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Slashback: Moolah, Visuals, Geosynchrony
Who needs an atmosphere? Xibalba writes "As a follow up story to the orbiting Web server, NASA already has an ftp server installed on UoSat-12 and has been sucessfully transferring images for the past week." Soon there should be no shortage of IP-addressable tin cans floating around space.
World domination, increment 00000003707391: xaniamud writes "NVidia have released version 0.93 of their OpenGL XFree86 drivers, check it out." Hopefully, nVidia is interested enough in selling video cards to the faithful to wipe it's nose clean of GPL violations, too.
This time, let's help DivX succeed ... Mike Hicks writes "An update to a previous story. FlashingYellow has combined with OpenCodex, and they now have a $10,000 prize along with an iMac DV for the first individual or group to produce an open source DivX ;-) plugin for Quicktime." Added to which, I will supply the second individual or group with a letterboxed DVD of Carlito's Way, Heat or The Godfather.
You may already be a winner! You may recall that Dr. Günter Bechly recently offered a $3000 incentive to the developers of KDE if the license under which KDE is released were amended such that it could be distributed with Debian's main (free) distribution.
Dr. Bechly has now withdrawn the offer, for the reasons he outlines below. He writes:
"Hello, I just wanted to let everybody know that KDE did not bother to send an official answer to my offer of a donation of $3000 in case that they fix their licence problems that currently prohibits an inclusion of KDE in Debian GNU/Linux. Just two people of the KDE camp answered at all, and both basically said that the licence change is impossible to do since there is too much code of third parties (including those who sent patches) involved who can hardly be traced. This is quite interesting, since in the past most KDE representatives claimed that the licence issue is moot since the requested exception clause in the licence is implicitly given due to the fact that the KDE programmers coded KDE-software for the QT-toolkit. Now they admit that they use a lot of GPL'ed code of non-KDE programmers which have never given such an implicit permission to link their GPL'ed code to QPL'ed libraries.Just as a reminder: The issue is not how to use KDE with Debian (e.g. by adding the link site to apt-sources), but how to legally include KDE as free software in Debian main. The issue is also neither that KDE is indeed free software nor that QT is indeed free software, but the issue is that the two involved free licences (GPL versus QPL) are mutually incompatible, which makes any distribution of binaries of GPL'ed software that is linked to QT simply illegal! The KDE project obviously does not care at all that it violates the GPL licence of other peoples code. This is not only rude behaviour but simply unacceptable. I hoped that my offer would help to solve the problem, but the reaction or rather the non-reaction of KDE shows that this attempt failed, just like any other attempts to solve this issue before. Apparently KDE and the distributions that include KDE are relying on the mean consideration that private authors of free software will not take the finacial risk to sue them for their licence violation. Maybe the only hope for the final solution of the problem could be that one of these authors proves this consideration to be ill-founded!
Allegations that Debian is just using the licence issue as camouflage for their general dislike of KDE are absolutely unwarranted, since I got only very positive responses from the Debian camp including the Debian leadership. There is no doubt that Debian would happily include KDE as soon as the licence problems are solved. Anyway, it does not look like that is ever going to happen. KDE unfortunately has a long tradition in violating the free software spirit:
1.) It was founded by Matthias Ettrich who developed the very fine program Lyx, but then used the non-free toolkit xforms for its GUI, instead of e.g. using a free alternative like TCL/TK.
2.) When the KDE project was started, it was built on a non-free toolkit, too, since QT1.x was not under QPL or any other free (open source) licence. KDE attempted from the very beginning to become the standard desktop of Linux by using a non-free toolkit. They could not know that QT would later be forced by the outcry in free software community and the attempt to develop a free replacement (Harmony) to release QT2.x under an open source licence (which unfortunately is still not compatabile with GPL).
3.) When the free QT replacement Harmony was still in development (it achieved a rather advanced state!) the KDE project refused to agree to switch to this toolkit in the future and they even announced that they will incorporate any useful new features of future versions of QT, which made it impossible for Harmony to ever reach compatability.
