Being myself a engineer, I would agree that having lots of people do not mean more is done. But I know there is a limit to what I can do with a small team. And having seen the gradual lose of workforce and the rise of Ubuntu and Fedora, I am not sure that having a small engineering team is so good for a linux distribution:/
They had to used a different installer than the previous one because they didn't have ressources to take care of it ( drakx being in perl , the new one is based on the livecd tools from fedora and in python, there is less maintainance burden since this is done by Redhat, and since python coder are easier to find ). But a livecd is not gonna be a good idea to automate installation of servers. So that's for one reason to not use it.
There is less and less supported packages, and with a small team, and a smaller community due to management choices, there is more work to make sure the servers are still secure and working. That's a secund reason to not use it.
And I do not understand why they had to forge a community while they could simply have kept the one they already had. How could they screw so badly than people who followed them, working for free since years in the storm decided finally to say "good bye" ? They fired Gael Duval, they merged with connectiva and lost several people, they had the whole club stuff, and tht didn't affect much contributers. They were seen as a commercial distribution since years, people were prefering Debian or Fedora, only the more loyal contributers were still with them, and then something happened, and they have almost no one anymore.
If we look at cia.vc and follows the news on who leaved mandriva ( Paulo Zanoni, Xorg maintainer, some months ago, glibc maintainer, some kde team guy ( see http://lwn.net/Articles/441940/ for the details, quite insightful despites being from one of the Mageia founders ), that doesn't look very good. The last one to leave is Eugeni Donodov, the head of the team after mandriva fired Anne Nicolas, and he left 1 month before the release, which doesn't sound very good. So if there is 45 persons in Brasil, why does all commits look like done by volunteers of RosaLabs ( http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-02/msg00000.php ) ?
Maybe you mean "there is 45 persons in Brasil, and they are all working on something else than the distribution" ?
Personnaly, I migrated my servers to Opensuse. The community is as goos as the one of Mandriva, and there is lots of nice nugget, such as zypper, yast, that doesn't make me regret the change. And there is the Evergreen project that is starting to take shape, so no need to wait for Mandriva to have some LTS based on non existant planning.
Yes that's network-manager. So now, someone has to port network-manager, or something offering a compatibiity API to others OS.
This is doable, but I see more people complaining than people sending patch for that. ANd for systemd, that's the same. Lennart keep telling "Reuse interface ( dbus one ), not code". Also, people tend to forget that's just a proposal being discussed at the moment, and if it is accepted, it would still take time for that to appear.
The idea was to reuse systemd for gnome-session. Booting your computer is starting lots of software running in background, and so does the session of gnome. The fact that systemd restart software when they die, allows to have upgrade wthout breaking conexion, etc is IMHO something that could be interesting.
I also think that cgroups could help to isolate process, to make sure that nothing is left behind ( think firefox + out of browser process in the same group of process with cgroup ), being able to make sure that CPU is limited for some task ( again, flash ), etc.
No oe seems to maintain it on windows, unfortunately. So unless someone volunteer to do so, I doubt bugs will fix by themself ( they do from time to time, but not often ).
By treating as beta product, you mean "avoiding it and waiting for the stable release to do testing and bug report in the last minute" ?
IIRC, people who tested kde4 before the release were quite happy of running it, it didn't crash much and few people complained. And I doubt that they decided to add bug just in the last month of coding.
See gnome 3, it was delayed 2 times, ( for 6 months each time ) and people still complain. And when it take too long to release people complain that "this is dead" ( see bsd, see debian ).
Yeah, they have nothing better to do that finding who call a number in France. The riots are not more urgent, nor are the medias, the economy, and likely organizing the escape of Mubarack. Nor is more urgent to have a new governement...
Afaik, n900 is using SGX 530, and there is no free driver for it, Imagination technologies being quite unfriendly to open source.
For example, poulsbo/intel gma 500 is using such a core, and we know what happened to the driver
Pearpc is a powerpc emulator, afaik, macos for iphone run on arm, so I fail to see the relation between the two. Maybe you want to speak of MacOnLinux ( which is still limited to ppc so this would not work either, but at least, this would make more sense with the needed emulation ) ?
Well, no, there is a lot of plateform running on OpenMoko phones ( Neo Freerunner ). To name a few, Hackable:1 , QTMoko, SHR, or debian, openwrt. And while most of them are quite new, QTMoko is using the qtopia project, the product of trolltech before nokia decided to let the community take care of it ( it was also called qt extended ).
And SHR was ported on htc phones, debian was ported on PalmPre.
And regarding Maemo, for something free and open, it has a lot of closed source software : http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages and http://blog.1407.org/2009/09/01/nokias-free-software-bullshit-and-insults-in-maemo/
According to opennet ( http://opennet.net/research/profiles ), China is far from being the only country that filter the Internet. For exemple, you can take a look at the report about United Arab Emirates, about Australia, about Norway.
And you can also read there some recent and disturbing news, like CCTV in Saudi, in internet cafés.
China is not the only censoring country, and people should not forget the myriad of others that are also doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is also deltacloud ( aeolus, etc ). Deltacloud aim to manage "clouds" with different backend, like libvirt for xen, kvm, lxc, vmware, etc.
Being myself a engineer, I would agree that having lots of people do not mean more is done. But I know there is a limit to what I can do with a small team. And having seen the gradual lose of workforce and the rise of Ubuntu and Fedora, I am not sure that having a small engineering team is so good for a linux distribution :/
They had to used a different installer than the previous one because they didn't have ressources to take care of it ( drakx being in perl , the new one is based on the livecd tools from fedora and in python, there is less maintainance burden since this is done by Redhat, and since python coder are easier to find ). But a livecd is not gonna be a good idea to automate installation of servers. So that's for one reason to not use it.
