Access to information is a valuable commodity in itself, one which existing structures often withhold from the poorest, who typically are farmers or labourers. Imagine being a subsistence farmer who relies on a small surplus from each harvest in order to be able to afford access to medicines or schooling for his children. Now imagine a cooperative or community of such people having access to accurate information about crop prices (this is probably the single most important financial value to farmers everywhere) and being able to negotiate with local middle men instead of being dictated to by them. There's nothing 'primitive' about this need, it's universal and it empowers communities and individuals. In fact it's essential to anythign which pretends to be a free market. Just because someone toils in the fields doesn't mean they are unintelligent or any less astute than someone who works in an office in a developed nation, and the benefit they can obtain from affordable access to information from disinterested parties is likely to be as great or greater and certainly more vital than the benefit obtained by those of us who already have easy access to information, medicines, education etc.
Circumventing copy protection? DMCA anyone? If he did this to a US site he would be charged with a felony. As the lawyer's letter states the act of circumvention of copy prevention took place on UK based servers and he's guilty under UK law.
"Unlawful circumvention of technical measures
s.296ZF(1) of the CDPA provides as follows:
"In sections 296ZA to 296ZE, "technological measures" are any technology, device or component which is designed, in the normal course of its operation, to protect a copyright work other than a computer program."
s.296ZA(1) of the CDPA provides as follows:
"This section applies where -
(a) effective technological measures have been applied to a copyright work other than a computer program; and
(b) a person (B) does anything which circumvents those measures knowing, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he is pursuing that objective.
As you know, the images from our client's website that you have copied were made available from our client's website using "Zoomify" software. As you know, Zoomify is an application that is used to publish photographic images in such a way that an entire high resolution image is never made available to a user although high-resolution extracts or "tiles" are made available one-at-a-time. Our client used the Zoomify technology to protect our client's copyright in the high resolution images.
By deliberately posting images from our client's website to the Wikipedia website in which the Zoomify software has been circumvented you have therefore acted in breach of section 296ZA(1) of the CDPA.
[edit] "
If you contend that the act of circumvention took place in the US then he's guilty under the far more onerous US law. Whichever way you look at it he did something that if discovered inevitably leads to either litigation or criminal prosecution. The NPG made an attempt to deal with this on a less formal basis and was rebuffed, hence litigition ensues.
The NPG does not "lock up culture". It's a *public* gallery with *no admission charge*. The images of all the works are already *freely* and publicly viewable online. The collections are made available nationally and globally by means of touring exhibitions. Why does Wikipedia need to surreptitiously and illegally obtain high res versions?
As to reputation, it has nothing to do with the person's nationality. Imagine Wikimedia being known as an entity that disregards, undermines and damages the world's finest publicly funded, liberal arts bodies, bodies which have a proven record over decades and centuries of public education, free access, 1st class scholarship and conservation, and free dissemination of culture and knowledge.
Dcoetzee *could* have tried some kind of negotiation instead of immediately resorting to illegal means. Back on reputation, you might like to consider that if he had performed the same circumvention of copy protection against a US based site he would be guilty of a felony under the DMCA and the result would have been rather more forceful than a request to remove the images, followed by litigation on refusal.
He could have just asked for permission to use the pictures. The NPG is not some corporate hawk, it's publicly funded, having an ethos of education and self improvement for all, in the Victorian tradition. The person who obtained the images chose to ignore this and harvest thousands of high resolution images (why does Wikipedia need high-res to display 96dpi???), circumventing copy protection in the process. The sale of these images, at extremely reasonable and non-commercial rates, is one of the sources of funding for the NPG.
Dcoetzee has brought into conflict two organisations which should normally benefit from each other, damaged the reputation of Wikipedia and all around acted like an idiot.
"An operating system provides fundamental services"....that the user simply shouldn't need to know or care about. Here's what the consumer of a Chrome OS netbook needs to know: how much time do I have left on battery? Am I connected to the www? That's it. Everything else pertinent to the end user is outsourced to Google's distinctly non-free servers. It's all happening elsewhere. If the OS is reliable (it should be, being built on well tested technology and *relatively* simple) then local maintenance and admin issues won't exist.
"I can't fathom why apple chose to create another windowing system rather than use X....."
