Interesting. I'll have to check that book out when I get a chance. I guess my own thought is that there are many 'lighthouse' opportunities out there already and that many sectors of free software are already reaching 'critical mass' where gap-closing is becomming more and more feasible, even for smaller firms. In the long run, I'd like to see more GPL'ed projects promote outside development via 'feature-adding' bounties or otherwise. It would be neat if freelance programmers could go searching for small contracted coding jobs contributing to Free Software projects. Maybe it wouldn't pay as well, but it'd certainly be more rewarding.
The other thought is some form of full-service consulting that includes writing / improving software to accurately meet clients needs. You just have to make sure the client realizes that they're paying for a consulting and development *service* rather than contracting a work-for-hire in which copyright would normally change hands.
Yes, I know of one definite way to pay the coders to write free software.
I won't go into detail because there are many ways to implement this, but the basic idea is to treat software production as a labor market rather than a product/service market. In other words, people who need software that doesn't already exist simply pay programmers to write it for them. Most of the time, this is not a matter of starting from scratch, but rather extending what already exists so that it meets a need. And in many cases, the hired programmer could be the maintainer of a project him/herself. If it is cheaper to pay a programmer to extend a free package rather than buy a proprietary one, it's a no-brainer. All we need is more freelance programmers / contractors.
The main thing that matters to most people in an MS Office replacement is how well it reads and writes MS Office files.
However, if an organization wants to switch to OpenOffice, they only need compatibility with the latest version of MS Office they had been using. From that point forward, the only problem is communicating with others who use MS Office. But if enough organizations begin to make the switch at the same time, Microsoft will get a taste of their own medicine--yes, they'll have to make Office be able to read/write OpenOffice formats. Granted, it's pretty lame when people send around simple text and data encapsulated in complex formats when ASCII would suffice, but I don't see this changing in the near future. At least the trend is towards XML-based formats.
Just in case anybody is wondering, the solar panels available today are neither "clean, renewable energy" nor cost efficient in terms of long-run payback. In almost all cases, the energy used to produce today's solar panels is greater than will ever be recovered by use within their approximate 10-12 year lifespan. When you add the energy and waste cost of inverters, lead-acid storage cells, etc. you end up with a power supply with far worse environmental impact than typical utility-provided power--especially if your local utility is nuclear--yes, nuclear is clean power, folks. Many solar installations also will never pay for themselves. So basically, today's photovoltaics are in essense expensive batteries. Lots of energy is put into their production, then they're shipped off somewhere else and they give you some of that energy back.
Right now, unless you live in a climate with very abundant sunlight and are off the grid due to location, the best alternative (electrical) energy sources are wind and possibly some of the new home fuel-cell units just arriving on the market. Plastic or other more exotic solar cells will definitely be interesting if they materialize, though--especially if they last longer and are easily/cheaply recycled.
But don't forget passive solar!! You don't have to convert it into electricity to make use of the sun's plentiful energy. With the right engineering and a suitable location, it is quite possible and inexpensive to use solar for most or all your home heating/cooling, cooking, water heating, etc. needs. Look around online; there's some interesting ideas out there. Plus-good for geeks who want to beat the system and whatnot. (-:
Heck, GNU's been bashing UNIX for years by its very name. Doesn't bother me any if M$ bashes proprietary commercial unixes. Linux and *BSD are the future anyways.
Exchange 2K is different. It's built around SMTP, POP, LDAP, and iCalendar. It's using standard protocols. Where are the UNIX clients to support them?
There's no need for exchange at all. That's the stupidity of this whole thing. Using Connector is still supporting Microsoft because you still have to pay for the client access license. Nobody needs Exchange. And there's no advantage to using Exchange.
Do we need Exchange for SMTP? Nope Do we need Exchange for POP? Nope Do we need Exchange for LDAP? Nope Do we need Exchange for Calendar services? Nope Do we need Exchange to integrate all these? Nope
Every single use of / reason for Exchange has been thoroughly obsoleted by free software. So who's going to pay for Connector? Employees working for companies with braindead IT deptartments. Kinda lame really. Why didn't they just put out some documentation on how to talk to Exchange and let the community build the software? But heck, if they can milk some money out of dumb M$ users to support their free projects, more power to 'em! (-:
The PlayStation 2 contains a subsystem for operating peripherals and audio including the SPU2 (Sound Processing Unit), the IOP, the HDD, the DVD drive, controllers, memory cards, USB and other peripherals. The hardware specification for these units is not disclosed. The Runtime Environment provided on DISC 1 includes binary software device drivers for controlling these hardware units. Source code for the Runtime Environment is proprietary and will not be disclosed. However, DISC 2 contains Linux device drivers (with source code) which show how to access all these devices through the Runtime Environment interface. This gives the developer access to the functionality of all the devices but not the complete hardware specification.
