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Jeff Waugh talks about similarities and difference in philosophy and in positioning

I just went to the UserLinux FAQ looking for the question, 'What is UserLinux?', and I was going to be all smug and reply with some 'read the FAQ you fool' type comment...

but then I realized...

They don't even have that question on the FAQ. Wow, so yea, you're absolutely right.

http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl ...

Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!

Good old GNU technology ;)

http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl ...

Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!

Good old GNU technology ;)

http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl ...

Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!

Good old GNU technology ;)

• http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl doesn't have a description, but it does say:
  
  "Main announcements have been moved to the UserLinux web site at http://www.userlinux.com/ . "
  
  and
  
  "# See http://www.userlinux.com/ and http://www.userlinux.com/about for more information. "
  
• 
  
  Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!
  
  
• Let's check out http://www.userlinux.com/about/.
  
  This site is parked via OpenSourceParking.com .
  No-Cost Parking, only Open Source / Free Software are used.
  Proceeds from advertising will go to political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
  Now, you can do some good with that parked domain!
  
  

• http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl doesn't have a description, but it does say:
  
  "Main announcements have been moved to the UserLinux web site at http://www.userlinux.com/ . "
  
  and
  
  "# See http://www.userlinux.com/ and http://www.userlinux.com/about for more information. "
  
• 
  
  Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!
  
  
• Let's check out http://www.userlinux.com/about/.
  
  This site is parked via OpenSourceParking.com .
  No-Cost Parking, only Open Source / Free Software are used.
  Proceeds from advertising will go to political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
  Now, you can do some good with that parked domain!
  
  

• http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl doesn't have a description, but it does say:
  
  "Main announcements have been moved to the UserLinux web site at http://www.userlinux.com/ . "
  
  and
  
  "# See http://www.userlinux.com/ and http://www.userlinux.com/about for more information. "
  
• 
  
  Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!
  
  
• Let's check out http://www.userlinux.com/about/.
  
  This site is parked via OpenSourceParking.com .
  No-Cost Parking, only Open Source / Free Software are used.
  Proceeds from advertising will go to political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
  Now, you can do some good with that parked domain!
  
  

• http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl doesn't have a description, but it does say:
  
  "Main announcements have been moved to the UserLinux web site at http://www.userlinux.com/ . "
  
  and
  
  "# See http://www.userlinux.com/ and http://www.userlinux.com/about for more information. "
  
• 
  
  Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!
  
  
• Let's check out http://www.userlinux.com/about/.
  
  This site is parked via OpenSourceParking.com .
  No-Cost Parking, only Open Source / Free Software are used.
  Proceeds from advertising will go to political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
  Now, you can do some good with that parked domain!
  
  

• http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl doesn't have a description, but it does say:
  
  "Main announcements have been moved to the UserLinux web site at http://www.userlinux.com/ . "
  
  and
  
  "# See http://www.userlinux.com/ and http://www.userlinux.com/about for more information. "
  
• 
  
  Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!
  
  
• Let's check out http://www.userlinux.com/about/.
  
  This site is parked via OpenSourceParking.com .
  No-Cost Parking, only Open Source / Free Software are used.
  Proceeds from advertising will go to political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
  Now, you can do some good with that parked domain!
  
  

• http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl doesn't have a description, but it does say:
  
  "Main announcements have been moved to the UserLinux web site at http://www.userlinux.com/ . "
  
  and
  
  "# See http://www.userlinux.com/ and http://www.userlinux.com/about for more information. "
  
• 
  
  Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!
  
  
• Let's check out http://www.userlinux.com/about/.
  
  This site is parked via OpenSourceParking.com .
  No-Cost Parking, only Open Source / Free Software are used.
  Proceeds from advertising will go to political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
  Now, you can do some good with that parked domain!
  
  

• http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl doesn't have a description, but it does say:
  
  "Main announcements have been moved to the UserLinux web site at http://www.userlinux.com/ . "
  
  and
  
  "# See http://www.userlinux.com/ and http://www.userlinux.com/about for more information. "
  
• 
  
  Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!
  
  
• Let's check out http://www.userlinux.com/about/.
  
  This site is parked via OpenSourceParking.com .
  No-Cost Parking, only Open Source / Free Software are used.
  Proceeds from advertising will go to political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
  Now, you can do some good with that parked domain!
  
