Not a love hate relationship for me; it just works very well. I've been using it as my sole browser [on openSUSE 11.x then 12.x] every day, pretty much all day, for years. It just works. Very well. Reliably. I'm happy with both the performance and the features.
Only time it bombs is when I try to view a 500MB XML file - it doesn't like that.
I'm a long time GNOME user, not a GNOME developer.
Bug aside, from reading the rest of these threads, it seems to me like GNOME devs are getting quite a bad reputation these days
Nope, they rock. When KDE did there big roll-out of KDE4 the lists *EXPLODED* with the wailing and gnashing of teeth. KDE4 arrived stable and that loud minority either adapted or went on the something else. Much the same thing happened with GNOME3 - although less than I expected. I moved to GNOME3 from GNOME2 and within a week it was clear that it was a superior system. But some adaptation was required.
And this particular bug is nonsense. Basically: if someone steals your harddrive they can read your data! Really? Wow, that's a surprise. This has always been true, is true of/home,/var. and everything else unless you encrypt everything.
This being said, all the scorn must come from somewhere.
Yes, it comes from a vocal minority who don't realize all these changes where discussed and made out-in-the-open. Now they enjoy pitching a fit and claiming the design changes are somehow being forced upon them.
My humble opinion is that once you reach a critical mass of users, enforcing a new grand-vision that the majority of those users (the ones who acutally chose to use GNOME,
Well, I'm one that uses GNOME ~9 hours a day. For work.
GNOME developers as a whole being bashed for what essentially is one bug in one lib by one person.
Eh. Spend time producing ANY kind of content and you'll eventually get someone who thinks they can get themselves some BLOG karma by bashing you.
The only base GNOME has truly alienated is the base that had made a very conscious and educated choice to use that DE on its technical merits, the ones who felt that the DE allowed them to work the way they want to work.
I want to work efficiently. GNOME3 lets me do that... more than GNOME2 did. This is an important distinction from, based on mail list traffic, people who apparently *NEED* to see the real-time weather report for three cities in the panel clock in order to be productive. I think the group primarily 'alienated' by GNOME3 are the "tweakers". They have a computer almost for the sole purpose of tweaking the appearance of the user-interface. One reads much of those posts and says "eh? really? don't you have something to *do*.".
we'll force our alternative on you.
The use of the term "force" in this context is bogus.
remember that the GNOME team doused itself in gasoline prior to this
I agree; this is a case of "nothing to see here, move along.".. Don't let it get to you. GNOME Terminal works great and the scrollback is fantastic. Thank you for your contribution.
And I don't need a PhD, I do enough data analysis to know that -
Quote: plot a simple chart showing temperatures along one axis and dates along another axis. A chart like that can be used to determine if the trend if towards higher temperatures or not.
- won't prove anything either way. Interpreting data takes work and lots of background knowledge. If whatever you did took less than at least a few hours - your analysis is worthless.
If average-totally-unqualified guy felt some restraint about commenting on topics he knows nothing about.... that would end something like 90% of the comments posted on Slashdot?
I know this is the first time I pulled up Slashdot it awhile - the troll factor makes in not work reading and who picks the stories these days? - and seeing this story right there.... Funny.
If guidance is what the poster wants then joining an existing project is a much better idea than creating a new [lonely] one. And from experience, joining an existing project is just more fun.
Find an Open Source project your interested in (I work on OpenGroupware) and ASK! If you demonstrate you are seriously interested I doubt you'll have any shortage guidance. In Open Source, and probably proprietary shops as well, aspirations also exceed available resources (time).
Being concerned about non-free frameworks such as.NET is almost as important as supporting Open Document Format as opposed to.doc and other proprietary formats.
Why? Contrary to the article: *NO* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" for use in Mono. This is confusion by the ignorant of the M$/Novell deal with Mono, the two have nothing to do with each other. The Samba team works very closely with M$, has accepted code from M$, and M$ testes Samba on M$ servers... should Samba be excluded from Debian?
