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Eazel On The Ropes
update() writes: "The SFGate has an article on Eazel. It's the usual color-by-numbers piece (embedded MP3 playing; Andy Hertzfeld is a genius) but with one new piece -- without new funding, the company has a month to go before running out of money." Particularly given that Eazel's beautiful desktop is in the new Mandrake 8.0, and scheduled to appear on several other companies' desktops, it would be a shame if the company should dissolve now. I wonder if some of the big names (Red Hat, VA, Mandrake, SuSE) could invest together to keep Eazel going at least for now -- they all stand to benefit. And would a PayPal account for donations be unreasonable?
I've been using Galeon for a while. The page loading and rendering speed is just like Mozilla because it uses the same code. It's far from snappy though (it's slower than IE, NS 4.x, Konq, and Opera). Rendering quality though is as good as it gets (just like Mozilla).
The menus, dialogs, navigation buttons, etc. are GTK+ widgets, so at least they're snappy. Startup time and memory usage are slightly better than Mozilla, but worse than the other alternatives.
I wouldn't choose Galeon if you're looking for a leaner, faster browser. Stick with NS 4 or try Konqueror or Opera instead. Choose Galeon if you want the rendering quality and standards compliance of Mozilla but you want the look and feel to match the rest of your GNOME desktop.
Try: http://www.webmin.com/webmin/ (Don't be put off by the .com ending, the
main package, webmin, is owned and funded by
Caldera and is BSD licensed).
I've used it for a long time and it's absolutely
brilliant.
I don't necessarily agree with your comparison.
Ximian has primarily been spending their money on two things - Red Carpet and Evolution. The KDE project has no real equivalent for either one.
Eazel did develop Nautilus. But that's only one contribution to a much, much larger project. Just because Ximian and Eazel get all the press doesn't mean they're the only ones doing work on GNOME.
In reality, Red Hat has been quietly paying people to move GNOME forward just as Troll Tech has been paying key KDE developers. And both projects have far more volunteer developers than paid developers.
Personally I don't care if users would rather shoot themselves in the head
Which was exactly his point. None of you who consider yourself ubergeeks will ever be able to design a good GUI because you think the CLI is awesome and end users suck. That's why it takes a company with the direction and organization the OSS community lacks to make something like Eazel.
The "magical touch" is that they are selling proprieraty software...
/mill
the new PSM2 (in the nightly builds, will be in next milestone) actually *works* for https sites.
The old one works fine in some cases, but not consistantly or reliably. Some pages just don't load properly, and other times the page loads, but about 5 minutes later you notice your computer is realllly slow, and discover that there's half a dozen PSM processes all using as much CPU as they can.
As far as I can tell, the new one fixes both of these problems.
OSX is a GOOD OS...
It's just that nobody's written native commercial apps for it yet. Or native drivers.
It's where Linux was at 1.0.. Limited driver support, no commercial app support.
It'll build almost everything that runs on FreeBSD, though its linker and object utilities are kinda, well, strange.
Oh, and the built-in management utils are nonexistent. If you don't mind hacking around in netinfo manager (which is how I got NFS to mount at boot, since appletalk isn't there yet) it works, but Apple really needs to provide more system control tools as a wrapper to the netinfo system in the Preferences app..
And it needs smbfs. Badly.
But I'm running it native most of the time, and it's not too bad..
ps: if anyone from Apple is reading, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make an option to BLOCK loading the classic environment, returning an error!! Classic really pisses me off and I'd like to disable it...
Your Working Boy,
- Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
That's fair enough :) and something I didn't know. thx
I didn't know if the GPL is specific to Free Operating Systems, or that proprietary Unix vendors (eg Sun) can use Qt under the GPL as well. I understand from your words that this is the case?
"yes". Trolltech's website, if you'll look for "free edition", specifically mentions it being a Unix/X11 solution. (sorry for the marketspeak) ..there's nothing in qt's license that prevents that, or the gpl for that matter. There is in fact a binary package for tru64 up at kde's website (no idea how well it works tho).
Right and wrong. Right in the sense that kde gets a free toolkit funded by proprietary sales. In fact the only 'free software' companies I know turning a tidy profit today are companies that combine supporting free software with proprietary sales, namely Trolltech and Cygnus (probably a good reason RH just broke even). I heard Suse might be doing well but I'm going to guess that's because their customers don't generally have fat internet pipes.
Wrong in the sense that the kde core team is not employed by trolltech. 1) Many of the best kde people work for other companies (ex. dfaure/mandrakesoft) 2) Most of the trolltech guys, with the possible exception of the ghost of ettrich (kwin), are less active in the kde scene than they used to be. Which is not a slam, btw. 3) There are *way* too many important developers for you to lump them into a group like that. It's like saying that all the core gnome developers work for Ximian.. uh..
In fact some of the more fanatic anti-KDE crowd may have a point in continuously bringing up Qt's licensing issues (although the real pain is past now, with Qt/Linux being GPL).
Bah. They have no point. They are only showing that it's easier to bitch than to port qt to windows themselves. Which *can* be done, it took one guy (hi tor) to do the gtk/windows port! And you should have said Qt/Unix.
The practical difference between Trolltech and Eazel (as regards Linux) is, Trolltech's not currently going down the crapper, so they'll have a lot more opportunity to support free software.
Are Linux user that UI starved that they think Eazel is the next greatest thing to swiss cheese. My god, the 1.0 release was very underwhelming. I have used their products. They don't strike me as being anything ground breaking or easy to use as the original Mac. (I owned a 128K in 1984) What is all the flap about? I know it was just 1.0. So it was bound to get better with time. How did they expect to make money. UI consultants? Aqua on Mac OS X is ground breaking. Barring, that the underlying engine of the OS definitley needs some work. Cheers, Thomas
Cheers,
Tomas
===========
Don't equate stock price to company stability. Especially when the market has been in a downturn for as long as it has. A company with a high stock price and rapidly shrinking margins is worse off than a company with a low stock price and stable or improving margins, all else being equal.
but then again, all things being equal, all things are never equal.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Great, now put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't give a crap about "A unified tree-structured hierarchy, transparently encompassing multiple disks and filesystems, networked storage, hardware and dynamic state information". Users never figured out the "F:" drive, they'll never figure out /mnt or /dev either.
The fact is, MacOS is (was?) the only system that was actually designed so that the file system was the primary user interface into the system. Both Windows and Unix GUIs are largely (failed) attempts to cover up what's down on the disk.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
On the Mac, the "file manager" is also how you install software and drivers, and is usually the only convienent way to launch your programs.
To that end, there's some cool features on the old MacOS such as absence of hardcoded config paths and file names and directories that designed to be human readable and usable from the Finder.
In this respect, luser Mac users are usually a little more in touch with their filesystem than Windows users (where C:\ is sorta a blackbox underneath the GUI, and the explorer is often not used at all, in favor of the File Open/Save box). Explorer is probably a better file manager than Finder, but most users would rather not see the uglyness going on down on their filesystem, and if they touch anything other than document files, the whole thing breaks.
Unix systems (and I think that includes OS X,but I haven't used it) have the same problems as Windows -- File Management is essentially a power user activity because what's down there is just as ugly and confusing.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You do realize that most users would rather shoot themselves in the head than try to use ANY existing Linux UI? Incidentally, KDE is highly dependent on QT, which was developed by TrollTech, a commercial company. Furthermore, I believe a fair amount of its development (despite my disapproval) has been handled by QT's developers. The kernel is like comparing apples to oranges. It's highly derivative, very much modular, exciting for "geeks" to work on in it (as opposed to say, a seamless help system for the user or an installer), etc. It lends itself to casual hacking by the masses, but I would not trust them to develop a seemless full blown user experience. Anyways, that's besides the point, they HAVE not (despite the fact that the "itch" exists for millions, and that many have tried), this is why companies like Eazel exist, even if their focus is relatively narrow.
Huh? I never said I disapprove of TrollTech employees working anywhere; I just think the KDE leaves (and will always leave--so long as it is developed like Linux) a lot to be desired, it simply is not a replacement for Windows for 99.99% of the users out there--despite the fact that it has SIGNIFICANT contributions from more traditional companies. The issue is not so much with QT, as it is with the KDE development, or lack thereof.
the complexity of engineering software of that size and sophistication. That said, I fail to see how you can dismiss the death of a Eazel by saying that free hackers will fix it, when Eazel's efforts are, by definition, being driven by a corporation. If a ragtag collection of Linux-like programmers can do what Eazel can do, then Eazel should be unnecessary. Unfortunately, it is not, Eazel is necessary. Software developed in the truely Open environment has yet to demonstrate (to me at least) that it is capable of driving complex and focused development.
While it may be fair to believe the open source community is capable of simple patches in Eazel's software (just perhaps a nominal improvement over closed source companies), the community is not going to fix any highly involved problems and they're certainly not going to maintain Eazel's level of development (not to mention the services). If Eazel dies, the people that use it are at a major disadvantage and the software would eventually become obscure. If anything, I feel that the customer faces a higher risk with a company like Eazel, since their open source nature vastly increases their risk of insolvency; I'd rather face a much smaller chance of no simple patches than a much greater risk of zero sustained development and ultimate obsolescence.
That said, I like what Eazel is doing and I hope they survive, but I'm highly skeptical.
I give a legitimate and honest position to the slashdot dogma and I get marked as troll? What a joke.
Saying Linux is more stable than Windows is not true when you are talking about Windows 2000 or XP. You can argue price all day long, but you can no longer argue stability.
Individuals looking for the truth would simply have said: "I have yet to see the stability claims you make.", not "no one can convince me." Refusing to even accept the possiblity outside of your own small experience is rather sad. I accept that possiblity that others may not have experienced the stability I have, but looking at the evidence that organizations like Gartner have collected, you are definitely in the minority on 2K stability.
And I thought it was clear we were talking about backwards compatibility, but oh, that's right, your buddies forgot to explain that part to you.
Eazel is both.
Je ne parle pas francais.
maybe i am going senile, but i am sure i logged into my etrade account using 0.8.1 last night.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
you forgot the lucrative T-Shirt sales and Speaking Tours.
Plus lets not forget the plush toy market. But for that they have to get a cute and cuddly icon.
So far they've been offering storage space and software/dependency upgrades for free. Very cool of Nautilus, but I'd hate to see them go bankrupt because of it.
IMO, Nautilus is Linux' best answer to Microsofts
It's hard to believe something as promising as Eazel is close to financial collapse.
"come off crisp and play up to the cynic
clean and schooled right down to the minute"
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
It's a fucking file manager, a cool file manager, but a file manager none the less. And your claim that the Open Source community couldn't even come close to the level of coding zen that Easel has, well I don't know what to say to that. You do realise that all of KDE (not just the file manager) was coded by unpaid hackers, oh and then there is this small part of the OS, you may have heard of it. It's called the kernel, you know, the Linux kernel.
