First of all, members of the foundation board are not representatives of their respective companies -- there is a separate Advisory Board comprising representatives of companies on the foundation. Decisions are made by the Foundation Board though.
Well, last year, the majority of the board was split over Red Hat, Ximian and Eazel. As Eazel went out of business, they aren't listed as the affiliation of any board member now.
There are other companies that have been working on GNOME, such as Sun and CodeFactory, but their work on GNOME (or the company itself) doesn't seem to have as high a profile. The Sun hackers have been doing a lot of great work on accessibility and GNOME 2.0. CodeFactory hackers maintain a number of core libraries in the GNOME 2.0 platform (Anders maintains libgnome and libgnomeui), and work on various other libraries/applications such as gtkhtml2 and Mr Project.
If you want to see more diversity in affiliation, try and convince more companies to pay for hackers to work on GNOME (the company doesn't need to join the Advisory Board though).
buy two VCRs, and connect the antenna output of one VCR to the input of the other.
configure the VCRs to use different channels, and tune the second VCR so you can see the video output from the first VCR
Insert tape in first VCR and press play
Insert blank tape in second VCR and press record
Now you can backup your copyrighted video tapes so you don't need to buy a new one when the original wears out. I wonder if the movie industry will sue me for encouraging piracy?
You are looking at this from the wrong angle. It is not about Troll Tech giving permission for their library to be used in someone elses program. They have already done that with the QPL. It is about the fact that pure GPL does not allow linking with Qt as the QPL stands.
As well as the author giving a packager permission to distribute the program under the GPL, the author must give permission to link with Qt. This permission comes in the form of a one line exception to the GPL. Complications arise when a programmer wants to use other people's GPL'd code in a Qt app. Unless they get permission (in the form of the one line exception) from the third party, they have no right to use that code. This is one area where a number of KDE developers pissed a lot of people off.
On the subject of system libraries, I wouldn't put Qt in the same class as libc, and I don't think it is the intention of the GPL to do so.
One or two of those screenshots showed the SVG icon theme, which uses the Raph's rsvg renderer. This renders the icons from SVG (the w3c's vector graphics format for the web), so they can be scaled to any size. Is that what you mean?
If you are aiming to have a spreadsheet program that is 100% compatible (or as close as you can get on a system that doesn't implement win32) with excel, you really need to be able to execute its macros. This is necessary if you want to round trip a spreadsheet into gnumeric and back to excel format without loosing all the macros.
I don't know if there is any talk of adding VB scriptability to evolution though.
Upon thirty days' prior written notice, the Foundation agrees to grant me non-exclusive rights to use the Work (i.e. my changes and enhancements, not the program which I enhanced) as I see fit; (and the Foundation's rights shall otherwise continue unchanged).
So even after you have assigned copyright, you can ask for an licence to use the work (possibly selling your code as part of a proprietary application). And the FSF can't refuse this request, as that would break the contract, causing ownership of the code to revert back to you.
How the GPL applies to IPC hasn't been cleared up yet. If the GPL disallows IPC to non GPL compatible programs, I could not pipe the output of the GNU cat program to some incompatibly licenced program (piping being a very simple form of IPC).
Another example is the system call interface to the Linux kernel. It is a form of IPC between programs and the kernel, yet you are allowed to run incompatibly licenced programs on top of the Linux kernel.
It is a little less clear that writing a custom IDL interface and packaging the GPL code as a CORBA server should be allowed (this is really just using another form of linking, but doesn't look exactly like normal linking).
So Bruce is correct when he says don't rush into any changes to the GPL, as they may have ramifications you haven't thought about. As it is at the moment, most programs that fall into these grey areas (at least the ones from GNU) usually include a clarification of the licence. If it ever wound up in court, the clarification makes it very clear what the intent of the author was.
You mean kind of like it was inconvenient for all australians to move from.oz to.oz.au when the internet became more international?
If the rest of the world was going to change, then it is arrogant for the US not to change as well.
As far as the toplevel.com domains go, they are not just a US namespace. People from anywhere in the world can register domains there. If a US company is beaten by someone from another country, they could always register something under their country code TLD like everyone else does...
