Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Victories of 2008
Meshach writes "Ars Technica has an interesting run-down on the major open source victories of 2008. Some, like Firefox 3, we can probably mostly agree on. Others — KDE 4 comes to mind — will be more controversial. And Mono 2? What else should be on the list?"
KDE4's fine... once you're talking 4.1 and later. The 4.0 stuff was very alpha quality, though a necessary step to get developers to actively start supporting it.
They probably meant that the controversy would be because 4.0 was a temporary step backward from 3.5 in features and stability.
wont feel like a victory if MS decides to pull the carpet off everyone's feet someday. to my mind, the phrase "walking on eggs" illustrates perfectly the situation of those developing or relying on Mono.
I can't believe nobody mentioned AMD open sourcing all of the Radeon documentation. That's some of the biggest open source news this year imho.
>> they should probably scrap it and start over by porting KDE3 to Qt4.
I agree 100% that the KDE 4 lacks a horrible level of features for a release series, thus far. The 4.2 betas are more stable and usable for users than 4.0 and 4.1 combined (:P Literally if combining means combining bugs)
That said, since porting would involve re-reading and recoding the whole old codebase, and reimplementing would also involve re-reading and recoding the whole old codebase, I think that scrapping the _very nice_ desktop framework is a very poor suggestion.
Really the new Desktop model is better than the old. The current implementation sucks from lack of features - but it is a better start than a 3.x port. The underlying work are complete enough that a port is now simply beyond a waste of effort. KDE 4 is here to stay, and this is not a bad thing.
> If Wine works well, why should I, (a developer) want to port my appz to *nix?
You should write them portable from the beginning. Use cross platform libraries, Qt (desktop applications/Games), wxWidgets (Desktop applications, license suits closed source apps also), SDL (2D games, very portable, but not very OOP), Irrlicht (3D games, easy to use) etc.
There libraries, e.g. wxWidgets, Qt and Irrlicht are easier to use than MFC and DirectX, so there is really no reason to write closed source applications. It is more expensive and it is not portable.
> but in all these years I've NEVER been asked about a Linux port
I quite rarely ask, especially if I see that the app has been written in MFC or Visual Basic, because I just know that they will never port it. That doesn't mean that I would not need Linux port. Instead I might write my own solution, release it as open source and become a competitor to you, with version that is portable and free.
VirtualBox 2.x (2.1? not sure) recently got 3d acceleration support. Most of the other open source VMs (as well as the proprietary ones) are also going to accelerated 3d. Combined with the general move towards multiple cores and hardware support for virtualisation, this is pretty much guaranteed to bring decent windows (and OS X) app and gaming support to Linux. If physics acceleration takes off more, it'll be the next milestone, but there's still time for that, and the 3d acceleration technology combined with things like OpenCL should help to make physics accel support a smaller/faster project.