1 later this year.

I can't help but think of the claims by Novell's Miguel de Icaza that "OOXML is a superb standard" and Novell's further support for OOXML. (For example, they joined the national standardization committee in Switzerland and probably also other countries and voted in favor of OOXML without having previously participated in the technical discussion of the specification's serious shortcomings.)

The whole idea of the browser selecting when to enforce the standards makes it not very supportive of the standards. Opera lets you play with settings that make ti disobey the standard, but that's the user's control, which is different.

All the popular browsers do that. If the author of the web page goes through the trouble of specifying a correct doctype, the browser will follow the standards. If the doctype is missing or incorrect the browser gives up and tries its best. By default Opera uses the doctype to choose quirks or standards mode just like all the rest, but it is the only one I know of that lets the user force standards or quirks mode.

See here for how Opera does it. Here for Firefox. Here for some old info on Konqueror. And here for more general info.

Are the GUI designers taking a nap while the programmers work? What's with all the empty space and huge nonessential widgets? Every single window in the screenshot (except maybe Konquerer) needs heavy redesigning:

• System monitor: Huge tabs, huge menu Compare it to Windows's Task manager or OSX Activity monitor - they pack much more data in a more readable way.
• Kopete: That toolbar is enormous! And the status bar at the bottom of the window looks mostly useless. The icons inside it are not only badly distributed spatially and of uneven / visually unadjusted size, they are also ugly and uninformative. The whole window looks like it's been designed by a novice VB programmer in a hurry.
• That window in the background: It looks like it's some sort of configuration application, and from what I see, the "main thing" in the application, probably the reasin the application exists, takes only about *half* of the window space. I'm talking about the list of effects. The rest of the window is taken by the menu, probably some kind of toolbar, probably a search bar, some kind of help label, tabs, a "hint", and a space at the bottom of the window which probably contains "ok/cancel/reset" buttons.

As with 99.9% of all memory benchmarking, it was done by someone who didn't totally understand how to measure memory use (and how Linux doesn't allow accurate measurements without a patched kernel). Just read the comments in the post which pointed at the original story.

KOffice 2 on Windows is running about as well as on UNIX now. I say in the KDE 4.1/4.2 timeframe (2008) it will become viable competition to OO.o. Some old screenies.

As for KMail, it's barely getting onto the KDE4.0 ship at all iirc. Too few devs. The Windows version is probably stalled.

Yes, look at:

http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/hacking/krita/kritawin.html

and

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2997

Boudewijn Rempt, KOffice release dude

I don't know anything about ZFS, but I think his general point may have merit. Consider the problem of speeding up the boot process. This would require interaction between desktop hackers, init hackers, filesystem hackers, etc. etc. Many possible speedups might require layering violations (desktop application making requests about desired file layout on the disk etc.) Due to the technical, social, political structure of Linux this is just unlikely to happen (unless a single distro has enough resources to throw at this particular problem). Consider this rant (that may be too strong a word) by KDE developer Lubos Lunak: Why does Linux need defragmenting?

Good thing you can then.

news here and here.

KDE developers are indeed planning big things for KDE4 but that is what they are stuck at. Show me where the results are.KDE's biggest problem is a lack of manpower and financial backing by big companies.

After reading your comment, I really think you should really read what some KDE developers are saying about the deal. Who knows, were it for MS to start deciding things in Novell's yard, we might see KDE as the default desktop in SLED! :))

This is a reasonably interesting read on Klipper.

I was speaking on the general state of windows computing. Currently under XP this can happen if you're not careful what you check. I had someone ask me about this just yesterday. MS isn't known for admitting they screwed up and backtracking on something like that. If they have, great, but the fact of the matter is they already went down that road. Its just proof that they have no problem testing the waters with highly restrictive DRM.

I'll check that out next time I boot my XP to play The Sims 2 (Currently gives me some minor graphical glitches in Vista RC2 that I haven't bothered investigating). If you would be so gracious as to provide proof positive that Microsoft did make copy protection the default for MP3s in any iteration of Windows Media Player that made it to XP, please let me know since I'm going to be so gracious as to provide links to you that you requested.

and I doubt they form 51% or more of MS customer base.