Moreover, the.NET framework is superfluous not only because of its "legal" status, but also from the bloatware point of view: having to run yet another slow, bloated, RAM- and CPU-hungry runtime at every boot -- and for what: just for being able to run a tiny yellow sticky-notes applet? No, thanx. The Java runtime is enough. And free. And better.
Better how? Have you done benchmarks? Run some, you'll be suprised.
Microsoft doesn't need to sue. All they need to do is rattle the sabre and put the fear out there that they might begin to go after people.
Right, that is why so many companies with smart legal departments have no issue at all using Mono. Like IBM, Novell, Cannonical, a gillion gaming companies (yet Mono is huge in game development). Because all the non-lawyers here are clearly so much smarter than all their actual lawyers.
The biggest problem with this is that if mono is installed by default on systems that makes it more acceptable for ISVs to write their software for Mono/.NET
Great, because there are allot of very good.NET applications and.NET is a very nice development platform.
which will hurt the (Debian or any other) platform if Microsoft suddenly decides to sue and Mono has to be removed.
*NO* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" for use in Mono. A patent that applies to Mono almost certainly would equally apply to Java and very probably GCC.
THERE ARE *NO*, *ZERO*, *ZILCH* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" used in Mono. *NOTHING* is "licensed" from Microsoft for use in Mono by anyone at all.
When will the flaming @*^$*&^@ ignorance stop?
Do people realize that a software patent that applied to Mono would almost certainly apply to Java? And very possibly GLIBC? Maybe even X? Or GCC? And that Microsoft holds patents that relate to HTML, AJAX, and CSS? Get your heads out of your collective asses and learn what your talking about - or shut the hell up.
It isn't. That is just google fanboy-ism (very prevalent here these days). Simply nothing that thread, filter, sort, slice and dice like a modern e-mail client - which explains the dominance of mailists for real conversation and debate. But then you'll get the people who use hotmail or whatever complaining mailists are sooo hard to use and we should all use web forums - which are just about the worst form of communication ever invented.
Yes, introduce a dozen new complicated tools in order to solve the network & system documentation problem!
Seriously, allot of the above is a GOOD idea (especially #9 - Get groupware and USE groupware! But you may very well be able to use what you already have, which almost always beats adding yet-another-silo).
Just beware just adding yet another glob of complexity that itself would need to be documented.
There is no way to cheat towards useful documentation. I think there are two rules: Rule#1 - Please, in the name of all that is Holy, do *NOT* create a *^&@( Wiki. Write documentation. A Wiki is *NOT* documentation. Rule#2 - Learn how to properly use M$-Office or OpenOffice. Seriously, this will make create and maintaining good and thorough documentation. In OpenOffice (sorry, don't know a darn thing about M$-Office) you can create a master document (ODM) that aggregates other documents and that will automatically create a table-of-contents, index, etc... if you use the styles correctly. It is *WONDERFUL* to use. And each section as its own file is much easier to maintain that one MASSIVE document and the auto-indexing makes it pretty easy to look stuff up (which also very much helps in keeping docs up to date). I have no doubt that M$-Office has the same features packaged somehow.
Documenting, especially creating documentation someone can actually use, is just plain hard work.
Impressive, now MySQL can have features other databases (PostgreSQL among others) have had for *years*. I've never understood; people like MySQL because it is "light", "simple", "easy", blah, blah.... and yet they add all these enterprise features that then everyone will laud about how MySQL is "growing up" or some such. MySQL is one of the best examples of self redefined success I think I've ever seen.
If you want these features why not use a database that has had them for a long time, where they are better tested, and possibly get better performance under concurrent load as a side benefit.
> The only problem with your rational is that if all the competition > was from commercial entities, and not from people willing to work > without compensation, then the bottom line would not be zero
The only problem with this problem with the rational is that it assumes that the undercutting being done by other Open Source projects is NOT being done by paid developers; statistically, it is probably being done, at least in part, by paid developers in the same scenario as the original poster.
