Mosfet Contributes Code To KDE (Again)
davidsmind writes "Former KDE hacker and creator of the much acclaimed Liquid theme, Mosfet(AKA Daniel M. Duley ) is back in the spotlight. The Dot was the first one with the story.
'Many in the KDE community are aware of some rocky history between KDE hacker Mosfet and other KDE developers. Fortunately, it looks like things have taken a great turn for the better: Mosfet wrote in to tell us that "I've decided to donate 20 effects I ported to KDE/Qt for PixiePlus to KDE3." Waldo Bastian promptly added them to CVS.'" The list of effects is long, impressive, and under a BSD-style license. Mosfet has done a lot of the work that makes my desktop pretty, so I'm very happy to hear about this.
I for one am looking forward to installing KDE3 when it's all good and ready. Both KDE and Gnome have made incredible progress in the last few years. I think that the Open Source desktop systems are advancing much more quickly than any proprietary system. It's only a matter of time before KDE and Gnome surpass (if they haven't already) all proprietary GUI systems as far as appearance and usability go. My only complaint about KDE is that it's all C++, and it takes forever to load on an older computer. As I recall that's a problem with the dynamic C++ linker, and not KDE itself, though.
It would seem that "The Dot" is already fallen under the Slashdot effect.
A solution to the problem with music today
An old carpenter I worked with almost 30 years ago told me "if it don't come out in the wash, it comes out in the rinsin'".
All of us that use and enjoy KDE owe thanks to those that contribute, regardless of whatever went on before they bring code to the table for us to share.
For those of us not in the know, what's the rocky history?
dot.kde.org is totally /.'ed.
But the icon may frighten off the readers :-)
One of the biggest things to happen to KDE in last year has been the rewrite of KDE's printing support, by Michael Goffioul. No-one goes around proclaiming Michael as a coding god, because he just got on with it and produced something very impressive (and that has got even more impressive in KDE 3).
Similarly for the developer(s) of Kate, KDE's text editor. Or the developers of Konqueror, who have equalled Mozilla with a twentieth of the personnel and a thousandth of the money.
Similarly for all the people that don't code, but instead translate KDE into 15 million languages.
KDE is a true team effort and can do without coding primadonnas.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
When was the last time you tried kde? You could argue that it is slow, but saying that it is buggy is completely untrue.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
'kwin' is actually a fairly lightweight window manager. Or do you not know the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment?
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Another /.er said:
"KDE can do without coding primadonnas".
Sorry, I think I disagree.
Primadonnas are a pain in the ass, ok.
But in the final count, you must kneel and ask them to come back on stage (hear the fine music about primadonnas from Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera").
Some primaddonnas have a contribution, a good contribution for that matter -- and *we* cannot afford being egocentric -- even and mainly if they are!
In the famous Lee Iacocca autobiographic book, he tells about having colleagues who complained about hardtimes with other people. He used to say, jokingly I guess, "Too bad, this company doesn't hire monkeys, or gorillas or tigers, we just got people!"
And that's it, to put it simply.
KDE is not just about technology. Ok, it is a very advanced project and what I like in the Linux world is that we progress faster than most other alternatives, be it commercial or not.
But KDE _is_ about people, too. Don't throw away competent people. Instead, put some buffer around their idiosyncrasies.
Heck, keep them in an asylum if you need, but don't disregard their work. We lost too many geniuses because they were gay, and now we regret it.
So, get two people, the primadonna and someone who can interface him/her to the world.
Now, to Mosfet and Rasterman, you can sing very well -- but what is a singer without an audience.
Have patience with those who must have patience with you.
From a friend.
would someone mind copying the list of contributions he has recently made here? (the article is nicely /.ed)
thanks!
The odd thing about open source is that the few who get paid doing it can be just as unreliable as a corporation. Its amazing to me watching how people fall over guys like Mosfet, in gratitude, after he basically walked out on the project a few months earlier saying "its my ball and i'm going home."
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Interesting!
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
As long as I have a bit of bandwidth to burn, (should last a few hours) you can see the dot front page here.
"Yah, you do that"
Miller's Crossing?
-------------------------------------------------
charlton heston is more of a man than yo
Nobody doubts the impact Mosfet has had on KDE, but we would be remiss if we neglected the many contributions of Bipolar and Jfet as well.
They too have played a big role in making KDE what it is today.
Everybody's carrying on as if this is some sort of important event in the history of KDE. The Liquid theme is pretty, but jaysus, it's a friggin' theme! Let's get some perspective.