There is less and less supported packages, and with a small team, and a smaller community due to management choices, there is more work to make sure the servers are still secure and working. That's a secund reason to not use it.
And I do not understand why they had to forge a community while they could simply have kept the one they already had. How could they screw so badly than people who followed them, working for free since years in the storm decided finally to say "good bye" ? They fired Gael Duval, they merged with connectiva and lost several people, they had the whole club stuff, and tht didn't affect much contributers. They were seen as a commercial distribution since years, people were prefering Debian or Fedora, only the more loyal contributers were still with them, and then something happened, and they have almost no one anymore.
If we look at cia.vc and follows the news on who leaved mandriva ( Paulo Zanoni, Xorg maintainer, some months ago, glibc maintainer, some kde team guy ( see http://lwn.net/Articles/441940/ for the details, quite insightful despites being from one of the Mageia founders ), that doesn't look very good. The last one to leave is Eugeni Donodov, the head of the team after mandriva fired Anne Nicolas, and he left 1 month before the release, which doesn't sound very good. So if there is 45 persons in Brasil, why does all commits look like done by volunteers of RosaLabs ( http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-02/msg00000.php ) ?
Maybe you mean "there is 45 persons in Brasil, and they are all working on something else than the distribution" ?
Personnaly, I migrated my servers to Opensuse. The community is as goos as the one of Mandriva, and there is lots of nice nugget, such as zypper, yast, that doesn't make me regret the change. And there is the Evergreen project that is starting to take shape, so no need to wait for Mandriva to have some LTS based on non existant planning.
Like the developpement of Fedora, Opensuse, or Debian ?
The network installer is still working, I think.
You mean like pushing various web services like what is planned on http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2011-05/msg00484.php For example, rosa sync, a help desk client, etc.
Yes that's network-manager. So now, someone has to port network-manager, or something offering a compatibiity API to others OS. This is doable, but I see more people complaining than people sending patch for that. ANd for systemd, that's the same. Lennart keep telling "Reuse interface ( dbus one ), not code". Also, people tend to forget that's just a proposal being discussed at the moment, and if it is accepted, it would still take time for that to appear.
The idea was to reuse systemd for gnome-session. Booting your computer is starting lots of software running in background, and so does the session of gnome. The fact that systemd restart software when they die, allows to have upgrade wthout breaking conexion, etc is IMHO something that could be interesting. I also think that cgroups could help to isolate process, to make sure that nothing is left behind ( think firefox + out of browser process in the same group of process with cgroup ), being able to make sure that CPU is limited for some task ( again, flash ), etc.
No oe seems to maintain it on windows, unfortunately. So unless someone volunteer to do so, I doubt bugs will fix by themself ( they do from time to time, but not often ).
By treating as beta product, you mean "avoiding it and waiting for the stable release to do testing and bug report in the last minute" ? IIRC, people who tested kde4 before the release were quite happy of running it, it didn't crash much and few people complained. And I doubt that they decided to add bug just in the last month of coding. See gnome 3, it was delayed 2 times, ( for 6 months each time ) and people still complain. And when it take too long to release people complain that "this is dead" ( see bsd, see debian ).
Kernel and KDE start by the same letter, so the link is obvious.
The awesome folk at statusnet have posted this : http://status.net/2011/04/01/new-federated-social-bookmarks-service-freelish-us So basically, that's statusnet + a plugin to add tags , and sahre them lie any microblogging tool, and it is federated. You can install your own service on your server if you want, or use one hosted somewhere. Too bad, the statusnet package in debian is still not uploaded ( http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=491723 ).
On the other hand, enough people complain that some company are selling Firefox or Openoffice on their website or on Ebay, so this work :)
Yeah, they have nothing better to do that finding who call a number in France. The riots are not more urgent, nor are the medias, the economy, and likely organizing the escape of Mubarack. Nor is more urgent to have a new governement...
Afaik, n900 is using SGX 530, and there is no free driver for it, Imagination technologies being quite unfriendly to open source. For example, poulsbo/intel gma 500 is using such a core, and we know what happened to the driver
Pearpc is a powerpc emulator, afaik, macos for iphone run on arm, so I fail to see the relation between the two. Maybe you want to speak of MacOnLinux ( which is still limited to ppc so this would not work either, but at least, this would make more sense with the needed emulation ) ?
Well, no, there is a lot of plateform running on OpenMoko phones ( Neo Freerunner ). To name a few, Hackable:1 , QTMoko, SHR, or debian, openwrt. And while most of them are quite new, QTMoko is using the qtopia project, the product of trolltech before nokia decided to let the community take care of it ( it was also called qt extended ). And SHR was ported on htc phones, debian was ported on PalmPre. And regarding Maemo, for something free and open, it has a lot of closed source software : http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages and http://blog.1407.org/2009/09/01/nokias-free-software-bullshit-and-insults-in-maemo/
That's not the first time they do this. They already get some money from magnatune, see http://patches.ubuntu.com/r/rhythmbox/extracted/ , patch 3. And they didn't told to rhythmbox developers. Amarok did receive their part of the money : http://blogs.magnatune.com/buckman/2008/04/giving-money-to.html . But just ask to people working on RB if they did, and if they know this was changed on ubuntu.
According to opennet ( http://opennet.net/research/profiles ), China is far from being the only country that filter the Internet. For exemple, you can take a look at the report about United Arab Emirates, about Australia, about Norway. And you can also read there some recent and disturbing news, like CCTV in Saudi, in internet cafés. China is not the only censoring country, and people should not forget the myriad of others that are also doing it.