There are lots of profitable open source companies
on
Opposing Open Source?
·
· Score: 2
> No, they weren't. They struggled along for ten
> years without ever achieving sustainable
> profitability. The buyout was a rescue.
That happen not to be the case. Appart from the first year, they had a comfortable profit during their entire run. And that was well *before* the Linux hype started.
This is from their employees, if you have any hard fact showing they lie, show them or shut up.
> How do you figure that they [gnat.com] are
> profitable? You get to look at the balance
> sheets of this privately held company?
As he said, they have been around forever. That is an indication (not a proof) of profitability. If you have seen anything indicating otherwise, show them, otherwise it is just fud.
> And how do you figure they're open source? It
> looks like it's "source included," not open
> source. There are no source downloads available
> on their site.
"Source included" plus redistribution and modification rights is enough for the original and most autoritative definition of open source.
In any case, the GNAT sourcecode is part of the GCC CVS tree, and can be downloaded (via anonymous CVS) from gcc.gnu.org.
> No, they just had big layoffs
Big layoffs and profitability are not mutually exclusive.
Because it is consistenly better than the alternatives for interactive tasks, thanks to its excellent environment.
> It is a fairly bad mail reader,
The "feel" is subjective, however, for the obvjective part, the features, Gnus beats everything else on the market.
> a fairly bad news reader,
The "feel" is subjective, however, for the obvjective part, the features, Gnus beats everything else on the market.
> and a HORRIBLE environment for writing
> functions to manipulate text.
Strange that the best packages for interactive text manipulations tend to be written in Emacs, then.
I wouldn't use it for batch oriented stuff though, for that Perl is more to my likeing.
> It is great for writing code or TeX though.
For that as well.
It is just another backend...
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
XEmacs has a clear separation between the display driver, and the rest of the system. To XEmacs, Gnome is just another window system, just like X11, win32, and for that matter, termcap. You configure it --with-gnome to select Gnome support.
In fact, XEmacs can have multiple display drivers active simultaniously, so the Cygwin port of XEmacs can have a native win32 frame, a console (termcap) frame, and an X11 frame open simultaniously.
I hope someone will add KDE support, just for the hack value of having a single XEmacs with both a Gnome and a KDE frame open simultainously.
The speration is less elegant in Emacs, the code is full of "ifdefs" for the differnet window systems, so adding support for Gnome would be more of a maintaince burden.
However, since Gnome _is_ the supported GNU desktop, the maintainers of Emacs would very much like to see someone volunteer to add Gnome support, despite the maintainance cost.
Technical reasons?
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
XEmacs has always been close to a superset of Emacs featurewise, so it is not likely many people will be able to point to a specific feature and say "that's why". However, both Emacs and XEmacs both has so many features, that only people with patological featuritis will chose XEmacs simply because it has more features. Most sane people will only let that be the deciding feature, if they really need some specific feature (like color in text terminals before Emacs 21).
Here are some real reasons most people use Emacs:
- Conservatism. Why switch when the existing solution work fine?
- Emacs is what most people hear about first, even XEmacs is often refered to as just "Emacs".
Here are some of mine:
- Emacs "feel" more coherent (both on a Lisp and UI level), probably because RMS has always been directing, even when someone else has been official maintainer. XEmacs has had different maintainers, and different parts have a different feel.
- I have submitted lots of small "scratch an itch" patches to Emacs, which makes it work better for me than XEmacs out of the box. (The big patches I also send to the XEmacs people).
- I trust Emacs to stay around because of RMS' dedication, and I like its role as flagship for the GNU project. I also like the historic significance, with RMS as the original author.
If you really want technical reasons, Emacs 21 will provide some. It's font model is stronger than XEmacs. It has limited Unicode support out of the box (XEmacs needs an add-on). I believe most of the GUI features are more elegant designed (if sometimes more limited featurewise) at the API level than for XEmacs.
XEmacs is available for Cygwin
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
... they keep asking "can Emacs do this ?", for which the answer is, invariently, "yes". Making coffe isn't even new with Emacs 21, I believe it was added back in the old Emacs 19 days.
The correct question is, "how can I make Emacs do this?".
