Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
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.