4.) KDE had no problems in the change of the licence of kisdn, which was developed under GPL, and as soon as it was accomplished was transformed into shareware. I am quite certain that they did not ask all people who sent patches for their permission for this licence change!
5.) Finally, KDE is blatantly ignoring their constant violation of the GPL of other peoples software that is used in KDE (e.g. in kflopppy). To sum up: There is no other volunteer project in the Linux world that has shown so much disrespect and ignorance of the free software movement than KDE (just for the record: this is said by someone who used KDE since beta4 and once in a flamewar with Bruce Perens even strongly defended the KDE-project; sorry Bruce, I did you wrong!). Therefore, even though KDE is very nice and usable software, I will say goodbye to all KDE stuff and will now only use Gnome which is rapidly evolving into a comparably mature desktop environment (current Helix-Gnome is certainly as good as KDE 1.1, and forthcoming Gnome 2.0 with Nautilus will be on a level with KDE2 and konqueror). Even koffice will soon be made superflous by The Gimp, Sketch, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Abiword, gcalender, etc. I hope that many will follow this migration from KDE to Gnome.
My offer of 3000,- $ will not be lost for free software and will now be given to Debian for an improvement of the Debian installer. Further details will be discussed with the Debian project.
With kind regards,
Dr. Günter Bechly
Dontcha love it when life imitates pundits? styopa writes "It seems that TurboLinux and Compaq Computing have announced an Alliance. Compaq will support TurboLinux on all of their platforms. Could this be the beginning of the end of TRU64?" Of course, this was carefully arranged to follow the recent story on Linux mergers, which now seems a bit more relevant. Of course, ZDNet had Compaq pegged for a date with Mandrake, but close enough.
That's correct. IANAL, but this guy is saying that distributing KDE binaries at all is illegal. Distributing the KDE source for people to compile themselves is perfectly OK.
Do their respective legal departments know about this?
I'm sure they do, by now, but they're conveniently ignoring it, because as far as anyone knows, nobody but Debian cares.
Or is the whole issue moot because those who would have to bring forth a complaint about license violations simply won't bother? (And who would those people be, anyhow? The KDE coders?)
It would be the people who aren't part of the KDE team, but who wrote code that was released under the GPL and has been incorporated into various parts of KDE. Were it not for this, the KDE team could simply re-release KDE under their own license, which would essentially be a modified GPL that allows for linking to Qt. The problem is that KDE incorporates code from other people outside the team, and in order to make the licensing change, all of those people would have to consent to this - that's what the $3,000 was for.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why is this in Slasback, and not a main story? It's certainly long enough. Let's keep Slashback limited to minor updates and errata, and put major updates like this one in full-fledged articles.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Why would a group in favor of opensource support a notoriously closed source platform?
Apple has a exclusive license with Sorenson Vision for the Sorenson codec. Also Apple doesn't port their codecs to the native platforms standard media layers.
Seems goofy that anyone would care to support Quicktime until Quicktime supports us.
If this quote (which is apparently what Debian maintains) is true, then aren't Redhat, Corel, Mandrake, SuSE, (etc. etc. etc. etc.) BREAKING THE LAW by distributing binary KDE packages?
Do their respective legal departments know about this?
Or is the whole issue moot because those who would have to bring forth a complaint about license violations simply won't bother? (And who would those people be, anyhow? The KDE coders?)
Anybody got a link to information on this issue?
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
I've never quite understood the need for the QPL. TrollTech could easily achieve the same effect by offering Qt under both GPL and proprietary licenses. Anyone who accepted the free license would be forced (by the GPL) to use it only in free projects, while anyone who developed non-free software would have to pay TrollTech for the privilege. This would be a perfect application of the viral effect of the GPL.
All that notwithstanding, I don't quite understand why the $3000-guy is so bitter. This all sounds like a lot of sour grapes to me. Why is he so hell-bent on getting KDE into Debian? KDE is a valuable asset to the Linux desktop, but if the Debian people don't want to include it then that's their perogative, and their problem. There are plenty of Linux systems (most of them, actually) that happily include it.
