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Google Eliminates Gizmo5 Client For Linux
cuttheredwire writes "Evidence on the Gizmo5 forum (login required) confirms that since Google's takeover of Gizmo5, only the Windows, Mac, and iPhone clients are available for download from the official Web page. The Linux download link no longer works. This is a potential problem for happy Linux users with paid-up credit in their Gizmo5 accounts if they need to reinstall the software. A back-door download is still available, although it is speculated on the forums that it will go away soon. Does this mean that (as with other Google projects such as Google Talk) Linux will be the poor relation for Google Voice also?"
Do not allow Linux users to be silenced
Since Google is busy on its own linux-based Chrome OS, I would be surprised if they weren't planning on providing a linux client anytime soon. My guess would be that they're making a linux client to ship with ChromeOS that is kickass, compared to the Gizmo5 builds of windows/mac.
Personally, i am no interested in any voip solution that isn't a standard (sip etc.). If i can't connect my ATA up to it, im not interested.
I don't know about you, but I can't seem to find any downloads unless I go to the specific site where they have it, you can't even get new membership it seems... Seems to me that google has packed up the product and is looking to move it elsewhere, maybe incorporate it in their own software perhaps? and the fact that you can't download linux version from http://www.gizmo5.com/download.php , seems to me to be more of a bug then a "kill the penguins" act, although I guess most of the posts here is going to assume so...
Gizmo, entirely unlike Skype, is based on standard SIP interfaces. You don't need their proprietary client to use the service.
Just pick your favorite SIP client, preferably with a lot of codecs and STUN support, and get on with your day.
Panic over!
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Or you know, maybe Google just feels that there is no pressing need for them to provide their own client merely to use a service which employs an open protocol to which any *nix user already has easy access.
Caveat Utilitor
Um, i checked the gizmo5 site this morning and the Linux client is still on the download page with the OS X and Windows versions.
1998 called, they want their rant back.
http://www.mhall119.com
If we could combine the transparency of Linux system and its expert friendliness, with the user friendly GUI characteristics of Windows and Windows backwards driver and app backwards compatability, it would be a winning combination.
Windows drivers rely on services provided by the NT kernel. So the only way to ensure compatibility with Windows drivers is to reimplement the NT kernel. ReactOS attempts to clone Windows NT 5.x thoroughly, but it's nowhere near ready for prime time. So let me sum up your rant: "I'm disappointed that development has concentrated on Linux rather than ReactOS."
If at their download page(http://www.gizmo5.com/download.php) it lists Linux perfectly prominently, the link is just broken (pointing at a page which seems to have vanished). As the summary pointed out, the files are still there. Since gizmo5.com redirects to a page on google.com, I think a much better summary would be "Google accidentally breaks link while moving website of recently acquired company"
Color me confused, this is a brand of open source that I haven't heard of before: Are you saying that any company that uses open source software should also support Linux with all their projects?
Can you please point me to the text in the GPL/APL/BSD licenses that states that?
Or are you saying that companies *shouldn't* use open source software if they are not willing to see (by most recent estimates) a 1% to 2% Linux desktop market share as a primary platform?
Personally I would be happy that a large company is contributing new programming languages (Go), support & employ the main guy behind Python, contribute to the kernel, released their webbrowser and mobile phone os as open source, organize and sponsor a 'Summer of Code' projects that contribute to open source, spend heaps of cash sponsoring large open source conferences, and, well released over 100 open source projects?
In fact Google is one of the larger contributors to the OSS movement that I personally know of
Citing the "do no evil" does not make you automatically cool, smart or insightful imo, just boring and lame (something about crying wolf comes to mind)
So are you saying that the real story here is that one Linux user decided to install it while the server was momentarily down, freaked out and wrote a panic-mode slashdot submission which was then published to the front page with zero fact checking?
then 2 comments later, your post, with the succinct quote:
It looks like the "Don't Be Evil" days are long gone at Google
This is why I don't pay much attention to slashdot any more, and user-generated content on internet more generally. almost every eloquent vitriolic diatribe, is ill-informed and flat-out wrong. I've been desensitised to arguments that don't have verifiable proof, and it's made me be a complete dick to my friends in real-life debates.
I mean, come on, for a START, Google couldn't be less "evil" without going out of business. There are whole tracts of the moral spectrum that are dubiously grey, that Google make a daily choice not to live in, but nobody is completely immune to technical failures/website bugs/human error. Your rant offends me, because it's a lot harder for the good guys to be good when everyone's going to talk smack about them anyway. It's people like you that make good things go away.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Actually Google does not strut about mouthing "Do no evil", it's in the "Ten things we know to be true" (http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html) that it believes it can do business without being evil, but the strutting around mouthing the "Do no evil" mantra is done by the people who want to use it as some kind of perverted emotional blackmail to force a company to do their bidding.