So we only care about the majority of users with something that's entirely optional. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to provide all these tools for creating your own music, video, whatever with tools that come with Vista, and instead of making it easy on content creators large or small, we decide to instead tell them that they need to go elsewhere for that when it's trivial to implement? That makes no business sense.

As for your education, here you go oh lazy one:

on DRM in KPDF

Re: DRM-crippled Banshee has no copyleft protection

Torvalds: "DRM is Perfectly OK with Linux

Linux and DRM - succeeding where MS failed?

The RIAA - Hollywood - DRM - Linux Suicide Pact

GStreamer to support DRM

2 GB for firefox, 5 GB for OpenOffice.org, 1/2 GB for X, 1/2 GB for desktop odds and ends, 1 GB for Evolution or Thunderbird, and 10 MB for old-style stuff running in the background

In any case, I'm glad they're improving Gnome support along with KDE simultaneously. Gnome needs more help, whereas KDE doesn't as much. I'm also glad that they're rewriting Yast--the important thing is that they're improving it, and I'm sure it'll look fine in either environment regardless of the toolkit they use. Same with zen, except of course they botched that one--but ideally they're laying the foundation for improved future technology, and honestly I could care less which toolkit/development environment is behind it as long as they integrate it properly with KDE (which they are unquestionably doing; for evidence see for instance Kerry.

Have a looksee! http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2201

Live CD printing is broken on k/ubuntu.

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2072

Here's a KDE developer that's not too happy about it (me either).

--AR

Xubuntu has some issues for me: * Opening Menu Editor wipes all menu items. * Have been unable to get printing working. Think this is also a major with Kubuntu. http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2064

There's a big difference between Ubuntu and Debian. Ubuntu is the Debian-based product of a commercial company, Canonical, and their marketing talk for Ubuntu consists of half-truths (=half-lies) and hiding problems from users is part of their their policy. Debian, on the other hand, is a distro made by a non-profit organization developed by volunteers. Debian (unlike Ubuntu) stands on its own feet, it's not based on any other distro and its policy is NOT to hide any problems. Debian supports officially 4-5 times more packages and many more architectures than Ubuntu. Making packages to build on more architectures helps finding and fixing bugs that would otherwise be hard to locate. Being based on Debian, also Ubuntu benefits from the high quality of Debian's packages. Ubuntu has some very skilled developers taking care of the packages in "main" category but there's hardly any criterion for selecting the MOTU's who maintain the packages in "universe" category. In Ubuntu, there's no security updates for the "universe" packages.

There was recently a protest among Kubuntu developers about not getting enough support from Canonical and the main Kubuntu developer (the only one who's getting paid for the job), Jonathan Riddell, quickly wrote a blog entry trying to tell people that there's no quarrel between Kubuntu devs, although there clearly was (and still is, AFAIK). http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1917 Riddel also wrote posts to public forums telling people to "move along, nothing to see here" when these forums informed people about the quarrel. This is just one example of the Ubuntu policy that tells the employed devs to attempt to hide any problems instead of discussing them openly in public. Also Ubuntu's marketing talks consist of half-truths that try to benefit from Debian's good reputation whenever it's appropriate but in general they try to hide the fact that Ubuntu is not really an independent distro that could stand on its own feet. Ubuntu's marketing talk also tries to hide the fact that bug-fixing and security updates are poorly managed in the "universe" packages. I'm sorry, but I refuse to buy Ubuntu's used-cars salesman's marketing discourse. Ubuntu just has too many problems that Debian doesn't have.

It seems that many people don't understand Debian's development model. Some people say that Debian unstable is a good choice for desktop systems. No, it isn't. Debian unstable is the development branch where all new stuff is first introduced. Saying that people should track Debian unstable is like saying that you should always track Ubuntu's development branch instead of using its stable releases. Debian unstable is UNSTABLE (the name should give you a hint about its unstable nature) and it's SUPPOSED to break every now and then because all the main development that goes into Debian happens in unstable. Debian unstable is for developers only -- it's not suitable or recommended for normal users.