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To start with, I'm sorry if this ends up being fairly strongly worded - but I thoroughly disagree with the very negative and aggressive means of disparaging and attacking the KDE project as a whole. As Lando Calrissian said - here goes nothing:
KDE attempted from the very beginning to become the standard desktop of Linux by using a non-free toolkit.
Apologies for the strong language, but that is an outright lie. How, in the name of Linus, can one attempt to become the standard Linux desktop by using a non-free toolkit? By doing so, one is rather going to incur the wrath of many Linux users who will not use it; therefore, using a non-free toolkit is the exact opposite of an attempt to become the standard Linux desktop. Two additional points - GNOME/GTK attempted that, said in a very outright and honest manner that they were doing so, and have more or less succeeded in becoming the 'standard' Linux desktop environment. Fanatic advocacy due to their free nature has added fuel to that. The fact that RedHat etc. are supporting them to such a degree is only more proof. The people behind KDE are very, very smart - they wouldn't have used a non-free toolkit if they'd seen a superior alternative; in their opinion (NOT MINE - NOT A REASON FOR FLAMEWARS) the QT libraries made coding easier than any other toolkit. So they used it. Not because they wanted to use it to gain 'Linux Desktop Supremacy'.
Oh - and it's not the standard desktop of LINUX, for Theo's sake. It's intended for UNIX- and UNIX-like systems. I like my FreeBSD KDE desktop quite a lot.
KDE unfortunately has a long tradition in violating the free software spirit [...]
This starts out as an outright flame. Using the shield of the 'free software spirit' isn't the best way to begin an argument. Quite a few people (BP, JWZ, ESR, RMS, etc) would wildly differ on what that spirit is, and how it's best interpreted. Quoting it as your main point of thrust to put the KDE project in a bad light will just evoke hatred and disgust from many.
When the free QT replacement Harmony was still in development (it achieved a rather advanced state!) the KDE project refused to agree to switch to this toolkit in the future[...]
Now, several points:
1. Of course they refused to switch to it at some later undisclosed point in time. They were using QT, which at that time was a highly advanced, well-supported, well-documented toolkit. Harmony aimed to be an open copy of QT, but never reached a state where any type of reasonable compatibility was achieved. If I was asking anyone here to throw away their Windows boxen, because WINE/X/Berlin/Linux may one day support all the games through a compat layer (WINE), and is now already supporting quite a few (Fallout2, etc), what would you say? Even worse, for those developers, the switch to Harmony would have meant embracing a half- finished toolkit. If you've ever done any major dev work, you will know that buggy, unfinished, or plain incompatible development tools are the most grievous bane you could ever encounter. Users of MS Visual Studio would probably agree wholeheartedly.
2. and they even announced that they will incorporate any useful new features of future versions of QT, which made it impossible for Harmony to ever reach compatability
That is the whole mantra of a lot of OSS development - if you see a good feature somewhere, you adopt it. Of course, if MS ever did so, their code would be closed, and nobody'd know how and what they did, and what they stole - but the KDE code has always been OPEN! If they took a feature from the Harmony kit and implemented it into software that is based on a Harmony-compatible toolkit, why would that invalidate Harmony compatibility? And even if the KDE people had broken the code for some reason, it'd be easy to see what they were doing, the CVS tree and the open code were and are there for everybody to see. (er, ok, maybe the KDE CVS tree merits another thread
3. Finally, KDE is blatantly ignoring their constant violation of the GPL of other peoples software that is used in KDE (e.g. in kfloppy)
For the main KDE developers, it is fairly difficult to always be able to track down code, and its origins. Whilst it may be true that licenses were violated in KDE-incorporated code, how can Linus, for instance, be absolutely sure that the patch he was just mailed to improve TCP/IP stack stability doesn't in some way violate other licenses, e.g. the BSD license? I would give the KDE developers at least the benefit of doubt, collect and document said GPL violations, and report them on the public KDE dev mailing lists. If those attempts fail, document what's happening, put up a website, and mail an article to Slashdot - once it's read by a million geeks, how damn fast do you think the KDE guys will come around to fixing it? Corel etc. have been quite good at fixing those problems so far, no?