If CBDTPA passes, this is precisely the kind of scenario we'd have on all PC hardware. Sure, you could still use Linux with it, but you'll have to use proprietary binary drivers to access any I/O device. Replace "Runtime Environment" in the above paragraph with "government certified anti-copying device" and you've got a near perfect preview of CBDTPA. And of course, note that "hardware specifications are not disclosed." In other words, if you reverse engineer a device.. say a USB scanner.. to write a Linux driver, you'd be in violation of the proposed law. Only the manufacturer would be able to legally provide the drivers to access their hardware. And we all know the wonderful track record of PC hardware manufacturers in supporting alternative operating systems. I for one, will not support any company who produces proprietary hardware in the name of "anti-piracy."
What would happen if every single small company that was threatened simply refused to show up in court if sued? Instead, just send in a form letter stating that the patent is total and complete BS and then list every other company that has been simultaneously sued and subsequently refused to go to court for the same reason. Technically, that's probably contempt of the court or something, but at some point this nonsense has to stop simply because it is hurting small tech companies. Call it the.. uh.. Boston Patent Party or something. (-: IANAL and this is neither legal advice nor personal recommendation.
This kinda nonsense is ridiculous. Java and all related technology would be much better handled as an open industry project rather than by an arrogant corporation that hasn't quite realized yet that proprietary is going the way of the dino. So it doesn't fit their current cost structure. Boo hoo! Restructure the company how 'bout.
I've heard the arguments about selling services, but for what we are doing it just really doesn't work.
Software that everyone needs should be developed by everybody--sorta like the idea behind Apache. Everyone chips in a little and everyone gets back a great piece of software. GPL works beautifully here. The same can apply for all of the "general, end-user" software that Kompany produces because none of it is all that specialized. Perhaps the question becomes: Why is the Kompany trying to make money on general purpose software like development environments or messaging/organizer clients or whatever that literally hundreds of thousands of people need? That is software better written as a community. The place to make money in Open Source software is consulting--providing solutions, not services. He's right: selling services as an after-market.. err. after-download.. addition to free software doesn't work very well. But there is money in customizing or extending existing free software to clients likings, assuming that cost is less than they would have to spend on proprietary solutions. There may never be a place for corporations of any size in free Open Source software. But there will always be a market for the individual or the small consulting firm.
Ice sheets that are 200 meters thick and more than 3000 square miles big don't form or melt overnight. The instability which caused the collapse was a relatively recent development. That such a stable chunk of the Antarctican ice should disintegrate is of great concern.
On the contrary, the same type of instability which caused the ice to melt could just as easily cause ice to form. There's no energy being magically lost or gained here. Where do people think the peninsula came from in the first place? It had to have formed during an 'instability' where the temperatures in that region, for one reason or another, dropped. Who knows. Antarctica might have been 10 times larger before humans ever discovered it and it may have taken thousands of years to both grow to its original size and shrink to its current size. Global warming, if it exists, is not a joke. But saying that humans are causing it or even significantly altering it's progress is downright ludicrous given the amount of *real* data to the contrary.
It seems to me the best way to reduce the amount of pornography (which in itself is a worthy goal) is to regulate the hell out of the sex industry. Force the strip clubs to abide by stringent health regulations, enact privacy laws that force full disclosure and explicit consent to any photography or videotaping of persons (this could go for most non-sex related things as well), outlaw sexual activity as a work for hire thus forcing strippers, porn actors, etc. to be hired as employees with full income tax reporting, and put regulations on where porn shops and strip clubs may be located--much as current zoning regulations indicate residential and commercial levels. And how about making pornographic materials exempt from copyright protection. Porn exists largely because it's profitable. Remove the profit and away goes the porn. Sure, it'll still exist, but it'll be a lot less prevalent and obvious.