He can't put a new email client to the market, if the leading ISP's doesn't allow their users to use new clients. If he can't market it, he will not be able to fund the development. If he can't fund the development, inovation will die.
The government often "back" international trade contracts, and therefore likely have inside information. Some of these compete with US companies, who would just love to know what their german competitors are bidding on a contract.
More to the point of NSA (or CIA), Germany traditionally have a more arab-friendly foreign policy that the US. The US government would probably like to know any changes (like e.g. lifting the embarco against Iraq) in the German policiy before it becomes official.
There "about" field just tell how professional and fact-oriented they are, but their articles look somewhere between MS FUD and/. trolls.
From the front page:
- IBM hasn't made any major open source announcements for several months.
- The Free Lunch crowd is against reasonable and nondiscriminatory licenses.
- Sun drops Gnome from Solaris 9.
I'd put a lot more trust in the last rumor, if it wasn't posted together with the first two exacmples of LinuxGram profesionally reported hard facts.
I *chose* to make it public readable, because I don't care if someone read it. The point was, *if* I cared about privacy, I'd probably start by making them o-r.
You may not be a troll, as it is possible you actually believe what you say. For some reason, software often tend to activate the tribal instict in nerds. You (and the moderators who scored you up) obviously belong to the KDE "tribe", in which case the defensive instict when the "tribe" is viewed as thretened tend to overrule logic thinking.
Disagrement about a license *is* a perfectly valid reason to choose another product. No reason to make up conspiracy theories about that.
Anyone knowing the history of RMS would know that licenses matter more to him than to almost all other people.
The "tribe" has for a long time maintained that was no legal conflict between the old Qt license and the GPL, so it is not too surprising that the members of the tribe did not recognize the need for a legal forgiveness, and instead chose to take it as an insult. However, the FSF had all the time maintained that they were incompatible (it is a core feature of the GPL), so such an action was consistent with that. No need to invent other reasons, except to protect the tribal myths.
And of course, with "Go gnomes" RMS openly encouraged his own tribe, which of course could only be taken as an attack by the competing tribe, making him fair game.
I agree with your technical comments, though. While I don't care for desktops, I do care about GUI toolkits. I prefer C++ and Qt for technical reasons, and I believe a C++ based design is better than a C + a lot of language bindings.
I did use Gtk-- because it, unlike Qt, was free software, and I wanted my product to be available as free software with no proprietary dependencies on platforms where that is possible. I like the idea of a complete free soystem. When Troll Tech switched to QPL (and later GPL) I switched to Qt, because it was a more stable toolkit.
My mail folders on our multiuser system are kept publically readable, so encrypting them on the wire seem silly.
However, there is a social convention about not reading other peoples mail, which means someone behaving like you would be rude. It is a public display of disrespect, which is insulting whether or not the victim cares about his mail privacy or not. I'd be annoyed too.
Volunteer work
on
LWN in Trouble
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the point was that it used to be that these kind of news sites could be run by enthusiasts as a not too expensive (except in time) hobby.
If the professional Linux news sites fail, hopefully amateurs will step in to fill the void. Unless something changed so this is no longer possible.
At least, the Emacs 21 ChangeLog files have plenty of entries from him. Emacs was his original project, so it make sense that he has retired to that. He also concentrate more on documentation that programming
API means Application Programming Interface, it is the source level interface. As long as the API stay the same, a recompile is the most that is needed.
ABI means Application Binary Interface, it is the binary interface. As long as the ABI stay the same, old binaries will work.
What free software developers care about is API stability, not ABI stability.
Uh, PDF is my preferred format for publishing. It looks exactly the same as the paper version, can easely be viewed and printed by non-techincal people, and thanks to pdflatex I can use my favorite source language. As an extra bonus, with \usepackage{hyperref}, all my references become hyperlinks.
Emacs 21 is 359801 lines of C code, and 795987 lines of Lisp code. So it is only about a third the size of OpenOffice or Linux, even though it does so much more.
Slashdot Mirror
> No, they weren't. They struggled along for ten
> years without ever achieving sustainable
> profitability. The buyout was a rescue.
That happen not to be the case. Appart from the first year, they had a comfortable profit during their entire run. And that was well *before* the Linux hype started.
This is from their employees, if you have any hard fact showing they lie, show them or shut up.