"Is this what Mosfet looks like? Is this him in drag? Who is that in the picture!?"
;) She looks abit kinky, though.
:)
I heard on a numerous occations that Mosfet actually is a woman, so if that is true, no it isn't mosfet in "drag".
.. Or someone might be pulling my leg or something.
Boba Fet(t)
Mosfet Contributes Code to KDE (Again)
[Graphics and Art] Posted by Dre on Monday December 31, @08:34AM
from the one-big-happy-family dept.
Many in the KDE community are aware of some rocky history between KDE hacker Mosfet and other KDE developers. Fortunately, it looks like things have taken a great turn for the better: Mosfet wrote in to tell us that "I've decided to donate 20 effects I ported to KDE/Qt for PixiePlus to KDE3". Waldo Bastian promptly added them to CVS. The new effects include normalize, equalize, solarize, threshold, emboss, despeckle, charcoal, rotate, sample, addNoise, blur, edge, implode, oil paint, sharpen, spread, shade, swirl, wave, and contrastHSV. All will be available under a BSD-type license in the KImageEffect class in kdelibs. According to Mosfet, these effects will be useful not only for image viewers and editors, but also for things like style engines. Except for the simple rotate, Mosfet ported the effects from ImageMagick to work directly on QImages and Qt scanlines. Nice job, Mosfet! (For those who have not yet heard the news, PixiePlus is the successor to Pixie; more information is available here.)
I would appreciate it if people would read my opinion on freekde.org... thanks!
--------- The 'gui' in 'penguin' is pronounced K-D-E .
Someone help me out here... This article brought up the point that the code was under the BSD license. However, I don't understand how the BSD and GPL could possibly be compatible. The BSD license states that copyright info must be kept intact, and the GPL has no such stipulation, so it would obviously be illegial to use BSD licensed software under the GPL. Alternatively, the GPL says no software may be released with GPLed code if it imposes additional restrictions beyond those imposed by the GPL itself, so BSD licensed software may not be used in a GPLed program under it's original license.
Did I get something wrong there?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
Feel free to point out where it says you may not modify or delete the existing copyright notices in a GPLed program.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A few months (a year?) ago, KDE added a small icon to the mouse pointer that animated whenever an app was launching. I considered that tiny act quite innovative -- it solved a usability problem (re-clicking an icon because you think it hasn't launched) that has existed for decades. Now Windows XP does it.
I think you'll find that Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 all did it too.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
So, you logic is Windows won because it works and others don't. I'd say it is not a so popular view. If you say "follow the way most people are used to", it's more reasonalble, (which still I don't agree but it's just my opinion).
With Winders you got a little hourglass, or some kind of thingy, depending on what you selected. It showed there was activity. KDE goes one step further and displays the icon of the app itself, so you know what is loading.
Pretty is useful. The better you can make it look, the more the masses will flock to it. On the MS side of things, I feel DOS is much more useful than Windows 3.1, but back in the day that crappy shell got everyday people using the PC. I'm sure much of that was because of "ooh, look at the perty graphics" compared with the monotone command prompt that was DOS.
...about this guy's sexuality sorted out. How the hell am I supposed to make an intelligent decision about open source GUIs and themes without this information?
I can't find Mandrake RPMS on the site and am having problems building the source. Anyone know if there are any Mandrake packages somewhere?
Ciryon
All a window manager does is manage windows. No file manager, no web browser, no panels.
Both KDE and Gnome (and XFCE) are desktop environments, and include within them a window manager (kwin for KDE, sawfish for GNOME, xfce's built in windowmanager for XFCE).
Both the KDE and Gnome environments work perfectly well using different window managers (a lot of people used to run KDE with the Blackbox window manager, as with Gnome and a window manager called Enlightenment).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Sorry, you loose, there's way too many shortcomings in konqueror to call it equal to mozilla. It's ahead of ie6, but that's about it.
Konqueror's biggest fault is 0 javascript. I have made really clean javascript code that spans from ns 3.0-mozilla 0.9.7, and it doesn't even start to run on konqueror.
If you really don't like the bloat in mozilla, check out skipstone, it's like galeon, but it actually delivers.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Maybe EXTREMELY HEAVILY INFLUENCED would be more appropriate. Yes?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I'm in the same boat as you. :)
:)
Once you're a minor celebrity, news sites continue reporting things about you even though you may not matter anymore.
Ok, a quick glance reveals:
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
and
2. b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
I don't see how '2.' even relates to this discussion.
'1.' only applies to those wishing to distribute the source without making modifications, so doesn't apply to this discussion.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant