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NX Compression Technology To Go Closed Source
An anonymous reader writes "NoMachine has sneakily revealed it is closing its source of the NX compression technology with NX 4.0: 'This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4.0 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.'"
"NoMachine has sneakily revealed..."
That's quite remarkable.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
VNC or reverse engineer an open alternative.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Such a niche tech. Who are their customer base?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Perhaps I don't remember it right, but in my recollection, NoMachine has always been a bit possessive with their (definitely impressive) technology. To the point that lesser alternatives have continued to be used and even developed.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
why else would they close their source when the compression industry is already saturated with near optimal free products?
Someone will come along and make a better opensource alternative to it.
It would appear they've achieved the impossible.
Not impossible. To me, "sneakily reveal" sounds like "bury in a tl;dr changelog".
Source is out there... it will live forever.
Rather than bitch about how they're making it closed source, or dismissing the gesture entirely, maybe this should be taken as a sign that the problem NX solves needs a different solution. Like, oh I don't know... maybe revising the X windows protocol so it doesn't suck so hard it has its own event horizon?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Suggest you change the public key used: See this article (Google cache as the original site appears to be behaving flaky). http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jfMRnjYGzqMJ:www.nomachine.com/ar/view.php%3Far_id%3DAR01C00126+nx+public+key&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Here is an explanation of what NX compression technology is.
I am trying to think of any company that has closed their source and been more successful and I can't think of any. It sure didn't help SSH. NX used to be really great and a number of people I know used it. But I don't know any one that still does.
They spent years doing something and along comes google with "yay, we can do it better and give it away for free!"
we wont use it anymore.
Read radical news here
Didn't take much slashdotting and www.nomachine.com is down for the count already. Somehow there is irony in seeing your browser fail to load a domain with that name.
It seems to me NX came up with some good technology and they think they should therefore be able to profit greatly off of it.
Like many pieces of great technology, however, nobody gives a shit about the problem NX is trying to solve. The market is tiny for the number of people who would buy this kind of technology, so they're not going to be the next VMWare.
Their only hope is to adapt it to something that is useful and sell it to some larger company.
Specifically, the core tech isn't too shabby. Their session management stuff with awkward use of ssh keys and a separate user on top of the user's real account, a real awkward mess. I use a complete separate management of nxagent/nxproxy that doesn't use any extraneous user and it's nice.
The real shame is their strategy seemed to be oriented around selling their crappy session management stuff and giving away the quality stuff.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The reason that the "core" bits of NX were always Free is because dxpc (and, thus, mlview-dxpc, from which NX sprang) is only available under the GPL.
If i was involved in dxpc (or mlview-dxpc, really, although I'd imagine most of those changes are owned by the NX folks) development I'd be lawyering up at this point, if only to get some kind of proof that I wasn't being ripped off.
You're doing it wrong.
I am not busting on NX - I like their software - but the real star of the show is ssh... without which NX is nothing.
And ssh remains open.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It seems like the project never bothered to get polished, but it is a handy frontend to nxagent/nxproxy with manual tweaking:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplenx/develop
It won't work with nxclient at all or anything, but I don't need to be root on the server to get it working.
NX is significantly better than running X over SSH. X protocols are very chatty to the point of being unusable when remotely administering a server not on the local LAN. The NX server and NX protocol have optimized away a lot of the network roundtrips found in the X protocols.
For example, I have a server hosted on a datacenter about 10 miles from me. It is running Ubuntu Server 10.10 with Gnome desktop. My pings to my server are 15ms and my upload bandwidth is 384 kilobytes/sec. When I access it with XMing over Putty/SSH the desktop is unusable (with or without SSH compression enabled). I can see each dialog or window individually redraw. However, when I use NX over SSH, it is almost as fast as if I were sitting in front of the server. There are a few things that are laggier, but overall, with NX the GUI on the server is very usable.
NX also has excellent built-in session suspend/resume support. You can get something similar with X, but it is not built-in, you have to install and run additional programs.
I have also tried using VNC to administer the server but found it nowhere near as smooth as NX.