Since they're less rigid and have less total mass to 'average out' any irregularities, what happens when there's a small variation that slightly unbalances the disc? This wouldn't affect audio players, but I wonder if their stability would be insufficient to handle much higher speeds. I didn't see any specs on average maximum read speed.
No, again. Mozilla didn't *exist* a few years ago.
Neither did Konqueror exist in its 2.x form. (ie. when they started making it a true web browser instead of just a file manager / help viewer) You can't fairly compare 1.x Konq because it was for all practical purposes an entirely different package. I'm not saying that Mozilla is bad. It most definitely is the best browser to date. I just think the KDE folks have a superior development strategy that will propel the project faster than others with less man-hours. But that's just my opinion so take it or leave it.
Well, given that Konqueror only runs on KDE, *still* has crummy Javascript support, doesn't have as standards-compliant a renderer as Mozilla does, isn't used on the MacOS or Windows and looks and works like that god-awful IE.
Total bullshit. Moz has a mail client and a newsreader at least built in. Konqueror does not. Moz renders more HTML properly than Konqueror. As for "integrated", that's a buzzword from MS. I like app intercommunication -- drag and drop support is nice. However, tying two products is just stupid -- something designed to be done to encourage purchasing solely from one vendor.
The 3.x series is slated to entirely re-work the Javascript support, which is currently the only major hangup. Konqueror 2.2.2 is already fairly standards compliant but I believe it will become even more so in the near future.
Konqueror is not used on MacOS or Windows because it is a component of a complete desktop environment, not a standalone piece of software. So in that way, yes, it is a lot more like MS IE. On the other hand, why is that automatically a bad thing? Frankly, there are a lot of advantages to an integrated web-browser / file-manager / desktop in terms of usability. In fact, that's what Nautilus is aiming for as well, though they are way behind Konq at the moment. The average user has become very accustomed to a highly object oriented desktop environment. Sure, it's not necessary and obviously Sun hates the idea, but in terms of abstracting the user from the computer, it's a major step forward. Your comment about vendors and tying products together is entirely meaningless to Open Source projects like Konq or Moz. Either way, you could say that Moz is stupid for trying to tie a browser and mail client together. I don't use Moz's mail client so it's a waste for me. But I'm not really complaining either.
The poor Mozilla guys! They're criticized around the block for abandoning the Netscape 4.x base and starting from scratch, and this guy says that they took too long because they had to deal with the Netscape codebase
They did at the beginning. Yes, I'm aware that by now just about everything has been re-written from scratch and that's a good thing. I was just pointing out that during the transition phase and the establishment of the mozilla.org project, there was a lot of time wasted hammering around with old broken speghetti code. That is what the Open Office project seems to be dealing with right now. It's pretty near impossible for someone not intimately involved with the project to be of any help in the development, hence the first goal of the developers has been breaking the bloated monolithic kludge into modules that are actually managable. Sounds like developer hell to me.
Can you say, "I can't think for myself?" Get your head out of your ass and look around. Open Source work is freelance by nature. There is no "office development" needed. If you pay some freelance coders to quit their day jobs and work full time on a project they love, they'll turn out some beautiful results for you. Those percentages you randomly quote are total bullshit manager-speak and do not reflect in any way how the Open Source community operates. When you turn out open code that people want / need, it grows automatically much like a seed planted in fertile soil. So that $1 million, divided by say.. 15 programmers for one year, gets the code flowing quickly which in turn creates incentive for other people to make contributions and the momentum builds. After they year is over, the project can stand on it's own. Because office suite software is in far greater demand than web servers, such a project stands to do at least as well as Apache or other highly successful open source projects.
Philippe: Can you reuse the stuff from OpenOffice ?
Werner: It's really hard. They use libc and nothing more. They have their own toolkit and stuff. You can't just take parts of it and reuse it. And te design is, well, hard to follow.
KOffice, despite it's slow start and lack of developers, is actually moving along faster than OpenOffice. Frankly, I'm not surprised. The OpenOffice code, originally from StarOffice 5.2 is a shitty mess. What the hell was Sun thinking when they wasted the money buying it from Star Division? Sometimes, it's just better to start over from scratch. Look at how fast Konqueror is improving and compare that to Mozilla. While Mozilla is quite a nice browser today, consider how long it took to get there due to the mess that was Netscape Navigator code. I wouldn't be surprised if in another year, Konqueror is the most popular choice. It's already more feature rich and integrated.
