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Too Much Free Software
An anonymous reader writes "The plethora of Free Software applications available today, none working perfectly, is a problem which stands in the way of major adoption of Linux on the desktop. In order to conquer the desktop, we have to stand united. Read the article on Freshmeat."
and many on freshmeat have already pointed out that it is not much more than a poorly thaught out and poorly researched troll.
-... ---
After reading that article, I nod my head in complete agreement. What linux needs for the masses (besides a little conversion and persuasion) is a working, fast and stable GUI + apps, a working sound architecture (such as the one that the XFree86 team has with 4.3!) and a working sound recorder/playback libaries. OOo needs to be a hell of a lot faster in load time (bloated)
This is a VERY easy goal that takes cooperation, and a few people/teams of developers to suck up that "not made here" syndrome and just HELP. seeing your name in the credits is all some people need.
Lets get behind this, can we? or is the crowd of penguins a little too cold to move?
just my 0.02c
ps. re-read the post before you mod.
main()
{
printf("Hello world\n");
exit(0);
}
Now you have seen it.
BZZZZZ! Wrong! Don, tell him what he could have won....
There are always ways programs are not perfect. For instance, the program above does not take in to account that stdout may not be available -- if that happens (it does, trust me), the program will either not give the intended result or it will die altogether (depending on the system it's built/run on).
The perfect program does not exists, not even yours...
Film GIMP is just a modified version of the GIMP meant to be useful in touching up individual frames in a film. Premiere is a video editing program, it's features do not cross over much to those of film GIMP, so Film GIMP is not an alternative to Premiere.
Bollocks.
Depends what are you talking about.
If you are talking about a desktop editor - yes.
If you are talking abot a 1000000 dollar application that is to be used by 20-30 potential customers - no. ClearSales, SAP, telco level oice switching etc are a good example. They require up to 3-7 million per year worth of extensive fiddling with them to keep them working and useful for whoever bought them.
So stop seeing all software as a personal editor. It aint.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Film GIMP(now CinePaint) is NOTHING like Adobe Premiere. Adobe Premiere is a non-linear video editor, CinePaint is a high dynamic range picture editor, basically just the Gimp with 64-bit RGBA color capability. Cinelerra is a non-linear editor, but not quite on par with Premiere IMHO. Kino and kdenlive are promising projects I have yet to use to do that same thing.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
There are alternatives to Autocad for Linux.
LinuxCAD
VariCAD
Varkon - which is free for Linux, but their web site is down so I don't know what the status of this is.
Can't comment on how "full-featured" these Autocad alternatives are.
--Drunk as in Beer
OSDir.com on the O'Reilly Network is a nice showcase to users of what is out there that's good, stable, and beyond 'beta' project wise.
I started OSDir as a showcase to end-users and now that it's on O'Reilly it is beginning to get a lot of eyeballs from folks who want to become familiar with open source and want to try stuff out.
First I tried Xine. I always try Xine first because the scaling works, while mplayer doesn't. The disk drive started spinning and Xine locked up. I've found that it does this with about 20% of the DVDs in my collection. I think it is a font issue, or maybe it doesn't support some extra menu features or something.
I switched to MPlayer. Like I said before, I don't get scaling with mplayer, but it plays almost any DVD I throw at it. Half way through the movie, my crappy (Aureal) sound card started corrupting the audio ever-so-slightly. The sound would vacillate between working perfectly and just being slightly annoying. Xine has never done this.
The movie was viewable, but not perfect. Don't get me wrong. I think Linux is fantastic. I can't even count the number of stupid problems I used to have with Windows and I'm not going back. I can, however, understand the argument presented here that there are too many 'slightly-less-than-perfect' solutions and no '$100 but it will work' solutions for Linux.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
blab above this post mentions OSDir.com that goes a longish way towards the goal mentioned above.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't Pro/ENGINEER run on linux? Granted, it's far from free, but it beats the socks off of AutoCAD for many things.
this guy has missed it, I mean truly missed it. The point of freesoftware is that people contribute back what THEY want to use. His treatment of various projects, Enlightenment for one (a waste of time) and Gaim, HERE WRITE YOUR PROGRAM HOW I WANT IT! Sir to quote ESR, you don't get it.
Why must everyone adopt linux? I quite frankly don't want to have to deal with the 200 morons and 10 clued people I work with all adopting linux and then having to answer all their questions. I'd be quite happy if they'd simply switch from IE to Mozilla so I don't have to keep removing virii from their desktop.
