Simply "make" the package, and it downloads and compiles the program, and any depdancies you need!
To satisfy a program's build dependencies you just type "apt-get build-dep program" in Debian. To get the source you issue "apt-get source program".
Granted, it's a few commands extra to compile it but I don't think it makes that much of a difference, if you want it easy you should probably "apt-get install" it anyway... or you could write a simple script to do it all in one step:).
I just can't figure out why they'd want to buy those companies out. It's not in their interest to get a monopoly, if there was a monopoly why would people leave Windows? Also, they can't get a monopoly, any distribution could take over in no time by building a good installer for Debian (heck, people are working on that already).
So I called Cisco tech support. I wish had done this sooner. I was amazed first of all by how you can talk to a qualified Cisco tech immediately... we're talking an 800 number that you dial and within less than a minute you are talking to a technician... doesn't Cisco realize how shocking this is to technical people, to actually be able to talk to qulified technicians immediately who say things other than, "Well, it works on my computer here..."? Do they not know that tech support phone numbers are supposed to be 900 numbers that require you to enter your personal information and product license number, then forward you to unthinking robots who put you on hold for hours, then drop your call to the Los Angeles Bus Authority switchboard... does Cisco not understand that if you do not put people on hold for at least 10 minutes they might pass out in shock for being able to talk to a human too soon? Apparently not.
Yes, but have you tried dialing that number when Slashdot wasn't down?
Surely this work isn't irrelivant. The information stored in it will probably be very useful to the AI field.
I was thinking myself it would be nice to use Cyc to train neural networks. That way you might be able to 'grow' (the beginning of) a real AI. Does this sound feasable?
At this stage, we were running out of time, so he speeded up:) One huge thing that helped KDE and would probably benefit other very big projects was that KDE had the KDE Summit which was sponsored by Trolltech. When you get all the people in same place, then magic happens. At the KDE one, Matthias Ettrich and Preston Brown got drunk to the stage of claiming "We could write better than CORBA. Hic. In a day!" The next day, of course, everyone reminded them about this claim, so they had to do something about it. 36 hours later, DCOM (?) emerged. There was a similar effect with KOffice, which came on by leaps and bounds as a result of the summit. So, if you're big enough to get sponsors, get your people all in one place and watch the results pour out.
This probably (hopefully!) isn't the whole story though:-).
Actually I've heard that KParts was made because a couple of KDE developers, when drunk, claimed that they could do better than CORBA. The hacker spirit I'd say:-). But it's an invention KDE made instead of GNOME who used CORBA.
Also GNOME uses the Gimp ToolKit which they also didn't invent themselves. The reasons for GTK over Qt should also be known by now, licensing and the fact that Qt is C++.
I was only giving khttpd as an example, also I wasn't talking about inserting a GUI in the kernel. Rather I was talking about putting the video card's drivers in it.
But now that I think about it.. that would probably mean inserting OpenGL (or something like that) in the kernel which doesn't seem like a good idea:-).
Linux does a lot of stuff that could be considered bloat by many (e.g. the httpd accelerator). Adding video drivers wouldn't be such a problem I think, it's probably xlib, KDE and GNOME rather than the drivers that take so much space. Also, you could always compile the drivers out.
The real reason I think is historical, the argument was that Linux was more stable than WinNT because its video drivers weren't built in the kernel. I don't believe this is true, it has only happened to me once that my computer froze up to a point that I couldn't do Ctrl+Alt+Fx anymore, I'm not even sure it was X (no network to telnet from here at that time). Another reason might be that X is maintained well and there is no point in moving the drivers, especially since the drivers would have to built into X for other Unices anyway.
I'm interested in the opinions from people that know a bit more about this than I do.
According to this interview at powerlinux.org the Berlin aims to be more than just an X replacement, it forces the Model View Controller paradigm onto the application, which makes it harder for many applications to be ported to Berlin. This I think will hold Berlin from replacing X (we all know how hackers don't like being forced a paradigm upon:).
As for the framebuffer-GTK, this is really neat but will only fill a niche I think. You see, the framebuffer means that it will not be possible to use the special functions found on todays cards without building special support for all cards. A new windowing environment with its own drivers would have to be build upon it to support that.
Also, X is not that bloated as people think and can be stripped down a lot. Remember that X is being used on Linux handhelds, and it's not like the developers didn't have a choice. Further it must be noted that X recently had a lot of sweet additions like Mesa3D, anti-alliasing and soon a RandR extension according to another post.
A lot of people did argue that Qt should have been GPL, yes. But a lot of people are also happy now that Qt is GPL'd. There's no hypocrisy here.
The ones that didn't get notice were those that complained that Qt wasn't released under the LGPL, BSD license, etc.. Which is very unfortunate since I'm one of those people:-).
Anyway.. check out the other replies I got to that message, the many follow-ups might give you an insight to why I feel the GPL is not appropriate for a toolkit.