Because they prefer to drive and manage their own development as far as possible, and not be subject to the success or otherwise of yet another 3rd party, especially one that doesn't regard Apple as any more important than all the other contributors and distributors? Because if they used a free windowing system on top of a free base they wouldn't have much of a proprietary product?
pacpl vs any other batch audio transcoder
cdrdao (as used as EAC's burning engine)
mplayer
ffmpeg
any package management toolset/suite vs windows update
amule/emule vs edonkey/overnet (whose death kind of writes the judgement in stone)
bittorrent vs whatever awful crap the media industry concocted this week
truecrypt
enfcs
matroska
mousepad vs notepad ha ha ha
moc vs 300 crappy music players
thunar/konqueror/nautilus vs explorer
midnight commander vs 20 norton commander clones
vlc
linux kernel vs nt kernel (nt is ok but can it run my router and my nas....no)
screen
sshfs
gcc
dictd
sqlite
bash, bash-completion
busybox
cowsay:-)
7-zip
kwm, xfwm even metacity vs microsoft window manager
lame vs frauenhofer
ok am bored now will stop. Clearly the purpose and qualities of many of these tools will elude the inquirer, though the limitation is his, not the software's. Nor am I claiming that every free software tool is equal to or superior to a similar proprietary tool, but many are.
It occurs to me that the author failed to acknowledge the single most interesting recent development in the free desktop which also happened to be completely commercially driven and successful; the interfaces designed for the Acer Aspire and Asus EEE PC netbooks. They are totally unlike anything produced by Gnome, KDE or shipped by any of the well known distributors. They are certainly not what most people would want on a home desktop or a big laptop but when you use them as intended, on a device with a small screen and relatively limited expandability, they are very impressive. They do what a good GUI should do, that is they let the user enjoy the device's capabilities while letting them ignore/forget/not care about what lies underneath. I was quite impressed playing with these things in the local store and I downloaded Linpus Lite to try for real on a regular laptop and I could see that it is extremely well thought out and coherent and nice to use. The people with a strong need and desire to have OEMs ship their product in huge numbers produced something utterly different in concept and execution to KDE and Gnome and it worked well enough for them to ship millions. It's not just the different desktop concept that is interesting to me, more interesting is seeing how raw commercial incentive takes the same set of tools and drives in a completely different, almost opposite, direction and produces a very well defined and valid solution.
Continuity is there in free desktops in the same way it exists in OS X and Windows....in parts. Gnome and KDE and MS and Apple have all at some point had to accept that backwards compatibility has too high a price, then swallow hard and offer something which upsets a lot of people (even more than usual ha ha). Anyway there's plenty more to the free desktop than Gnome and KDE so it's not even a notable issue for many.
Mostly the article is filler. Precis: is KDE lead developer pissing in the wind? Maybe. Should I mention Ubuntu in every article just for the fanboi hits? Definitely. Are end users uncomfortable with unfamiliar concepts and interfaces? Yes...until they become familiar with them. Is the cheque in the post and will I churn out more turgid hackery next week? Yes and inevitably.
I think that's a good summary of the anxieties of end users.
"the greater danger is always simply that the package maintainers will simply stop working on the project."
That's something real and within most people's experience. Yet it doesn't stop us happily using all kinds of stuff which may be deprecated/abandoned in a few years. And a common event, especially with proprietary applications, is the breaking of backward compatibility. Still it doesn't deter many people. So my guess is that as mono and mono-based applications *are* free software and *are* distributable and *do* offer distributions and end users and developers applications that appeal and a development environment that appeals then it will take more than the fear and uncertainty to hold it back. Something like a protracted legal dispute (one with actual expensive lawyers involved as opposed to one involving bloggers screaming or bizarre campaigns of slander against individual developers) or a decision by either the FSF or the OSI that mono doesn't meet their definitions of Free or Open Source software. Unless that happens then the people who oppose mono are really wasting their breath.
A reasoned opinion, well expressed. Like a breath of fresh air.
My understanding (I may be wrong and am happy to be corrected) is that the worst that Microsoft could do would be to extend.NET in ways that make projects built on mono incapable of being compatible with.NET. They can do this without any "attack" on mono as it currently exists. As far as desktop applications go it's pretty much a non-issue or a minor issue because cross compatibility with Windows.NET isn't the goal of the typical mono application. It would be a bigger issue if mono was, like Sun's Java, the basis of important enterprise applications. That doesn't seem to be the case. Again I'm happy to be corrected and to be shown those widely used cross platform enterprise tools.
And what would happen if *somehow* mono itself was directly attacked, perhaps becoming the subject of litigation in the way BSD was, becoming so surrounded with uncertainty that it gains de facto untouchable status?