Did anyone get Nautilus to work, or does everyone just like the idea? I waited half a day for the thing to download, fired it up, and it was unusably bloody. It didn't seem to offer any improvement over gmc + mozilla. The installer looked nice, but that was about it for me. From day one it was given that Eazel would die as a business. It's a worse revenue model than Netscape. At most, they could hope that RedHat would buy them up, but RH already has its own gnome team. If the gnome people could convince the graphic designer from PocketLinux to make a massive set of free icons for gmc, we'd be better of than with Nautilus. PocketLinux is by far the best Linux UI. They should make a desktop version.
Okay, here's someone who's obviously never used Dreamweaver, or at least to any extent.
:)
Dreamweaver is a blast. It's fun, you can knock out webpages lickity-split, and for mock ups, you can't beat it. Other good things about it are the fact that you can edit the source right there on the spot for fine-tuning and, surprise, Dreamweaver actually produces really decent HTML. I helped work on a site where we used Dreamweaver for the layout, then went back in and just edited the HTML directly to get precision placement of various layers and tables (however, I probably won't use layers again.. it's a nice idea, but I'd rather keep it simple).
Dreamweaver for Linux, yes I'd buy it. But have to have it? nah, I've got a win2k partition for it if need be... I wonder if it runs under vmware? Hmm.
Oh, yes, I do think it's important to learn HTML, and coding by hand is the best way to learn. however, when your deadline is tomorrow, and you've just been stuck with the job, Dreamweaver!
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?
Well, in theory is a benefit for users.
I'm saying "in theory" because this makes sense mainly for well-established products, or for products not directed to final users (i.e. cross-platform frameworks - it's not nice to have to refactor a product because the company providing the framework it is based on went under).
Personally I think that the "put Gnome on the desktop" meme is spreading at a lower rate than the one Eazel expected (after all, how long did it take to the "put Linux on your server" meme to spread?), which combined with the actual economic situation (in which big IT companies have to downsize themselves and little IT companies have troubles getting funding) is causing the problem here.
And if you want to make money by charging for consumer productivity software, you've got to be named Microsoft and sell software called Windows and Office.
That, of course, leaves the options of moving to China and changing the company name to Microsoft and the product name to Windows, or finding an alternate way of making money off software.
Have you used it lately? GNOME is more similar to Windows than KDE these days.
I think Eazel is doing fine work. I have installed Nautilus on my desktop and my laptop, and it is DEFINITELY the way to go.
Sure, the community can pick up where they left off, but it is A Good Thing(tm) to have developers working on it 40 hours a week, rather than 4.
But hey, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. -Dennis Miller
for an easy to use web editor with php support and all, look at Quanta...
hell. vim/gvim is just dandy. they have syntax highlighting for a plethora of file types.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
yeah, but the ones that are amiga-like are clearly alot better... and that is basically 'x application' like, so there.
Juln
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What about Apple buying Eazel? Their Aqua gui for Mac OS X needs a lot of UI work. They should buy their old head programmer back.
And, as an added bonus, Vim has also been ported to Windows, so you don't have to learn a new text editor for both environments. :)
So you're saying that Linus does not work on the Kernel while working at Transmeta?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
That was unnecessary. It's apparent by his strange conjugations of verbs that the_emmy is not a native English speaker.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Or is it not free software that they produce. It's a very simple equation. Nobody buys software = we make no money.
Yes, Quanta (which is a text-based web editor similar to HomeSite) absolutely rocks. I recommend it to anyone who will listen. No decent WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver yet though. IBM offers TopPage, but it's fairly cheesy and is a Winelib port anyway.
--
No it has services.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Just how is a comment redundant when it's at #16?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
i think ximian has a better chance with making money in the long run because they have a deal with various Hardware vendors. They will most like make money from selling support to these customers, and for the pay services when they roll them out. ximian is going to provide services through evolution, and probally others too.
Cool. A PGP signature. So we KNOW it's REALLY anonymous coward talking.
isn't there a way that they can link to paypal, so when people sign up from that link, they automagically get $5? cause i think that some of us (even people who don't like nautilus, cough cough) would be willing to do that. on top of that, the commercial distro who use it, should all think about donating some money to it, since its true that they will be the ones who reape the benifits of its continued existance...
Without an easy 1-2-3 binary installer, most people wouldn't see any benefit of installing their software. Instead I think Eazel and Ximian should be accepting donations, something like Linux Mandrake's donation page where users can donate to a chosen project. While this alone has no chance of breaking even, I am sure many of us appreciate their efforts and want to help any way we can, especially if we aren't talented coders.
As much as Microsoft annoys me and despite all windows' bugs, I don't believe I'll ever see the day that Linux-style open source will ever create a user experience that rivals windows--end to end system that allows the user to do everything that they need and want to do In a work envirmonment I have to agree. Windows gives them more time to do everything they want to do... like go have a smoke while they reboot their machines for the third time that day.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
-
-
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
if one thing abounds in *nix is text editors, most of them way better than Notepad.
Vim for example does syntax coloring, and is included in many distributions.
~
~
~
~
:wq
Lets not forget - the really revolutionary stuff in the Lisa/Mac came from Xerox anyway.
We as a community just happen to think that Eazel's and Ximian's and RedHat's products are waaaay cooler than DC's. So we support their moneymaking efforts and may even try to come up with some more for them, unlike DC's.
But that doesn't mean they have a right to make money. If they decide to screw us some time down the road, we'll stop supporting them real quick! Just like if DC comes out and sincerely apologizes for all their misdeeds, we'll welcome it.
But no corporation, no matter what they do, has a right to make money!
Not that I've tried it, but I hear that Galeon is quite a snappy browser. Wouldn't this mean that it wasn't all Mozilla's fault?
- To my earlier point of what is missing, for admins I'm referring to good, solid GUI based apps for configuring the basic services. A small suite to deal with Apache, Sendmail, Inn, and other daemons.
You nuts? I'll dismiss completely the silliness of the idea of creating a GUI to handle the possible complexities of Apache, but the problem with Sendmail, INN, et. al. is not in the configuration, it's the fact that the daemons are COMPLEX BY NATURE.It is not necessary for Unix to be simple. Unix is designed to handle complex tasks, and if you don't need or understand that complexity, then by all means use Windows.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Emacs is nothing but a lisp compiler, a virtual machine for running compiled lisp files, and a really, really crappy editor written to match some guy's favorite macros on a 1975 text editor.
Well, there are also a few thousand additional lisp programs included in there that make it a little more useful. But I find myself editing text in a text editor, then firing up emacs to run on of those myriad programs on my text, quiting out of emacs again, and then continuing my editing with a real text editor.
Now, don't misunderstand -- I certainly believe a decent editor could have been written in emacs. Heck, it probably wouldn't be haard to write a decent text editor in emacs. But since vi is already a decent text editor, it's hard for me to see the point....
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
But I can't give it up because all the other editors seem intent on copying MicroSoft's stupid control key bindings (ie ^P prints: I believe most people move up one line much more often than they print!)
Huh? Why would I use my editor to print? It's an editor, not a pretty-printer.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
But I guess it would be too much to ask for you people to get off from your lazy ass and actually contribute something.
Entertain me with Eazel.
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
This is just one element in the ongoing schism in the Linux community: Should the Linux world focus on the desktop market currently occupied by MS and Apple, or should it remain faithful to the UNIX tradition?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Who would build a business on a file browser? And a damn ordinary one at that. You know, for all their "expertise" and designing the first mac and its interface everyone forgot one thing. Steve Jobs is the one that pushed and prodded and kept driving them until they got it right. What a bunch of idiots.
No, I periodically use galeon (like every time there's a new mozilla release). It crashes regularly too. Granted, I'm trying to use it as my daily browser (requires javascript and ssl). And there are some crashes that are galeon's fault. Galeon is cool. I say a prayer to the 'net gods regularly that I can replace my stupid netscape navigator with galeon. The point is that mozilla is still not ready for primetime.
Doug Alcorn
I've been running mozilla on a Pentium Pro 200 at work for a few months. It was just barely usable. I few days ago I installed Galeon, which uses gecko for rendering, but has its own UI. It is very much faster and nearly as stable. (Though it seems to loose /.'s cookie sometimes :-( )
Two is not equal to three, not even for very large values of two.
I played around with the Dada Engine for hours and never got it to churn out Slashbot bullshit like that. How big is your grammar file?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
What, you mean send them money? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of "free software"??
These stupid copyright signs are not for some kind of 'coolness' effect, by the way. Instead, Netscape 6 sometimes likes to use them to replace my full stops.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Mod you up... damn, no mod points.
The commercial unices have all got fairly advanced system admin GUIs - SAM on HP-UX, SMIT on AIX, don't know about Solaris but it has something.
Some of the 'unix admins' I work with don't know the shell. OK, that says something about the admins, but it also says something about what's required to make Gnome prime time.
Not to say that nothing is happening on these fronts though, but there really should be something for sysadmins with the kind of high profile Nautilus and Evolution are getting. And don't tell me about Linuxconf, I don't want to know.... any system that requires me to use it exclusively is a bad thing, and I've been bitten doing some things manually on Linuxconf managed systems. Too long ago to remember what, because I gave it up immediately.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
For someone that posts at +2, you are full of nonsense.
:)
Your one-line dismissals of projects that hundreds of Free software developers have worked on for years are nothing more than amusing
Linux... The type of thing that lends itself to casual hacking.
Either you are a guru uberhacker who is so full of himself that he can't perceive reality, or you are an undergraduate Software Engineering student who's picked up some buzzwords and can't stop using them... "modular", "derivative"...
Grow up.
Woops, I took the flamebait....
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Unix systems (and I think that includes OS X,but I haven't used it) have the same problems as Windows -- File Management is essentially a power user activity because what's down there is just as ugly and confusing.
Hmmm...
A unified tree-structured hierarchy, transparently encompassing multiple disks and filesystems, networked storage, hardware and dynamic state information. As ugly and confusing as the windows filesystem.
I think not.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
You are right, some daemons are complex by nature©
Therefore, understanding them, and planning configuration carefully, is an essential prerequisite to configuration©
This does NOT mean that the actual implementation of the configuration has to be complex too© Text files are a good thing for all sorts of reasons© I love the shell and text files for automation, fault analysis and quick fixes, but for complex config work, why should I not have a speedy, easy-to-use interface?
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Damn, the curse of Netscape 6 again, the blasted full stop.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Sorry, who says the GUIs for Linux 'and kin' are 'non-existent or often crappy', or 'missing'?
Unfinished, by all means. But Microsoft has been selling unfinished GUIs for about 15 years.
Apple, on the other hand, completed their GUI and left the rest till some time around now.