The foolish push to get everyone to use linux for everything is misguided. Quite honestly if I was a developer in any project he mentioned, I would be incredibly insulted. Fortunately I'm not but I still find this prevailing attitude that the sheep need to use linux on the desktop misguided.
The app might be good for what it is - a quick and dirty app - but surely you jest when you suggest that is the equivalent of AutoCAD.
I'm convinced that CAD/CAM will remain in the hands of commercial developers for a long time (most likely forever). Genuine 3D feature-based solid modeling with assemblies, geometric tolerances, etc. is so difficult to create well, that even the biggest names in CAD haven't got it 100% right after over a decade of massive development.
For example, Pro/E, as wonderful as it is, still has, in my opinion, issues associating assembly features with their physical geometry, because only the components of the assembly can really "own" that geometry. These are fundamental issues that are very hard to solve in a practical way. I understand why Pro/E behaves like it does with respect to assembly features and have come to terms with it, and I wish the people at PTC the best of luck in finding good solutions (if they are even mathematically possible).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Okay, let's see if I can sum this up for you.
Let me first make the define libraries. Libraries are, sort of, predefined routines to save programmers time. The windows equivalent is the DLL file. Only under Linux drivers are either compiled into the OS or are modules that can be plugged in.
What most consider the Linux operating system consists of the Kernel, and the GNU tools at it's core. The entire system is exceptionally modular in nature.
The kernel handles everything from memory management, to task scheduling. It is the grand lord brain, translating everything from the plebian programs into action on the system. The kernel by itself would just sit there and do nothing, with no way to interact with the system.
The GNU tools are tools for interacting with the system, managing files, etc.
Everything else is stacked on top of this.
X is a series of libraries and programs that provide the core of the GUI for a linux system.
On top of this you stack various libraries which do various things within the X framework, GNOME and KDE are a set of tools and libraries that extend X and make it pretty.
Then you have programs that utilize all of the above.
So your typical program, like say OpenOffice has a series of dependancies on up the tree. Some of them require additional libraries.
This is why, with a little tweaking, you can have a BSD Kernel running a "Linux" program. Each part for the most part can be substituted for something else with a little work.
I hope I didn't ramble or was nonsensical there.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Graphical Toolkits
GTK+. That's it. Qt still has licensing problems, being non-Free for commercial applications.
Wrong! QT has the SAME license as GTK+, the GPL. It ALSO is licensed under the another licence that LETS you do commercial work, but then you have to pay for the product. So what's the problem here? Use the GPL QT and you have to release your product under the GPL. Use the commerical QT and you don't, but now you have to pay for it. I don't see the problem. If anything QT is LESS restrictive than GTK+ since it lets you sidestep the virus nature of the GPL if you want to.
For the same reason that if(strcmp(foo,bar)==0) is better than if(!strcmp(foo,bar)) at testing two strings for equality. The code works either way, but the former makes more sense.
In this case, it's more sensical to think of argv as an array of char pointers than it is to think of it as a pointer to a char pointer.
(Now watch while I seamlessly tie this answer back into the topic of this article.)
This kind of difference is important to take into account when writing free software. Only when we consistently write clear and readable code will we all be able to unite and defeat Windows on the desktop.
and not even a very good one.
Number one incorrect premise: If everyone only works on one of each type of software that software will be perfect.
This is just wrong in so many ways.
1. Not everyone can all work on a single piece of software all at the same time.
2. Not everyone _wants_ to work on the same peice of software that everyone else is working on.
3. Not everyone works the same way, what works for you sucks for me and visa versa.
4. There is no such thing as perfect.
5. People have amazing new ideas that don't fit into the existing schema of software already out there.
6. People have amazing new ideas about existing software that really doesn't fit into any software project.
7. People hate each other and it would really suck if those people weren't able to fork the code and go work on their own project.
8. We developers know we can do it better, sometimes we are even right.
I really can go on all day about how wrong this premise is.
I will just say that choise is good and we should all work on whatever we feel like working on. The beauty of open source is that the software will always be available for someone else to study and learn from.
We are finally entering the information age with open source programming that is scientifically reproducable and provable and shared with the world.
The cost of entry to the open source world is just a few hundred dollars now and this is why we have so many millions of open source programs available to us. Just because you have ten thousand programs on your install disk doesn't mean that you have to install them all. On a daily basis I use less than a dozen applications and maybe 20 command line programs. So all you have to decide is which program is best of breed for you and use that program for a couple of years until a friend tells you about an amazing new program that does everything you are doing plus more.