I only have 64 megs, and I don't have your problems. Here are a few things you can try:
Don't use pixmap themes. These can take up heaps of memory, so maybe they aren't a good idea for your system. They use imlib, which is not the best at managing its memory. If you use an engine based theme (such as thinice or gtkstep), you can get nice looking apps without memory problems.
If you are using enlightenment, either switch to a less heavy theme (ie. one that uses less pixmaps), or switch to a different window manager such as sawmill which uses less memory.
If you don't use the file manager (that is, you don't use the icons on the desktop, or file manager windows), don't run it. You can exit it from the commands menu of a file manager window. It should give two confirmation dialogs, then the icons on the desktop should disapear. You can bring it back up from the entry in the foot menu on the panel.
Instead of bringing up multiple instances of the gnome-terminal application, right click on it and choose new terminal. This way, the single gnome-terminal process will manage multiple shell processes.
Helix GNOME can be thought of as similar to the GNOME packages distributed with Red Hat or Debian or something. It is pretty much just the standard gnome packages with a few changes to give different defaults, and an updater utility.
Asking if Helix will be wrapped into a different product is like asking when Red Hat will stop distributing GNOME and just provide a pointer to www.gnome.org. There is nothing wrong with providing a distribution of GNOME programs.
Nautilus will be the standard GNOME file manager in the future (and it does look very nice), so will be part of future GNOME releases and will almost definitely be included with future Helix GNOME releases.
Of course, I am not a Helix Code employee, so this is all based on what I consider to be obvious.
It should probably read "because Indians have less money". That is the whole point of region locks. If you are the sole supplier of some sort of product (a movie, a music album, a book, a car, etc), you can charge what you want for it.
You may decide to sell the product for one price in Australia or America, and at a lower price in a poorer country since you figure more people will buy it there if it is cheaper, so you will make more money. You can do this because no one else can sell the product to the customers.
Now you have a problem if someone decides to import quantities of the product from the poorer country and starts undercutting you in the richer country. To prevent this sort of thing, the Government has tarrifs and other measures which help support your `right' to sell the product for different prices in different places, or even withold it from certain countries.
Of course, occasionally governments do stupid things like introducing laws to allow parallel imports. A while back they did this in Australia for CDs, and ARIA (the.au equivalent of RIAA) started a big advertising campaign in opposition. They claimed that if parallel import was allowed, then they would have less money to support local artists (personally, I believe there will always be a market for local music -- the same way there will always be supporters for local sports teams. By taking a small cut off the profits from some bit name artists, they could easily support a local music industry). This campaign did not really educate people about the issues, to the extent that a lot of musicians didn't know what ARIA was on about.
To get around these government `mistakes', a lot of new forms of media have region locks. This way, even if parallel imports are allowed, you can keep your profits high since the stuff your competitors import doesn't work!
This is what it looks like from the corporation's side. If you are a consumer, region locks allow big companies to screw you for as much money as possible without having to worry about competition.
This is one of the reasons a lot of consumer watchdog associations don't particularly like the idea of region locks.
It is interesting how much you can tell about someone's stance on these sort of issues from the words they use. It also gives some idea of what their values are like
The words people choose have a big effect on what people make of an issue. For instance, what should be more strongly punnished: software piracy or illegal copying/copyright infringement? Who deserves a longer prison sentance: someone guilty of burglary or someone guilty of home invasion?
If you read much of what the DVD-CCA/MPA has been saying and take it at face value, you couldn't be blamed for thinking that all people who want to watch dvd's under linux are deviants who enjoy pirating IP and want to destroy civilisation as we know it:)
It is good to see that some mainstream press is covering the other side of this issue.
This is not good enough in itself. If the user does not know that they have a right to ask for the source code, you have not fulfilled your end of the licence.
Personally, I would think it easier to just distribute the source CD with the product. It would save a lot of hassle. Remember that the user is within their rights to wait a bit under three years and then ask for the source to the program you distributed to them. That is the actual version that you distributed -- they don't have to accept a newer version. It would be a pain to keep an archive of the source of all distributions you made for the last three years in stock if a user wants a copy.