> How do you figure that they [gnat.com] are
> profitable? You get to look at the balance
> sheets of this privately held company?
As he said, they have been around forever. That is an indication (not a proof) of profitability. If you have seen anything indicating otherwise, show them, otherwise it is just fud.
> And how do you figure they're open source? It
> looks like it's "source included," not open
> source. There are no source downloads available
> on their site.
"Source included" plus redistribution and modification rights is enough for the original and most autoritative definition of open source.
In any case, the GNAT sourcecode is part of the GCC CVS tree, and can be downloaded (via anonymous CVS) from gcc.gnu.org.
> No, they just had big layoffs
Big layoffs and profitability are not mutually exclusive.
Imagine a law so stupid that civil obedience becomes an efficient way to fighting it...
Get it here.
> Why should emacs do everything ?
Because it is consistenly better than the alternatives for interactive tasks, thanks to its excellent environment.
> It is a fairly bad mail reader,
The "feel" is subjective, however, for the obvjective part, the features, Gnus beats everything else on the market.
> a fairly bad news reader,
The "feel" is subjective, however, for the obvjective part, the features, Gnus beats everything else on the market.
> and a HORRIBLE environment for writing
> functions to manipulate text.
Strange that the best packages for interactive text manipulations tend to be written in Emacs, then.
I wouldn't use it for batch oriented stuff though, for that Perl is more to my likeing.
> It is great for writing code or TeX though.
For that as well.
XEmacs has a clear separation between the display driver, and the rest of the system. To XEmacs, Gnome is just another window system, just like X11, win32, and for that matter, termcap. You configure it --with-gnome to select Gnome support.
In fact, XEmacs can have multiple display drivers active simultaniously, so the Cygwin port of XEmacs can have a native win32 frame, a console (termcap) frame, and an X11 frame open simultaniously.
I hope someone will add KDE support, just for the hack value of having a single XEmacs with both a Gnome and a KDE frame open simultainously.
The speration is less elegant in Emacs, the code is full of "ifdefs" for the differnet window systems, so adding support for Gnome would be more of a maintaince burden.
However, since Gnome _is_ the supported GNU desktop, the maintainers of Emacs would very much like to see someone volunteer to add Gnome support, despite the maintainance cost.
XEmacs has always been close to a superset of Emacs featurewise, so it is not likely many people will be able to point to a specific feature and say "that's why". However, both Emacs and XEmacs both has so many features, that only people with patological featuritis will chose XEmacs simply because it has more features. Most sane people will only let that be the deciding feature, if they really need some specific feature (like color in text terminals before Emacs 21).
Here are some real reasons most people use Emacs:
- Conservatism. Why switch when the existing solution work fine?
- Emacs is what most people hear about first, even XEmacs is often refered to as just "Emacs".
Here are some of mine:
- Emacs "feel" more coherent (both on a Lisp and UI level), probably because RMS has always been directing, even when someone else has been official maintainer. XEmacs has had different maintainers, and different parts have a different feel.
- I have submitted lots of small "scratch an itch" patches to Emacs, which makes it work better for me than XEmacs out of the box. (The big patches I also send to the XEmacs people).
- I trust Emacs to stay around because of RMS' dedication, and I like its role as flagship for the GNU project. I also like the historic significance, with RMS as the original author.
If you really want technical reasons, Emacs 21 will provide some. It's font model is stronger than XEmacs. It has limited Unicode support out of the box (XEmacs needs an add-on). I believe most of the GUI features are more elegant designed (if sometimes more limited featurewise) at the API level than for XEmacs.
here
... they keep asking "can Emacs do this ?", for which the answer is, invariently, "yes". Making coffe isn't even new with Emacs 21, I believe it was added back in the old Emacs 19 days.
The correct question is, "how can I make Emacs do this?".
He can't put a new email client to the market, if the leading ISP's doesn't allow their users to use new clients. If he can't market it, he will not be able to fund the development. If he can't fund the development, inovation will die.
From the article:
> ALICE was judged better than a human
> correspondent only once during the testing.
I wonder how the humans scored in general. With one sad exception, they did better than the best AI, but did they all pass the test?