Not that you mentioned either of these companies in your post, correct me if you meant something else.
No, Mr Troll, you are talking out your hairy hole.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Furthermore, I believe a fair amount of its development (despite my disapproval) has been handled by QT's developers.
Despite your disapproval?
So who are you then? A manager at QT? A head honcho on the KDE development team?
Or an arrogant, self-inflated fool?
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
You are right, it is slower than IE and the old Netscape©
My hardware is an Athlon/800 with something like 256Mb RAM© On this platform, it's slightly faster than IE on my PII/333 at work©
But this is still 0©8©1, it is still not production software, and I think we are just about feature freezing ¥already frozen? so it's speed up time from now on©
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I think having a GUI on a server box is plain stupid©
You don't have to have your GUI on the server© Run your GUI tools on your desktop, generating text files to put on your server© However:
It hurts performance, hurts stability, and most of all it opens up a whole lot of security issues©
No it doesn't© It might do this in Windows, where a dead mouse means a dead box, but *nix have a nice, fairly well behaved userland GUI which does not bring your box to it's knees when it crashes©
And if you want to trim the load and risk down even further, use the network capabilities built into X, and run your Xserver at your desktop©
I love the command line© But I am not a bigot, and I will happily use the GUI when it's going to save me time and hassle© Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't© 99% of the other real-world admins out there will agree with me©
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Some people don't know what their left ventricle is, that doesn't mean it's not entirely appropriate for them.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
ARGGH WYSIWIGs are for fucking rookies. This is not a valid point. No self respecting Web developer would use anything but a text editor.
"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to m
Neither is strange women punching holes next to the name of a known antisemite when they meant to punch it next to the name of a democrat.
Gotta love that...
The sad truth is, now that the internet bubble has burst, all the venture capital companies are looking over their portfolios for what hey can cut back on. This is leaving start-ups that have even the fainest whiff of 'internet' about them high and dry once there current money runs out.
Count in the fact that most tech companies are feeling very poor because their share price is so low, therefore buy-outs are going to be unlikley, and you've got a situation where there's going to be a lot of dead animals by the side of the road.
Paul
Hi folks, By popular request, we have set up a Paypal account. If you're a happy user of Nautilus or Eazel's services, or just want to make a contribution to support us, please send payments to paypal@eazel.com. We'll send a tshirt to anyone who contributes at least $20 (if you'd like one, make sure to include your mailing address and specify a size). Cheers, Bart Decrem
Eazel should Merge with Ximian and let Sun, HP, Red Hat, etc etc pay for them
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
For the admin part, I am very glad that I don't have to deal with GUI tools. Call me old fashioned, but I think having a GUI on a server box is plain stupid. It hurts performance, hurts stability, and most of all it opens up a whole lot of security issues. /etc/* is the perfect way to configure and administrate a server; leaving no performance overhead whatsoever.
From a webdesigner/developers point of view, Linux offers a lot of useful tools. Granted, no WYSIWYG html editors, but with todays focus on dynamic content, I spend precious little time coding pure HTML; most of the time, I spend programming in Perl, PHP etc. For that, I use Quanta +, which offers the tools I need. Syntax highlighting, html/css tools, you name it. For my C(++) needs, I use KDevelop. Couple the two with CVS and Cervisia - what more can you ask for?
I'm not going to start a KDE vs. Gnome flamewar here, but one should also note that KDE2.1X offers much of the userfriendlines and application integration you ask for as well. I have not tried Nautilus, mostly because it's a bitch to install on a non-Redhat/debian system (i.e. I use Slackware), but Konqueror does offer much, if not all, of the functionality that Nautilus has. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
My NOK .5 anyways.
^]:wq!^M
i wasn't aware of the abisource death, and am unable to find anything on their site that shows this. could someone clue me in?
Since DELL and several others, say they want to make Eazel part of the user desktop, why don't they buy or at least help eazel. Yes, it would mean spending money, but the respect Dell would earn if they did a really good job would go light years for them in the OS community. Something Dell is lacking.
--SuperBug
After all this time it still does not play well with Red-Carpet and Ximian. Not only do I have to fight KDE and GNOME weirdness, I still have to fight with forking bonobo devel trees. Ripping Eazel back out of a system is a nightmare.
Ahhh... I was missing something.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
I wonder if some of the big names (Red Hat, VA, Mandrake, SuSE) could invest together to keep Eazel going at least for now -- they all stand to benefit.
I cannot think of how they would benefit. Hmmm....
Let's think about this. <thinks> Pay out money and get no money back. </thinks>
Nope. Still don't get it.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
The bottom line is that no matter what Eazel does or how good or useful it is, they need to find some way to get $$$ if they want to continue to do what they are doing.
OTOH have a UI where you can change daemon and driver configuration as easily as their inherent complexities allow, that'll get a few converts.
Add the ability to run that Windows program you can't live without, whatever it might be, and you'll get a lot more.
What's a sig?
Some corrections.
Why, exactly, was work on GMC just given up on?
GMC caused to many development headaches, because it's based on the synchronous, console-mode MC which is sychronous. Porting it to a asynchronous (GUI) environment proved very hard, leading to lots of bugs.
Granted, if Nautilus was to dissolve that code would become the world's, but would outside programmers be able to catch onto it and take off from where they left off? I'm sure plenty of programmers out there have seen a plenthora of programs that are poorly commented, poorly put together...
If you're suggesting that Nautilus was badly written, please come up with some facts
With Miguel proclaiming "Let's Make Unix Suck Less" [via making everything more componentized, or, hell, the UNIX philosophy in general] the whole Nautilus idea is this complete contradiction toward what he supposedly believes in.
The opposite is true. Nautilus really is a component container, exactly like Evolution. Check this.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Hehe.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
What? A month to learn Emacs?
I recently switched to Linux from Windows here at work. I had been doing my web developing in Homesite, finding it a fairly good application, but far from perfect. When I switched to Linux, a coworker introduced me to Emacs.
It did seem a bit complex at first, but I was very much up to speed after a few days, and after the first few weeks I was doing my programming much faster. Now, after several months, I can honestly say that I'm doing simple tasks at least twice as fast as before. I won't use another text editor again, and especially not a glorified one which eats memory as bad as Homesite does.
I do realize others might not be as easily comfortable with all the key bindings of Emacs, but a month? Come on..
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
I think the idea of a marketing survey is a good one. It illuminates the areas that need focus. Ximian is running a survey in which you can win a free DVD player. It is pretty general (Linux vs. Windows, primary distro, application spread etc,) but I think it is a good first start. Perhaps, /. could run a better one in place of its silly polls. Go there!
In practice, though, this value requires significant additional expenditure to realize. An open source project requires intense commitment to get involved with technically, if it's of a large size and if the changes you want to make are anything but trivial and cosmetic.
I've looked at getting involved in various large open source projects which interest me -- Mozilla, the Linux kernel, Eazel, gcc, etc. -- and in every case I found that it was by no means possible to go in, make a quick change, and get out. In every case, I found that I would have to adopt those projects as my lifestyle for at least two months, and sometimes more, before I was reasonably functional in the code bases. It's less like "changing a program" and more like "joining a religion." It's harder to get started in open source projects than commercial ones because the documentation is terrible and the coding styles are a Frankenstein patchwork.
A two-month startup time for a software architect means a five-figure investment just to get started on an open source project, before actually adding anything significant. That's not the simplest value proposition in the world. In fact, it's a value that you can guarantee most customers will never have the resources to realize, which is to say, the median value is zero.
Now, looking more broadly at the value proposition, note that there are significant negative values in most open source software compared to commercial counterparts:
And it appears that for the median customer, the value proposition is significantly negative.
Tim
Or is IBM only coming to their own rescue when they run their Linux ads?
Good point, especially as they claim to be pouring $1 billion a year into Linux.
Anybody know where this money is going? All I've seen so far from them is the S390 port, and how many really have one of those to play with...
First of all HTML is a mark up, not a scripting language.
Second, web designers dont need wysiwyg, they need a WEB BROWSER!
I need to be able to see what it looks like!
Nothing else is that important. A good editor will tell me if the code works in this or that, but a great editor would also let me see what it looks like.
I dont understand why I cant have web browsers in linux that dont suck. Opera is the exception. But even opera sucks compaired to IE.
Are you on the Sfglj (SF-Goth EMail Junkies List) ?
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Ok, I was under the impression that quite a few of the core designers/developers worked for Trolltech. This appears not to be as true as I thought. Thanks for enlightening me.
It may be easier to bitch about Qt than to port it to Windows, I grant you that. However, as something in their favour, the most 'vocal' critics of KDE shut up and started refining Gtk, which also runs on both platforms. I believe those people had and have the right to criticize KDE for their choices. Thankfully, as I perceive it, these are the most pragmatic people, and the ones now working the hardest on interoperability.
As I said, I have the highest respect for the KDE developers, and I am impressed with their obvious skills, I happen to prefer Gnome though, but that's personal.
BTW, I specifically referred to Qt/Linux, because I didn't know if the GPL is specific to Free Operating Systems, or that proprietary Unix vendors (eg Sun) can use Qt under the GPL as well. I understand from your words that this is the case?
Thanks for a civil discussion all,
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Nobody benefits by Eazel going under, however had they only proprietary software users would have to find something else. By having GPL'd code Eazel can die, but their software will continue to be developed by other people.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
Why? Yes, Eazel makes free (open source?) software. But they are a for-profit company, with investors who are out to make a buck. Nautilus is a very cool product. However, why would we want to donate money to a business??? If they can't make money, they should just release their source-code and give up.
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
I believe that Mandrake comes with a Linux System Administration Guide....
No, he claimed that Gnome and Nautilus were a drag for him, with his distribution. And then he said that Konqueror was a better option.
And I was just making the point that I had the same problems with my distribution, just the other way around. Ok?
Actually, I had it very,very easy to install Nautilus, or Red Carpet and GNOME using Ximian's installer on my RH6.2. Nothing more than a few mouse clicks and a network conection.
Now, I have tried to install konqueror, and then I really managed to screw up the computer. Tons of rpms to download (I had to search for them, I'm using Rh6.2 mind you). And then, I had tons of dependencies to solve. In the end. I even give up installing java for koqueror, since I don't know if it was not working because of a bad install, or something else.
I really think that Nautilus and Ximian Gnome are easy to install on RedHat.
most of it comes from Ximian, true. But also remember Ximian is just gnome hackers organized. (Same people, same goals, same products.)
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
I have had limited success running Dreamweaver with Wine. The only problem is the first screen which does not display properly. Perhaps, someone could contact Allaire/Macromedia and see if they might help us fix this problem in Wine... Also, since Allaire and Macromedia have just merged, Jeremy Allaire is the CTO, ColdFusion has been ported to Linux, and Allaire is based in Boston right next to Ximian, perhaps they might release a linux addition. Would anyone buy?