And Open Source or not has no bearing on support costs, so you need to hook your customers on paying, and renewing, support agreements.
Now please add a XAML designer to Monodevelop so I can create Silverlight/Moonlight apps without Visual Studio. AJAX, etc... is too twitchy and cumbersome. Silverlight is a great way to make real apps that deploy over the web, and without having to waste time fighting with JS+HTML+CSS (Ugh!).
>here are examples of major projects that are > taking this path to some degree or other: >Scalix, Zimbra, VMware,
None of these three are OSS projects; in the case of Scalix and Zimbra I think they are commercial products masquerading as OSS projects. VMware is certainly NOT an OSS project by any definition at all. Simply utilizing Open Source components does not turn something into an OSS project.
In defense of things like Scalix and Zimbra (not that I'm inclined to defend them) most of what they offer is Open Source. Stand-alone components like Outlook/MAPI connectors/plugins are different animals; there are real reasons why those are not generally OSS. And having independent units under different licenses in entirely OK.
>Amanda Backup, MySQL
Yep, I'll agree with those. (Fortunately alternatives, even superior alternatives [such as PostgreSQL], exist). And is "Amanda Backup" a "major" project?
I just don't see "seriously stifled in terms of making enhancements to the OSS". What significant feature has someone contributed to MySQL, or even Zimbra, that has been refused by upstream? The number seems very small.
>Typically when a commercial entity leads >development of OSS where they have a propriety >solution that enhances it, they PREVENT those key >proprietary feature from EVER being added to the >free version. Thus the ONLY way to get it to use >their paid version.
We don't yet know who will "lead" Android development. If it will be the OHA, Google, or someone/something else. Only time will answer that question.
While what you cite it certainly a legitimate concern I've very rarely seen it in practice. All the development work I've done for $$$ on OSS software has gone upstream or at least been released. There just isn't as much perceived benefit to keeping-code as many people think; perhaps there is if a company actually controls a product and 'owns' the user base. But that is pretty rare. Where are the proprietary features in Apache, Samba, MIT or Heimdal Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Mono, etc...? These products all have very large commercial contributors and are all fine examples of openness.
Most companies that sell FOSS (in any capacity) use it to sell solutions and not as a product. So the lock-it-up just doesn't really benefit anyone.
Oh, I should should I? Well, please forgive my immense ignorance.
> Private to cluster computing goes back and forth in time.
We aren't talking the *ONE* time IT shifted from the "glass room" to the desktop and client/server and then back to the server room with thin clients and consolidation. While an interesting shift in an *apparent* back-and-forth - one cycle of something doesn't really constitute a pattern, that would be a a serious case of over-reading the evidence.
Also the current shift is not equivalent. It is not a shift in preferred technologies or architecture with organizations. It is the shift of IT right *out of* organizations.
And as for the first "shift", it is less profound than often flaunted. Client/Server apps have *not* been replaced in anything resembling a ubiquitous way. Many a "consolidated" server is running the backend for client/server apps. The vast majority of desktops are not thin-clients and spend all day running fat-client apps. Meanwhile there are many companies still using dumb-terminals in applications where they are still effective and appropriate; most of the admins I know still have dumb terminals around.
Provision some of your hardware to run a hypervisor (like VMware ESX) and provide interested students or student groups with their own *real* virtual server. That is quite distinct from lame site-hosting provided by most free services. This would be valuable to any research groups or local FOSS projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a love hate relationship for me; it just works very well. I've been using it as my sole browser [on openSUSE 11.x then 12.x] every day, pretty much all day, for years. It just works. Very well. Reliably. I'm happy with both the performance and the features.
Only time it bombs is when I try to view a 500MB XML file - it doesn't like that.
I'm a long time GNOME user, not a GNOME developer.