Time to find an alternative to NoMachine then. I guess I could just go back to using nothing but the shell to remote-manage my web server.
But better enough to pay for it? Most will say that its not. Some will.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
just use the x2go server from the linux4africa project
who smells source fork?
I've switched from using no machine's product to the x2go project a few months ago. I liked it enough that i stopped using no machine's product at all.
There is nothing software based on the market right now which comes close to offering what NX has. Nothing. X, VNC and Spice all have their drawbacks and it boils down to how they behave with limited bandwidth and high latency. With NX, our engineers can actually be productive in an NX session. While I am philosophically opposed to them closing the source for version 4 and not sharing, the pragmatist in me is thinking "hey, built in web server, cool, that'll make it easier for me to allocate VMs to the engineers via a web gui. Screw that NX plugin crap.".
Until someone can come up with an open source product that does what NX does, as well as offer a web client, we're sticking with it. It simply is the best that is out there.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
I've been using FreeNX since Fedora 8 or so and it's superior in just about every way to VNC. Yeah, it's annoying brittle when the distro's packages are broken or not configured correctly, but that's just an implementation issue. The way it caches X calls makes a remote desktop run at local speeds over most broadband. This is a technology that needs to be brought mainstream.
That said, this is probably not the end of the world. They weren't bragging about any protocol level enhancements, more user level enhancements like a "revamped client GUI" which were never available under an open source license anyway. The core NX library is probably pretty mature by now. Since all future development on their side will be closed, it presents the opportunity for a real project to grow up around a fork. No more being held back by lockstep to a company that never wanted a successful open solution to begin with.
Not for me, as a Win/Mac/Nix user, I want something with clients/servers where i need them... VNC/VNC+SSH works... not as well as NX or RDP, but hey, that's the price I pay...
Wouldn't remote X11 over BZ stream cut it similarly?
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
But SCO is bunch of evil cheap bastards and they won't let them call the new product UNIX Compression Technology because the the standard licensing package only includes the rights to use consonants of the UNIX trademark. A license package that included vowels costs a few million dollars extra.
Instead of all just sitting there wondering why they are closing the source, and wondering what you can use in its place, just download and try it. They have obviously closed the source because they got fed up with "the community" taking a technology for free without giving a shit back. They have no doubt got some tricks up their sleeves, and who said no one uses it? It is clear you don't read much, you just sit there and drink your free beer. Who cares about forks, it's nomachine that's holding the knife by its handle.
Linus himself says Git is not as good as BitKeeper.
Actually when I had a need for Linux remoting which actually was not do slow, I paid for NX already years ago. It simply was so much better.
The glorified plain X remoting is a dog once you get out of the Lan area, and it is one of the reasons why I hate X passionately and wished the protocol finally would be overhauled for modern times.
VNC also almost never is a solution in WAN scenarios due to streaming also being dog slow. RDP and NX simply are the best protocols for such things there is no discussion.
And NX is basically X done right or more along the lines, X fixed up so that the glorified remote protocol actually is usable.
[citation needed]
Linus : "I'm an egotistical bastard"
Imagining Linus actually admitting that something was better than something he wrote is hard. git soundly beats BitKeeper in terms of performance ; BK was managing a kernel patch merge in 6 seconds at a time that git was managing 6 patches per second. Squishy-feeling UI considerations don't sound like Linus' bag, and he wrote git specifically to cater to his needs, so I'm struggling to grasp what he would consider "better" about BitKeeper over git.
He thought BitKeeper was better than all the other VCS systems at the time he started git, that I will concede.
Screenscaping (VNC) will suck as much as it always did and X11 derived solutions (NX) won't work. Now might be the time to consider how over the wire functionality such as 3d, compositing etc. occurs and plumb it in in a much more coherent and integrated way with Wayland. Really there should be no reason for there to be a separate product to do this anyway on the server side. On the client side I imagine there will be lots of competing products both commercial and open source which would consume the content.