Ximian is a company that was until just recently led by Nate and Miguel. Although these guys have done some good coding its been far too obvious that neither of them have the objectivity and dispassionate sense that it takes to lead a corporation.
Instead of making product for the most installed desktop version of Linux (mandrake), they would rather spend their time debating with the Linux community about placing inane and unethical ads on Google.
english is the 5th lanuage i learned by the time i was 12. so i don't have any sympathy for people with excuses. thanks for your concern.
learn how to spell! God loves stupid people, because there are so many of you!
Poor functionality and gargantuan memory requirements got it removed from my system after 5 minutes.
One has to question a company that bases it's flagship product on a hideously deficient program like mozilla.
However, they should become a non-profit, fire all of their executive management + marketing staff, and become a purely technical and support company.
The Gnome Foundation could fund the lion's share of the development, as well as handling all marketing-like functions.
All of us principled free software adherents could then put our money where our mouths are and give (tax deductible) donations to help keep it afloat.
Of course, with this scheme, though Miquel and Andy could still pay themselves decent salaries, they wouldn't be able to become Internet Millionaires (TM), but I think we can all agree that that bubble has burst for good anyway...
Oh, and as far as PayPal goes, that's a recipe for bankruptcy. PayPal accounts can either be limited to recieving a grand a month (hardly enough to pay a bunch of developers and execs), or be a premium member, which means that anyone can bankrupt you by repeatedly sending you one penny (and causing you to pay 30 cents for each transaction).
I wonder if some of the big names (Red Hat, VA, Mandrake, SuSE) could invest together to keep Eazel going at least for now -- they all stand to benefit.
The problem is that none of the big names have any money to invest.
It took too long for Novell to come out with a GUI and look what happened to them. Folks you really don't know how much I hate to say this but W2K is good enough that without good gui tools Linux market share is at its peak right now. Moan and groan about how command line is better but without a gui admin tool that works very well, it won't win the hearts and minds of PHBs.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
"If you're suggesting that Nautilus was badly written, please come up with some *facts*"
Sorry, but you completely misinterpreted the part of my message having mentioned lots of programmers have had to work with stuff that is above their head for one reason or another. I wasn't singling out Nautilus. And, to further clear matters, I wasn't flaming it 100% -- I respect ANYONE who can create even if they don't do it perfectly (though that doesn't mean I'll use it!) -- I was flaming it though.
"The opposite is true. Nautilus really is a component container, exactly like Evolution. Check this."
Again, you seem to have misunderstood my point (and your link doesn't reveal anything of significance to me, either, but mabye I'm just not "in" enough.) With Nautilus including all these functions OTHER programs can (and should) provide it it seems kind of redundant, the very thing Miguel was complaining about. I don't care if I seem to be misquoting him -- I respect him too! -- but as for "well, we're talking reuse of components in this case," bull shit, sounds pretty much philosophy derived from the UNIX way of doing things. And the UNIX way of doing things is certainly nothing new.
However, I do think if a program can contain a small enough footprint then hell, who cares about the rule? Konquerer is a good example of this BECAUSE it runs beautifully compared to lots of other alternatives out there. Breaking the "rule" is justified in some cases... When it doesn't harm the actual operation of the computer. Nautilus isn't at that point yet, and from the sound of the article might not reach it.
I follow LINUX, have for awhile, and I get tired of hearing apologists of certain programs with their piss poor arguments (and I'm not pointing you out.) Just because it is on a free platform, it is free, etc, does NOT mean it deserves positive recognition.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
Damn, you really hit the nail on the head in terms of looks.
Another thing I hate is you can't double size icons in KDE on the main panel menu like you can with GNOME's footprint menu!
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
I kind of agree with the general sentiment about GNOME core =/ Eazel. And that is harming to GNOME in a sense. Why shouldn't the GNOME team be handling the file manager? Is it that difficult of a burden without all these bells and whistles? Why, exactly, was work on GMC just given up on?
A few more menu options, tweaks and GMC could be a worthy competitor. (GNOME's team seems to be focusing more on framework/libaries then anything else, aside from the applets, taskbar, etc.)
The fact Nautilus wants to have a bit of a commercial venue with services on the side isn't very enthralling, IMHO, nor does it seem very promising for future development of Nautilus. Linux desktop, despite cries from the rampant advocates, is such a niche market compared to the Linux server one. Granted, if Nautilus was to dissolve that code would become the world's, but would outside programmers be able to catch onto it and take off from where they left off? I'm sure plenty of programmers out there have seen a plenthora of programs that are poorly commented, poorly put together...
Also, I agree with people who state Nautilus has too many features. And it does. If I want thumbnails I'll load up an image program. If I want web browsing I'll load up Netscape 4.77 (which works a hell of a lot better then the majority of other options.) If I want... well, you get the idea. I know I can turn it off, but that seems to be it's claim to faim and all that code is still in the program. People are all telling us: Oh, give it a chance. They've been saying that same monotonous shit toward Mozilla for YEARS, now -- the web browser that commands more respect with regard to it's existence rather then it's actual performance and usability -- and it still isn't usable on a earlier Pentium, compiled -O3 no debug executable included. I've also said it before but I'll say it again: With Miguel proclaiming "Let's Make Unix Suck Less" [via making everything more componentized, or, hell, the UNIX philosophy in general] the whole Nautilus idea is this complete contradiction toward what he supposedly believes in.
I would sure dislike switching to KDE, though I do have respect for it -- very professional. For one, I can't stand the WM and the looks of lots of other things -- I know that is trivial, but it means a lot to me. Second, I don't like having to have two toolkits running despite how cheap RAM may be. I have always followed GNOME, but I find it disheartening that Naitulis is being so embraced when many Linux systems out there aren't the P4-Geforce2 machines made for gaming.
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
I've tried GNOME 1.2 from Ximian - but after 15 mins i got back to my fresh compiled CVS HEAD KDE ...
Sorry, GNOME 1.2 has IMHO nothing very special over KDE2 - And GNOME 1.4 still not avaible for SuSE7.0 in compiled form. - And compiling from Source IS a nightmare (since i did not find a description how to compile the sources in which order -- nor did i find a batch for this). Also the people on #gnome could not really help me ... :(
KDE on the other side is very easy to compile - Maybe because there are not so many packages and there provided detailed documentation on this?
Wow, you used the word "there" AND "they're" wrong in the same paragraph! Congrats!
What are they "picking up?" Thanks to the GPL, Eazel has no intellectual property.
All the have are the people, so just hire them.
"Also very easy to understand (source code wise) and easy to install (not such an nightmare as nautilus or GNOME)." gnome isn't hard to install. Did you ever try Ximian gnome? The problems of Eazel don't mean that commercial OS-developement doesn't work, it's just one case where it did not work. I don't know how Ximian turns out in the end, but at least they have really cool products (Evolution, Red Carpet). Hm, what I don't like about Eazel is that there are no .deb packages for Nautilus.
IBM recently started a KDE theme contest. I doubt they will invest in Gnome, too. It is rather likely that Sun or maybe Dell puts some money in Eazel, since they are commited to gnome (or at least their marketing departments are).
Comparing Nautilus to Konqueror, I find Konqueror faster, more stable, and far more fully featured. Nautilus has the cute trick of displaying thumbnails and starting sound files, but i'd guess those features will soon be standard in Konqueror as well. Once they are, I doubt that I'll have any use for Nautilus at all. If Eazel dies, it dies. Perhaps Ximian can carry on its code, but they'd likely feel it necessary to change their name again to mark the occasion.
Since when Open Source / GNU projects needs funding to have the work to be done? Are such projects done by free(dom) contributors? I don't understand why people 'want' money to program for such projects... Please enlighten me.
Really?
Check KDE - it only missed few months when the 2.0 version was out (and even MS misses few months with their products), but other then that - the KDE project is very focused, developed very fast and it could be a good example of how a project should be managed.
Hetz (Heunique)
I think it's sort of a given in management at both companies that both are sinking ships..there's no reason for either to take on more weight. I haven't heard of either being even in the same continent as profitability and I doubt either's burn rate will get them there before a folding or acquisition. If anything, Ximian needs to get by on fewer employees, not more. A growth spurt will just put them in Eazel's position.
As always, if you're looking for mindless URL fun I suggest http://news.getschooled.com/
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
The two are no where nearly the same.
If you want to compare CueCat to anything, compare it to MSIE. It's free, as long as you use it the way they designed. The CC C&D letters were sent because people were using those devices for purposes other than the manufacturer intended.
With Eazel, Ximian, Red Hat, and the other Linux software companies, not only do you get a free, usable product, but you get the license to use it as YOU see fit, not how they decide it should be used. Want to hack a new feature into Nautilus, go for it (Ximian hackers are already doing this to make it play nicer with the existing GNOME components).
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Oh come on, you're just mad because you haven't had hot sweaty man sex with ESR yet. Keep at it.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
You know, you should go to your local newsstand and look at the selection of magazines on the stand. A magazine is considered to be successful if it makes money after four years of operation.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Hello, just pointing out that the previous two comments (the essay, and the first comment) were originally posted on kuro5hin.org and are, unless posted by the original authors or with the original authors' permission, posted here illegally. I look forward to seeing the administrators removing the offending comments.
Oh wait, Big & Tough Slashdot doesn't remove copyright violations. My bad.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Very good point.
As I recall my Linux indoctrination you're supposed to give money to Eazel so that they can afford to hire programmers.
But then when Bill Gates said the same thing 25 years ago, he get's ridiculed.
I don't think that Linux zealots really have a very mature set of beliefs. That they contradict one another is pretty much par for the course.
It isn't a benefit that they go under. I'm not sure that doing free software makes you go under any more or less often the closed software.
The benefit is as a user of open source software you aren't totally screwed if the vender goes bankrupt. It may be hard to find support, but if you are willing to pay enough, it can be had. The benefit an OSS vender has is they can go in and tell potential customers that in the off chance that they don't make it, the customer is safe.
If you had your choice of two small bisnesses that made exactly the product you needed, and one was OSS and one wasn't, you should pick the OSS one because even if they go bankrupt you can still get some support. If there is one small OSS bisness and one huge closed source one, then it might work out different (like based on the quality of the existing code, or how you think the future will play out, or prices, or...).
I think the idea behind Ximian is to have the companies producing the software pay Ximian to have the software packaged for them. For example, Sun might pay Ximian a few million to have a Sun GNOME channel, or a Sun kernel channel. Other companies will pay to have their software available through Red Carpet. They'll need to add an authentication method for use with proprietary software, but it could make them a lot of money, and they wouldn't have to charge the users a dime, just the suppliers.
Engineering and the Ultimate
There's a big difference. In this case, if you make donations, you get more code. In the case of Bill Gates, he gets more code.