Now the sad thing is that, while many businesses are still buying up MS Office licenses, nobody is supporting the KOffice project. Why the heck not? A million bucks in donations across the board could allow for enough full-time developers to oust MS Office once and for all. Compare that to the billions spent on MS Office licenses every time a new version comes out. It makes good long-term business sense to support Open development of the software you need. All that's needed is somebody to organize this and put forth an incentive, such as focused development on certain features.
Musicians. We're just ordinary people with a hobby--nothing worth making a big fuss over. I do music because I enjoy it, because it's a great feeling to watch other people enjoy the performance, and because it gives the left half of my brain a rest. I could give a care about making any money from my tunes. My daytime job is a primarily Open Source-based freelance software consultant and it pays the bills adequately. Right now, I'm working on setting up some digital recording equipment--half of it built myself with a soldering iron in one hand and a grounded heat-sink utensil in the other. When I'm done, I'll put all my work online in MIDI, OGG and FLAC formats for anyone who cares to enjoy or enhance--using a GPL style license so that it can't be commercialized too much. Just for fun I'll also put the work out on Gnutella and OpenNap servers.
This sorely-needed article is interesting and well thought. I firmly agree with the notion that the future of music will, above all, be more diverse. I also expect to see the power of labels fall dramatically. When the walls come down and markets are set free, monopolies do not survive. And when enough free music is available, there's no need for a market anyhow--just a culture. Maybe somebody will set up a site where the community can rank their favorite tunes. Who knows. Anything is possible.
Surely now they _must_ Open Source the code if they have no buyer for the business.
Unfortunately, the same braindead shareholders who insisted on keeping Blender closed to begin with will no doubt try to sell the rights to somebody else. Hopefully that somebody else will have the vision to turn it free and use the services model that NaN should have used from the start.
At least a half dozen times in the past few years, I kindly suggested to the Blender folks that they open source *all* of their software and adopt a services-oriented business model while building a support and development community around the code itself. "You have no market for proprietary 3D software," I told them, "Who is going to spend money on small-name software when highly superior Maya, Lightwave3D, 3D Studio, etc. are available?" But they never listened, "it's not our business plan." Apparently their shareholders had firmly decided that there was no money in Open Source (sounds aweful familiar to the trolls on/. eh?) Even though Blender was free (as in beer), they refused to open the code because they knew that it would kill the (non-existant) market for Publisher. Folks, it's not easy to make money in software no matter what approach you take. However, all things considered, you have far greater chance to succeed with community backing. And if you fail, at least you'll still have something to show for all your hard work.
..The gap between the tech-savvy and the techno-confused keeps growing, a monumental failure of our arrogant and elitist tech industries. It's hard to recall any industry which has so abused, neglected and exploited its customers and survived.
Open Source software is often lambasted for being harder to use than its proprietary Windows equivalents. On the other hand, it simultaneously has far better user support available. Proprietary software, being a product-based industry, cares more about shipping out new products than it does supporting what already exists. This comes naturally with the business model. They don't make money on support so it's very tempting to slack off. Open Source based business, in contrast, is purely a service industry. By very nature it results in far closer communication between users and developers. Open Source breaks down arrogance and elitism quickly as the development community expands. A customer cannot be neglected if it is also a co-developer. As the use of OSS continues to spread and more consulting firms spring up to meet the service need, I believe we'll see a flourishing of consumer friendly technology both on and off the desktop PC.
As long as you're not using a crap distro that statically links zlib all over the place, the fix for this is trivial. Install a patched zlib package and you should be pretty safe. The only instances of static zlib linking in Debian are:
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that Nautilus is roughly at the functionality level of old Konqueror 1.0. Any word on when serious progress is going to be made?
Interesting. I'll have to check that book out when I get a chance. I guess my own thought is that there are many 'lighthouse' opportunities out there already and that many sectors of free software are already reaching 'critical mass' where gap-closing is becomming more and more feasible, even for smaller firms. In the long run, I'd like to see more GPL'ed projects promote outside development via 'feature-adding' bounties or otherwise. It would be neat if freelance programmers could go searching for small contracted coding jobs contributing to Free Software projects. Maybe it wouldn't pay as well, but it'd certainly be more rewarding.