How graphics went over the wire really depends on the capabilities of the server and of the client and the datapipe between them. I expect that OpenGL instructions would form the basis of it, but would there be scope to merge, concatenate, cull instructions over the wire? Would there be scope for the server to perform certain transforms to spare the client the effort? Should the server send all textures, shaders, meshes etc. as is or also provide functionality to simplify them? Perhaps the client has a more powerful GPU than the server. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Perhaps the server would have to render most of the screen in some cases or not other. Perhaps the server has too many connections and doesn't have the GPU available to do this. Lots of questions, but it seems like this is all plumbing that should be considered for Wayland.
Obviously things like mouse, clipboard have to be considered too but I expect those issues are largely solved and fairly trivial compared to the graphical bits.
lol, they've just signed their company's death warrant. They couldn't even get people to use NX when it was free! What hope is there now? Oh well... Hopefully Wayland will be able to do this much better anyway.
While interesting, does it matter? Does anyone actually use NX anyways? This will affect what, maybe 3 or 4 people at most?
and just how much of their work was based on other people's work?
No, and for this reason.
It is a special protocol, mostly designed by Nomachine, caching round trips for improved latency, and do smart compression of X11 (including even bitmap compression).
I'm using free version and so far it's been very satisfactory. Biggest complain is handling of keyboard mappings which are sometimes broken on evdev-enabled client machines. However windows client seems to work OK (minus a few quirks).
Free version allows up to 2 simultaneous sessions and up to 2 users, which is fine for me. No idea if this will be available for 4.0.
Also I think they should start advertising that their software is used by some CERN experiments. CMS and ATLAS both have it for remote logging into their detector intranets and in my experience this makes life MUCH easier.
Commercial SSH has always just pretty much been for suckers...
That's probably true if you refer only to command line ssh.
For GUI SSH, however, spending a bit of coin can be very much worth it.
I have to use Windows on my work desktop, from which I help manage hundreds of remote Linux boxen. It would be madness to do that that with PuTTY, with its horrible UI, or with ssh in a Cygwin window, where session management is entirely missing, unless you count ~/.ssh/config. The commercial GUI SSH client we use[*] lets us organize all those sessions, save login info, and sync all that among the handful of computers used by the people who I help with those remote servers. A user name, password, or IP changes about once a week, somewhere. Managing that with just command line tools would be less efficient. Further, we get features like a tabbed UI, integrated file transfer, scripting, etc. We pay back our hundred bucks a seat in efficiency pretty quickly.
[*] no point naming it, I'm not here to sell anyone anything
I frequently use NX and have just now performed a side by side test which at least shows for my situation that NX is better than VNC. I've got two identical PC's on a local network, each running ubuntu 10.04 updated. Local machine has two flat screen displays, I've got an NX full screen connection on the right display, and a VNC full screen connection on the left. The remote machine is used to access some graphical waveform control screens. Output of top shows VNC (vinagre) is using 8% of CPU compared to 4% of CPU for NX (nxssh). Both are using same amount of memory at 0.6%. Just moving the mouse around in the window shows the difference between the two, the mouse pointer movement is smooth on the NX display and jumpy on VNC. Windows open immediately on the NX display and are slow to display on VNC. I tried VNC with and without JPEG compression option and it made no apparent difference.
I have no doubt that VNC is inferior in performance to NX. But a much harder comparison to perform is to compare NX to RDesktop. The two protocols are more like each other than like VNC, and I'd expect their performance to be alike as well. NX is more like LBX (low bandwidth X) in terms of performance, although significantly better in my opinion, and more portable (LBX never really caught on).
VNC is popular not because it is fast, but because it is so very easy. It's way easier to setup VNC than NX. There are lots and lots of clients and servers available for VNC. And having written my own VNC server from scratch I can tell you one reason for this is because it is easy to develop VNC software. In addition there are plenty of open source VNC library forks to begin development on a VNC based project.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
NX sucks anyways. Yeah the compression is good and once setup it works alright, but getting it setup is a bitchy process. This is where x2go and (from what I've heard) Xrdp shine. Good luck with your shitty proprietary technology that nobody will use in the future.
It doesn't seem of any importance whatsoever to me, considering I had never heard of NX before opening this page.
I am not devoid of humor.