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Red Hat: Who Needs Netscape?
LazyBoy points to this story on Yahoo which says that Red Hat won't be bundling Netscape with its distribution once Mozilla 1.0 is out. And since the (very nice) .9 is out, with .9.1 on the horizon, that shouldn't be all that long from now. Rather cool that the long-heralded failure of Mozilla is proving to be exaggerated, even with a lot of other good browser projects in the ring.
I know a lot of Slashdotters use /. moz updates as personal reminders to go get the latest build, just for browsing purposes.
I've been following the nightly builds pretty closely, and I would suggest waiting for 0.91 for most browsers. There have been a few bugs that crept in over the last two weeks or so. The most well-understood one is a problem with right-click context menus, at least on Win32. It sounds like they have the problem in hand, but it makes life painful.
I think there are some problems that have been introduced into the rendering engine, because I have gotten a few really unexpected and unusual crashes. In some cases the browser window just completely disappeared without a trace or any error.
And I have had a few *really* annoying crashes while composing messages in textareas. (Like I'm doing now.) That is extra painful because you lose what you were writing!
So your best bet is to wait on this one if you have a stable build that you're running, and pick up a nightly build or 0.91 build in a few weeks.
Other than that, recent changes in how pages are built make everything seem a lot smoother and faster. I forget what they called the one fix... it had a funny description, but the upshot was that you can now click on things on an "outgoing" page if your new page hasn't loaded yet. For us impatient browsers who give up on crappy-loading sites, that one was a real breakthrough!
You're missing the point. RedHat ships binaries to users. They also ship source, but that's not really their focus. They may modify the source and ship modified binaries if they feel it improves their distribution. With Bernstein's license, they can't do this.
In addition, you're quoting the GNU project out of context when you say Bernstein's license matches freedom 2 "The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor." the same page that lists the freedoms also clearly says, "The freedom to redistribute copies must include binary or executable forms of the program, as well as source code." Clearly Bernstein's license doesn't allow binary forms of modified code.
Fortunately, as you point out, Bernstein's code "NEVER" has holes in it, so we don't need to worry about it. Of course, I'm more impressed with your ability to travel into the future and confirm this. Unfortunately Red Hat is not able to visit to future to check this, so errs on the side or caution.
In addition, while Bernstein's software has never had any holes under Bernstein's narrow definition, Linux itself might have problems which require modifying qmail as a workaround. This is quite common, and while Bernstein can complain all he wants that it's the operating system's fault, the rest of us need to deal with the reality of the hole and find a workaround. This has happened before, and under Bernstein's license, Red Hat can't ship patched binary to fix it.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
djbdns and qmail are Free Software in the GNU sense of the word.
Near as I could tell from looking at Bernstein's web site you are not allowed to distribute modified binaries or source!
According to the FSF, one of the four freedoms provided by "Free" software is "The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public". A license that requires you to distribute your improvements as patches can barely be consideded to provide that freedom. Certainly that's enough reason for me to avoid it.
This belies the point that holes are NEVER discovered in Bernstein's software
A completely foolish statement. Even if it is true that there has never been a qmail or djbdns exploit, that does not prove there never will be one. Even OpenBSD has had exploits, and those guys are DAMN careful!
It is impossible to guarentee that a non-trivial piece of software does not have vulnerabilities. Not allowing distributors, or hell just concerned sys-admins from distributing sources or binaries that with any kind of improvements is just plain fucking rediculous. IMHO Bernstein is just being a jackass. His "Free software" is about as free as Microsoft's "Shared Source" bullshit.
Why don't you just come out and admit that marketing ploys are your only reasons for including or not including something in the dist.
What marketing ploy would that be? Thier attempt to actually follow thier stated values? Thier attempt to support the Free Software that spawned them?
You are a hypocrite.
In this case, they are not. You, however, are a fool.
Somebody told me I shouldn't log in as root all the time, so I just changed my .bashrc to have a 'su -' at the end instead, and then set root's password to nothing.
Is that bad?
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
> Soon you'll have different browsers in the Linux
> world to those found in the corporate mainstream.
It's really the same browser. Same code base, so everyone has a common interest in improving it. Same support for standards, so presenting a united front to Web developers (this includes Konqueror and Opera too as a matter of fact).
The only significant difference from Netscape's point of view is that they lose revenue from the buttons and bookmarks they ship with their branded browser.
then worry about the 200 applications they want to build into it. But instead they let the engineers run the show which will ultimatly be their downfall.
I interned at Netscape last summer. I worked on the Mail/News client. Let me assure you that there are most definitely phases to the project, and its not just a bunch of engineers sticking in whatever they want. Whatever new idea I had, it was shot down, because we were focusing on bugs at the time. All feature work was put on the back burner. Instead, I, and everyone else, worked on critical bugs.
And let me also assure you that the other projects in Mozilla (IRC, etc) were not created when an engineer said "Screw my bugs, I'm going to work on this." They were created when someone had some free time, or an outside contributor delivered some code.
Did NS6 ship bug free? No, but don't blame that on random engineering if you don't know what you're talking about.
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
BTW, feel free to ask the Mozilla team what they think about the OS/2 programmers they work with.
--
Lord Nimon
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Read the licenses of djbdns and qmail, and you'll see why we can't ship them: If a hole is discovered, we're not allowed to distribute a fixed version in binary form.
As for Netscape, there really wasn't an alternative when we added it - there now is. qmail and djbdns, OTOH, would have a hard time making it in anyway as there are other alternatives with better licenses. Qmail isn't a "must have", when we already have sendmail, postfix and exim
I've been using 0.9 since it was announced a few days ago, and I have to tell you it's MUCH faster than the previous versions, and doesn't make me miss IE at all. I'm slowly making the conversion from using windows for all my desktop tasks to using only free software, and not having a browser that could run effectively on my redhat 6.2 box with only 64 megs of ram has, until now, been a real pain. But 0.9 runs very nicely with my setup, and I'm not sure what you think would make it better. I think they've figured the big picture rather nicely, and their plans are beginning to come together. You may not be a troll, but you're wrong. Bryguy when neverwinter nights comes out, my conversion will be complete :)
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
djbdns and qmail are both under the DJB license, a license of their creator. You arent as free to do what you want with them as GNU applications. As such, RedHat has stated it will never distribute them unless the license changes. However, They distribute Netscape, Which is worse than djbdns/qmail. You can see more on D. J. Bernstein's site
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
The Netscape browser will end up on the desktops of the 30 million or so hapless AOL users, when the next version of AOL ships. AOL's contract with Microsoft for IE is up soon (if not already) and they own Netscape, so it's no extra cost to them.
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