The other thought is some form of full-service consulting that includes writing / improving software to accurately meet clients needs. You just have to make sure the client realizes that they're paying for a consulting and development *service* rather than contracting a work-for-hire in which copyright would normally change hands.
Yes, I know of one definite way to pay the coders to write free software.
I won't go into detail because there are many ways to implement this, but the basic idea is to treat software production as a labor market rather than a product/service market. In other words, people who need software that doesn't already exist simply pay programmers to write it for them. Most of the time, this is not a matter of starting from scratch, but rather extending what already exists so that it meets a need. And in many cases, the hired programmer could be the maintainer of a project him/herself. If it is cheaper to pay a programmer to extend a free package rather than buy a proprietary one, it's a no-brainer. All we need is more freelance programmers / contractors.
The main thing that matters to most people in an MS Office replacement is how well it reads and writes MS Office files.
However, if an organization wants to switch to OpenOffice, they only need compatibility with the latest version of MS Office they had been using. From that point forward, the only problem is communicating with others who use MS Office. But if enough organizations begin to make the switch at the same time, Microsoft will get a taste of their own medicine--yes, they'll have to make Office be able to read/write OpenOffice formats. Granted, it's pretty lame when people send around simple text and data encapsulated in complex formats when ASCII would suffice, but I don't see this changing in the near future. At least the trend is towards XML-based formats.
Just in case anybody is wondering, the solar panels available today are neither "clean, renewable energy" nor cost efficient in terms of long-run payback. In almost all cases, the energy used to produce today's solar panels is greater than will ever be recovered by use within their approximate 10-12 year lifespan. When you add the energy and waste cost of inverters, lead-acid storage cells, etc. you end up with a power supply with far worse environmental impact than typical utility-provided power--especially if your local utility is nuclear--yes, nuclear is clean power, folks. Many solar installations also will never pay for themselves. So basically, today's photovoltaics are in essense expensive batteries. Lots of energy is put into their production, then they're shipped off somewhere else and they give you some of that energy back.
Right now, unless you live in a climate with very abundant sunlight and are off the grid due to location, the best alternative (electrical) energy sources are wind and possibly some of the new home fuel-cell units just arriving on the market. Plastic or other more exotic solar cells will definitely be interesting if they materialize, though--especially if they last longer and are easily/cheaply recycled.
But don't forget passive solar!! You don't have to convert it into electricity to make use of the sun's plentiful energy. With the right engineering and a suitable location, it is quite possible and inexpensive to use solar for most or all your home heating/cooling, cooking, water heating, etc. needs. Look around online; there's some interesting ideas out there. Plus-good for geeks who want to beat the system and whatnot. (-:
He should paint it a sickly pink-gray color, draw lines around the bumps and along crevices, and then name it... Mother Brain.
UNIX is dead! Long live the POSIX!!
Heck, GNU's been bashing UNIX for years by its very name. Doesn't bother me any if M$ bashes proprietary commercial unixes. Linux and *BSD are the future anyways.
Exchange 2K is different. It's built around SMTP, POP, LDAP, and iCalendar. It's using standard protocols. Where are the UNIX clients to support them?
There's no need for exchange at all. That's the stupidity of this whole thing. Using Connector is still supporting Microsoft because you still have to pay for the client access license. Nobody needs Exchange. And there's no advantage to using Exchange.
Do we need Exchange for SMTP? Nope
Do we need Exchange for POP? Nope
Do we need Exchange for LDAP? Nope
Do we need Exchange for Calendar services? Nope
Do we need Exchange to integrate all these? Nope
Every single use of / reason for Exchange has been thoroughly obsoleted by free software.