Gnome and various developers, in house and independent, would have wasted some time and resources. Tomboy is not the only note tool, F-Spot is not the only photo manager and Beagle is not the only meta-search tool. Whatever the merits or otherwise of these applications they are clearly attractive to users, distributions want to ship them and developers evidently enjoy improving them. But none of them is necessarily irreplaceable. Existing installations would continue to work, the end users would not immediately be disadvantaged. The issue then becomes "what are the replacements?". At that point I'm left wondering why the vociferous opponents of mono have singularly failed to create applications with the same appeal. I'm not sure porting Tomboy to C++ is exactly inspirational. The one truly effective and practical act that would negate mono would be the development of applications with the same appeal to users and distributions and the Gnome project. Tracker is a reasonable substitute for Beagle. Despite being a fan and a user of Gthumb and Geeqie I wouldn't have the bare-faced cheek to claim they are drop in replacements for F-Spot or even claim to have similar goals or features in many important ways. One has to doubt the potential longevity of Gnote, given that it exists principally as a protest and offers nothing new in the way of ideas or presentation.
Free software relies on all kinds of sources. The GNU system itself was/is a re-implementation of UNIX. Many of the languages used started off as proprietary. There's nothing new in this. Where is the campaign to purge Fortran or Pascal from the free software opus? Why no campaign against Samba and the use of the SMB protocol? Why is nobody outraged at DotGNU? Where are the calls to cease supporting.avi container and other MS developments?
Essentially this hatred of mono is about its origin not its qualities or legal status. That is Microsoft in the first instance and then it's a continuation of long standing and often vitriolic personal attacks on M de Icaza which gained added impetus and some spice with Novell's deal with MS.
It's hard to debate with people when their fundamental position is composed essentially of hatred, fear and dislike of persons or groups. Where is the factual basis? Where is the ability to consider anything useful when hate or fear is the driving force? This is religion by another name, it cannot be reasoned with, it is impervious to contradictory verifiable fact, it allows no deviation.
I find it curious that one of the people who might agree quite strongly with the botycottnovell stance is a certain Mr S. Ballmer. He's known to have a similar affable nature and often makes the startlingly similar assertions regarding patents and free software.
boycottnovell couldn't be doing a better job if they were a paid Microsoft stooge.....
"you are unnecessarily acting like an arsehole... "
"If you have nothing civil to say. Shut up."
There speaks the voice of reason, a mellow tone, enhanced by the author's keen grasp of facts, generous nature and delightful delicacy of writing style. Conoisseurs of English, philosophy, manners and other of the gentle arts please gather and drink deeply of this wisdom. Be thankful that the muse has blessed us all.
Maybe that will happen. It's just as likely as anything else. This is in Sid. There are at least 18 months until a new Debian release. Sid now does not translate into Debian stable 2011. Sid's a big mish mash, there's no assurance that anything in there now progresses to stable or anything not in it right now won't run that course. Sid's not even guaranteed to be complete in itself. It may have missing or broken libraries and dependencies.
It's a development branch. Stuff changes every day of every week.
The people getting self-righteously outraged about some (free software) packages in a development branch, Sid, or writing headlines about 'the default install' aren't doing much more than reminding everyone that they are remarkably stupid as well as loud and tiresome.
Debian also offers an Xfce/LXDE version of CD1 and a KDE version of CD1, CD1 being the installer. Neither of these offer mono or Gnome (duh!). Debian also offers fine grained package selection in all the installers, and a netinstall and a tiny netinstall, the businesscard iso. There is also the DVD installer which offers a choice of desktop environments along with the usual options for fine grained selection of packages, the 'Expert Install' option.
So *one* of the numerous ways of installing Debian *may* offer Tomboy to those who want it. Cue howls of intolerant, ill-informed, unsubstantiated quasi-religious outrage.....
And anyway mono is accepted as free software by the two bodies which are best placed to determine its status, the FSF and the OSI (and Debian Legal as well). Their legal teams have somehow failed to persuaded by psychotic ravings and are obstinately insistent in assessing these things by means of reason, facts, law and other little know methods. How churlish.
On the other hand it might be a far reaching conspiracy and have something to do with the Kennedy assassination, 9/11 and Roswell.
It's not enough to say player X accounts for the majority without demonstrating it. If ipod sell more than any other single brand they may still not be the majority. Example: maybe they sell 40% but all other players together account for the other 60%. Even being the biggest seller doesn't equate to monopoly or majority.
But apart from making unsupported assertions and revealing your ignorance of facts, figures and all other competing players that was a fascinating and insightful post. Congrats.