Now, Eazel should realize that they need to make money, but users might feel that they want to support Eazel because the users get more benefits. They get just as many rights to the code as Eazel does.
Also, as far as maturity of belief, you act as if Slashdot had one set of beliefs. Here you will find many beliefs from many different angles, most of which will contradict each other because they are coming from different people.
What people miss about free software is that when you buy free software, you get _additional_ value - you get freedom to do what you want with it, which makes it more, not less, valuable. Now, this usually means that the software is available at no cost, and people start getting into the "you must give me handouts for free" mentality. This is the biggest problem. It's also the one that RMS has been trying to beat into people's minds - FREE DOES NOT MEAN "NO COST" BUT FREEDOM!
If you want to look at people who have gotten this concept successfully, have a look at Ada Core Technologies, Cygnus Solutions, and RedHat. Yes, I know Cygnus is now part of RedHat, they are also giving RedHat its profitability.
Anyway, the fundamental point of free software is to not have your freedoms taken away. Freedom is important in life, whether personal or business. Freedom is valuable and costly, but it is also vital, and worth its costs. So, to those looking for a hand-out, I say "grow up", and to those who think freedom is worth less that non-freedom, I say "go to China".
Engineering and the Ultimate
The company who actually ran it is called SourceGear. They also are the developers of CVS (well, they bought Cyclic Software, who was the developer of CVS). They still provide server space, but they don't provide full-time developers anymore. I live in Champaign, and actually had a friend doing QA on AbiWord at one point in time, so I'm pretty familiar with the situation. If this has changed, it has been so recently. It used to say so on either AbiSource or SourceGear's site, but I can't find it. The only good references to this I have found are:
9 66 358018/966372740/966389964/index_html
9 66 358018/966372740/966389964/index_html
http://gnotices.gnome.org/gnome-news/966342954/
and
http://gnotices.gnome.org/gnome-news/966342954/
Yes, that is an underscore before html, but slashdot also may put in spaces in the URL that you should take out.
Engineering and the Ultimate
And those developing code can provide something that noone else provides - experience with the code. Just having access to it means nothing. It takes time and energy to get involved and learn how it works. If I have a kernel question, would I rather ask a kid next door or Alan Cox?
Engineering and the Ultimate
The problem with Eazel is that they only had enough cash to get them _to_ the 1.0 release. How did they expect to make money before that? It was stupid, really. This is the same way AbiSource died. They cut funding _before_ the 1.0 release. How did they expect to make money before the 1.0 release? This is either a matter of
a) poor scheduling by the programmers
b) poor planning by the administrators
You should be able to sustain for a few months with no sales off the bat, or have another way to make money. You shouldn't expect customers to beat down your door with the first release of anything.
Bad business, open source or not, is what causes companies to fail.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Oh come on. With this line of reasoning nothing software-related would work, and certainly not proprietary-software based businesses, given last year's fall-outs.
I have not used or downloaded Nautilus myself, but IMHO they have a sound business plan: Invest in a software that grows popular and people use for free to have them hooked on services you charge for. Not unreasonable. What magical touch does theKompany use to make them so superior?
Lars
__
Reality or nothing.
I tried out Mozilla on my 486 (yeah, yeah, you spend your money on hardware, I have a life, okay?) last year, and was dumbfounded at the slowness of the thing. It was just wretched, really unbelievably slow. I didn't and still don't understand why. This is not rocket science. OK, so the machine was only a 486 with 24Mb RAM and a similarly-aged m/b; but netscape can run decently well on the same platform, why not mozilla? Granted, I'm comparing netscape "pre-bloat" (3.04) to what is in effect the end-product of years of bloatware (netscape 4 et seq). Whatever, that's history. Now, I have a Pentium 166 with 128Mb of RAM and a less obsolete m/b. And you know what? Mozilla is usable. It doesn't fly, but it does well enough for sites that I can't see properly in lynx. And it works, it doesn't crash -- I've *never* had netscape stay up under intensive use for long, and while I haven't pushed mozilla as hard, so far it seems much more stable. So, here's one nay-sayer who's halfway-converted, at least. And that's good, because mozilla is in many ways the test case of free software. At present, it has reached the point that Richard Stallman refers to when he says he'd rather use an inferior free application than a super-duper bells and whistles non-free one. That's mozilla now: usable but inferior; and maybe it can reach the point of being a true netscape (or, dare I say it, IE) replacement. This is very necessary; it's all very well saying, "hey! just use lynx" (and I often do say it), but if users of free software don't want to be cut off from large swathes of the web, they need a modern browser, and right now it's mozilla or bust. By comparison, Gnome and KDE and Eazel and all this stuff is just iceing on the cake.
Congratulations, you have seen the light of vi ;-)
I was the same way... I hated that thing until I decided to learn it. Now the first thing I do on a Windows box is install Vim and drop a link in the 'Send To...' menu.
Mr St Law Sir - step out of your image mongering world of advertising and get real for a moment. How many computer system networks have YOU administered lately?
Specifically, in my office of 50+ machines I have a Linux mail server that runs flawlessly, day in, day out, it's perfect. Not very sexy but it gets our business done reliably and pays the bills w/o a lot of pain. However, while I'm trying to find time to put together a cluster out of old parts for future database growth, I'm constantly interrupted by the Windows desktops user having this problem, having that problem - and Windows is full of 'issues' - that's how they keep people on the upgrade treadmill. As a systems engineer I find the Msft products woefully lacking and have become a definite liability for career progress - unless I hire someone (more "cost of ownership") to run around plugging up holes in the dike so I can get on with progressive projects, w/o having to run like the red queen just to maintain the status quo. Other admins, I imagine, rely on Msft flakiness and constant need for attention to justify their existance, keeps them busy, a faux appearance of productivity.
Maybe I'm being an unrealistic cunt but I like *quality* well built, finely tuned machines like German automobiles - however we seem to be stuck with using broken down Yugo's just to keep the Yugo company's cash flow going with incessant service problems - just because investors mistakenly think Msft is a "leading technology company" - what utter bullcrap. Take your fool 'em all consumer mind games and shove it - I just want to work with and sell quality information systems to appreciative customers, w/o Mr vaporware spoiling everything with his crud.
Anyway, the point of this thread was the companies may come and go, but the ideal lives on - just look at the cp/m days - lots of small business stepped up and failed before IBM created the PC mkt with an *open* hw platform and handed Msft a lucrative market on a silver platter. I'm expecting the same thing to happen here. At the end of the day, the paying customer must benefit, otherwise it's a bullshit job.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Guru uberhacker? Nope, but I am competent developer that has had enough to exposure to engineering and software development efforts to know the difference. Since I live in this world, I have to make certain judgements based on imperfect information. Time will prove me wrong if you are correct. In fact, it should have already, it's been long enough. Think about it for a minute, here we have a major piece of the Free Software world missing, the non-existent or often crappy User Interfaces for Linux and kin. Ask yourself why.
I think the reason is two-prong: lack of proper desire [as in desire to accomplish what the user needs in the way that the user needs it--not the way that some geeks are momentallarily inspired to create a toy that amuses them] and lack of direction/organization of skill. A half million programmers of assorted skills working part time towards whatever interests them at the moment is simply insufficient for oh so many projects.
My disapproval is with the end-result, KDE (it sucks), not TrollTech workers themselves.
I don't exactly mean to say that it must be a commercial organization. It could also theoretically be a non-profit or a government agency (although I have my doubts), my problem with "open" development efforts is one of organization, motivation, direction, and skill. All of these elements CAN and HAVE been succesfully fit under the tent of for-profit companies developing proprietary software. It may be possible for open-source companies as well (though that remains to be seen in my opinion--in terms of their financial success). I just don't think they're remotely probable when they're developed like Linux. e.g., mostly everyone working part time at best, when there is no clear heirarchy, when the objectives are unclear, when motivation is in doubt [as in, developers may want features X,Y,Z...when users want/need features A,B,C, ...quite the opposite], and even when the number of skilled developers is limited.
Yes, I am extropolating, but such is life. Just as I extropolate that an open development process is not going to create a complete and solid UI, you extropolate that it does (or could, if so desired) produce what you regard as "many large, complex, well designed, high quality software projects" . It is not written. Furthermore, I'm not just extropolating from the lack of examples of UIs, I'm extropolating from: all other open developed end products, the attitudes I've seen in open source development efforts, the effort I've seen in complex development efforts, human nature, and many other things. That said, give me an example of open development that has met all four of these conditions (or even in part):
a) originality -- as in very little copying of design and/or code.
b) low degree of modularity / high degree of sustained complexity throughout.
c) relatively low entertainment value / geek cred potential
d) successfully carried to fruition
Now that is not to say that anything that does not meet these 4 criteria is worthless or less worthy than the alternatives (e.g., not a "hacker toy"). Rather I simply assert that a great many things require this and that open development is not capable of doing this with any real probablity.
I could comment on your other replies, but that'd be redundant.
No, it's more than just the fact that Windows/MacOS is an easier development target because of their singularity. It's a demonstration of sustained development that meets some (or all, even if both are quite flawed examples) of the criteria that I don't believe open source is capable of. e.g.:
a) originality -- as in very little copying of design and/or code.
b) low degree of modularity / high degree of sustained complexity throughout.
c) relatively low entertainment value / geek cred potential
d) successfully carried to fruition
Now you might think that some open development efforts meet one or two of these requirements, but I don't think any ever have come close to meeting them all, nor do I think it will for some of the reasons listed previously.
Linux? Highly modular, very derivative, relatively simple to organize. The type of thing that lends itself to casual hacking. Yes, there is some sophistication, but it's for limited duration and it can be isolated quite well.
Apache? Quite simple when you actually sit down and think about it. It listens, opens up files, and sends them over the network, plus or minus a little caching, logging, vhosting and other features. Yes, it is efficient and good at what it does, but that's not the same thing.
Samba? Not much different, the only hard part is reverse engineering MS's "extensions".
XEmacs? Who cares?
XFree86? Relatively simple, modular. Truely lacking in many regards.
KDE? Bloated piece of crap. It also depends very much on QT, which was developed by a company.
Gnome? More trouble then it's worth. Also being funded by RedHat as of late. That means more (but not nearly enough) full time programmers and leaders.
Just because some things are succesfull in terms of number of installations does not mean they're feats of engineering.
I'm sorry, but I must draw a major distinction between original, sophisticated and well concieved projects that are carried to fruition, not leaving any holes for the user to fall through, and all of these projects that you mention. Yes, there are a lot of man hours in these other projects, but brute force does not work for everything. Some projects require a lot of focus, clear thinking, and follow through, that can only be found in a structured, full-time, and highly skilled environment. In other words, I'd only accept ~20 (or more) accomplished programmers working full time with ONE direction and ONE leader, not a half million programmers of varied skills following their own agendas while working part-time at best.