Now evil is not an objective term, what to one could be considered 'evil' might be perfectly normal to others (drinking alcohol or seeing a woman's hair is 'evil' in some cultures, while heavenly in others) so it is an easy term to abuse.
However calling Google hypocritical while they are the #1 investor in open web protocols (openid, oauth, portablecontacts, opensocial, hyrbid openid/oauth, webfinger, salmon, etc), one of the largest contributors to open source (even though not everything is open source, or anywhere near perfect, they have more people working and contributing to opensource then say red hat, novel or any of the other classic OS companies), they actively sponsor Apache, OS events and motivate people to become OS contributors through the Summer of Code program, and on top of all of that they have released quite a bit over 100 large open source products and libraries.
So ok in your opinion Google's primary business should be desktop software, with Linux ports for each and every one of those products.. Ok and if you were a majority owner of Google that opinion might matter
In reality how ever Google is a web company, and most of the engineers at Google are working on web products that all work fine in Safari, Chrome, FF and even IE, so that really includes all major OS's, and thus sidestepping the 'platform wars' entirely. A smart move i.m.o.
``It's evil to build your huge business on a technology made from community contributions, then take more than you give back while shutting down some community projects.''
I don't agree. If the license allows it, it's fair game. If you didn't want that to happen to your software, you shouldn't have released it under a license that allows it.
If you want licensees to have to make available improvements they make to your code, you may want to take a look at the Affero General Public License. This license requires modifications to be made available not only to receivers of the software, but also to people who use hosted software over a network.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So, are you saying that because Google builds their business on top of open-source technologies, they have an obligation to release EVERY piece of software they've EVER written EVER back to the open-source community? Including their search algorithm, their AdWords processes, etc?
I hope you realize that this is the kind of attitude that impedes greater commercial support of open-source technology. If businesses think that using FOSS means having to placate rabid fanboys like you who bitch and moan that their proprietary technologies (that they depend on for revenue) aren't available for public scrutiny, they're going to say, "Fuck that."
And for the record, the GP is right. Spend five minutes on Google Code and you can see that Google has made and continues to make huge contributions to all kinds of open-source projects. Just because they've decided not to contribute to $MY_PERSONAL_FAVORITE_SOFTWARE, doesn't mean they're evil.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
"Don't let the LSB people fool you. There is no single, common, standard Linux ABI set to target when developing a commercial app"
Not true. If you build your app against X86 LSB 3.2, it'll run on any X86 Linux distro that supports LSB 3.2.
You have to package it twice, once as rpm and once as deb, to reach everybody, but that's not so hard.
And if there are libraries missing from the LSB, you have to link them statically, or hope that
they have the same package name and ABI on all distros.
That said, commercial ISVs really don't have much incentive to support fringe distros. 99% of the linux desktop market is covered by ubuntu/debian, red hat/fedora, suse/opensuse, and maybe mandriva, so that's what ISVs will test against. If you're running something else, and the ISV's app doesn't work, chances are the ISV won't even get enough problem reports to know that it needs fixing. But since that kind of problem doesn't affect 99% of users, that's not so bad. And there's always the chance that the distro can fix the problem (after all, if it works on the four major distros, it's probably not the app's fault).
You wrote:
In Linux though, unless you have a good package system and stick with strickly vanilla packages as offered by the Distro, you are screwed, blued and tattoo'd as soon as you step outside official repositories because of version specific library needs.
But just before that, you wrote:
Although Windows had DLL hell that could give people real headaches, it was fairly easy for the coders to simply change the directory where the app located specific DLL version to it's installation folder though few did.
Why is this solution acceptable for Windows but not Linux? I've seen it done plenty of times on both platforms. Do you just not know what you're talking about? Or are you biased? You are, after all, engaging in apologetics for an admitted fault of Windows when you won't allow the same defense for Linux.
Actually, I think there's a third, far more likely explanation aside from you being uninformed or biased against Linux. People judge potential tasks on a basis of reward to effort ratio. If it's high, the job is worth doing. If it's low, it's not worth doing. And when it's not worth doing, you only considered putting the blame on the effort side and not the reward side. Let's examine that.
When targeting a platform, effort refers to how much work it takes to get your application working on that platform, and the reward is how many users you gain, which is dictated by market share. Assuming the rough estimate of a Windows market share of around 90% and a Linux marketshare of 5%, then to say that the problem with the Linux platform is the ease of developing for it is to say that Linux's problem is that it's not 18 times easier to develop for than Windows. Because that's what it'd take to match the reward-effort ratios. This is an unreasonable demand.