There are an awful lot of players which support ogg. Almost anything from Cowon, iRiver or Sansa does. And almost all the Chinese brand/no-name/shop brand players support ogg even though they fail to explicitly state this (preferring to emblazon their players and packaging with mp3 and wma logos). I used to import and sell mp3 and mp4 players and generally it's only the very cheapest mp4 video players which don't support ogg, that's the ones which claim asf container support is something to brag about.....usually these use an old rockchip video processor.
I have 5 personal players. 2 are old iRivers, H140 and H340, 2 are tiny no name Chinese mp3 players and one is a Chinese mp4 video player. Only the iRivers claim to support ogg audio but the cheap mp3 players handle it fine as well. I lived in SE Asia and every cheap mp3 player I ever checked played ogg audio too. Not a single one made mention of it in the instructions, the specs, on the box or on the player.
Unfortunately the Google trike is far to wide to access many UK cycle paths. Many have a small barrier which allows bicycles (though forces rider to dismount) but prevents small vehicles and tricycles and any but the smallest motorcycles from passing. Also many cycle paths are in any case so ridiculously narrow that a substantial trike has no chance. Urban paths often share traffic light controlled crossings with footpaths and these again are often too narrow for a trike. Then there are the cycle paths which repeatedly alternate the rider from the road to the sidewalk, what to speak of the paths hosting street signs, trees, litter bins etc etc. Even on a normally loaded touring cycle, or a bike with a small trailer or child carrier some UK cycle paths are a problem. A trike is going to be hopeless.
Whatever the purpose of the Google trike in the UK it clearly isn't going to work well for footpaths (illegal) or cycle paths. And most white roads, green lanes, unmetalled roads etc are essentially muddy, rocky or overgrown trails requiring an unencumbered mountain bike with a fit, skilled rider, or a vehicle. My guess is that it will give Google access to the many urban streets which only allow taxis, public buses, emergency vehicles, and bicycles during the day. This is extremely common.
"The faster we can get a strong secular leader in power there, the better the odds of Iran returning to the peaceful international fold."
That's what we said about the USA when Bush was in power....in fact any country controlled by authoritarian religious crackpots will benefit from replacing them with a liberal leader with secular leanings, though I have to admit that here in the UK we missed that opportunity when Blair slipped out of the back door.
On Debian type systems cron-apt is extremely useful for having remote machines notify via email and/or syslog of available updates. By default it downloads but does not install new packages, though it can be set up to do anything you can do with apt-get, so for example you could set it up to automatically install security patches but not other packages.
I don't have enough similar machines to benefit from using clusterssh but it cron-apt+clusterssh would seem to be ideal for remote package management of multiple similar Debian type systems.
The domain name is only one thing, perhaps the least deceitful aspect. I did actually visit http://wikipediaart.org/ and then http://wikipediaart.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page and was very surprised to find it describes and refers to itself as "Wikipedia Art". There is a disclaimer "This web site documents a performance art work that promotes a critical view of Wikipedia. It is not affiliated with Wikipedia in any way." I'm English and reasonably literate and I remain uncertain what that is supposed to mean. Perhaps it isn't supposed to mean anything tangible. Would the authors referring to themselves as "Wikipedia Art" ten times on the same page suggests that their disclaimer is insincere?
Apparently they had an idea for a collaborative work of art, wished it to be part of Wikipedia and created a Wikipedia article to fulfil this wish. Wikipedia, within hours, declined to host their project and removed it. Now the 'artists' feel they are justified in trading on the Wikipedia name and claiming oppression. It looks to me like a group of pompous blowhards having a tantrum.
There is no sign of any artistic endeavour unless hysterical hissy fits can be considered art.
Slashdot Mirror
Access to information is a valuable commodity in itself, one which existing structures often withhold from the poorest, who typically are farmers or labourers. Imagine being a subsistence farmer who relies on a small surplus from each harvest in order to be able to afford access to medicines or schooling for his children. Now imagine a cooperative or community of such people having access to accurate information about crop prices (this is probably the single most important financial value to farmers everywhere) and being able to negotiate with local middle men instead of being dictated to by them. There's nothing 'primitive' about this need, it's universal and it empowers communities and individuals. In fact it's essential to anythign which pretends to be a free market. Just because someone toils in the fields doesn't mean they are unintelligent or any less astute than someone who works in an office in a developed nation, and the benefit they can obtain from affordable access to information from disinterested parties is likely to be as great or greater and certainly more vital than the benefit obtained by those of us who already have easy access to information, medicines, education etc.