As much as Microsoft annoys me and despite all windows' bugs, I don't believe I'll ever see the day that Linux-style open source will ever create a user experience that rivals windows--end to end system that allows the user to do everything that they need and want to do. (Even though I think windows is horrible in many ways, there is a level of involvement in its totality that the open source community does not fully appreciate). I think Eazel (or a similar company) is as close as Linux is ever going to get, and when and if it dies, it'll be a real loss for the Linux community that'll never be made up by the hundreds of open source wanna-bes.
Furthermore, I believe that organization ties into motivation itself. In other words, with the ESR's "itch" hackers are personally motivated to solve problems that they find (though I could dispute this from a cost/benefit point of view, I won't...for the time being). The problem is that when we have no "itch", no particular problem for the casual hacker to focus their energy towards, just a mass of problems for OTHER people, there is no naturally occuring way for each and every problem to get solved. The open source developers have to know what the problems are. Even if the individual developer knows what the problems are, unless there is a proper division of labor amongst a sufficient number of hackers, that individual is going to be very much discouraged because he will not be able to create tangible results because everything else will be broken. In short, allocation of resources--not just on a macro level but on a micro level--is an issue.
People may be impressed by the eye candy; afterall windows is pretty ugly. However, that doesn't mean they'd be happier actually using it. Even ignoring the lack of applications, I think most users would not want to use Linux UIs. Take, for instance, installing applications. Do any UI's / installers actually install a GUI icon from the user now, or does the user have to know where the application is, how to invoke it, and then setup an icon...? How about hardware? How about help systems?
Sort of unrelated, but most of those "20" businesses are sole-proprietorships and parterships, as in the numerous small businesses that you see near you, like restaurants and retail stores. They're generally not companies that recieve millions of dollars in external financing. Although I grant you that venture capitalists often do make stupid investments; that hardly lets Eazel's business model off the hook.
It was never intended to be a commercial benefit to the developer. That just sort of developed, to the extent that it has. There's nothing wrong with donation-ware, but without a fund-raising group, don't expect it to be too successful. ( Perhaps the company that should sponsor them is Pay Pal? :-)
The GPL was created to allow hobbyists to persue their avocation without being taken financially. To this end, it is largely a defense against many of the normal commercial practices. OTOH, one may question the rationale behind many of those practices in every field. Software just makes it more obvious.
The problem is there is this thing which has been called the common intellectual heritage of mankind, and there are these groups who want to turn it into private property. They didn't create it, but they feel that if they do a little bit of ground clearing, that they should be able to homestead it. Now this doesn't work out very well for those who are already occupying the area. So the GPL is a kind of claiming without exclusiveness. It just says that if you want to play here, then you can't be exclusive either.
Personally, I really think that there should be fall-back licenses, sort of a defense in depth. Something along the lines of:
This GPL version is to be considered and advertising demo. If you wish to make commerial use of this code, then you must pay the author $1000 per copy, and otherwise agree to abide by the trems of the ... (some other Open Source license, possibly the MPL, or even the BSD). Something that would allow at least a nominal amount of damages to be assessed.
Nobody can predict what the courts will decide. Perhaps the best policy is a diversity of licenses, so that they must be attacked one-by-one. That way if any of them holds up, there will be a good point to recover from. And, to the extent possible, avoid centralized power. These create handy targets.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If they think that refering to "wav" and "mp3" files as songs is what's really going to enhance the quality of the user experience, they're a little loopy.
For a few first time users, I think that could be useful.
However, Eazel's real selling point could be: simplifying system administration, which is really the hard part of computers. If you can do that with Unix -- or any system -- the world will beat a path to your door. Well, 10% of the market anyway, looking at things empirically....
--
Tweet, tweet.
I don't know about the rest of the non-redhat users out there, but I did not find very pleasant the fact that Eazel only supported Red Hat officially. I could understand that from a non linux related company but from Eazel, I didn't. Maybe if they did something like Ximian, supporting a big bunch of linux distributions,they had more people following their work and got more venture capital to continue their work. I would hate to see Eazel go down the toilet, but for me that clearly showed how important is to this kind of companies to gather an open community around them, and not around on a distribution.
To my earlier point of what is missing, for admins I'm referring to good, solid GUI based apps for configuring the basic services. A small suite to deal with Apache, Sendmail, Inn, and other daemons. Today folks would rather tweak on the text files directly then use those few apps that are out there because they aren't nearly as good as they should be yet. Neither GUI environment today provides much for admins.
Well, Linuxconf and Webmin both look to take a shot at that, but these are not part of the GUI environment per se. Also, what about integration of the GUI with peripherals? PNP, while far from perfect on Windows, is something we need to strive for. I should be able to plug a printer into the parallel port and have the OS automagically detect that it is plugged in, and install/configure any software necessary to get that printer working.
Don't get me wrong...with CUPS it's *far* better than it has ever been...before that, you would need to edit scripts and configuration files and it was a mess... but if Linux is going to succeed on the desktop, it has to be easy enough so that Grandma can use it, but still be configurable enough that even the brightest Ubergeeks have a powerful enough system to tinker with.
It's a hard balance to strike, but Linux has the most potential to strike that balance than any other operating system I've seen.
My journal has hot
In all fairness, there are some projects looking to provide some of HomeSite's uses, but there's nothing even coming close to Dreamweaver in the way of a GUI HTML editor.
:)
There's always FrontPage for Linux...
Quanta isn't bad, but I guess that's more like HomeSite? I don't know, I don't use Windows HTML editors except for HoTMetal.
My journal has hot
--Ben
This is a serious question, not a troll:
How is it that KDE can put out software that is arguably as good as Gnome without millions of dollars of venture capital?
It seems that the past year's (impressive) Gnome improvements have been contributed in large part by Ximian and Eazel, whereas KDE has been able to create some nice software without an equivalent source of funding. Is there a lesson somewhere in the KDE project for Ximian and Eazel?
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
So many major Linux companies are in trouble of some sort. Indrema and Eazel look to be going bust. Redhat seems to be doing badly economically (look at the stock). Linux companies seem to be going the way of the web companies in this economic environment, and I'm doubtful that the craze will ever return. After a few months of this, I guess we'll see what Linux companies/organizations can truly have their act together. Fortunately, GNOME, KDE, Debian, and of course, the kernel itself have truly non-profit motives, and so there is some route mostly guaranteed for Linux to stand the test of time and of the economy.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"yet the editors here feel we should make donations via PayPal to keep this company afloat. Does this mean that these rules are only supposed to apply to non-Linux related companies? "
Well yes. You judge companies the same way you judge people. If they are nice people doing nice things and they need a hand you help them out. If they are morons then you don't hang out with them and you point at them and call them morons. Why should we treat every single company exactly the same?
War is necrophilia.
god damn.. I've been dissin' vi users for years now and for some strange reason I recently decided "Damn it, I'm gunna learn that obscure stupid editor that you have to press 'i' before you can start typing and all the other mode lameness" and I figured it would take me a few weeks.. it took one day! one day and I had memorized half the command set and was up to my old level of efficiency in other editors, now I'm going beyond it. Ease of use often == lack of effort.
How we know is more important than what we know.
...but there's nothing even coming close to Dreamweaver in the way of a GUI HTML editor.
Talk about missing the niche! Someone running *nix is extremely unlikely to use a graphical WYSIWYG-type editor if they are doing any serious web design. It is much more difficult to configure an Apache server (with security patches, etc) than it is to script HTML.
To be perfectly honest, web scripting (HTML, Javascript, DHTML) is best done using a simple and effective text editor with configurable text colouring (IMHO, Visual Interdev is ideal). There is much more control over where items are placed on the page when you script by hand and learning enough HTML tags to be functional in the language is not that difficult.
If you ask me, all *nix needs is a text editor like Windows Notepad that does text colouring. Find me one of those, and I'll be happy.
----- rL
this is ridiculous, post an article on /., the #1 linux site about some up-and-coming linux company going under, and make a plea to the "big boys" (RH, VA, etc.) to give them some support. i don't know about you, but this sounds a bit fishy...
E.
-
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This Post has been brought to you by the letter "E".
Mergers suck and usually always fail to give return on investment.
Ximian should not merge with Eazel. Why would you want to buy a business model you already have? What ximian should do is wait for Eazel to go out of business, and hire the developers of nautilus. Cheaper, more effective, low overhead, and you get to keep nautilus alive, just as it was before.
Business is tough shit. You dont feel sorry for a bad business, although there's nothing wrong with picking at the carcass.
Was that their code was too user friendly. If they'd cranked out a really amazingly cool product that was esoteric, a bear to install and had hundreds of non-intuitive/hidden features, they could have made a killing in tech support. But noooo... It's got to be easy to use and install...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I guess they didn't spend any of their money on advertising.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Great technology is one thing, but staying alive in business is a totally different animal.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That if you want to make money from software, you got to charge for it.
We have both of those, by the way. In a Red Hat Linux 7.1 or sufficiently similar system, look at kontrol-panel (in kdeadmin) for a centralized configuration tool for everything - for an easy to use web editor with php support and all, look at Quanta... The bigger problem is that people aren't aware of those tools. *nix still has the reputation of being hard to use, even though both KDE and GNOME beat Windows.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
I'm typing this message from my Win2K machine. The same machine that I had to physically turn off this morning because I had a DOS box running telnet that would not respond and that wouldn't close. Not that I haven't had problems with Netscape or Mozilla on Linux, but none of them forced me to pull the plug. Win2K is not as stable as Linux. I run them both, use them both every day, co-administer a large network that is all Microsoft on the desktop, and no one can convince me that Win2k is not flakier than even Winnt.
"I like to play with things a while... before annihilation!" Ming the Merciless
At the rate the GNOME world is going I very well may switch back to KDE 2 when it is all said and done. Why? Here's why!
They probably *did* do what they promised in their funding proposals. Given that they started up in August 1999, the single word "linux" was probably enough to bring them their $11 million of venture capital.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Yes and QT is under a public license... so what.
Personally I don't care if users would rather shoot themselves in the head... oh wait a minute. That'd definiteley make the world a better place.
I happen to like existing Linux UI's. The command line is a particular favorite of mine. But I like the GUI's too, which would be the ones with windowing for those of you out there that don't know the difference.
Regardless, Gnome, KDE, it's all the same to me. It still takes me less effort to get more work done than anyone ever will with Winblows or Mac.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
cool, I'll have to try webmin. Linuxconf is a total joke (what fool thought that putting a "quit" button on the bottom of each screen to go to the next made sense??). Memorizing N conf file formats gets tedious real fast, it would be nice to have a good GUI way to remotely admin unix machines.