Agreed entirely with the author about the malaise in Linux desktopland. Infact, I wrote a not so well proposed article about it almost an year back: Whats Wrong in Linux DesktopLand.
Red Hat has since attempted to do a unifying job, but the question I ask is this: how many of the applications that Red Hat ships will they support? As an end user, why ought I have to deal with figuring out how to install mp3 playing or DVD playing capabilities. Why should I not have good fonts? This is the value add commercial outfits are supposed to provide.
But they cant because they are too busy making too many CD's. Why not, as the author has suggested, pare down the number of applications, and pay a royalty to the author/maintainer of the application for each copy sold? Why must a Linux company follow the same path as a standard company in not renumerating the author? (To be fair, RedHat employs many application or subsystem authors, but why not pay the others a royalty instead. For example, why not pay Ximian for eg a royalty to maintain Evolution to be consistent with RedHat design guidelines?).
The authors suggestion of one toolkit is important too. I applaud Lindows and Lycoris for dumping gnome and making KDE based applications (though I dont applaud everything as root idea..why not use capabilities and gradually eliminate root from most applications). I dont agree with KDE as a toolkit choice as the high licensing cost of Qt screws small developers wishing to develop commercial apps or shareware. The Mac is a thriving desktop platform precisely because of these people, and we need to attract such development if we want to keep the long term viability of Linux..dont forget that windows started out as a poor desktop implementation, and but for linux+bsd's would have largely wiped unix out of small and mid-range installations.
LGPL toolkits are good choices...
Here's one possible plan. Create a new distribution, I like to call it birdbrain because thats all the brain one should need to use it. Elitists not welcome. The basic subsystems are kernel+device, init, basic unix utils, binutils, libsystem(libc, curses, etc), directory services/auth. Thats 6 subsystems..create 6 teams, and assign royalties. Get basic X. Pay royalties. Get basic languages: perl, pythonChoose the basic desktop, say gnome. Get Ximian to package it, and get Ximian redcarpet to distribute it. Pay royalties. Choose no more than 15 gnome apps as part of the basic package..choose teams for each, hopefully including original developers, who are willing to fork, customize to needs of distribution. Needs are for (IMO): browser, instant messager, email/news, news aggregator, editor, wysiwyg html editor, rdesktop, file manager, package manager/installer/redcarpet, media player, pdf reader, terminal. Thats all. Make sure media player can play both DVD's and mp3's. If this requires factoring licensing costs into the distrib, so be it. USABILITY comes FIRST. Then choose personal server apps for fileserving, personal web serving, ssh serving.
Thats it in the basic system. If this sounds like taking a page out of Apple, well, yes it does, except that the whole commercial idea here is to get money directly to the developers who maintain the app for the distribution. Think of it as debian on a much smaller, and thus way more coherent scale.
Now make add on packages with separate royalty and responsibility spheres, for development(compilers), science(plotting, etc), office. Anf of these packages, and also the previous 15 odd apps, ought to replacable by others provided they provide the same task capabilities. Nautilus can then be made more task oriented too, where tasks are done independent of the apps providing them.
Create an experimental distrib in which new things are played with before being dropped into the stable distrib. Examples would include a unified way to deal with data in text form like Apple's plists or RedHat's al
The Inscrutable Gargoyle
To everyone who is saying that multiple programs are good because they all have their individual specialties: Remember that programs are mutually exclusive, you can (in general) only use one to perform a particular task. If the particular features you want to use together happen to reside in different programs, tough. In the commercial world, this problem is resolved by programs defeating each other through assimilation: A program adds a feature mimicking that of its rival and thereby gains market share. Then the customer wins, because the features now work together under one program and the task is possible.
I'm not saying this problem doesn't affect commercial software as well, but claiming this is an advantage of OSS is specious. And customers have much more leverage over a commercial developer than any *individual* open source developer ("Add this feature or I won't pay you" as opposed to "Add this feature or I'll send you angry emails"). Downloading software that already works is far more desirable than patching a faulty product even to the most hardcore OSS evangelist; no one writes their own text editor or compiler, do they?
It is free as in beer and speech. If you want an easily installable version and your distribution does not include it you do need to pay $5/month for a subscription. Every $5/month you pay gives you a vote toward what games get worked on. Not really bad if you ask me.