4. I will say goodbye to all KDE stuff and will now only use Gnome which is rapidly evolving into a comparably mature desktop environment [...]
You see, this is how major flamewars start. You criticise the ATTITUDE and debatably also the LEGALITY of KDE maintainers and licenses, and follow it up by, quite frankly, only thinly veiling 'GNOME ROCKS! KDE SUX!'.
Even koffice will soon be made superflous by The Gimp, Sketch, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Abiword, gcalender
Miguel freely admitted that for Gnumeric, for instance, he just [paraphrased quotation] 'copied every feature from MS Excel', an attitude that you aggressively criticised earlier on? And you follow it up, again, by basically saying 'Gnome software rocks!'
I hope that many will follow this migration from KDE to Gnome.
Holy Cron, could this be any more incendiary? I'm pretty sure that this is the first truly fully-fledged flame posted as an article on Slashdot. I know lots of people are just waiitng to flame the hell out of Dr. Bechly, but just leave it. Point out the flaws in his argument, but don't insult KDE, Gnome, GTK, E, or whatever else. Keep cool. I'm not sure I've managed to do so myself, and there's certainly a lot of finger-pointing in the lines above, but let's try to keep calm.
Alex T-B
St Andrews
I am currently working with both XP1000s running Tru64 and Ultra 1's and Ultra 10's running Solaris 7 and Solaris 8. Although I agree that Tru64 is mature, stable and reliable, my experience with the two is that Solaris is better cared for by Sun than Tru64 is by Compaq. Perhaps you have had a different experience than I, but I have found that there are more programs are created for Solaris and then modified to work with Tru64 later, and in some cases almost as if it were just thrown together.
I don't want it to disappear anytime soon, it works fine for my high energy physics research, although not all of my collegues have the same luck. All of the software we run were created on Sun boxes and not all of them have been ported to Tru64, I'm just lucky that the ones that I need have been.
The reason that I think that this might be the beginning of the end of Tru64 is that with Compaq openly supporting Linux on the Alphas, Linux will take some of the would be Tru64 users away. That along with it competing directly against Solaris in quite a few markets may cause Compaq to think about whether or not keeping it is cost effective.
I don't think that Tru64 will be going out anytime soon, but this might be the first of many moves towards its death.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Harmony would almost certainly be a good thing. Unfortunately there are several HUGE strikes against it. First of all, as the other poster already pointed out there is already a perfectly acceptable LGPLed toolkit in GTK+. It even has C++ bindings. Second of all the KDE team has specifically stated that they will incorporate new QT features into KDE. This means that Harmony would continually be in catch up mode.
If there is one thing that the Free Software Foundation and Free Software hackers everywhere have learned it's that it is very hard to chase a proprietary standard. LessTif and Wine are both good examples of why it is simply much easier to support free APIs instead of reverse engineering proprietary ones. If KDE promised not to use any new features, then we could at least hope to get Harmony to the same point that QT is at now. Once Harmony was up to par then Harmony and KDE could grow together. Without the support of the KDE team Harmony doesn't have a chance.
Besides, it is the KDE team that made the mistake of using QT in the first place. They should be the ones creating Harmony (no pun intended). The FSF, Debian, RMS, RedHat, and a whole pile of Free Software hackers have been pointing out the dangers of using QT since before the KDE project was started. The users that didn't stand up for freedom then should not expect someone else to bail them out now.
Remember, for folks like RMS free software isn't about popularity, it's about freedom. The fact that there are quite a few KDE means very little.
The KDE team has acted irresponsibly from day one. These complaints are in no way new complaints. Debian has, to the best of my knowledge, never included KDE despite the fact that the KDE license has been changed for some time.
It makes me glad that I didn't spend any of my time learning QT. It's issues like this that will guarantee that Gnome becomes the desktop of choice. GTK+ and Gnome are advancing rapidly, and there is no question what my rights as a user are.