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I had the EXACT same experience as you, except the speech I went to was 14 years ago in Dallas. I got dragged to that event by co-workers. I had never heard of Stallman before the event.

Bull! I used to routinely play Quake3, as well as TuxRacer (full version) with a matrox g200 card in my Linux box. See this site for instance, the documentation may not have been the best, but it was enough.

I know they had problems getting an OpenGL driver out for Windows, I'm not sure they ever got it right, and a lot of people were pissed, but that's completely different.

The average middle manager wouldn't know a Linux User's Group if it jumped out of their ass and did the tap number from 42nd street.

While certainly deserving of being modded "Funny," it's equally deserving of "Overated," possibly "Untruthful." The North Texas Linux Users' Group job opportunity list routinely sends out requests for assistance, sometimes full-time, sometimes part-time, sometimes contract. Over the years I have participated in a few contact jobs as a result of posts to the LUG mailing list. Contrary to the parent poster's message, there are people out there who recognize the value of networking and the value of targeting a select group of individuals who, on average, will generally have a more appropriate skill set than, say, the population exposed to a newspaper classified.

Find the LUGs in your area, as well as other UGs and subscribe to their job lists. It's probably one of the more underated activities and least time-consuming you can add to your job search techniques.

I just found a very useful page discussing the history of spreadsheet software and their current problems and limitations. It also has some thoughts about possible improvements in spreadsheet architecture, and lists both free and commercial Linux-based apps. Check it out.

What about XWindows? Sounds more infringing then Lindows and is also the same industry

Maybe they just need to call it the Lindow Operating System, and look the other way when people add the 's'.

Ahem ... ;-)

Sorry, had to add this because I got this message : Reason: Your comment looks too much like ascii art. (if you have to mod me down, I pity you for not downmodding the slashcode-moronic-filter first)

the attitude of the Linux users I ran across was intollerable

The local users' groups are usually much friendlier than the IRC or newsgroup crowds. Many users' groups have mailing lists set up specifically for folks new to Linux. Check out NTLUG for some friendly advice.

Spot on!

Anyone remember the Digital Multia aka "Universal Desktop Box" powered by Alpha CPU's?

They weren't all that powerful (had a lower cost version of the Alpha CPU - the 21164PC with watered down FPU and such) or popular, but they were out there long before Apple had any 64-bit dreams.

KDE/GNOME is a bit off-topic for a discussion of the license of Mono's class libraries, but what the heck, I'm game.

the KDE project was based on Qt due to it being a nice toolkit and due to the naivete of the core team. They just weren't aware of the implications, and couldn't understand it because, let's face it, programmers aren't lawyers.

This excuse does not fly. Perhaps it could have been true for a short time, but lots of people pointed out that KDE was depending on non-free software. KDE could have adopted the Harmony project (free library compatible with Qt) but they chose not to do so.

(There was an essay about this, with a title something like "Why KDE still isn't a good idea". I've searched the web for a long time and I couldn't find it. I think I read it on Slashdot, but I can't find it here either. Can anyone help me out?)

It seems clear to me that we have GNOME to thank for Troll Tech freeing up their license on the Qt library.

By the way, read this:

http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/qtcontroversy.html

To admit that both sides wanted the same thing would be to admit that the GNUbites were a bit wrong to spew so much venom at the KDE crowd.

I'd prefer that no one spew venom at anyone, least of all at fellow free-software developers. But I must say that I have seen about as much anti-GNOME venom as anti-KDE venom. Both desktops have lots of rabid supporters.

Doggone it, news items like this just show how harmful having GNOME around is for the Free desktop. Nowadays, to be free-from-cost in the KDE world, one has to release their code under a Free license. To do otherwise is to pay a princely sum to Troll Tech, which most people don't want to do. The GNOME project, however, has wanted to get into bed with commercial projects since the beginning, and this is a great example. Such a license is bad for the Free world, though they'll not admit that their darling environment would be so.