So who's going to pay for Connector? Employees working for companies with braindead IT deptartments. Kinda lame really. Why didn't they just put out some documentation on how to talk to Exchange and let the community build the software? But heck, if they can milk some money out of dumb M$ users to support their free projects, more power to 'em! (-:
From the FAQ on the playstation2-linux.com page:
The PlayStation 2 contains a subsystem for operating peripherals and audio including the SPU2 (Sound Processing Unit), the IOP, the HDD, the DVD drive, controllers, memory cards, USB and other peripherals. The hardware specification for these units is not disclosed. The Runtime Environment provided on DISC 1 includes binary software device drivers for controlling these hardware units. Source code for the Runtime Environment is proprietary and will not be disclosed. However, DISC 2 contains Linux device drivers (with source code) which show how to access all these devices through the Runtime Environment interface. This gives the developer access to the functionality of all the devices but not the complete hardware specification.
If CBDTPA passes, this is precisely the kind of scenario we'd have on all PC hardware. Sure, you could still use Linux with it, but you'll have to use proprietary binary drivers to access any I/O device. Replace "Runtime Environment" in the above paragraph with "government certified anti-copying device" and you've got a near perfect preview of CBDTPA. And of course, note that "hardware specifications are not disclosed." In other words, if you reverse engineer a device.. say a USB scanner.. to write a Linux driver, you'd be in violation of the proposed law. Only the manufacturer would be able to legally provide the drivers to access their hardware. And we all know the wonderful track record of PC hardware manufacturers in supporting alternative operating systems. I for one, will not support any company who produces proprietary hardware in the name of "anti-piracy."
What would happen if every single small company that was threatened simply refused to show up in court if sued? Instead, just send in a form letter stating that the patent is total and complete BS and then list every other company that has been simultaneously sued and subsequently refused to go to court for the same reason. Technically, that's probably contempt of the court or something, but at some point this nonsense has to stop simply because it is hurting small tech companies. Call it the.. uh.. Boston Patent Party or something. (-: IANAL and this is neither legal advice nor personal recommendation.
This kinda nonsense is ridiculous. Java and all related technology would be much better handled as an open industry project rather than by an arrogant corporation that hasn't quite realized yet that proprietary is going the way of the dino. So it doesn't fit their current cost structure. Boo hoo! Restructure the company how 'bout.
I've heard the arguments about selling services, but for what we are doing it just really doesn't work.
Software that everyone needs should be developed by everybody--sorta like the idea behind Apache. Everyone chips in a little and everyone gets back a great piece of software. GPL works beautifully here. The same can apply for all of the "general, end-user" software that Kompany produces because none of it is all that specialized. Perhaps the question becomes: Why is the Kompany trying to make money on general purpose software like development environments or messaging/organizer clients or whatever that literally hundreds of thousands of people need? That is software better written as a community. The place to make money in Open Source software is consulting--providing solutions, not services. He's right: selling services as an after-market.. err. after-download.. addition to free software doesn't work very well. But there is money in customizing or extending existing free software to clients likings, assuming that cost is less than they would have to spend on proprietary solutions. There may never be a place for corporations of any size in free Open Source software. But there will always be a market for the individual or the small consulting firm.
Ice sheets that are 200 meters thick and more than 3000 square miles big don't form or melt overnight. The instability which caused the collapse was a relatively recent development. That such a stable chunk of the Antarctican ice should disintegrate is of great concern.
On the contrary, the same type of instability which caused the ice to melt could just as easily cause ice to form. There's no energy being magically lost or gained here. Where do people think the peninsula came from in the first place? It had to have formed during an 'instability' where the temperatures in that region, for one reason or another, dropped. Who knows. Antarctica might have been 10 times larger before humans ever discovered it and it may have taken thousands of years to both grow to its original size and shrink to its current size. Global warming, if it exists, is not a joke. But saying that humans are causing it or even significantly altering it's progress is downright ludicrous given the amount of *real* data to the contrary.
It seems to me the best way to reduce the amount of pornography (which in itself is a worthy goal) is to regulate the hell out of the sex industry. Force the strip clubs to abide by stringent health regulations, enact privacy laws that force full disclosure and explicit consent to any photography or videotaping of persons (this could go for most non-sex related things as well), outlaw sexual activity as a work for hire thus forcing strippers, porn actors, etc. to be hired as employees with full income tax reporting, and put regulations on where porn shops and strip clubs may be located--much as current zoning regulations indicate residential and commercial levels. And how about making pornographic materials exempt from copyright protection. Porn exists largely because it's profitable. Remove the profit and away goes the porn. Sure, it'll still exist, but it'll be a lot less prevalent and obvious.