The impatient can always install their own stuff on the day it comes out from the source code. If you don't have GNOME 1.4 running on your system at this point in time, that really is a result of the choices you have made.
Or a result of choices that others have made, such as telcos not providing broadband in the area where your family lives and making it hard to download the latest GNOME releases every single day. Quite a bit of software written for GNOME required GNOME 1.4 components before GNOME 1.4 was even released.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In fact some of the more fanatic anti-KDE crowd may have a point in continuously bringing up Qt's licensing issues (although the real pain is past now, with Qt/Linux being GPL).
Except what you call "Qt/Linux" will (with trivial tweaking) compile and run on Windows, thanks to Cygwin XFree86 (think DirectX11), which has recently been patched to run properly on Windows 9x and ME (which are not as 32-bit clean as Microsoft would have you think).
How does this work? Qt Free Edition is intended to run on any POSIX environment with an X11 server. Cygwin creates a POSIX conforming environment with a complete GNU userland inside Win32; Cygwin/XFree86 handles requests from Xlib clients and calls GDI and DirectX on their behalf.
Of course, Mac OS X can run X11 programs too.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Webmin is some good stuff, but it's more a proof of concept kind of application. The concept it proves is that you really can have some utility to assist in configuring daemons without having to give up the ability to edit text files directly.
What I'm specifically referring to is having either a set of GTK or QT based apps that can do this. Using the web as an interface for this type of work is limiting, though webmin does a fair job of working around it. The goal here should be to provide a set of "compelling" (yes I'm going to over use this word) set of tools that *nix a no brainer kind of decision when a choice is to be made.
All to often I've seen companies that friends of mine work for go with an NT solution based only on the fact that they've got folks that know how to admin it. The thinking is also that there's a lot more NT folks out there then *nix folks, and they're cheaper too. Pages served per second, up time stats, and software licenses all go to the toilet in comparison to ease (or more appropriately, apparent ease) of use.
Again, I don't have anything really against Webmin. It's just that we shouldn't consider that the end game.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Mozilla (0.8.1) has been running on my Debian Woody machine for two or three days now without crashing.
Granted, I've not visited any SSL sites in that time....
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Nicely written little begging-for-capital- through-the-press article. Makes Eazel sound like it might actually compete for the same market that buys a Mac these days - folks who really have no leaning towards understanding the underpinnings of their machines, and just want intuitive obviousness. What it needs to be to sell to them, though, is part of an appliance. Put something together where the underpinnings are Debian (for easy upgrading at that level), the CPU is Transmeta (advertise the ecological soundness of power saving - "We're in an energy crisis, no doubt about it," says Ms. Whitman), and the box itself is built by someone like Sonic Blue (because I was stupid enough to buy their stock when they went by the less silly name of S3, plus they know something about consumer devices, and were an early Transmeta adaptor - and appear to have some cash to invest).
There are currently two Mac markets: graphics designers and folks who just use them as fancy typewriters and communications devices - Eazel as an appliance could own the second group, and they'd pay extra just as they pay extra to run Macs now.
For everyone else - probably 90% of the coming Linux desktop market - there's KDE, which is well on the way to being a better Windows than Windows - and we already know from the relative triumph of Windows over the Mac that that's enough for the majority of productivity users, especially when coupled with lower cost.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Basically, when you are given a "free" cuecat, you are being lied to, because you aren't allowed to use your own property. Eazel Nautilus is under the GPL license; therefore, you are allowed to use it for anything you want. You just have to give people the ability to obtain the source code, if you distribute a binary application based on the GPL'ed code. The GPL even grants you the right to charge for distribution. It just doesn't give you the right to demand licensing fees.
The idea to donate money to Eazel is based on the fact that if we benefit from it, it would be good to keep it going. Eazel isn't demanding that we use their service like DigitalConvergence is basically doing with the cuecat. The cuecat situation is as deceitful as someone giving you a car, and the next day they demand to be paid for it, not directly but by forcing you to go to their toll roads.
Use Debian stable!!!
And yes, Window Maker is a fine wm to use.
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
I think that picking up Eazel would be a no-brainer for Mandrake or RedHat. The company has only a couple dozen technical people, and their work will definitely be a tremendous enhancement to Linux as a desktop platform. I think Eazel has it right when they call themselves the missing piece of the desktop puzzle.
I understand your argument completely, and it is a very valid one, but one may argue that it is this specific 'benefit' of Free Software (giving away your program open-source for free) that might make them go under. So it is a benefit to whom? Not to poor eazel I think...
Really a shame to see yet another company go that dreaded route. As for another company picking them up, its a highly doubtful move that anyone would budge, and I'll try to explain my views on it.
Market is crappy for tech stocks, sure Greenspan made a move this week, but the market is half of what it once was, which means money is still tight, and even though the past two days have been good, companies have to hold on to their money for future's sake.
With that being said...
Companies like Redhat, Mandrake, etc., fall under this umbrella of saving money, (well RHAT is on the market don't know or care about Mandrake) if they attempted to save every dying Open Source good idea project, they'd have no money for their own companies.
What should be done, is the developers should they not find funding, is post their work to maybe SourceForge or something similar to preserve their work and continue producing until funding comes around.
Pay pal may sound like a good idea, but how many people actually donate to projects like this lets get realistic. Personally I would work under the most limited circumstances if I had to, and if it fullfilled my needs, and would rather donate to something like feeding a needy child or something.
Sorry but reality kills in this game.
Pimpfolio ©
360 degrees of Karma
How do they ever want to earn money? -- I think it is not possible if they not ship a usable program which everybody can install and which is nice to use.
I've thinked about installing GNOME 1.4 - but after i downloaded the source packages i stoped because i dont wana spend days with compiling it -- There are of course no packages for SuSE 7.0 ...
Just getting some money from investors, putting some (non open source) programmers on an program and releasing the sources is not making a program an open source comunity project.
AFAIK Ezael put 80 programmers on Nautlius - with an simmilar result as Mozilla - Slow bloadware which is never really finished or usable ...
Look at Konqueror - very few programmers did a very good web browser in a very short time. Also very easy to understand (source code wise) and easy to install (not such an nightmare as nautilus or GNOME). -- They just did OpenSource at there best.
IHMO Nautilus dies when Ezael dies - which will happen soon i think - because it is not community driven.
Look at theKompany to see how open source can work. -- Hmm, but perhaps it works there because there have many very good products which are made by (former) open source programmers - and some of this products are selled to keep the programmers payed. They will IMHO survive.
Eazel already got the benefit from making their software free: the chance of having it adopted. Sure, their business model may not have worked out, so that wasn't enough. But without it, how much chance of widespread use do you think yet another closed source C-based application suite would have had?
You need to have a sufficient demand for a product by paying customers in order to make a go of it today. Eazel also might have some issues with their performance metrics if they have burned through a sizeable amount of cash already. The big money big spender attitude is hurting them. It's a plus for the marketers to have a big name behind the project, but it tends to lead towards more spending as the old school employees think that's the way a business is run. Sadly that's the odd mix we see in many flawed Linux business plans today, how do you mix the free commando attitudes with the spend big money to make big money people.
I could make 13 million last more then a few years while working on a file manager, I promise you that.
One of the major issues I've noticed while getting my business off the ground is the total lack of quality collaborative relationships which align towards common goals. I suggest the good folks at Eazal take a hard look at that.
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
>Try: http://www.webmin.com/webmin/
I'll second that!
So far, webmin is the ONLY admin system (short of modifying config files by hand) that comes close to doing everything it should. Linuxconf? nice try, but it's too linux-centric and buggy.
WebMin is sweet. It's all Perl, and it gives me a consistent way to admin Debian, RedHat, FreeBSD or Solaris (and more) boxes.
What's the easiest way to setup printing in Debian (or FreeBSD)? Install webmin. Want to know how to change the IP address of your NIC on an unfamiliar unix variant? Try webmin.
Seriously, other than sound setup it gives you everything. Really.
WebMin is the best, most underrated Unix admin program I've met. The best part is that it works on almost every unix out there!
Oh, and I'll second Quanta as being the best HTML editor too. Unless you've spent the three years needed to master Emacs, it's the best way to go. (Sorry, no WYSIWYG. Still, what self respecting web designer uses WYSIWYG anyway?)
The KDE team doesn't announce that a new version is ready for public consumption until they either have working binaries or are in the process of finishing up the testing of the binaries. It was only around 1-2 weeks before Mandrake 7.2 users had fully operational RPMs ready for installation. It has been what.... at least 3 weeks going on a month and not even an announcement that "hey guys, we're working on the binaries.... here's our expected ETA for them, we'll keep you all posted!" from Ximian.
I agree totally that the most important factor for any mainstream platform is applications. Everyone needs and wants them, otherwise there's no sense in having a PC. People don't stare at pretty widgets all day, they want to write, read, surf the net, e-mail, play games, look at pr0n, and wipe their monitors, though not necessarily in that order. ;-) You can't do that stuff as well unless there are a lot of application choices. That's why Win9x is desktop king. That's why I still use it myself--few of the programs I love are available in Linux; in fact, I think only one is.
But the interface is key as well. Users want easy to understand and standard displays, so that they can go from home to work to a computer lab and know exactly what to do everywhere, without thinking "which shortcut is for Mac? which for Windows? Which for Linux? Why does this Linux have a shortcut panel here on the desktop, but this one has this thingy instead, and this one has nothing?" Most of all, average users need help sometimes. So, running Windows or MacOS, they can call up tech support and some random guy can tell them exactly what to do.
Not so for Linux. I can see it now: "Ma'am, are you running KDE or Gnome or Eazel? Well, umm, is there a little elf-like foot anywhere on your desktop?" Linux will never be a viable desktop operating system for non-techies until there is a standardized interface for average-joe oriented distributions. And no, a techie setting up a system for Grandma and being her own personal tech support doesn't count.
This is why the big companies, like it or not, need to back a standard for interfaces and run with it. Geeks everywhere can still choose to use whatever desktop and wm they want, or to go without one. But for average joes, we need a standard Linux interface.
Now, if Linux had one, it would have a great chance very soon. MS is going to be switching consumer desktops to Windows XP, and so a lot of the Win9x and DOS apps people use will be broken or run poorly. That would give Linux a chance to zoom onto more desktops quicker than it ever has before. I can see it now, screwdriver shops and small vendors everywhere telling customers, "Yeah, Windows XP is the new standard from Microsoft, but it won't run many older Windows programs. It'll also cost you an extra $100. But take a look at this computer with Linux--it works like Windows does, is more stable, is free, IBM backs it, and if you want this on your computer instead of Windows it not only won't cost you anything it'll come with free software to view pictures, play movies and music, edit and print text, and even make your own graphics, all for free." But it ain't going to happen because there's no standardization. But just imagine how big a threat to MS it would be if IBM and Sun backed a certain Linux interface and distribution for the average joe, and started offering it on all new IBM computers, and telling OEMs that it's the greatest thing since grated cheese and they should back it as an option.