  

• http://www.userlinux.com/ directs me to http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl
• http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl doesn't have a description, but it does say:
  
  "Main announcements have been moved to the UserLinux web site at http://www.userlinux.com/ . "
  
  and
  
  "# See http://www.userlinux.com/ and http://www.userlinux.com/about for more information. "
  
• 
  
  Great, so I click on http://www.userlinux.com/ and end up back at http://www.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl . No luck there!
  
  
• Let's check out http://www.userlinux.com/about/.
  
  This site is parked via OpenSourceParking.com .
  No-Cost Parking, only Open Source / Free Software are used.
  Proceeds from advertising will go to political and promotional efforts on behalf of Open Source / Free Software.
  Now, you can do some good with that parked domain!
  
  

The entire computer industry has been stifled for years. We need competition, and we need it badly.

Yeah. Because Microsoft has no real competition at all in desktop operating systems.

UserLinux answers "no" (in European).

Looks like UserLinux is still in the works. Last time I checked their website, it was a wiki, but they have a very professional-looking site now, and they have installer isos available. I have used it in the past, and it was not bad, basically Debian unstable with their package set.

Anybody here active in UserLinux that can give us a quick summary of what's been happening lately?

And some bright spark has even sported a q&d script to help use them with OO.o docs.

When marketing Linux on the desktop we have to put into the center the gigantic set of free and useful applications that people can get on a Linux PC, as opposed to the blank slate that a Windows XP (without Office) is. We have word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs, sound editors, drawing/painting/image editing programs, cool web browsers, download managers, text editors, the best email clients, free games (some of them nice), RSS aggregators, heck, clients for any Internet service you can think of. Spyware is unheard of, all of this is free and installed if you want it.

I hope that with Ubuntu and Userlinux we'll see serious attempts to build user-ready Linux desktop computers with cool extra services like remote support via SSH and auto-update via apt-get, and with a lower price thanks to the lack of a Windows tax.

But how is one supposed to take them seriously when their "installing UserLinux" section is actually a link to goat.cx?

If you don't believe me, go here and click "See installing UserLinux"

Bruce

1. Create a Grub boot disk: http://i30www.ira.uka.de/~ud3/mkgrubdisk/
2. Download the installer .iso and put it in an EXT2, EXT3, or (V)FAT partition. Remember where it is.
3. Extract the initrd and vmlinuz files from the CD iso (mount -t iso9660 netboot.iso /mnt/cd -o loop) to this partition (again... remember the location)
4. Create a menu.lst on the Grub floopy with the following:

   title New Install
   kernel (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram devfs=mount,dall ramdisk_size=17000
   initrd (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

   Or just type the relevant info into the grub prompt. Of course, edit these values to reflect your real file locations.
5. Reboot
6. Start the install... Woohoo!!!

I see both sides of the camp here, but...

The GPL doesn't ever reject your freedom to create non-free software. I can write an application to GNU/Linux, have it closed-source and make money on it, just like I can on *every other* OS. More importantly, the LGPL allows you to make non-free programs that build on them, hence you choose the APIs that are based on LGPL. See Bruce Perens' new pet project User Linux for a perfect example of this.

I respect the FSF for the stance they take, and I believe they're doing the right thing by proclaiming that software should be free, and then stick by their choice. Anything other would just make them a bunch of hypocrates in my eyes. Yes, sometimes compromises are neccessary. But the FSF feels that they're perfectly happy with their free OS and wouldn't ever dream about using something non-free. They've made a choice, and are willing to live with that choice. They're willing to sacrifice a few programs for what they believe in. I can understand and respect that.

Noone is forcing you to use only Free Software. Noone is forcing you to develop only Free Software. It's your choice to make. I've made mine, and I'm happy with it. 'Nuff said.