Bug aside, from reading the rest of these threads, it seems to me like GNOME devs are getting quite a bad reputation these days
Nope, they rock. When KDE did there big roll-out of KDE4 the lists *EXPLODED* with the wailing and gnashing of teeth. KDE4 arrived stable and that loud minority either adapted or went on the something else. Much the same thing happened with GNOME3 - although less than I expected. I moved to GNOME3 from GNOME2 and within a week it was clear that it was a superior system. But some adaptation was required.
And this particular bug is nonsense. Basically: if someone steals your harddrive they can read your data! Really? Wow, that's a surprise. This has always been true, is true of /home, /var. and everything else unless you encrypt everything.
This being said, all the scorn must come from somewhere.
Yes, it comes from a vocal minority who don't realize all these changes where discussed and made out-in-the-open. Now they enjoy pitching a fit and claiming the design changes are somehow being forced upon them.
My humble opinion is that once you reach a critical mass of users, enforcing a new grand-vision that the majority of those users (the ones who acutally chose to use GNOME,
Well, I'm one that uses GNOME ~9 hours a day. For work.
GNOME developers as a whole being bashed for what essentially is one bug in one lib by one person.
Eh. Spend time producing ANY kind of content and you'll eventually get someone who thinks they can get themselves some BLOG karma by bashing you.
The only base GNOME has truly alienated is the base that had made a very conscious and educated choice to use that DE on its technical merits, the ones who felt that the DE allowed them to work the way they want to work.
I want to work efficiently. GNOME3 lets me do that... more than GNOME2 did. This is an important distinction from, based on mail list traffic, people who apparently *NEED* to see the real-time weather report for three cities in the panel clock in order to be productive. I think the group primarily 'alienated' by GNOME3 are the "tweakers". They have a computer almost for the sole purpose of tweaking the appearance of the user-interface. One reads much of those posts and says "eh? really? don't you have something to *do*.".
we'll force our alternative on you.
The use of the term "force" in this context is bogus.
remember that the GNOME team doused itself in gasoline prior to this
Nah, they doused themselves with awesome.
I agree; this is a case of "nothing to see here, move along.".. Don't let it get to you. GNOME Terminal works great and the scrollback is fantastic. Thank you for your contribution.
And I don't need a PhD, I do enough data analysis to know that -
Quote: plot a simple chart showing temperatures along one axis and dates along another axis. A chart like that can be used to determine if the trend if towards higher temperatures or not.
- won't prove anything either way. Interpreting data takes work and lots of background knowledge. If whatever you did took less than at least a few hours - your analysis is worthless.
If average-totally-unqualified guy felt some restraint about commenting on topics he knows nothing about.... that would end something like 90% of the comments posted on Slashdot?
I know this is the first time I pulled up Slashdot it awhile - the troll factor makes in not work reading and who picks the stories these days? - and seeing this story right there.... Funny.
If guidance is what the poster wants then joining an existing project is a much better idea than creating a new [lonely] one. And from experience, joining an existing project is just more fun.
Find an Open Source project your interested in (I work on OpenGroupware) and ASK! If you demonstrate you are seriously interested I doubt you'll have any shortage guidance. In Open Source, and probably proprietary shops as well, aspirations also exceed available resources (time).
Being concerned about non-free frameworks such as .NET is almost as important as supporting Open Document Format as opposed to .doc and other proprietary formats.
Why? Contrary to the article: *NO* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" for use in Mono. This is confusion by the ignorant of the M$/Novell deal with Mono, the two have nothing to do with each other. The Samba team works very closely with M$, has accepted code from M$, and M$ testes Samba on M$ servers... should Samba be excluded from Debian?
Moreover, the .NET framework is superfluous not only because of its "legal" status, but also from the bloatware point of view: having to run yet another slow, bloated, RAM- and CPU-hungry runtime at every boot -- and for what: just for being able to run a tiny yellow sticky-notes applet? No, thanx. The Java runtime is enough. And free. And better.