The real problem is the other part of the equation: market share. If Linux had 90% market share instead of Windows, I bet you'd be downplaying the faults of Linux and blaming Windows's faults for lack of developer support. But it really is just a matter of market share, not the intrinsic merits of the competing platforms.
I use Linux on pretty much all of my computers, and I guess I don't fall in with your stereotype that they can't make money off of me, because I pay for:
- Gizmo5 (have done so since pretty much their launch when were called sipphone.com) x 2 accounts
- Google Voice x 2 accounts
- a couple of other SIP service providers
There is one good solution - make your source available, and given that your program is of some minimal usefulness to their users, the distros will package it for you. Not only that, many times they will provide you with free computing resources to [re]compile your program if there is a change in one of the libraries it uses; for not just one, but as many architectures as they support; free bandwidth to distribute it; free bandwidth and support to push out its updates (security, version, etc.) to as many users as you have. Sometimes, they'll even give you feedback, patches, suggestions, AND thank you for it. If you have a subscription model like Google, there is no need to keep the client secret and charge for it.
While reading your post, I noticed that if you substitute Linux with Windows in your rant, you pretty much have the same point, but with none of the above available. There is no single ABI for Windows either. There are multiplicity of DLLs and components that are going to be different versions on different versions of the OS, different service pack levels, different versions of .net or some other random programs installed. Windows XP is different from Vista and 7. Same for Windows 2K[X], unless you have program XYZ already installed, unless it's below version X, unless, unless... Which means you provide all libraries with your app, or it potentially breaks for a lot of users. And no, it's not practical to test every single configuration either. Oh, and this before you get to Windows CE, Tablet PC, or, heaven forbid, Windows Mobile. They look nothing like a single product.
Gizmo uses SIP, and there's no shortage of SIP clients for Linux that are better maintained and more consistently compatible with Linux's ever-changing audio interface. Don't be silenced, but don't riot either.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
This is a very, very old argument, I hope you know. And it's quite wrong.
For all your ranting, you're really just demanding that the open source software ecosystem behave in the same manner as the proprietary software ecosystem that you're used to. I'm surprised that this still needs repeating (especially here on Slashdot), but here it is anyway: Open source software and proprietary software are not the same thing.
In the proprietary software world, all players take responsibility only for their own products. (And often, not even then.) When there's a problem that looks like it might be the fault of some other company's product, the user is directed to the other company for support. Sometimes, the situation reaches a stalemate where one company blames the other and you can't get them to budge from that position. Since the code is closed, you don't even have the option of fixing the problem yourself, even if you have the skills to do so or the money to hire someone. If you want anything besides a base OS install (which generally isn't very useful), you have to go out and buy software, and then go through an often non-trivial installation process involving physical media, registration, CD keys, and reboots.
In the Linux world, the distributions try to take responsibility for the entirety of the end-user's computing experience. On Linux, the onus is on the distribution to provide a stable and usable base system, hardware drivers, desktop environment, and thousands upon thousands of free third-party programs. End-user support is largely community-based, but there are commercial support options as well. To install new software, you just open up your package manager, click a button or two, and your new software (plus any dependencies) is installed automatically. Most hardware devices are completely plug-and-play right out of the box, with no device drivers to manually install or some endless series of reboots.
"Fragmentation," as many people put it, is part of the Linux ecosystem by design. It gives the distributions the freedom to innovate, try new features, new designs, new subsystems, and so on. It gives the end user choice. If they don't like one Linux distribution for whatever reason, there are several others to download and take for a spin. If all distributions were forced into a single unyielding design or set of libraries all for the sake of a few proprietary apps, then there would no longer be any point to having multiple distributions. All distros would essentially be indistinguishable and we'd be stuck with the same interface, bugs, and security problems for decades on end. (Remind you of anyone?)
Google certainly can leave it up the distros to port and build, that's the way the Linux software ecosystem is meant to work. All Google has to do is release the source and the distros will do the rest. Subscription fees don't even enter into it. You can't please everyone and there will always get people who get mad at the world because they don't know how to operate their own computer, but if the software is good enough, there will be few support problems. Even in the worst-case scenario, it would even be within Google's right to say, "here's a port of our software to Linux, you're free to use it, but don't come crying to us for support." This is exactly how Skype has always handled it and they seem to be doing just fine.
Well there's always the elitist and arrogant attitude of those who haven't used linux since 1998 and don't even realise that most modern distros are far better for common users needs than their current Windows box. These idiots who think granny and most people are going to learn how to edit registry files and remove their own viruses?