The government often "back" international trade contracts, and therefore likely have inside information. Some of these compete with US companies, who would just love to know what their german competitors are bidding on a contract.
More to the point of NSA (or CIA), Germany traditionally have a more arab-friendly foreign policy that the US. The US government would probably like to know any changes (like e.g. lifting the embarco against Iraq) in the German policiy before it becomes official.
There "about" field just tell how professional and fact-oriented they are, but their articles look somewhere between MS FUD and /. trolls.
From the front page:
- IBM hasn't made any major open source announcements for several months.
- The Free Lunch crowd is against reasonable and nondiscriminatory licenses.
- Sun drops Gnome from Solaris 9.
I'd put a lot more trust in the last rumor, if it wasn't posted together with the first two exacmples of LinuxGram profesionally reported hard facts.
So now we are forced to use ugly, bloated CDE, unless ugly, bloated Gnome get ready in time?
Well, there is always my Debian box with olwm.
I *chose* to make it public readable, because I don't care if someone read it. The point was, *if* I cared about privacy, I'd probably start by making them o-r.
... so it is hard to fault /. ethically in this case.
--
Per Abrahamsen, registered Linux user #367.
You may not be a troll, as it is possible you actually believe what you say. For some reason, software often tend to activate the tribal instict in nerds. You (and the moderators who scored you up) obviously belong to the KDE "tribe", in which case the defensive instict when the "tribe" is viewed as thretened tend to overrule logic thinking.
Disagrement about a license *is* a perfectly valid reason to choose another product. No reason to make up conspiracy theories about that.
Anyone knowing the history of RMS would know that licenses matter more to him than to almost all other people.
The "tribe" has for a long time maintained that was no legal conflict between the old Qt license and the GPL, so it is not too surprising that the members of the tribe did not recognize the need for a legal forgiveness, and instead chose to take it as an insult. However, the FSF had all the time maintained that they were incompatible (it is a core feature of the GPL), so such an action was consistent with that. No need to invent other reasons, except to protect the tribal myths.
And of course, with "Go gnomes" RMS openly encouraged his own tribe, which of course could only be taken as an attack by the competing tribe, making him fair game.
I agree with your technical comments, though. While I don't care for desktops, I do care about GUI toolkits. I prefer C++ and Qt for technical reasons, and I believe a C++ based design is better than a C + a lot of language bindings.
I did use Gtk-- because it, unlike Qt, was free software, and I wanted my product to be available as free software with no proprietary dependencies on platforms where that is possible. I like the idea of a complete free soystem. When Troll Tech switched to QPL (and later GPL) I switched to Qt, because it was a more stable toolkit.
My mail folders on our multiuser system are kept publically readable, so encrypting them on the wire seem silly.
However, there is a social convention about not reading other peoples mail, which means someone behaving like you would be rude. It is a public display of disrespect, which is insulting whether or not the victim cares about his mail privacy or not. I'd be annoyed too.
I think the point was that it used to be that these kind of news sites could be run by enthusiasts as a not too expensive (except in time) hobby.
If the professional Linux news sites fail, hopefully amateurs will step in to fill the void. Unless something changed so this is no longer possible.
At least, the Emacs 21 ChangeLog files have plenty of entries from him. Emacs was his original project, so it make sense that he has retired to that. He also concentrate more on documentation that programming
API means Application Programming Interface, it is the source level interface. As long as the API stay the same, a recompile is the most that is needed.
ABI means Application Binary Interface, it is the binary interface. As long as the ABI stay the same, old binaries will work.
What free software developers care about is API stability, not ABI stability.
Uh, PDF is my preferred format for publishing. It looks exactly the same as the paper version, can easely be viewed and printed by non-techincal people, and thanks to pdflatex I can use my favorite source language. As an extra bonus, with \usepackage{hyperref}, all my references become hyperlinks.
I did somewhere that there was some special rules about Sun stock that protected them from hostile takeover.
I have no idea whether such a thing is possible, and even if it isn't, it probably would not prevent a volunteerly merger.
Emacs 21 is 359801 lines of C code, and 795987 lines of Lisp code. So it is only about a third the size of OpenOffice or Linux, even though it does so much more.
Since you asked.
GCC recognizes the construct, and doesn't open the file the second time.
GCC performs that optimization.