Better how? Have you done benchmarks? Run some, you'll be suprised.
Microsoft doesn't need to sue. All they need to do is rattle the sabre and put the fear out there that they might begin to go after people.
Right, that is why so many companies with smart legal departments have no issue at all using Mono. Like IBM, Novell, Cannonical, a gillion gaming companies (yet Mono is huge in game development). Because all the non-lawyers here are clearly so much smarter than all their actual lawyers.
It's not about mono being removed, it's about mono being included by default. Debian should just move mono and apps that depend on it out of main.
Why? Python is included in main. Any software patent that applies to Mono would very likely apply to Python as well.
The biggest problem with this is that if mono is installed by default on systems that makes it more acceptable for ISVs to write their software for Mono/.NET
Great, because there are allot of very good .NET applications and .NET is a very nice development platform.
which will hurt the (Debian or any other) platform if Microsoft suddenly decides to sue and Mono has to be removed.
*NO* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" for use in Mono. A patent that applies to Mono almost certainly would equally apply to Java and very probably GCC.
*NO* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" for use in Mono.
This is just idiots confusing the M$/Novell deal with something to do with Mono, which is doesn't even relate to.
THERE ARE *NO*, *ZERO*, *ZILCH* "specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms" used in Mono. *NOTHING* is "licensed" from Microsoft for use in Mono by anyone at all.
When will the flaming @*^$*&^@ ignorance stop?
Do people realize that a software patent that applied to Mono would almost certainly apply to Java? And very possibly GLIBC? Maybe even X? Or GCC? And that Microsoft holds patents that relate to HTML, AJAX, and CSS? Get your heads out of your collective asses and learn what your talking about - or shut the hell up.
It isn't. That is just google fanboy-ism (very prevalent here these days). Simply nothing that thread, filter, sort, slice and dice like a modern e-mail client - which explains the dominance of mailists for real conversation and debate. But then you'll get the people who use hotmail or whatever complaining mailists are sooo hard to use and we should all use web forums - which are just about the worst form of communication ever invented.
Ditto, NNTP is dead.
Yes, introduce a dozen new complicated tools in order to solve the network & system documentation problem!
Seriously, allot of the above is a GOOD idea (especially #9 - Get groupware and USE groupware! But you may very well be able to use what you already have, which almost always beats adding yet-another-silo).
Just beware just adding yet another glob of complexity that itself would need to be documented.
There is no way to cheat towards useful documentation. I think there are two rules:
Rule#1 - Please, in the name of all that is Holy, do *NOT* create a *^&@( Wiki. Write documentation. A Wiki is *NOT* documentation.
Rule#2 - Learn how to properly use M$-Office or OpenOffice. Seriously, this will make create and maintaining good and thorough documentation. In OpenOffice (sorry, don't know a darn thing about M$-Office) you can create a master document (ODM) that aggregates other documents and that will automatically create a table-of-contents, index, etc... if you use the styles correctly. It is *WONDERFUL* to use. And each section as its own file is much easier to maintain that one MASSIVE document and the auto-indexing makes it pretty easy to look stuff up (which also very much helps in keeping docs up to date). I have no doubt that M$-Office has the same features packaged somehow.
Documenting, especially creating documentation someone can actually use, is just plain hard work.
Impressive, now MySQL can have features other databases (PostgreSQL among others) have had for *years*. I've never understood; people like MySQL because it is "light", "simple", "easy", blah, blah.... and yet they add all these enterprise features that then everyone will laud about how MySQL is "growing up" or some such. MySQL is one of the best examples of self redefined success I think I've ever seen.
If you want these features why not use a database that has had them for a long time, where they are better tested, and possibly get better performance under concurrent load as a side benefit.