Let me get this straight. It is better for the free software world to depend on a commercial product, one you must sometimes pay for the right to use, than to depend on a completely free library? Nonsense. To believe that, you would have to believe that contributions by business to free software are tainted and bad. I don't believe that. If IBM wants to donate a journaling file system, big iron patches, or anything else to the free community, I'm all for it.

I also note your implication: if we didn't have GNOME we would have more free apps. Let's think about this. If some company wanted to make and sell a product to run under Linux, and they didn't want to pay for a Qt license, you think that they would then go ahead and write the product and give it away for free? Not in this world. They would just forget about writing the product. The people who want to release their software free will do it, whether they are developing for GNOME or KDE. Lack of a free alternative will not cause more people to give stuff away.

If anyone's been harmful to the Free desktop, it's GNOME, not KDE.

Utter nonsense. The competition between the two desktops has made both of them better. The KDE guys are doing a great job, but so are the GNOME guys. The big difference is that companies like Sun and HP are going to ship GNOME on their computers, not KDE. But you have totally failed to make any case that it's a bad thing when more computers are running a free desktop.

steveha

DTP is really the one domain where I do not know of any working Free app. Sucks hard, IMHO.

There isn't anything anywhere near Quark, InDesign, Pagemaker etc. There is, however, KWord, which is a frame-based word processor and allows more powerful layouts than, say, MS Word, but still...

Another program you might want to check out is called Impress, but frankly, I didn't like it.

On the other hand, there's LaTeX or Docbook, which are fine for some areas where Framemaker would be used in Windows-Land (actually, there was a beta of Framemaker for Windows - while Adobe won't release it officially, perhaps you find this somewhere lying around).

So the best would be to start a new project - I will be happy to beta-test it when it's ready :)

Good luck!

No offense, but the odds of you finding one thousand computer users willing to keep Linux on their desktop for everyday use is also next to ZERO.

Gee, it would probably take me so long to look up a few Linux Users Group pages and ask who uses Linux for a desktop. There can't be any of them out there ...

That's the extreme case; in rather less extreme cases, a benefit of Paying The Bucks for Oracle is that you can do online backups while the system is running, and have the expectation that any DBA that is worth his (or her) salt can bring it back up if there is a problem.

Those are the critical things that cause managers to be willing to pay the Big Bucks for licenses.

The fact that there's a sizable community of DBAs from which to hire is a nice bonus; the process feeds on itself in that it is profitable for everyone (well, almost everyone...) to get involved in certification activities. That means that there's a half-reasonable lowest common denominator set of skills out there.

Another "merit" is that there is a whole pile of third party software out there, whether in tools to help you manage databases, tools to help you build DB schemas, applications running atop Oracle ( e.g. SAP R/3 ), and such, again, with financial benefits to many of those involved. It is SAP's interests to promote Oracle sales, and vice-versa... (Albeit that being an example of a situation where there are some conflicts of interest!)

Yes, Corel Linux was pretty bad. They tried building a slick install, and did not do too badly from that perspective. But it was inadequate for more "sophisticated" use, and there just isn't yet a big market for "nonsophisticated" Linux users.

They were selling it as product when they were effectively still beta-testing it.

It's fair to say that they needed something to sell; what they probably should have done was to make sure it included software that would lead to "callbacks."

As it stood, it was pretty easy to install, but the process of adding packages to make it really usable for anything leads to the users becoming knowledgeable enough not to need the crutch of "simple installation." (Add to which that about the only faintly daunting install still around is that of Debian. With many distribution makers working on "easy installs," it's hardly unique to Corel...)

• Corel probably should have included .debs for WordPerfect 8, with prominent splash screens promising the improved features of newer versions.
• They probably should have included some slick little "applets" samples based on Paradox 9, with prominent advertising of the merits of deploying that.
• They should have included some samples of Windows software "WINE-ized" to allow them to run natively on Linux.