(And FYI I'm writing this in Opera, which is a non-free but kickass browser. ;)

new installer has a 'working' hardware detection (thanks to progeny at this point) and extreme modularity. I think grafical interface will come from http://www.userlinux.com/userlinux

Bruce Perens explains this problem here

"Red Hat has already proposed an answer to this problem, but I think it's the wrong answer. Their Fedora project is obviously intended to look like Debian. But unlike Debian, Fedora is an extremely unequal partnership. "Fedora" is where the community developers are supposed to build Red Hat's product, while the certifications and vendor endorsements are held back for the high-priced "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" brand. This is especially obvious in recent certification announcements: the Common Criteria certification will go to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", not "Fedora". And of course the entire steering board of the Fedora project are Red Hat employees. Red Hat recently announced a second draft of the leadership structure for Fedora, in which they have eliminated voting, expressing the need to keep control in the hands of Red Hat's management. ...

How much would I advise a volunteer, community developer to contribute to Fedora? I think it makes sense to make Fedora packages for your own software - that way, you have some assurance that it will be packaged correctly. Beyond that, because of the vastly unequal partnership, I fear that a volunteer developer would be making himself an unpaid employee of Red Hat rather than a member of a real community. I guess that's OK if you think they'll hire you eventually. But I'd advise volunteer developers to concentrate their work on projects where the partnerships are demonstrably equal."

1. Firstly, under a commercial license (which is ~$1000)
2. Secondly, under the GPL for non-commercial usage only

Technically it is triple-licensed, as it can also be used under the QPL -- this is what KDE does. The QPL is easier to combine with certain other free software licenses. See Peter Vandenabeele's answer to "Why did UserLinux decide to not include Qt" in the UserLinux FAQ.

I've switched my servers to Debian, although I think Fedora is a fine desktop.

If UserLinux ever gets some momentum, I'll be switching desktops over as well.

I believe UserLinux is GNOME only...

Debian needs a subdistro with less archs

*COUGH* USERLINUX *COUGH*

uhh... UserLinux

"Doesn't QT have a bunch of annoying licensing restrictions?"

Thanks

Bruce

Bruce Perens is leading the UserLinux project with the specific goal of creating a global "co-operative" if you like, of Debian GNU/Linux service provider companies (and consultants), with a completely Debian (ie. 100% Free Software) core. Additionally, the GNOME desktop has been standardized upon specifically to simplify custom/ proprietary development on top of UserLinux. See the homepage. The only thing might be the release-ready (version 1.0) timing; depends on your deployment timetable of course.

Bruce has jumped all over the place with his reasoning/rationale.

Usually, when people make claims like this, they provide examples to support their claims. You say that "Anyone who has monitored the actual UL list can see this", so it should be easy for you to provide a few examples.

Here, I'll help. The UserLinux mailing list archives can be found on this web page:

http://lists.userlinux.com/pipermail/discuss/

I read through the whole GNOME-KDE debate on the UserLinux mailing list in December, and I say you are wrong. I went back today and re-read every email Bruce Perens wrote in the month of December, and I still say you are wrong.

God, why are people so lazy!

When you are trying to convince people of something, you are expected to provide some sort of evidence to back up your position. If you aren't going to provide any evidence, you can't expect anyone to pay much attention to your bare, unsupported assertions.

Find out for yourself.

I did. You are telling me I'm wrong, but you haven't shown me any examples that support your position.

steveha

"Uhm, no. First, Bruce explicitly said he was talking about his support company and its unacceptable difficulty in supporting KDE/Qt."

Wrong. From On the GUI Selection in UserLinux:

The difference between one and two GUIs may spell profitability or bankruptcy for some of our service providers. [emphasis mine]

It's not whether Perens LLC can support KDE, it's whether the smallest of the service providers can support KDE.

From you again:

And then you have all of the KDE developers on the list who were *more* than willing to provide all the effort required.

Effort required to to what? The KDE developers can choose to act as a de facto service provider of a KDE-based version of UL. That has no bearing on the fact that it costs more to support both KDE and GNOME than just GNOME alone.

The short and long answer is an obvious "No." Take a look at the UserLinux website.

Redhat continues to sell enterprise distributions at enterprise prices. Redhat does however have a community supported distribution called Fedora.

"And no where has Bruce said that all UL service providers would be required to support the entire UL base system in toto."

Oh, no, he's just implied it very strongly. From Bruce Perens:

"We should consider _reducing_the_support_burden_ to be a very important goal. It makes it much easier for either customer internal staff or our support providers to support the system if they have some limit on the gamut of products they must support, and reduces the support cost to the customer. Knowing two complete GUIs is expensive, so expensive that I think it could make a difference between viability and nonviability for support providers - especially small ones. If our support providers aren't viable, neither is the project." [emphasis mine]

Now back to what you said:

If service providers are smaller, less experienced, etc., than Perens LLC, they can choose to support a subset of the UL base.