Of course, if the spammer puts 100 addresses into the BCC header, you get 180,000 messages an hour. Granted this is less than is possible without timeouts, but it still is a lot of messages. I suppose you could get around this by varying the delay based on the number of recipients (maybe use an exponential relationship?).
An ORB is not a huge 10MB daemon running on your system (at least it doesn't have to be). It is a library that marshals requests to possibly remote or out of process objects. If you use two different ORBs at the same time, you would just have two libraries in memory -- many of the CORBA services such as name service and interface repository could be shared (and you probably would want to).
CORBA does not have to be huge. For instance there is a partial implementation of the marshalling (not services) code written in a bit over 1000 lines of emacs lisp.
There are a limited number of places on the ICANN board. It is true that the internet started out as an american thing, but it is now an international thing, and it is growing very fast. Using current internet demographics may not be the best way to pick the representatives.
What I said about other countries being even more underrepresented still stands. Say the US has one less representative than they think they should have. There will be countries with NO representation on the board, which is even worse. Of course, some US politicians seem to think anything less than majority power or power of veto underrepresents their country.
So I take it that the Americans would prefer to be over represented instead? I am sure that there are many other countries are even more under represented than america in ICANN.
It would be nice if some Americans would think globally for a change. Not all standards and defaults that suit america suit the rest of the world (you wouldn't believe how much trouble is caused by applications setting the default paper size to Letter (a format that is pretty much only used in the US), in other countries).
How much of that 1MB is actually unique to the fish applet? I would think that it is not much.
You noticed how it was linking with a number of libraries. Did you know that two programs using the same shared library share the code segment of the library. If you add up the memory usage of all the GNOME programs the way you are measuring it, they will get a number much larger than the actual memory usage. Shared libraries are good.
As for the fish applet, if you are writing the applet panel interface, you would want to test it with a simple applet (such as one that simply displays a pixmap to its screen area, and has a few menu items on its context menu), rather than a complex one such as mini comander, so that problems can be isolated easily.
If you do not like the fish applet, why would you put it in your panel?
The C bindings are the most mature. There are C++ bindings in development. Take a look at the ORBit-C++ module in the GNOME CVS tree (http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/ is your friend). For information about the other bindings, the orbit mailing list is probably the best place to ask.
For a start, the info file format is no more proprietary than HTML (it is basically a subset of TeX with a macro package). And as for why they did not use HTML, probably because the web did not exist (or was not as popular) back then.
Info was a replacement for man pages (which do not have indexes, cross references, etc). Not the web.
Then delete the offending keybinding in the window manager's config file.
When you say gnome is slow, which parts are slow? If you run it without gmc, is it still slow? If you run it without panel does it speed up? Or do you find the apps slow? One of the nice things about gnome (and kde) is that you don't have to run everything all the time.
Lat I checked, enlightenment was passing the mouse clicks to gmc through the GNOME wm hints. If enlightenment does not pass the mouse clicks to gmc, then gmc will not display menus.
Yes, the root window is the wm teritory, so apps need the wm's cooperation to make use of it. That is why the gnome wm hints (soon to be replaced with a desktop neutral set of hints, which is a joint effort between wm and desktop authors) were created.
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The first ballot from RMS was an automatically generated away message:
First of all, members of the foundation board are not representatives of their respective companies -- there is a separate Advisory Board comprising representatives of companies on the foundation. Decisions are made by the Foundation Board though.
Well, last year, the majority of the board was split over Red Hat, Ximian and Eazel. As Eazel went out of business, they aren't listed as the affiliation of any board member now.
There are other companies that have been working on GNOME, such as Sun and CodeFactory, but their work on GNOME (or the company itself) doesn't seem to have as high a profile. The Sun hackers have been doing a lot of great work on accessibility and GNOME 2.0. CodeFactory hackers maintain a number of core libraries in the GNOME 2.0 platform (Anders maintains libgnome and libgnomeui), and work on various other libraries/applications such as gtkhtml2 and Mr Project.