"his actions were completely within US law"
Circumventing copy protection? DMCA anyone? If he did this to a US site he would be charged with a felony. As the lawyer's letter states the act of circumvention of copy prevention took place on UK based servers and he's guilty under UK law.
"Unlawful circumvention of technical measures
s.296ZF(1) of the CDPA provides as follows:
"In sections 296ZA to 296ZE, "technological measures" are any technology, device or component which is designed, in the normal course of its operation, to protect a copyright work other than a computer program."
s.296ZA(1) of the CDPA provides as follows:
"This section applies where -
(a) effective technological measures have been applied to a copyright work other than a computer program; and
(b) a person (B) does anything which circumvents those measures knowing, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he is pursuing that objective.
As you know, the images from our client's website that you have copied were made available from our client's website using "Zoomify" software. As you know, Zoomify is an application that is used to publish photographic images in such a way that an entire high resolution image is never made available to a user although high-resolution extracts or "tiles" are made available one-at-a-time. Our client used the Zoomify technology to protect our client's copyright in the high resolution images.
By deliberately posting images from our client's website to the Wikipedia website in which the Zoomify software has been circumvented you have therefore acted in breach of section 296ZA(1) of the CDPA.
[edit] "
If you contend that the act of circumvention took place in the US then he's guilty under the far more onerous US law. Whichever way you look at it he did something that if discovered inevitably leads to either litigation or criminal prosecution. The NPG made an attempt to deal with this on a less formal basis and was rebuffed, hence litigition ensues.
The NPG does not "lock up culture". It's a *public* gallery with *no admission charge*. The images of all the works are already *freely* and publicly viewable online. The collections are made available nationally and globally by means of touring exhibitions. Why does Wikipedia need to surreptitiously and illegally obtain high res versions?
As to reputation, it has nothing to do with the person's nationality. Imagine Wikimedia being known as an entity that disregards, undermines and damages the world's finest publicly funded, liberal arts bodies, bodies which have a proven record over decades and centuries of public education, free access, 1st class scholarship and conservation, and free dissemination of culture and knowledge.
Dcoetzee *could* have tried some kind of negotiation instead of immediately resorting to illegal means. Back on reputation, you might like to consider that if he had performed the same circumvention of copy protection against a US based site he would be guilty of a felony under the DMCA and the result would have been rather more forceful than a request to remove the images, followed by litigation on refusal.
He could have just asked for permission to use the pictures. The NPG is not some corporate hawk, it's publicly funded, having an ethos of education and self improvement for all, in the Victorian tradition. The person who obtained the images chose to ignore this and harvest thousands of high resolution images (why does Wikipedia need high-res to display 96dpi???), circumventing copy protection in the process. The sale of these images, at extremely reasonable and non-commercial rates, is one of the sources of funding for the NPG.
Dcoetzee has brought into conflict two organisations which should normally benefit from each other, damaged the reputation of Wikipedia and all around acted like an idiot.
"An operating system provides fundamental services"....that the user simply shouldn't need to know or care about. Here's what the consumer of a Chrome OS netbook needs to know: how much time do I have left on battery? Am I connected to the www? That's it. Everything else pertinent to the end user is outsourced to Google's distinctly non-free servers. It's all happening elsewhere. If the OS is reliable (it should be, being built on well tested technology and *relatively* simple) then local maintenance and admin issues won't exist.
window manager does not equal windowing system.
"I can't fathom why apple chose to create another windowing system rather than use X....." Because they prefer to drive and manage their own development as far as possible, and not be subject to the success or otherwise of yet another 3rd party, especially one that doesn't regard Apple as any more important than all the other contributors and distributors? Because if they used a free windowing system on top of a free base they wouldn't have much of a proprietary product?
"Another window manager just dilutes the current pool....."
It isn't 'another window manager', it's a new windowing system. Don't think X11+KDE/Gnome, think Apple CGL+Quartz.
pacpl vs any other batch audio transcoder cdrdao (as used as EAC's burning engine) mplayer ffmpeg any package management toolset/suite vs windows update amule/emule vs edonkey/overnet (whose death kind of writes the judgement in stone) bittorrent vs whatever awful crap the media industry concocted this week truecrypt enfcs matroska mousepad vs notepad ha ha ha moc vs 300 crappy music players thunar/konqueror/nautilus vs explorer midnight commander vs 20 norton commander clones vlc linux kernel vs nt kernel (nt is ok but can it run my router and my nas....no) screen sshfs gcc dictd sqlite bash, bash-completion busybox cowsay :-)
7-zip
kwm, xfwm even metacity vs microsoft window manager
lame vs frauenhofer
ok am bored now will stop. Clearly the purpose and qualities of many of these tools will elude the inquirer, though the limitation is his, not the software's. Nor am I claiming that every free software tool is equal to or superior to a similar proprietary tool, but many are.