You are correct in that there would be no dangers for the GPL'd projects (a.o. KDE), a fortunate thing. KDE would be a serious loss.
I guess a solution for people not releasing under the GPL would be to develop for GTK+. Both toolkits would then have to interoperate better so that they use the same theme, have the same widgets, etc... one can only dream:).
Of course Linux is not yet mainstream enuogh for getting a lot of attetion from the commercial vendors (concerning desktop applications, that is), it is not a problem at the moment but I can foresee it becoming one in the future.
Also, I wouldn't bet for TrollTech to release BSD under the BSD license if they ever stopped working on Qt. Saying they ran out of money for whatever reason and they would have to sell their assets, you'd be at the mercy of the company buying Qt. IANAL but I don't think that it would be even legal for them to release it under the BSD license, I believe they would have to try to pay as much debts as possible by selling Qt.
Note that if Trolltech would ever stop developing Qt people continuing to work on Qt would have to ship the modified QPL edition as one giant patch.
Also, the proprierty version of Qt would not be upgraded anymore and thus the KDE support for proprierty software would die.
This is of course a worsed case scenario but I think it's important to consider this as Qt is at the core of KDE.
I was indeed incorrect about the QPL not allowing other licenses than the GPL. That mistake was unintentinal.
But the problem that commercial vendors must pay to Trolltech still remains. I think this is a very bad situation for a toolkit like Qt.
Think about it, what if Microsoft charged money for linking against its APIs? I think a lot of third-party APIs would pop up and a lot of apps would use different toolkits and ruining the consistency in the OS.
The GPL/Qt dual licening is doing just that, requiring commercial vendors to pay for the library, it is thus encouraging them to use another toolkit. And that is also why the licensing thing is a mess, developers should be encouraged to program for KDE, even if they have a closed-source mindset.
Another problem is that the QPL only allows changes to be distributed as patches. If Trolltech were ever to stop developing Qt, the people that continued to work on Qt would only be allowed to distribute the QPL'd version as the latest one released by Trolltech plus a giant patch, a mess I'd say.
Even worse, if I understand correctly commercial vendors wouldn't be able to get updates at all if Trolltech were ever to quit developing Qt because they are licensed under different terms from the QPL and GPL. If this were ever to happen it would be impossible to develop proprierty applications for KDE.
It's too bad the KDE developers are so careless about the Qt license, really. I think they miss a lot of users and developers because of that.
Even though I agree that KDE is technically superiour to Gnome (except for Bonobo, Evolution and Nautilus:) I don't want to switch to a desktop environment whose developers don't care one bit about its users license concerns.
For example:
Did the fact that QT was not GPL ever stop you?
Never. We saw QT and we knew how good it was. We just put out KDE. We're not forcing anyone to use it. We just put it out there. If you don't want to use it, that's ok.
That's an additude I could understand somewhat if they weren't building a desktop environment. He's basicly saying that he doesn't care that people don't write KDE apps, what kind of attitude is that?
Also it is still very bad that the Qt library is licensed under the GPL. This is locking out everyone that doesn't want to use the GPL.
Why GPL? Since part of my goal was understanding how these things work and would work under NT, GPL was as good of a way as any to share my work with others. I ended getting a little help from a couple people in the process. Overall, it was a fun experience I learned a lot from.
I assume you mean that some people contributed to the code.
After working for Microsoft for about a year, someone from research called me and asked me if they could use Fnord as an example for their IP6 effort. They needed a server example, releasing a subset of IIS was not possible (I suspect size and intellectual property issues) so Fnord fit the bill. Other than saying yes and being glad Fnord still was of some use to someone, I had no other role in MS release it.
I assume the code was released not under the GPL as the guy from research explicitely asked your permission.
If these assumptions are correct then you and/or Microsoft (IANAL) have violated the GPL by not asking the co-authors of Fnord if it was OK to relicense the code.
Unfortunately Gnome doesn't have anything like DCOP, therefore every program would have to implement this itself.
BTW: does anyone in here know how hard it would be for Gnome to be made compatible with DCOP (excluding the actual applications that would have to be modified)?
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Granted, it's a few commands extra to compile it but I don't think it makes that much of a difference, if you want it easy you should probably "apt-get install" it anyway... or you could write a simple script to do it all in one step :).
I just can't figure out why they'd want to buy those companies out. It's not in their interest to get a monopoly, if there was a monopoly why would people leave Windows? Also, they can't get a monopoly, any distribution could take over in no time by building a good installer for Debian (heck, people are working on that already).
I was thinking myself it would be nice to use Cyc to train neural networks. That way you might be able to 'grow' (the beginning of) a real AI. Does this sound feasable?
The number is 1-800-647-6131 ext.8047. But it's not like I'm going to make an international call to opt out :-).
I sometimes get spam containing a (U.S.) phone number to dial if I want to opt out. Do you happen to know if that is legal in the U.S.?