That's very unhelpful for the users of UserLinux. Imagine looking for UL service providers and not being sure if the subset that they support is the same subset for which you need support, especially since it makes a service provider look bad if it says outright that it only supports less than the whole of UL. If UL-branded service providers are required to support the whole of UL, then you at least have a fair idea of what to expect from a provider, and service providers who can support a superset of UL will likely broadcast that fact, as it will look good as a selling point.

Hard to convince me of that when they already have their own deb repository and installation instructions.

I haven't seen Perens Vaporware yet.

You're not looking very hard if you can't find the installation instructions using Debian unstable as a base (once a couple of needed dependancies filter down into testing, that will be the minimum required).

True, there is no install CD yet, but that's because UserLinux is going to use the new Debian installer for sarge.

Jay (=

So I can't find a link to the original announcement, but according to this link, I see no mention of his support company. Yes, I know he was talking about LLC in this last message, but I'm talking about at the start.

Firstly, (in the link) there is no real mention of a difficulty in supporting Qt. The difficulty and *expense* lies in supporting two frameworks, and that difficulty and expense is in reference to any support provider, not Perens' in particular: "For developers and support staff, maintaining expertise in both of two GUIs is an expensive proposition" and "The difference between one and two GUIs may spell profitability or bankruptcy for some of our service providers".

So, still, no preference for GNOME/GTK over KDE/Qt. The decision at this point is that, to reduce economic strains for any support provider, UserLinux will only have one GUI.

The decision then has to come down to something else, and that decision was made on licensing: Qt is GPL, GTK is LGPL. The LGPL is better for commercial users of UserLinux. As "in order to get any Free Software into businesses, our Free system must promote the creation of a large collection of proprietary solutions that do not exist today" it's better in *this* instance to pick the LGPL library. Hence, we make a defacto decision to use GNOME.

Now, in reference to "keeping up with the distro". I look at Mandrake, and see that KDE has been "tweaked" for Mandrake. I assume GNOME is the same. Red Hat, the same. I guess most (if not all) distros don't just take the default desktop and ship with that. They value add, either through extra components, through themes, through different menus, whatever. UL's GNOME support being just one meta-package is to be expected: UserLinux doesn't really exist yet! However, when it does, you can be sure that it'll be tweaked, with a little extra config app over here, and pretty buttons over there.

From what I can remember, when RedHat started using their BlueCurve themes (I think that's the name), of the few positive comments about it most of them were along the lines of "well, you gotta hand it to them: its not easy to get KDE and GNOME to have such similar and consistent themes". That's what I mean when I say keeping up with the distro: apparently theming and everything else is difficult to keep consistent across desktop environments, and any time changes are made to the "distribution" (as in from a top level "marketing" point of view) those changes will now only need to be reflected in one desktop environment.

Finally, fair enough: the KDE developers providing the effort "required" answers the problem that I just discussed, but would they also provide all of the support that the customer facing support providers could not? No, and again we come back to supporting the GUIs at a user level, and attempting to reduce the cost of running *any* support company.

When has he ever said Qt isn't free?

Try here for one.

Bruce was replying to my email where I pointed out that Qt would help prevent the very problems the UL manifesto was written for. Bruce replied stating that, sorry, he was interested in '100% free software'.

Several times Bruce chose to obfuscate the old 'Free VS free' canard and as a result he has a bunch of ill-informed anti-Qt trolls roaming his list. Check the list.

Never mind the GNOME/KDE fanboy wars, I'm more interested in another holy war: plan text versus HTML mail. The info page for the mailing list Perens wrote to says 'Please use HTML email when sending to the list.' Why on earth would anyone actively want that? But he seems to have broken his own rule, since his message is plain text.

Never mind the GNOME/KDE fanboy wars, I'm more interested in another holy war: plan text versus HTML mail. The info page for the mailing list Perens wrote to says 'Please use HTML email when sending to the list.' Why on earth would anyone actively want that? But he seems to have broken his own rule, since his message is plain text.

...if UserLinux is ever more than VaporWare.