It occurs to me that the author failed to acknowledge the single most interesting recent development in the free desktop which also happened to be completely commercially driven and successful; the interfaces designed for the Acer Aspire and Asus EEE PC netbooks. They are totally unlike anything produced by Gnome, KDE or shipped by any of the well known distributors. They are certainly not what most people would want on a home desktop or a big laptop but when you use them as intended, on a device with a small screen and relatively limited expandability, they are very impressive. They do what a good GUI should do, that is they let the user enjoy the device's capabilities while letting them ignore/forget/not care about what lies underneath. I was quite impressed playing with these things in the local store and I downloaded Linpus Lite to try for real on a regular laptop and I could see that it is extremely well thought out and coherent and nice to use. The people with a strong need and desire to have OEMs ship their product in huge numbers produced something utterly different in concept and execution to KDE and Gnome and it worked well enough for them to ship millions. It's not just the different desktop concept that is interesting to me, more interesting is seeing how raw commercial incentive takes the same set of tools and drives in a completely different, almost opposite, direction and produces a very well defined and valid solution.
Continuity is there in free desktops in the same way it exists in OS X and Windows....in parts. Gnome and KDE and MS and Apple have all at some point had to accept that backwards compatibility has too high a price, then swallow hard and offer something which upsets a lot of people (even more than usual ha ha). Anyway there's plenty more to the free desktop than Gnome and KDE so it's not even a notable issue for many.
Mostly the article is filler. Precis: is KDE lead developer pissing in the wind? Maybe. Should I mention Ubuntu in every article just for the fanboi hits? Definitely. Are end users uncomfortable with unfamiliar concepts and interfaces? Yes...until they become familiar with them. Is the cheque in the post and will I churn out more turgid hackery next week? Yes and inevitably.
I think that's a good summary of the anxieties of end users.
"the greater danger is always simply that the package maintainers will simply stop working on the project."
That's something real and within most people's experience. Yet it doesn't stop us happily using all kinds of stuff which may be deprecated/abandoned in a few years. And a common event, especially with proprietary applications, is the breaking of backward compatibility. Still it doesn't deter many people. So my guess is that as mono and mono-based applications *are* free software and *are* distributable and *do* offer distributions and end users and developers applications that appeal and a development environment that appeals then it will take more than the fear and uncertainty to hold it back. Something like a protracted legal dispute (one with actual expensive lawyers involved as opposed to one involving bloggers screaming or bizarre campaigns of slander against individual developers) or a decision by either the FSF or the OSI that mono doesn't meet their definitions of Free or Open Source software. Unless that happens then the people who oppose mono are really wasting their breath.
A reasoned opinion, well expressed. Like a breath of fresh air.
My understanding (I may be wrong and am happy to be corrected) is that the worst that Microsoft could do would be to extend .NET in ways that make projects built on mono incapable of being compatible with .NET. They can do this without any "attack" on mono as it currently exists. As far as desktop applications go it's pretty much a non-issue or a minor issue because cross compatibility with Windows .NET isn't the goal of the typical mono application. It would be a bigger issue if mono was, like Sun's Java, the basis of important enterprise applications. That doesn't seem to be the case. Again I'm happy to be corrected and to be shown those widely used cross platform enterprise tools.
And what would happen if *somehow* mono itself was directly attacked, perhaps becoming the subject of litigation in the way BSD was, becoming so surrounded with uncertainty that it gains de facto untouchable status?