The exact paragraph:
At this stage, we were running out of time, so he speeded up :) One huge thing that helped KDE and would probably benefit other very big projects was that KDE had the KDE Summit which was sponsored by Trolltech. When you get all the people in same place, then magic happens. At the KDE one, Matthias Ettrich and Preston Brown got drunk to the stage of claiming "We could write better than CORBA. Hic. In a day!" The next day, of course, everyone reminded them about this claim, so they had to do something about it. 36 hours later, DCOM (?) emerged. There was a similar effect with KOffice, which came on by leaps and bounds as a result of the summit. So, if you're big enough to get sponsors, get your people all in one place and watch the results pour out.
This probably (hopefully!) isn't the whole story though :-).
Also GNOME uses the Gimp ToolKit which they also didn't invent themselves. The reasons for GTK over Qt should also be known by now, licensing and the fact that Qt is C++.
But now that I think about it.. that would probably mean inserting OpenGL (or something like that) in the kernel which doesn't seem like a good idea :-).
The real reason I think is historical, the argument was that Linux was more stable than WinNT because its video drivers weren't built in the kernel. I don't believe this is true, it has only happened to me once that my computer froze up to a point that I couldn't do Ctrl+Alt+Fx anymore, I'm not even sure it was X (no network to telnet from here at that time). Another reason might be that X is maintained well and there is no point in moving the drivers, especially since the drivers would have to built into X for other Unices anyway.
I'm interested in the opinions from people that know a bit more about this than I do.
As for the framebuffer-GTK, this is really neat but will only fill a niche I think. You see, the framebuffer means that it will not be possible to use the special functions found on todays cards without building special support for all cards. A new windowing environment with its own drivers would have to be build upon it to support that.
Also, X is not that bloated as people think and can be stripped down a lot. Remember that X is being used on Linux handhelds, and it's not like the developers didn't have a choice. Further it must be noted that X recently had a lot of sweet additions like Mesa3D, anti-alliasing and soon a RandR extension according to another post.
That should have been that I *do* think this is optimistic. *sigh*
The ones that didn't get notice were those that complained that Qt wasn't released under the LGPL, BSD license, etc.. Which is very unfortunate since I'm one of those people :-).
Anyway.. check out the other replies I got to that message, the many follow-ups might give you an insight to why I feel the GPL is not appropriate for a toolkit.
I guess a solution for people not releasing under the GPL would be to develop for GTK+. Both toolkits would then have to interoperate better so that they use the same theme, have the same widgets, etc... one can only dream :).
Also, I wouldn't bet for TrollTech to release BSD under the BSD license if they ever stopped working on Qt. Saying they ran out of money for whatever reason and they would have to sell their assets, you'd be at the mercy of the company buying Qt. IANAL but I don't think that it would be even legal for them to release it under the BSD license, I believe they would have to try to pay as much debts as possible by selling Qt.
I think that there are a lot of developers that aren't willing to take that bet.
This is of course a worsed case scenario but I think it's important to consider this as Qt is at the core of KDE.
But the problem that commercial vendors must pay to Trolltech still remains. I think this is a very bad situation for a toolkit like Qt.
Think about it, what if Microsoft charged money for linking against its APIs? I think a lot of third-party APIs would pop up and a lot of apps would use different toolkits and ruining the consistency in the OS.
The GPL/Qt dual licening is doing just that, requiring commercial vendors to pay for the library, it is thus encouraging them to use another toolkit. And that is also why the licensing thing is a mess, developers should be encouraged to program for KDE, even if they have a closed-source mindset.
Another problem is that the QPL only allows changes to be distributed as patches. If Trolltech were ever to stop developing Qt, the people that continued to work on Qt would only be allowed to distribute the QPL'd version as the latest one released by Trolltech plus a giant patch, a mess I'd say.
Even worse, if I understand correctly commercial vendors wouldn't be able to get updates at all if Trolltech were ever to quit developing Qt because they are licensed under different terms from the QPL and GPL. If this were ever to happen it would be impossible to develop proprierty applications for KDE.
Even though I agree that KDE is technically superiour to Gnome (except for Bonobo, Evolution and Nautilus :) I don't want to switch to a desktop environment whose developers don't care one bit about its users license concerns.
For example:
That's an additude I could understand somewhat if they weren't building a desktop environment. He's basicly saying that he doesn't care that people don't write KDE apps, what kind of attitude is that?Also it is still very bad that the Qt library is licensed under the GPL. This is locking out everyone that doesn't want to use the GPL.
Not that I don't think this is optimistic.
If these assumptions are correct then you and/or Microsoft (IANAL) have violated the GPL by not asking the co-authors of Fnord if it was OK to relicense the code.
BTW: does anyone in here know how hard it would be for Gnome to be made compatible with DCOP (excluding the actual applications that would have to be modified)?