Debian testing is the current development branch for the next Debian stable. Debian testing is quite suitable for everyday desktop use -- Debian unstable acts as a kind of bumper where all the serious bugs hit first and where they're also fixed. Once the packages migrate to Debian testing, they have already received some real-world testing that ensures that they're ready for the everyday use. Applications in Debian testing are usually almost, although not quite, the "latest and greatest" versions, because new packages first need some testing and buf-fixing time in Debian unstable. But at times when development goes smoothly, Debian testing can be quite up-to-date. If you use Ubuntu's stable release (that isn't updated for six long months) and if everything goes well in Debian's development (like it has gone lately), then Debian testing should have newer packages most of the time when compared to Ubuntu.

Let's compare some package versions in Ubuntu's latest release and the current Debian testing using the DistroWatch pages for these two

...can I really complain?

Well, the German Kubuntu team have closed their website in protest to what they claim is Canonical's disregard for KDE. Here are some of their concerns:

1) Canonical sponsors many more gnome developers than KDE developers -- just look how many more gnome-related commits appear in the Dapper commit log.
2) Edubuntu, whose education-specific programs come almost exclusively from the KDE Education Suite, runs on gnome instead of KDE. Canonical has never sponsored a KDE Education Suite developer, even though Edubuntu simply wouldn't exist without their work.
3) Canonical does not financially support the team that creates Kubuntu-LiveCDs, so they have to pay all the expenses from their own pockets.
4) Kubuntu doesn't accept community contributions (ie. contributions by anyone beside Jonathan Riddell and Andreas Mueller). A lot of volunteers wanted to contribute, but they can't because they have no access.
5) The name of the version featuring gnome is called Ubuntu, while the version featuring KDE has a K added to the front. This makes it sound like gnome is the default, standard, and KDE is some sort of offshoot. It would be more equitable to name them Ubuntu-KDE and Ubuntu-GNOME, or Kubuntu and Gubuntu.

Jonathan Riddell, Kubuntu's main developer has tried to calm fears that Mark Shuttleworth is backing down on his commitment to KDE as a premier desktop system.

Have a look at this: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1864 to see why this kind of performance test is largely useless.

Actually, Konqueror passed second. Some might say this is less of an achievment since the fixes that allowed Safari to pass could be more easily ported into the Konqueror codebase, but I still think the OSS project that passed Acid2 first should probably get more respect on /. ;)

Info here.

KDE will be equally supported on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Stephan Binner, a Novell engineer who is also a lead KDE developer, confirmed this on his blog.

Last July, Apple asked Anton Altaparmakov, lead developer of the Linux-NTFS project, to dual license the Linux-NTFS driver under the APL so that the Intel version of OS X can read/write files on Windows partitions (presumably for dual-boot computers). The problem pointed out by other Linux-NTFS developers is that the APL is not GPL compatible, and any changes made by Apple to the driver will be unusable in Linux. As one person put it:

This would open up a one-way street: towards OS X and away from GNU/Linux and any other OS based on the GPL.

Not to mention the Konqueror / Safari fiasco where Apple complied to the terms of the LGPL by the skin of their teeth, making it impossible for open source developers to port changes upstream.

In November, Apple has again tried to hijack Linux-NTFS code, this time by suggesting that it be licensed under the LGPL. This was promptly rejected by one main developer, who threatened lawsuits.

Dysan2k, here is the announcement of Konqueror passing Acid2: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1129

Konqueror first passed the Acid2 test last June, about a month or two after Safari. It works in Konqueror 3.4.2.

That video is not XGL. It is quite impressive and it can give you an idea of what XGL could look like, it is not XGL but is Luminocity and it is taken from http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots. Read "How Luminocity Relates to Other Stuff" to get more info on Luminocity. Read the interview with KDE's Zack Rusin: "Beauty and Magic for KDE, with Zack Rusin". Download the demo video of Zack's XGL hacks: http://vizzzion.org/stuff/xgl_wanking.avi 16MB. If you want to read more about XGL then read aseigo's blog entry or Zack's blog.