It would be damn nice.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
1. -the GNOME team and/or Ximian DO NOT release packages on a timely basis when new versions of GNOME are out, users should not have to wait a month or more or in the case of Mandrake users for their distribution creator to release a new distro with the updated GNOME
Guess you don't appreciate that just because the source code is out, it's not necessarily an instantaneous process to make RPMs and test them thoroughly on all the distributions.
I have seen a ton of people complaining that Ximian hasn't released packages for GNOME 1.4. It's been three weeks since they were available. Ximian supports about 15 distributions and generally does a damn good job of bundling all the GNOME stuff together in one easy-to-install and easy-to-use set. Give them time to make sure that when they release Ximian GNOME 1.4 they get it right. The same moaners who are whinging and carping at the moment would be yelling blue murder if Ximian Evolution had corrupted their mail file or broken their IMAP setup, or if a minor glitch in Bonobo was causing grief with their GNOME subsystems.
For those of you who can't be bothered to build your own GNOME distro, be patient. The impatient can always install their own stuff on the day it comes out from the source code. If you don't have GNOME 1.4 running on your system at this point in time, that really is a result of the choices you have made.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I kinda figured there'd be replies similar to this one, so a reply here is as good as anywhere else.
:) BTW, I'm also of a similar opinion on this. Very definitely a KDE advocate. Thing is, providing the tools for the admin and webmaster are going to be key to which of those two come out dominant in the long run. If neither get to it in a serious way, it'll probably keep things split up like they are for a long while to come.
For the admin part, I am very glad that I don't have to deal with GUI tools.
So am I. All to often folks seem to get the notion that you have either GUI or Text config, but never ever both. That is simply not true. SWAT does an outstanding job of admin for Samba, yet I am just as capable of editing the text file directly. SWAT also shows me up front a variety of tweaks and settings that'd take me far longer to locate and learn then reading a cryptic man page. The two concepts can live in harmony.
It hurts performance, hurts stability, and most of all it opens up a whole lot of security issues.
Again you seem to be thinking from an NT perspective. There's no reason why a GUI would need to be running all the time. An admin can get in, make the tweaks, and get back out again. The point is, none of the GUI solutions available now give the sysadmin a compelling reason to use them.
From a webdesigner/developers point of view, Linux offers a lot of useful tools. Granted, no WYSIWYG html editors...
You say that like it's a minor point. This is a HUGE point for folks doing layout and design work. This is a major show stopper for a lot of folks. It should be a place where a *nix app provides a highly compelling reason for a user to move on over. The web is a Linux/BSD specialty served up on a gold platter.
For that, I use Quanta +, which offers the tools I need.
Quanta is a tweak on KWrite with the GUI made to look like HomeSite, without even half the functionality. For example, you do some PHP coding, as do I. Try putting together a page with JavaScript, HTML and PHP all in the same file and watch what happens to that syntax highlighting. I could rattle off another twenty some odd features I use regularly in HomeSite that Quanta, nor any other text/html editor simply doesn't provide.
It's not a matter of having apps that are "good enough" in comparison to Windows counterparts. Companies such as Eazel need to be working on those apps that make working with *nix a compelling choice for users on the fence. They don't have to be free, but they do need to make a user want to use the platform they're sitting on.
I'm not going to start a KDE vs. Gnome flamewar here
Oh sure, and take ALL the fun outta Slashdot while you're at it
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Now, it is clear after MS and Apple got done reading their customer surveys and doing their marketting research that the Explorer/Finder is the key factor to a successful desktop.
No, whatever their 'marketing research' says, the key factors are:
+ Available applications (Win)
+ Public awareness (Win+Mac)
+ Prettiness (Mac)
+ What everybody else uses (Win)
+ What came first in a niche field (Mac)
+ What they can get cheap on a CDR (Win)
At the end of the day, Explorer and Finder are just file managers. Many of the non-technical Windows and Mac users I know avoid managing their files properly, because they don't know how, or don't see the benefits - everything goes on the desktop or in the 'My Documents' directory. Eventually that fills up, then they forced into learning the skills required to get some return from the tedious task of file management.
None of them went with Windows or Macintosh because it had a great file manager.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
I find this comparison between CueCat and software flawed, to say the least.
And not just because Red Hat broke even and Caldera showed profits this past quarter, but because you seem to miss a very important point about modern software business: THIS BUSINESS IS ALL ABOUT SERVICES. The days of selling software as a self-contained "product" are long gone. Look at Oracle, Microsoft and others as they are trying really hard to change themselves into business of selling their software as services.
I do agree that the open source companies don't seem to spend enough time thinking about what kind of paid services would be the most beneficial for their users to bring in enough revenue. How long did it take Red Hat to come up with such an obvious moneymaker as their Red Hat network?! A lot of companies using dozens of Linux boxes would love to pay for a unified automated way of tracking upgrades for all the Linux boxes on their network.
Same with Eazel and Ximian. Their business plans are very blurry about what services exactly they plan to make money on.
I do think that Eazel is positioned better than others to make Linux useable by your average PC user, which in turn would advance Linux position in server market as well, as more people become comfortable with using it.
It is readily apparent that Eazel and most other Linux related products (Ximian, RedHat, etc.) follow the CueCat business model of "give away the product and try to make money off the product by indirect means." In this case, it's give away the product and try to get people to pay for services. This business model is doomed to fail in every instance.
What I don't understand is the reasoning here on Slashdot. I hate to paint this community with a broad brush, but the editors inundated us with article after article on the CueCat. Granted, most of it was about how Digital Convergence was trying to enforce licensing on hardware and how they were issuing "Cease and Desist" orders to anyone writing alternative software for it. However, there was quite a bit of commentary from this community about how flawed DC's business model was, and how no company has a right to make a profit or survive for that matter. It appears that this is the same business model a lot of the so-called "Linux Companies" are following, yet the editors here feel we should make donations via PayPal to keep this company afloat. Does this mean that these rules are only supposed to apply to non-Linux related companies?
I apologise for the long-winded, Jon Katz style editorial, but this seems to be an issue that not only affects Eazel, but most other "commercial" Linux companies. I fully expect this post to be modded down as a "Troll" by the blind Linux faithful, but hopefully enough people will read it before it finds -1 to spark some discussion on this problem.
IBM seems to be marketting itself as the Linux hero. Well, in responce to the Windows desktop war, IBM was more than willing to dump alot of money into the looser desktop formally known as CDE. Now, it is clear after MS and Apple got done reading their customer surveys and doing their marketting research that the Explorer/Finder is the key factor to a successful desktop. It seems clear that Eazel knows how to provide the best possible Explorer/Finder ever created. Now, will IBM be willing to provide the same sort of $backing$ that they provided to CDE? Or is IBM only coming to their own rescue when they run their Linux ads?
It just seems to me that both Gnome and KDE are missing out on an important niche as they go striving for usability for the mass market. At this point in time the *nix desktops simply don't offer much to either the system admin, or to the web developer. Considering that these are the folks most likely using *nix now.
Eazel has tossed the bulk of their effort into making a file manager and putting gobs of ease of use features in and around it. The problem is, that's not where the holes are! Both Gnome and KDE are quite user friendly on their own merits today. Both are making great strides in this realm without venture capital.
To my earlier point of what is missing, for admins I'm referring to good, solid GUI based apps for configuring the basic services. A small suite to deal with Apache, Sendmail, Inn, and other daemons. Today folks would rather tweak on the text files directly then use those few apps that are out there because they aren't nearly as good as they should be yet. Neither GUI environment today provides much for admins.
As to my point about the web developer, there's simply nothing I've seen in the *nix world that compares to Dreamweaver and HomeSite for development. I just have to imagine there are a lot of web developers that would like to work on the platform that Apache runs best on. Neither of those apps are perfect, but telling someone who has been working on a Mac or Windows that they need to take a month out to learn EMACS is just silly. In all fairness, there are some projects looking to provide some of HomeSite's uses, but there's nothing even coming close to Dreamweaver in the way of a GUI HTML editor.
Bottom line, if Eazel does crash and burn I really don't feel that this is an indication of some kind of open source failure. On the contrary, it might go to prove that the environments already in place are plenty user friendly. What is needed are the apps for those folks most likely to be looking to work with Linux or a BSD and expand upon that.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
The problem with both these companies is that
they don't even try to make money, they give
away all their best product for free.
If they wanted to pull in some cash they should
move to a model where they give away source code
for free, and make people pay for their easy
1-2-3 binary installer. After all why would
anyone bother with buying their CDs if it's
easier to download ximian for free off their web
site.
They both pay lip service to the idea of selling
services, but ximian even gives that away in
redcarpet!
Not that I'm complaining, but I do want both of
these companies to stick around, and they have
to make money to do that.
This sucks that Eazel might go under. But I would like to point out a big benefit of Free Software. For example if a company like MS or Apple were to go under. The current owners of their software would be screwed as all updates etc would stop. Free software is different in the fact that if Eazel dies, a group of people will take over. The advantage is that Free Software will never die as long as there is someone to keep it alive. That is also a disadvantage as you cannot really make money from it.
I think a solution to Eazel would be to consolidate with Red Hat or Mandrake, that way they would have a financial backing to continue.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
Ximian, as I understand it, still has money. In addition, Ximian is highly dependant of Eazel's work, and has competing business strategies (services). How about Ximian buying out Eazel, thus keeping them alive, and merging Eazels services-strategies with their own. I suspect this would have been the better option from the beginning, as newbies won't like the idea of several different entities from which they are supposed to get help.
Every time Eazel releases a new version of Nautilus, I gleefully download and install the latest and greatest patch or release hoping to have come across something that I can actually use. Every time, I'm disappointed. Here's why.
It's not Eazel's fault. I believe that their part of the application is pretty solid. From what I've seen, it's that dang Mozilla browser that's embedded that renders the application unusable. Without fail (and I've run it on a myriad of boxen with fairly heterogeneous configurations), within a few hours something will snap and Nautilus will choke, requiring me to switch to a text console and remove it with kill. Considering the fact that I've had similar luck with many of the Mozilla releases, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to Eazel and placing the blame on Mozilla instead, though I admit to having never set out to research the phenomenon.
Conclusion: Eazel has a good thing going for them. They're making my favorite desktop more enjoyable. Mozilla also has a good thing going for them. Finally a browser that adhires to the standards set by the W3C. But in my opinion, Mozilla needs far more work than Eazel does, and Eazel can't survive without a bulletproof Mozilla (it's embedded... there's no way around it). Therefore, I say that before we can hope for Eazel to fulfill all our hopes and dreams, we're going to have to finally build a browser that rivals IE in stability.