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What 2008 May Hold In Store for FOSS
eldavojohn writes to mention that LinuxPlanet has a brief discussion on what 2008 may hold for FOSS. The list includes thoughts on KDE 4, OOXML, DRM, and 3-D desktops. What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to in 2008?
That's what I'd like, a version of bash implemented in opengl, so I can make the console apps I write look funky.
Not perhaps the highest priority of the FOSS world, but sometimes you just gotta go with 'it`d be fun'.
A Linux port of Duke Nukem Forever, now that we finally know it isn't just vaporware...
I've been hearing about this "free beer" with FOSS for years... maybe in 2008 we'll finally get some?
I'm thinking many would not consider DRM in FOSS to be a boon of any sort...
>>And in 2009 I hope a giant pengiun robot attacks Microsoft headquarters.
Quick someone call the japanese. They can build it. It would be awesome even if it didn't have any weapons. Just walking around the MSFt campus would be great for laughs.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I really REALLY mean it this time!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The end of the tyranny of copyright law. Only then will there be true progress. Otherwise, this and everything else will be buried under the dog pile of licensing, which has already begun.
What?
bash *could* support opening an OpenGL screen to display a 3D model paper clip to help you enter commands...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm among those who would be happy if existing apps could get fixed, Firefox being the prime example. On my G4 Mac every new realease of FF brings more crashes, more memory leaks, and generally more sluggish performance. I finally abandoned it last month for Opera, which I am liking very much.
When most Open Source apps were small, simple and fast I could tolerate the inevitable bugs, and assume that they would be fixed up in the next release. Now it feels like everyone is working to add more and more features and "widgets," but no-one is worrying about overall stability and reliability.
Three Squirrels
I'm not trying to say we should necessarily support a company that has a lot of bad practices, but they create a huge market for us to make money. When they release a new OS, they beef up the minimum requirements for it and in turn brings prices of last gen products down in price for us to use.
There is no reason that AI shouldn't be integrated into the OS, but "invisibly". Here's an example:
Joe User gets a lot of email. He tends to be organized, so he likes to sort his mail into different folders. He could use procmail or his client's filtering capabilities, but why should he have to? OSS has good solutions to the text classifying problem
If only the email client (or imap server) paid attention, he's already supplying all the input necessary for a text classifier to sort all his mail for him without any additional action on his part.
When Joe (manually) moves an email from his inbox to a new folder, this is a training event.
If Joe notices that an email is in an incorrect folder and moves it (manually) to the right one, this is a retraining event.
This concept could be expanded to other applications: how about a window manager that remembers where you tend to arrange your applications and starts putting them in the right place to begin with? The ability do manually set placement rules like with KDE doesn't count. That's just a workaround for not using the information the user is already providing.
You probably got modded because it was a crazy ass sounding rant against trying to predict tech trends by using religion. You then followed up with a bunch of offtopic tripe.
Tech website speculating about the future of FOSS in the next year.... yeah... it happens. That's great that no one will remember who predicted what. That's not the point of the exercise. The point is to discuss it NOW for the heck of it. It most likely has nothing to do with hating religion.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
From the article: "And it is true that food and clothing may seem like more immediate priorities in many regions."
Please do not send any more clothes. You've already killed off the local textile industry and put all the cotton farmers out of work with your free clothes. Who can compete with free crap? Please stop.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1076411.stm
I no longer donate clothes for exactly this reason.
Why do they keep selling themselves to DirectX instead of OpenGL? GRRRR!
Because DirectX and OpenGL are not equivalents. OpenGL is only an API for drawing graphics; with DirectX you can not only do graphics, but you can also handle sound, input, networking, and more. The only open source equivalent to DirectX that I'm aware of is SDL, which is perfectly usable, but honestly it's not nearly as powerful as DirectX is. If you want just as much power, you'll have to go hunting through half a dozen common different alternatives for every aspect of your game, and none of them will work on every Linux system out there.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Just reiterating what the other poster said. In the normal world, you get paid for the work you do, not the work of your work. If I hire Bob to come build me a gate, he doesn't get to charge me every time someone comes through it. He is paid to build the gate and then he gets the hell out of my life. He only gets paid again if I need him to return and do more work.
Same with the novel (or insert song, program, etc in here). You might have (and without copyright likely would have) been paid to write the story in the first place. Once you've been paid to write, you write the novel. Now, you can choose to only give it (or you could technically sell it) to the people who already gave you money, but the bottom line is you will have already been paid to write it. Once it's done your part is done and if people want to make copies of it to sell, or to give away, that's their own concern. If you want to keep raking in cash you better have written a story good enough that people are willing to pay you to write another one. And you better be willing to write a number of "sample" stories to begin with if you want anybody to start reading your stuff.
With music, it's even easier. You could in the same way be paid to write the songs, or more likely you would be paid for live performances (ie, you are actually gonna have to get out there and do work again).
With software, GPL isn't needed because if you release a closed source version of my code I'm just gonna decompile it, reimplement the changes in a high level language, and rerelease it again. If you want to be paid for software, someone will end up hiring you to do a custom program for them (ie, you must work, not live off imagined entitlement), or you can write free stuff and charge to support it (again, working).
You also have to understand that not EVERYTHING will/would be feasible with copyright gone. It's a shift of society, but for the better. I'm sure if we reinstituted slavery we could achieve some absolutely marvelous feats in construction and such, but that doesn't mean it's something that a fair society should support. I seriously doubt large scale motion pictures as they currently stand would still be realistically profitable (though live theater certainly might return to a much more profitable status). That's not something we can't live without though, and it's certainly not worth instituting insanely oppressive laws over.Copyright instills a limited supply (and source) onto something that by nature is unlimited (and not really even tangible). It's one of the most perverted corruption of economics ever seen.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
SDL + OpenGL + OpenAL + OpenTNL (or HawkNL) + ODE + DevIL + FreeType. There you go, Windowing + Input + Threading, Graphics, Sound, Networking, Physics, Texture loading and Fonts all with a similar syntax (i.e. glEnable, alInit etc.) all also aim to be cross-platform and importantly, all bind together really well and will compile on pretty much any modern Linux distro, Windows or Mac OS. Of course Microsoft provides math functions (but honestly.. you only need to write a math lib once and there are plenty free ones out there anyway). Write a game using those libraries and you hardly need to do anything to make it completely cross-platform (just file paths *cough*boost-filesystem*cough* and a few other bits and pieces).
There are 2 reasons Microsoft has a hold on the games market:
1. They provided a decent, well-supported solution first (well by the time they got to DX7 or 8 anyway)
2. Big games developers can't just change the way they work without a very VERY good reason.
The only way we can expect a shift in Linux support in games is if Linux market share gets to about 20% and ATI/nVidia really start supporting open source drivers properly so Linux drivers can as fast (if not faster) than the Windows ones. It will happen... it'll just take time.