> I'm afraid it'll take more than a grassroots effort to compete with Redhat's server lineup...

How about I throw in a sweet ass web site. Would that make you happy?

-Bruce

How is the replacement already here? There's zero companies involved with this from the looks of the Wiki site. The page has a nice "just stubs" commenting the voidness and lack of content. Would'a, could'a, should'a. I could be President if only I had enough votes.

you forgot one

2004 will definitely be the linux desktop year.
And IMHO it takes the right direction with Bruce Perens' UserLinux initiative, if he succeeds at convincing linux users/developpers to switch to/work on this new DIY operating system.
It's mission statement would be : Provide businesses with freely available, high quality Linux operating systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support options designed to encourage productivity and security while reducing overall costs.

Well, this is really an excellent news, and I'm glad the Apache team managed to achieve this result.
However, I'm saddened by the declaration of Rasmus Lerdorf published on the UserLinux discuss list, where he claims that Apache 2/PHP integration is a "bad idea" on UNIX systems.
This sounds like an excellent news for all the PHP developpers in the world!

Bruce Perens is known for being a great communicator. Being a communicator he needs to simplify things. But here he is over-simplifying to the point where it becomes counter-productive.

He poses it as a simple question of "a royalty in connection with proprietary software development". Remove the royalty, and -- voila! -- your platform gets magic attraction and becomes the accepted one in big enterprises.

Apart from a few other facts, namely....

--> ...that many companies are happily paying royalties if they get something in exchange [[in the case of Qt that is: superb API documentation, extremly stable releases, world-class support for your developers, an extremly well-working "help-me-port-my-Windows-MFC/VC++-app-over-to-Linu x" set of tools, a solid cross-platform development framework, a quick "time-to-market" timespan, re-use of our developers' prior C++ knowledge... I should know, because our company decided in favour of (paid-for) Qt, and against (gratis) GTK. GTK simply didn't cut it on all these fields I listed]].

He is also missing another factor, namely that...

--> ...Linux in the Enterprise does not just magically appear. It is brought there by people who have prior experience. Prior experience and prior preference. And likely, these people will have a KDE or a GNOME preference these days -- maybe both, but they'll have their favorites. Excluding one of the two for whatever reason alienates its supporters big time!

I, personally, prefer KDE, just because I've worked with it for a long time. If I had a voice in a Linux choice in my organisation (and I do have, but we are not quite there yet), I will make the strongest possible stance against a product which excludes KDE -- for merely the experience reason. I would not deploy UserLinux for this superficial "royalty freeness" reason, although the underlying idea seems great to me.

Not that my personal decision matters here, I am sorry to bring it up. What I am trying to say is - there will be a lot of people out there for whom a similar reasoning may hold: And that creates a roadblock for UserLinux by design. I would see that as a significant risk.

Look how sane the KDE guys have formulated their own proposal ( http://desktop.kdenews.org/strategy.html): they do not just want to base themselves on their own creation, they want to include GNOME and GTK-apps. They say they are working on a tight integration of Gimp, Sodipodi, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Evolution and other GNOME apps into their Desktop Environments to turn it into an integrative environment. I have even seen links to a few very promising screenshots (using KDE fileopen and print dialogs for Sodipodi) -- and I can say this is exactly what we in our organisation need, to see Linux desktops ready for rollout.....

Sorry for the long rant.

Errm, pardon me, but who in holy hell are these UserLinux people and who's this Bruce Perens guy?

If you don't know that Bruce Perens is a former Debian Project Leader and the primary author for the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines (which was reworked into the OSI's Open Source Definition, a group he co-founded), or that UserLinux is his attempt to provide an DFSG-compliant reference distribution to high-priced Enterprise Linux solutions that can be developed and extended by Linux vendors, then why should I care who you are or why you felt the need to mindlessly babble on /. about a topic you admit you know nothing about?

I'm a GNOME user, but to be honest, I'm not losing any sleep over UserLinux's decision to pick GNOME over KDE because I'm not the target market for the distribution (although the use of GNOME means I may be more likely to look at early builds and see if I can contribute); Bruce has his goals, they're clearly outlined on the UserLinux site, and if can't come to some kind of accomodation with that, you're welcome to not contribute to the project.

Jay (=