Gnome and various developers, in house and independent, would have wasted some time and resources. Tomboy is not the only note tool, F-Spot is not the only photo manager and Beagle is not the only meta-search tool. Whatever the merits or otherwise of these applications they are clearly attractive to users, distributions want to ship them and developers evidently enjoy improving them. But none of them is necessarily irreplaceable. Existing installations would continue to work, the end users would not immediately be disadvantaged. The issue then becomes "what are the replacements?". At that point I'm left wondering why the vociferous opponents of mono have singularly failed to create applications with the same appeal. I'm not sure porting Tomboy to C++ is exactly inspirational. The one truly effective and practical act that would negate mono would be the development of applications with the same appeal to users and distributions and the Gnome project. Tracker is a reasonable substitute for Beagle. Despite being a fan and a user of Gthumb and Geeqie I wouldn't have the bare-faced cheek to claim they are drop in replacements for F-Spot or even claim to have similar goals or features in many important ways. One has to doubt the potential longevity of Gnote, given that it exists principally as a protest and offers nothing new in the way of ideas or presentation.
btw I don't run any mono apps :-)
Free software relies on all kinds of sources. The GNU system itself was/is a re-implementation of UNIX. Many of the languages used started off as proprietary. There's nothing new in this. Where is the campaign to purge Fortran or Pascal from the free software opus? Why no campaign against Samba and the use of the SMB protocol? Why is nobody outraged at DotGNU? Where are the calls to cease supporting .avi container and other MS developments?
Essentially this hatred of mono is about its origin not its qualities or legal status. That is Microsoft in the first instance and then it's a continuation of long standing and often vitriolic personal attacks on M de Icaza which gained added impetus and some spice with Novell's deal with MS.
It's hard to debate with people when their fundamental position is composed essentially of hatred, fear and dislike of persons or groups. Where is the factual basis? Where is the ability to consider anything useful when hate or fear is the driving force? This is religion by another name, it cannot be reasoned with, it is impervious to contradictory verifiable fact, it allows no deviation.
I find it curious that one of the people who might agree quite strongly with the botycottnovell stance is a certain Mr S. Ballmer. He's known to have a similar affable nature and often makes the startlingly similar assertions regarding patents and free software.
boycottnovell couldn't be doing a better job if they were a paid Microsoft stooge.....
"you are unnecessarily acting like an arsehole... "
"If you have nothing civil to say. Shut up."
There speaks the voice of reason, a mellow tone, enhanced by the author's keen grasp of facts, generous nature and delightful delicacy of writing style. Conoisseurs of English, philosophy, manners and other of the gentle arts please gather and drink deeply of this wisdom. Be thankful that the muse has blessed us all.
Maybe that will happen. It's just as likely as anything else. This is in Sid. There are at least 18 months until a new Debian release. Sid now does not translate into Debian stable 2011. Sid's a big mish mash, there's no assurance that anything in there now progresses to stable or anything not in it right now won't run that course. Sid's not even guaranteed to be complete in itself. It may have missing or broken libraries and dependencies.
It's a development branch. Stuff changes every day of every week.
The people getting self-righteously outraged about some (free software) packages in a development branch, Sid, or writing headlines about 'the default install' aren't doing much more than reminding everyone that they are remarkably stupid as well as loud and tiresome.
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-gnome/desktop/unstable/meta-gnome2/debian/control?revision=20303&view=markup
"Depends: gnome-desktop-environment (= ${source:Version}),
gdm-themes,
gnome-themes-extras,
gnome-games (>= 1:2.24.3),
libpam-gnome-keyring (>= 2.24.1),
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly (>= 0.10.10),
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg (>= 0.10.6),
rhythmbox (>= 0.12),
synaptic (>= 0.62),
system-config-printer (>= 1.0.0),
totem-mozilla,
swfdec-mozilla,
epiphany-extensions,
gedit-plugins,
evolution-plugins (>= 2.24.3),
evolution-exchange (>= 2.24.3),
evolution-webcal (>= 2.24.0),
serpentine,
gnome-app-install,
transmission-gtk,
bluez-gnome,
arj,
avahi-daemon,
tomboy (>= 0.12.2) | gnote,"
note: tomboy (>= 0.12.2) | gnote
In plain English that means tomboy *or* gnote.
It's Debian, you have a choice.
Debian also offers an Xfce/LXDE version of CD1 and a KDE version of CD1, CD1 being the installer. Neither of these offer mono or Gnome (duh!). Debian also offers fine grained package selection in all the installers, and a netinstall and a tiny netinstall, the businesscard iso. There is also the DVD installer which offers a choice of desktop environments along with the usual options for fine grained selection of packages, the 'Expert Install' option.
So *one* of the numerous ways of installing Debian *may* offer Tomboy to those who want it. Cue howls of intolerant, ill-informed, unsubstantiated quasi-religious outrage.....
And anyway mono is accepted as free software by the two bodies which are best placed to determine its status, the FSF and the OSI (and Debian Legal as well). Their legal teams have somehow failed to persuaded by psychotic ravings and are obstinately insistent in assessing these things by means of reason, facts, law and other little know methods. How churlish.
