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.'"

Comments

Re:The more reason to use something else.

[sl3xd]

I've never seen NX perform as well as VNC - espescially Turbo/Tiger VNC with VirtualGL.

If you're doing remote 3D/scientific visualization, Turbo/Tiger VNC and VirtualGL is far and away better than NX. I've gotten 20 fps for 1280x1024 3D graphics -- over a 2 Mbit connection. VirtualGL/TurboVNC can also handle clusters of GPU's (ie. many nodes, each rendering part of an extremely complex image). The final screen buffer is then tunneled over SSH. It's amazing, frankly, to have some-odd 16 or so GPU's rendering a hellaciously complex 3D scene, and then it gets sent over a tiny pipe using TurboVNC & VirtualGL, and is then displayed on a netbook with very usable frame rates.

I didn't believe it was possible until I tried it myself. Recall you can stream a movie at close to DVD quality at 2 MBit; so I guess it's not that unbelieveable after all.

NX, in comparison, couldn't even start glxgears.

you don't need any special ports open, just SSH

SSH is all you need for anything. It's port forwarding and tunneling capabilities can be used for anything that uses TCP/IP - NFS, VNC, Samba, HTTP, video games - anything.

NX does the same thing - it uses SSH port forwarding & tunneling; it just handles it transparently for the user.

This is hardly unique to NX, as many VNC implementations also uses SSH transparently for the user.

And it's been pointed out - there isn't a major platform that VNC doesn't support.