Since they're less rigid and have less total mass to 'average out' any irregularities, what happens when there's a small variation that slightly unbalances the disc? This wouldn't affect audio players, but I wonder if their stability would be insufficient to handle much higher speeds. I didn't see any specs on average maximum read speed.
No, again. Mozilla didn't *exist* a few years ago.
Neither did Konqueror exist in its 2.x form. (ie. when they started making it a true web browser instead of just a file manager / help viewer) You can't fairly compare 1.x Konq because it was for all practical purposes an entirely different package. I'm not saying that Mozilla is bad. It most definitely is the best browser to date. I just think the KDE folks have a superior development strategy that will propel the project faster than others with less man-hours. But that's just my opinion so take it or leave it.
Well, given that Konqueror only runs on KDE, *still* has crummy Javascript support, doesn't have as standards-compliant a renderer as Mozilla does, isn't used on the MacOS or Windows and looks and works like that god-awful IE.
Total bullshit. Moz has a mail client and a newsreader at least built in. Konqueror does not. Moz renders more HTML properly than Konqueror. As for "integrated", that's a buzzword from MS. I like app intercommunication -- drag and drop support is nice. However, tying two products is just stupid -- something designed to be done to encourage purchasing solely from one vendor.
The 3.x series is slated to entirely re-work the Javascript support, which is currently the only major hangup. Konqueror 2.2.2 is already fairly standards compliant but I believe it will become even more so in the near future.
Konqueror is not used on MacOS or Windows because it is a component of a complete desktop environment, not a standalone piece of software. So in that way, yes, it is a lot more like MS IE. On the other hand, why is that automatically a bad thing? Frankly, there are a lot of advantages to an integrated web-browser / file-manager / desktop in terms of usability. In fact, that's what Nautilus is aiming for as well, though they are way behind Konq at the moment. The average user has become very accustomed to a highly object oriented desktop environment. Sure, it's not necessary and obviously Sun hates the idea, but in terms of abstracting the user from the computer, it's a major step forward. Your comment about vendors and tying products together is entirely meaningless to Open Source projects like Konq or Moz. Either way, you could say that Moz is stupid for trying to tie a browser and mail client together. I don't use Moz's mail client so it's a waste for me. But I'm not really complaining either.
The poor Mozilla guys! They're criticized around the block for abandoning the Netscape 4.x base and starting from scratch, and this guy says that they took too long because they had to deal with the Netscape codebase
They did at the beginning. Yes, I'm aware that by now just about everything has been re-written from scratch and that's a good thing. I was just pointing out that during the transition phase and the establishment of the mozilla.org project, there was a lot of time wasted hammering around with old broken speghetti code. That is what the Open Office project seems to be dealing with right now. It's pretty near impossible for someone not intimately involved with the project to be of any help in the development, hence the first goal of the developers has been breaking the bloated monolithic kludge into modules that are actually managable. Sounds like developer hell to me.
Can you say, "I can't think for myself?" Get your head out of your ass and look around. Open Source work is freelance by nature. There is no "office development" needed. If you pay some freelance coders to quit their day jobs and work full time on a project they love, they'll turn out some beautiful results for you. Those percentages you randomly quote are total bullshit manager-speak and do not reflect in any way how the Open Source community operates. When you turn out open code that people want / need, it grows automatically much like a seed planted in fertile soil. So that $1 million, divided by say.. 15 programmers for one year, gets the code flowing quickly which in turn creates incentive for other people to make contributions and the momentum builds. After they year is over, the project can stand on it's own. Because office suite software is in far greater demand than web servers, such a project stands to do at least as well as Apache or other highly successful open source projects.
And by the way, it's spelled 'naive.'
Philippe: Can you reuse the stuff from OpenOffice ?
Werner: It's really hard. They use libc and nothing more. They have their own toolkit and stuff. You can't just take parts of it and reuse it. And te design is, well, hard to follow.
KOffice, despite it's slow start and lack of developers, is actually moving along faster than OpenOffice. Frankly, I'm not surprised. The OpenOffice code, originally from StarOffice 5.2 is a shitty mess. What the hell was Sun thinking when they wasted the money buying it from Star Division? Sometimes, it's just better to start over from scratch. Look at how fast Konqueror is improving and compare that to Mozilla. While Mozilla is quite a nice browser today, consider how long it took to get there due to the mess that was Netscape Navigator code. I wouldn't be surprised if in another year, Konqueror is the most popular choice. It's already more feature rich and integrated.
