Next Knoppix Release to Feature GPL'd FreeNX

linuxtag-reporter writes "The first day of LinuxTag, Europe's biggest Free Software event (expecting 25,000 visitors) already has one big highlight. It seems that Fabian Franz from the Knoppix Project hacked up a 'FreeNX Server' based on NoMachine's NX technology (poor NoMachine might lose business now). Fabian Franz presented a first preview of the 'GPL Edition' in a live demo together with Kurt Pfeifle. The demo showed sessions going from Germany to Italy just based on a slow WLAN connectivity (shared with hundreds of visitors). A connection lost due to bad network conditions was easily re-connected to, and a deliberately suspended session was revitalized too -- it was just like 'screen' with a GUI! A report on the official LinuxTag webpage says FreeNX will be publically released for the first time as part of the upcoming Knoppix-3.6 release. The Kalyxo project is building and hosting Debian packages of FreeNX and NX/GPL for everyone to use."

Comments

What do these things do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides being part of a future Knoppix release, what is NX?

Please assume that some readers (me, others?) don't know what "screen" is.

Maybe I should google for "linux screen knoppix" - that would be useful...

I could click on the nomachine.com link, but why should I have to?

-ac

Re:What do these things do?

[KilobyteKnight]

So, you're saying that you should be able to get a full and complete understanding of a technical system solution from a Slashdot article blurb without doing any research of your own or without reading any of the links?

I believe what what the poster meant was that a news posting should at least have a basic overview of what the heck it's about.

I know what Knoppix is, I know what screen is, but I don't have a clue what NX is. Even descriptive adjectives would help.

I'm interested in finding out what NX is. Since the link is Sashdotted I can't at the moment. I've gotten side tracked by your anonymous flame. I will probably have forgotten about it by later today. So I'm left wondering.

The editors here signed million dollar contracts, revenue is coming in from ads and subscriptions, they've been at it for years.... you'd think they'd have learned at least a few basic journalism techniques.

I see a lot of wrong information posted as news. The most descriptive news items are typically when they lucked out and copied a good paragraph from the story link. Heck, they aren't even good at checking to see if they've already posted the story on their own site.

It's just laziness. I'd expect such from volunteers... but as I pointed out, they're getting paid well.

Re:What do these things do?

[KilobyteKnight]

Nothings changed since they started making money.

Oh, but it has. It changed from being a hobby to being a business. A business based in part on ad revenue. And I, as a consumer, for whom those ads are targetted, certainly have every right to comment on the quality of the service.

One thing that has remained pretty much the same is the quality of the service. I expect more from professionals than I do from hobbyists. And don't kid yourself into thinking they haven't entered the realm of paid professionals.

Don't get me wrong, the Slashdot crew broke ground. I respect them for that. They were among the first to do what they do. They created something wonderful. Then they got paid and have done little more than add a couple of features to the website since then. Moderating and meta-moderating and karma may help weed some of the nonsense out of the user responses, but unless they pay attention to people like me the nonsense will continue in the articles themselves.

I intend this as constructive criticism, not a troll or a flame. I want Slashdot to stay around. I just want it to be better.

Slashdot shouldn't rest on its laurels.

Kudos to developers

[Metteyya]

It seems that Knoppix doesn't stop surprising everyone, being probably the most innovative Linux distro (introduced LiveCD and great hardware detection).
It would be great if other distro's developers tried going the same way - be innovative, be creative!. Now it's quite boring to have hundred of Kno* and *pix distros, every one built with philosophy "take Knoppix and replace two apps with your favourite ones".
Is there any way to financially support Knoppix?

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[hackel]

Heh, you obviously don't understand the point of Free software. In general, having that product available as Free software will attract much more users than the few at that particular company that might go out of business. If they are -smart-, they will assist the open source development effort, and re-tailor their business to provide expert integration solutions of FreeNX, etc.
It's all about -service- and developing code, not re-selling code over and over again without doing any work. That's the difference. They don't have to go out of business, just change their old business model.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[finkployd]

But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work and made it available for free, even giving it a similar name.

Why is this a good thing?


Have they taken (ie stolen) the company's work? Or did they simply re-implement a commercial product's functionality from scratch? In the latter case I don't believe there is anything wrong with that (and seemingly neither do you, since you seem to be in support of Linux). In fact I consider that to be a very good thing. Complaining about that is like complaining that couples getting married and having sex out of love is hurting prostitution.

Finkployd

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[zgornz]

NX is a PUBLIC standard, they WANT other implementations of it. Nothing becomes real mainstream if it's closed, look at HTTP/FTP/SMTP/VNC those are all standards. Then you have closed things, like IM where there are a million different closed protocols (and yes a few open ones).

Knoppix is implementing a protocol that NX released, they also released a proprietary implementation of it. Obviously they want people to buy theirs, but they published the protocol so that others could use it to. (In turn making their protocol stronger, and their product stronger)

Re:Knoppix is great for the KDE crowd...

[kfg]

The biggest benefit is that you can hand a disk to someone and say, "Here, try Linux." They don't have install 'er nothin', just boot from it.

The next biggest would be that it's an ultra-super rescue disk.

And bit less important, to me at least, but still a virtue, is that you can pop it into any machine, say a friends, one at work, or a clients and run in your prefered enviroment.

KFG

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong

[Bob9113]

But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work

If I understand correctly, (s)he only took their Free work. The core of the NoMachine product is GPL.

and made it available for free ... Why is this a good thing?

Speaking strictly from a capitalist standpoint, it is good because it reduces the cost to businesses that wish to use this technology. Similarly, the freeness of HTTP software (client and server) has been a great boon to corporations that wish to provide easy access to information about their product lines. This has in turn lead to consumers making more informed decisions, which is one of the keystones of free market capitalism. (that's just the good part, in response to your question, see below for a look at the bad part)

even giving it a similar name.

The similarity in the name is the "NX" part. I believe NX is a Free protocol. This is much like referring to both Sendmail and Postfix as SMTP engines.

If F/OSS developers want to speed up Linux, the corporate environment is where they should be looking. By doing this they have enabled corporations to get something for free

Very well said. This statemtnt (which clearly supports FLOSS) seems to be in contrast to the rest of your post.

which could cause a company (and a lot of potential Linux users) to go out of business.

All competition has this effect, whether from proprietary or Free sources. Are Chevrolet and Ford evil because they caused Yugo to go out of business?

How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed?

They can't. But this makes a leap from "FreeNX removed or reduced the ability to charge twice for solving a problem once" to "developers will be unemployed." That is a spurious leap. The ideal situation, from an economic standpoint, would be for each solution to each problem to be developed once, and the development effort compensated once, freeing the development resource to move on to the next problem. The increased pool of available software labour resources would reduce the time delay businesses incur in solving their information problems, but does not necessarily reduce the time value of solving any given problem the first time. If we begin to approach software development as a temporally-oriented problem solving service, one cannot accurately predict the effect on the wages paid - the economic shift is too great to predict the result on the supply side - but the demand side will be very happy indeed.

We have not yet developed the economic models to make this a practical reality yet, but with FLOSS operating in tension with proprietary software, the economic stage has been set. This is the typical first stage in every major economic advancement - new technology, in this case zero cost reproduction of information, makes new economic models possible. The shift to the implementation of those new economic models must necessarily occur after the technological advancement, and so a period of market inefficiency occurs. It's not a bad thing, any more than Ford's assembly line was bad for Daimler Benz.