If you want to see more diversity in affiliation, try and convince more companies to pay for hackers to work on GNOME (the company doesn't need to join the Advisory Board though).
Now you can backup your copyrighted video tapes so you don't need to buy a new one when the original wears out. I wonder if the movie industry will sue me for encouraging piracy?
You are looking at this from the wrong angle. It is not about Troll Tech giving permission for their library to be used in someone elses program. They have already done that with the QPL. It is about the fact that pure GPL does not allow linking with Qt as the QPL stands.
As well as the author giving a packager permission to distribute the program under the GPL, the author must give permission to link with Qt. This permission comes in the form of a one line exception to the GPL. Complications arise when a programmer wants to use other people's GPL'd code in a Qt app. Unless they get permission (in the form of the one line exception) from the third party, they have no right to use that code. This is one area where a number of KDE developers pissed a lot of people off.
On the subject of system libraries, I wouldn't put Qt in the same class as libc, and I don't think it is the intention of the GPL to do so.
One or two of those screenshots showed the SVG icon theme, which uses the Raph's rsvg renderer. This renders the icons from SVG (the w3c's vector graphics format for the web), so they can be scaled to any size. Is that what you mean?
If you are aiming to have a spreadsheet program that is 100% compatible (or as close as you can get on a system that doesn't implement win32) with excel, you really need to be able to execute its macros. This is necessary if you want to round trip a spreadsheet into gnumeric and back to excel format without loosing all the macros.
I don't know if there is any talk of adding VB scriptability to evolution though.
It is a good idea to read the FSF's copyright assignment form. Among other things, there is the following paragraph:
So even after you have assigned copyright, you can ask for an licence to use the work (possibly selling your code as part of a proprietary application). And the FSF can't refuse this request, as that would break the contract, causing ownership of the code to revert back to you.
How the GPL applies to IPC hasn't been cleared up yet. If the GPL disallows IPC to non GPL compatible programs, I could not pipe the output of the GNU cat program to some incompatibly licenced program (piping being a very simple form of IPC).
Another example is the system call interface to the Linux kernel. It is a form of IPC between programs and the kernel, yet you are allowed to run incompatibly licenced programs on top of the Linux kernel.
It is a little less clear that writing a custom IDL interface and packaging the GPL code as a CORBA server should be allowed (this is really just using another form of linking, but doesn't look exactly like normal linking).
So Bruce is correct when he says don't rush into any changes to the GPL, as they may have ramifications you haven't thought about. As it is at the moment, most programs that fall into these grey areas (at least the ones from GNU) usually include a clarification of the licence. If it ever wound up in court, the clarification makes it very clear what the intent of the author was.
You mean kind of like it was inconvenient for all australians to move from .oz to .oz.au when the internet became more international?
.com domains go, they are not just a US namespace. People from anywhere in the world can register domains there. If a US company is beaten by someone from another country, they could always register something under their country code TLD like everyone else does ...
If the rest of the world was going to change, then it is arrogant for the US not to change as well.
As far as the toplevel
Define finished.
October GNOME (gnome-*-1.0.5x) could be considered to be finished, but gnome-2.0 is not finished.
I only have 64 megs, and I don't have your problems. Here are a few things you can try:
Helix GNOME can be thought of as similar to the GNOME packages distributed with Red Hat or Debian or something. It is pretty much just the standard gnome packages with a few changes to give different defaults, and an updater utility.
Asking if Helix will be wrapped into a different product is like asking when Red Hat will stop distributing GNOME and just provide a pointer to www.gnome.org. There is nothing wrong with providing a distribution of GNOME programs.
Nautilus will be the standard GNOME file manager in the future (and it does look very nice), so will be part of future GNOME releases and will almost definitely be included with future Helix GNOME releases.
Of course, I am not a Helix Code employee, so this is all based on what I consider to be obvious.
It should probably read "because Indians have less money". That is the whole point of region locks. If you are the sole supplier of some sort of product (a movie, a music album, a book, a car, etc), you can charge what you want for it.