> The only problem with your rational is that if all the competition
> was from commercial entities, and not from people willing to work
> without compensation, then the bottom line would not be zero
The only problem with this problem with the rational is that it assumes that the undercutting being done by other Open Source projects is NOT being done by paid developers; statistically, it is probably being done, at least in part, by paid developers in the same scenario as the original poster.
And Open Source or not has no bearing on support costs, so you need to hook your customers on paying, and renewing, support agreements.
Now please add a XAML designer to Monodevelop so I can create Silverlight/Moonlight apps without Visual Studio. AJAX, etc... is too twitchy and cumbersome. Silverlight is a great way to make real apps that deploy over the web, and without having to waste time fighting with JS+HTML+CSS (Ugh!).
>here are examples of major projects that are
> taking this path to some degree or other:
>Scalix, Zimbra, VMware,
None of these three are OSS projects; in the case of Scalix and Zimbra I think they are commercial products masquerading as OSS projects. VMware is certainly NOT an OSS project by any definition at all. Simply utilizing Open Source components does not turn something into an OSS project.
In defense of things like Scalix and Zimbra (not that I'm inclined to defend them) most of what they offer is Open Source. Stand-alone components like Outlook/MAPI connectors/plugins are different animals; there are real reasons why those are not generally OSS. And having independent units under different licenses in entirely OK.
>Amanda Backup, MySQL
Yep, I'll agree with those. (Fortunately alternatives, even superior alternatives [such as PostgreSQL], exist). And is "Amanda Backup" a "major" project?
I just don't see "seriously stifled in terms of making enhancements to the OSS". What significant feature has someone contributed to MySQL, or even Zimbra, that has been refused by upstream? The number seems very small.
>Typically when a commercial entity leads
>development of OSS where they have a propriety
>solution that enhances it, they PREVENT those key
>proprietary feature from EVER being added to the
>free version. Thus the ONLY way to get it to use
>their paid version.
We don't yet know who will "lead" Android development. If it will be the OHA, Google, or someone/something else. Only time will answer that question.
While what you cite it certainly a legitimate concern I've very rarely seen it in practice. All the development work I've done for $$$ on OSS software has gone upstream or at least been released. There just isn't as much perceived benefit to keeping-code as many people think; perhaps there is if a company actually controls a product and 'owns' the user base. But that is pretty rare. Where are the proprietary features in Apache, Samba, MIT or Heimdal Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Mono, etc...? These products all have very large commercial contributors and are all fine examples of openness.
Most companies that sell FOSS (in any capacity) use it to sell solutions and not as a product. So the lock-it-up just doesn't really benefit anyone.
>having commercial entities charter and lead
>features of a platform that their own commercial
>offerings provide 'enhanced' versions of
Earth to Slashdot... this is how almost every major OSS project runs; people who pay for developers [such as me] will get the features they want.
> You should know better.
Oh, I should should I? Well, please forgive my immense ignorance.
> Private to cluster computing goes back and forth in time.
We aren't talking the *ONE* time IT shifted from the "glass room" to the desktop and client/server and then back to the server room with thin clients and consolidation. While an interesting shift in an *apparent* back-and-forth - one cycle of something doesn't really constitute a pattern, that would be a a serious case of over-reading the evidence.
Also the current shift is not equivalent. It is not a shift in preferred technologies or architecture with organizations. It is the shift of IT right *out of* organizations.
And as for the first "shift", it is less profound than often flaunted. Client/Server apps have *not* been replaced in anything resembling a ubiquitous way. Many a "consolidated" server is running the backend for client/server apps. The vast majority of desktops are not thin-clients and spend all day running fat-client apps. Meanwhile there are many companies still using dumb-terminals in applications where they are still effective and appropriate; most of the admins I know still have dumb terminals around.
Provision some of your hardware to run a hypervisor (like VMware ESX) and provide interested students or student groups with their own *real* virtual server. That is quite distinct from lame site-hosting provided by most free services. This would be valuable to any research groups or local FOSS projects.