Now the sad thing is that, while many businesses are still buying up MS Office licenses, nobody is supporting the KOffice project. Why the heck not? A million bucks in donations across the board could allow for enough full-time developers to oust MS Office once and for all. Compare that to the billions spent on MS Office licenses every time a new version comes out. It makes good long-term business sense to support Open development of the software you need. All that's needed is somebody to organize this and put forth an incentive, such as focused development on certain features.
Musicians. We're just ordinary people with a hobby--nothing worth making a big fuss over. I do music because I enjoy it, because it's a great feeling to watch other people enjoy the performance, and because it gives the left half of my brain a rest. I could give a care about making any money from my tunes. My daytime job is a primarily Open Source-based freelance software consultant and it pays the bills adequately. Right now, I'm working on setting up some digital recording equipment--half of it built myself with a soldering iron in one hand and a grounded heat-sink utensil in the other. When I'm done, I'll put all my work online in MIDI, OGG and FLAC formats for anyone who cares to enjoy or enhance--using a GPL style license so that it can't be commercialized too much. Just for fun I'll also put the work out on Gnutella and OpenNap servers.
This sorely-needed article is interesting and well thought. I firmly agree with the notion that the future of music will, above all, be more diverse. I also expect to see the power of labels fall dramatically. When the walls come down and markets are set free, monopolies do not survive. And when enough free music is available, there's no need for a market anyhow--just a culture. Maybe somebody will set up a site where the community can rank their favorite tunes. Who knows. Anything is possible.
Surely now they _must_ Open Source the code if they have no buyer for the business.
Unfortunately, the same braindead shareholders who insisted on keeping Blender closed to begin with will no doubt try to sell the rights to somebody else. Hopefully that somebody else will have the vision to turn it free and use the services model that NaN should have used from the start.
At least a half dozen times in the past few years, I kindly suggested to the Blender folks that they open source *all* of their software and adopt a services-oriented business model while building a support and development community around the code itself. "You have no market for proprietary 3D software," I told them, "Who is going to spend money on small-name software when highly superior Maya, Lightwave3D, 3D Studio, etc. are available?" But they never listened, "it's not our business plan." Apparently their shareholders had firmly decided that there was no money in Open Source (sounds aweful familiar to the trolls on /. eh?) Even though Blender was free (as in beer), they refused to open the code because they knew that it would kill the (non-existant) market for Publisher. Folks, it's not easy to make money in software no matter what approach you take. However, all things considered, you have far greater chance to succeed with community backing. And if you fail, at least you'll still have something to show for all your hard work.
"There's booze in the blender. And soon it will render.. the frozen concoction that helps me hang on.." - from "Margaritaville"
..The gap between the tech-savvy and the techno-confused keeps growing, a monumental failure of our arrogant and elitist tech industries. It's hard to recall any industry which has so abused, neglected and exploited its customers and survived.
Open Source software is often lambasted for being harder to use than its proprietary Windows equivalents. On the other hand, it simultaneously has far better user support available. Proprietary software, being a product-based industry, cares more about shipping out new products than it does supporting what already exists. This comes naturally with the business model. They don't make money on support so it's very tempting to slack off. Open Source based business, in contrast, is purely a service industry. By very nature it results in far closer communication between users and developers. Open Source breaks down arrogance and elitism quickly as the development community expands. A customer cannot be neglected if it is also a co-developer. As the use of OSS continues to spread and more consulting firms spring up to meet the service need, I believe we'll see a flourishing of consumer friendly technology both on and off the desktop PC.
As long as you're not using a crap distro that statically links zlib all over the place, the fix for this is trivial. Install a patched zlib package and you should be pretty safe. The only instances of static zlib linking in Debian are:
amaya 2.4-1potato1
dictd 1.4.9-9potato1
erlang 49.1-10.1
freeamp 2.0.6-2.1
mirrordir 0.10.48-2.1
ppp 2.3.11-1.5
rsync 2.3.2-1.6
vrweb 1.5-5.1
So upgrade these too if you happen to use them. ppp would be the most critical of those for most people.