  This wouldn't require going after anything spectacularly prominent; I'm sure that throwing a few thousand dollars at some Windows shareware authors could get a few interesting applications ported.

Those would represent "strides" towards demonstrating that it might be worth spending more money on their software.

There's not the money in simply "making it easier," especially when other makers of distributions are trying to do the same.

This already provides a set of protocols and data formats standardized under the auspices of the IETF . There's an XML encoding under way as well as an OMG committee working on CORBA IDL.

There are already applications that know how to use these protocols/formats, including the GNOME and KDE calendar programs.

Build a "calendar server" that knows how to store appointments for a horde of users, and a "vCard" server that can accept address info for hordes of users, and use the existing standards to try to build in further sorts of useful interactions.

This would make the existing tools vastly more useful. It doesn't fundamentally matter whether this involves XML, CORBA, MySQL, or LDAP; those are all implementation details that can probably vary a whole lot without breaking the fundamental idea, which is to build standards-compliant servers.

That was the whole point to defining these calendaring and scheduling and address standards, namely to provide a standard way of doing the sorts of things that Microsoft built proprietary interfaces into Outlook for.

And yes, I think this would be a really good idea.

"Boy, that sure proves that it's a conspiracy!"

On the other hand, there is a considerable Linux presence at Nokia, between the fact that:

• A sizable LUG meets monthly at that Nokia campus, and
• There are quite a few "Linux folk" at Nokia.

  Perhaps not "notable kernel hackers," but there certainly are a lot of engineers that use Linux...

It all goes together to imply that things are seldom as "black-and-white" as they may appear to be...

That was one of the reasons why we incorporated, so that there would be a "shell" there around which such activities could grow.

But we concluded about a year ago that having "a Linux show" here would require really fine-tuning the purpose, in that there are just so many others.

• There's effectively more shows than companies to help sponsor them, especially after the Venture Capital has died to a trickle.
• Linus Torvalds can only attend so many shows per year.
• For those companies that "sell" on the show floors, it has got to be a lot of work to pick up shop and move, as hobos, from show to show.

  This is not something that most would want as a career.

It's a lot of work to put on a show, whether it be small or large. It sounds like the Kansas group got overambitious, which is quite regrettable, as there will be some unfortunate fallout.

OO? Microkernels? All nice things to have (since the 1960s, in fact, see Hydra->AS/400 on this page). But people more interested in the future might want to check out "reflective OSes".

Aperios is the name of Sony's OS for that robot dog. I had a link to it but now it seems to be broken. It is just an evolutions of Apertos (the OS formally known as Muse).

I particularly recommend the paper "The Muse Object Architecture: A New Operating System Structuring Concept" (number 24 on this page) for a good comparison of the various ways to design an OS.

What does CorelDRAW provide that GIMP doesn't (or couldn't)?

CorelDraw 9 is actually a small suite of packages, including CorelDraw, Corel Photo-Paint, a font navigator, a texture explorer, a bitmap-to-vector tracing package and various image distortion tools. So, to answer your question, the functionality provided by CorelDraw 9 that the GIMP doesn't do is vector-based artwork, rather than pixmap. This is still an area of the Linux application base that is not fully up to speed yet - there are various applications which do vector-art/vector-design on Linux, such as Dia, Sketch, KIllustrator, Xfig (ancient but still useful) and it's successor GTKFig, GYVE and Impress but many of these are as yet incomplete or have fallen by the wayside. That's not to say that CorelDraw 9 is necessarily the best vector art package out there - I'd like to see the latest Adobe Illustrator on Linux too - but it is a welcome filling-out of the application base.

There are several things in the Windows package which it will be very interesting to see what Corel do with regards to porting them, or if they are simply ommitted. For example, the MS Visual Basic for Applications scripting language used for automation of CorelDraw 9 - drop or replace? - and the Digimarc Digital Watermarking software, something I'm currently unaware of anything like this on the Linux platform. Plus the usual glut of a thousand TrueType and Type1 fonts you get with any vector or DTP package these days.