On the other hand it might be a far reaching conspiracy and have something to do with the Kennedy assassination, 9/11 and Roswell.
iRiver are not cheap and not crappy.
Cowon are not cheap and not crappy.
Sansa, Archos.....etc etc
It's not enough to say player X accounts for the majority without demonstrating it. If ipod sell more than any other single brand they may still not be the majority. Example: maybe they sell 40% but all other players together account for the other 60%. Even being the biggest seller doesn't equate to monopoly or majority.
But apart from making unsupported assertions and revealing your ignorance of facts, figures and all other competing players that was a fascinating and insightful post. Congrats.
There are an awful lot of players which support ogg. Almost anything from Cowon, iRiver or Sansa does. And almost all the Chinese brand/no-name/shop brand players support ogg even though they fail to explicitly state this (preferring to emblazon their players and packaging with mp3 and wma logos). I used to import and sell mp3 and mp4 players and generally it's only the very cheapest mp4 video players which don't support ogg, that's the ones which claim asf container support is something to brag about.....usually these use an old rockchip video processor.
I have 5 personal players. 2 are old iRivers, H140 and H340, 2 are tiny no name Chinese mp3 players and one is a Chinese mp4 video player. Only the iRivers claim to support ogg audio but the cheap mp3 players handle it fine as well. I lived in SE Asia and every cheap mp3 player I ever checked played ogg audio too. Not a single one made mention of it in the instructions, the specs, on the box or on the player.
Unfortunately the Google trike is far to wide to access many UK cycle paths. Many have a small barrier which allows bicycles (though forces rider to dismount) but prevents small vehicles and tricycles and any but the smallest motorcycles from passing. Also many cycle paths are in any case so ridiculously narrow that a substantial trike has no chance. Urban paths often share traffic light controlled crossings with footpaths and these again are often too narrow for a trike. Then there are the cycle paths which repeatedly alternate the rider from the road to the sidewalk, what to speak of the paths hosting street signs, trees, litter bins etc etc. Even on a normally loaded touring cycle, or a bike with a small trailer or child carrier some UK cycle paths are a problem. A trike is going to be hopeless. Whatever the purpose of the Google trike in the UK it clearly isn't going to work well for footpaths (illegal) or cycle paths. And most white roads, green lanes, unmetalled roads etc are essentially muddy, rocky or overgrown trails requiring an unencumbered mountain bike with a fit, skilled rider, or a vehicle. My guess is that it will give Google access to the many urban streets which only allow taxis, public buses, emergency vehicles, and bicycles during the day. This is extremely common.
"The faster we can get a strong secular leader in power there, the better the odds of Iran returning to the peaceful international fold." That's what we said about the USA when Bush was in power....in fact any country controlled by authoritarian religious crackpots will benefit from replacing them with a liberal leader with secular leanings, though I have to admit that here in the UK we missed that opportunity when Blair slipped out of the back door.
On Debian type systems cron-apt is extremely useful for having remote machines notify via email and/or syslog of available updates. By default it downloads but does not install new packages, though it can be set up to do anything you can do with apt-get, so for example you could set it up to automatically install security patches but not other packages. I don't have enough similar machines to benefit from using clusterssh but it cron-apt+clusterssh would seem to be ideal for remote package management of multiple similar Debian type systems.
Except they didn't produce art, but only the same kind of noise which can be reliably reproduced by saying mean things about ponies.
The domain name is only one thing, perhaps the least deceitful aspect. I did actually visit http://wikipediaart.org/ and then http://wikipediaart.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page and was very surprised to find it describes and refers to itself as "Wikipedia Art". There is a disclaimer "This web site documents a performance art work that promotes a critical view of Wikipedia. It is not affiliated with Wikipedia in any way." I'm English and reasonably literate and I remain uncertain what that is supposed to mean. Perhaps it isn't supposed to mean anything tangible. Would the authors referring to themselves as "Wikipedia Art" ten times on the same page suggests that their disclaimer is insincere?
Apparently they had an idea for a collaborative work of art, wished it to be part of Wikipedia and created a Wikipedia article to fulfil this wish. Wikipedia, within hours, declined to host their project and removed it. Now the 'artists' feel they are justified in trading on the Wikipedia name and claiming oppression. It looks to me like a group of pompous blowhards having a tantrum.
There is no sign of any artistic endeavour unless hysterical hissy fits can be considered art.
What if the moon really was made of cheese?