Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: KDE, Tsunami Hacker, and Image Bugs
We Slashback, to provide updates to three recent stories. All happy news, for once. JoaoPinheiro writes "After last week's reports that Novell plans not to ship the KDE desktop on Novell and SUSE Enterprise products, the company got lots of feedback from its customers. Novell has listened to them and reconsidered its desktop strategy." Meanwhile, in the employment sector, sebFlyte writes "Daniel Cuthbert, recently a high-profile victim of the UK's outdated cybercrime laws, has found a job in the security industry." Finally, one less thing to worry about, as gUnit writes "eWeek is reporting that virus researchers at Trend Micro jumped the gun with a warning that a Trojan in the wild was capable of exploiting newly patched Windows security flaws. Just 24 hours after announcing the discovery of a proof-of-concept Trojan that supposedly exploits a trio of image-rendering vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft, Trend Micro is retreating from that claim and offering up a batch of excuses."
Firstly KDE will be the primary and default desktop on OpenSUSE and any future SUSE Linux releases. Secondly they will now ship the full KDE as a fully supported (and developed, whatever that means) desktop on all enterprise products. Some more details here.
Daniel Cuthbert, recently a high-profile victim of the UK's outdated cybercrime laws
To be fair, if you look at what happened:
The judge indicated that he would normally have let Cuthbert go for the core act.
However, Cuthbert didn't just commit the core act, acknowledge what he'd done and then say sorry. Instead, when the police investigated, he concocted a lie about what he'd been doing, causing them to spend a lot more time and money investigating, and only told the truth when caught.
The judge outright stated that, whilst he would be inclined to simply give a slap on the wrists, the fact Cuthbert deliberately lied to the police led him to impose a harsher sentence.
The same holds true of pretty much any law. If the judge feels the law is dubious, unmerrited or whatever, he has freedom for leniency. If you piss them off by deliberately lying to the police though, don't expect them to go easy on you.
"Flip-flopping" is a very stupid term, and even stupider when used as an insult.
Novell made what amounted to a mistake in the eyes of many of their users, and such users let Novell know that. So Novell did the responsible thing, listened to their users, and cleared up the problem. That's not a bad thing. They were being responsive to their customers needs.
Indeed, it's very good when people go back and fix a mistake that they made. It's called being responsible.
However, I do agree with you about the GNOME file selector being quite unusable. It is what keeps me from using Firefox.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Besides, half the apps on your list are toys ... nice toys for a home desktop (yes, amarok and k3b is lovely) but where are the more "serious" apps like scribus? Is there an gtk equivalent? Edutainment? I mention this last because linux might become more and more important in education, and only KDE offers a nice, integrated solution. In fact, I just read about a specific case where schools (in Germany) used KDE because of the edutainment package (was in one of the blogs on kdeplanet).
Which leads me to what I wanted to say originally: marketing. KDE did no or very little marketing, and almost no research of KDE deployment. That's where the "other" project excelled: marketing, case studies, success stories, etc... This way, it was relatively easy for ximian's people to convince Novell's management that they should standardize on GNOME. It was at this year's academy that they decided to form the KDE Marketing Working Group. And in just a few days, oh look: Dutch Record Shop Chain Migrates 1000 PCs to KDE on Novell Linux Desktop that's bye bye for 1000 customers when the next upgrade cycle comes, if Novell standardized on GNOME. They use kiosk mode and the associated admin tools to lock the features - which seems to be a mature feature. In fact, here is an "enterprise ready" praise if there is any:"
And oh look, another two more cases (you have to scroll down). Quote:
So someone (quess who) misrepresented KDE's readiness or usefulness - and the demand for it - in corporate environments. But the damage is already done. Who would trust novell on this now? I think most of the users in the past days were looking at distrowatch (or at the Kubuntu site)
Well, I guess the proof is in the pudding, as they say. TrollTech survive by selling licenses for their toolkit, obviously. There are literally hundreds of apps out there written using it (Photoshop CS, for example). Contrary to your opinion, commercial developers love Qt. No offense, but small developers like you just don't write the big apps that sell. If you made money from your apps, a Qt license would be no big deal. Sorry. (Yes, I'm a C++ developer of many years, and I've worked for big companies and small - right now, I'm in a 16 person startup. I know the value of time to market and working with the best tools.)
I'd like to hear about commercial apps written with gtk. Can you name any? I can't.
KDE == Proprietary and expensive
Your subject is misleading. KDE is not proprietary. It can be expensive though, if you wish to develop proprietary software.
One important thing to consider is that Qt is so darn good. People complain about programming in Gtk. No one complains about programming in Qt. If your employer buys you Qt to develop with, then you're a lucky bastard. The only thing people complain about with Qt is the commercial license cost. In some ways, this reminds me of Apple: pricey, but there are people out there that will pay that price. This is why a lot more "high end" apps are written in Qt (like Pixar's tools, for example).
That said, this is further complicated by the fact that Qt is also free as in GPL. For open source developers, the choice between Gtk and Qt is simple, and this is why KDE thrives. Granted, Gtk is used by a lot of open source developers, but I'd say this is mostly due to preference of the C progamming language. It is the KDE crew that loves what they are doing, and they make faster progress.
You wrote: If you're a "Linux enthusiast", you're using a "free" desktop to prevent paying fees to the likes of Microsoft. But with Qt, you are encouraging people to pay Trolltech.
Maybe so, but you have to admit it is a very different situation. I like that Trolltech gets paid. They give us free stuff. Free as in GPL. That's like corporate suicide. Nobody gives their stuff away like that. Fortunately, here we have a business model that allows it to happen. In fact, it turns the whole system upside down. When you pay Microsoft, you encourage further closed source development. When you pay Trolltech, you are sponsoring open source development. Qt would not be as good as it is today without this funding.
It might be that Qt is "hurting Linux" in some way, as you say. But in my opinion I don't think we'd even be talking about Linux if it weren't for Qt (and you can take that any way you like... simply technical merit, or the fact that without Qt, Gtk wouldn't have been started).
I hear you though. On some days I wish Qt were LGPL/BSD. Simple licenses make life so much easier... But it would be a tradeoff.