Whether Corel Photo-paint 9 holds a candle to the GIMP (I don't honestly know, since I haven't used Photopaint since v5) is vaguely irrelevent, since it is the vector art package in this lot that will probably be of most interest to most people.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

This story is sending lots of bad feelings all around.

'X wasn't designed with these in mind'

Xlib Programming Manual by Adrian Nye
Chapter 10 - Internationalization
Chapter 11 - Internationalized Text Input

I can say nothing that hasn't already been said many times before by Kenton Lee or by Christopher Browne.

It is entirely possible the people at Sun, IBM, HP, Compaq, (and possibly others) decided that as they're supporting Linux from other perspectives, that the needed to tell TOG that it needs to as well.

Convincing signs of a TOG "change of heart" would include things like:

• Defining UNIX 1999 or UNIX 2000 in such a way that Linux systems could become branded as UNIX, rather than their current comments
• Releasing Motif/CDE in Open Source form.

Shameless Plug: People should help Sponsor XFree86. My local Linux Users Group, NTLUG, is in the process of soliciting that members help sponsor several free software project organizations, including XFree86.

Sorry about that...

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The requested URL /linuxy2k.html was not found on this server.


...phil

As for the September 9th issue, this looks like it was largely an issue of incompetent journalists noticing that there are a whole lot of "9"'s together in 9/9/99.

They failed to grasp that in order for this to actually represent days and months, which can number higher than 9, the representation actually needs to be like 09/09/99.

There is a rumor that the Chinese stock exchange, running some six-year-old IBM AS/400 systems, ran into problems Sept 9 and is now down; I saw this in a news report reported on at work, which I would have hoped to be accurate. I have not found any independent verification, so this has to be considered mere rumor and not reality...

here is one of the better comparisons I have seen between *bsd and linux on the net.

Setting up tax-exempt charities to fund free software development is good for the donors' tax bill, but if the charity is paying programmers to write the software, the programmers' salaries are taxable.

On the other hand, if you give a cash gift to your favorite free-software programmer, you can't deduct the gift on your taxes, but the programmer doesn't have to declare it as income, either.

Back on the first hand, a gift, by definition, has no strings attached, so if you give a gift to your favorite free-software programmer, and that programmer takes the money and retires to Bermuda, you have no recourse.

[*]Browne has a collection of Web pages describing his own proposal, the Free Software (Gift) Exchange Registry.

Setting up tax-exempt charities to fund free software development is good for the donors' tax bill, but if the charity is paying programmers to write the software, the programmers' salaries are taxable.

On the other hand, if you give a cash gift to your favorite free-software programmer, you can't deduct the gift on your taxes, but the programmer doesn't have to declare it as income, either.

Back on the first hand, a gift, by definition, has no strings attached, so if you give a gift to your favorite free-software programmer, and that programmer takes the money and retires to Bermuda, you have no recourse.

[*]Browne has a collection of Web pages describing his own proposal, the Free Software (Gift) Exchange Registry.

I personally am not that happy with the idea of taxpayer funding. No matter what the source of funding, there's the danger that the priorities of the funders will distort the work.

So, in an ideal world, funding would operate in a manner analogous to free software itself - totally decentralized, with funding coming from individuals, and with an absolute minimum of extra layers of management and administration.

I've been thinking about how to do this. At the core of my idea is a cryptographically sound mechanism for identifying the members of various groups, for example, legitimate free software developers. My idea is based on certification by peers, and also has the property that it's very difficult to attack, i.e. if some imposters managed to get certified, they'd be able to do only a very limited amount of damage.

The link above talks mostly about the techinical issues. However, the social ones are even more important. Christopher Browne has written a proposal that goes into much more detail at this level - you might have seen his letter to lwn.net a couple of weeks ago.

My ideas are too rough and unfinished right now to do anything concrete. When I get the prototype running, I'll try to write up the ideas in less drafty form.