.au equivalent of RIAA) started a big advertising campaign in opposition. They claimed that if parallel import was allowed, then they would have less money to support local artists (personally, I believe there will always be a market for local music -- the same way there will always be supporters for local sports teams. By taking a small cut off the profits from some bit name artists, they could easily support a local music industry). This campaign did not really educate people about the issues, to the extent that a lot of musicians didn't know what ARIA was on about.
You may decide to sell the product for one price in Australia or America, and at a lower price in a poorer country since you figure more people will buy it there if it is cheaper, so you will make more money. You can do this because no one else can sell the product to the customers.
Now you have a problem if someone decides to import quantities of the product from the poorer country and starts undercutting you in the richer country. To prevent this sort of thing, the Government has tarrifs and other measures which help support your `right' to sell the product for different prices in different places, or even withold it from certain countries.
Of course, occasionally governments do stupid things like introducing laws to allow parallel imports. A while back they did this in Australia for CDs, and ARIA (the
To get around these government `mistakes', a lot of new forms of media have region locks. This way, even if parallel imports are allowed, you can keep your profits high since the stuff your competitors import doesn't work!
This is what it looks like from the corporation's side. If you are a consumer, region locks allow big companies to screw you for as much money as possible without having to worry about competition.
This is one of the reasons a lot of consumer watchdog associations don't particularly like the idea of region locks.
It is interesting how much you can tell about someone's stance on these sort of issues from the words they use. It also gives some idea of what their values are like
:)
The words people choose have a big effect on what people make of an issue. For instance, what should be more strongly punnished: software piracy or illegal copying/copyright infringement? Who deserves a longer prison sentance: someone guilty of burglary or someone guilty of home invasion?
If you read much of what the DVD-CCA/MPA has been saying and take it at face value, you couldn't be blamed for thinking that all people who want to watch dvd's under linux are deviants who enjoy pirating IP and want to destroy civilisation as we know it
It is good to see that some mainstream press is covering the other side of this issue.
This is not good enough in itself. If the user does not know that they have a right to ask for the source code, you have not fulfilled your end of the licence.
Personally, I would think it easier to just distribute the source CD with the product. It would save a lot of hassle. Remember that the user is within their rights to wait a bit under three years and then ask for the source to the program you distributed to them. That is the actual version that you distributed -- they don't have to accept a newer version. It would be a pain to keep an archive of the source of all distributions you made for the last three years in stock if a user wants a copy.
Of course, if the spammer puts 100 addresses into the BCC header, you get 180,000 messages an hour. Granted this is less than is possible without timeouts, but it still is a lot of messages. I suppose you could get around this by varying the delay based on the number of recipients (maybe use an exponential relationship?).
An ORB is not a huge 10MB daemon running on your system (at least it doesn't have to be). It is a library that marshals requests to possibly remote or out of process objects. If you use two different ORBs at the same time, you would just have two libraries in memory -- many of the CORBA services such as name service and interface repository could be shared (and you probably would want to).
CORBA does not have to be huge. For instance there is a partial implementation of the marshalling (not services) code written in a bit over 1000 lines of emacs lisp.
There are a limited number of places on the ICANN board. It is true that the internet started out as an american thing, but it is now an international thing, and it is growing very fast. Using current internet demographics may not be the best way to pick the representatives.
What I said about other countries being even more underrepresented still stands. Say the US has one less representative than they think they should have. There will be countries with NO representation on the board, which is even worse. Of course, some US politicians seem to think anything less than majority power or power of veto underrepresents their country.
XSL is an application of XML, not XML itself. You don't use the existence of C as proof that ASCII is a programming language.
So I take it that the Americans would prefer to be over represented instead? I am sure that there are many other countries are even more under represented than america in ICANN.
It would be nice if some Americans would think globally for a change. Not all standards and defaults that suit america suit the rest of the world (you wouldn't believe how much trouble is caused by applications setting the default paper size to Letter (a format that is pretty much only used in the US), in other countries).
How much of that 1MB is actually unique to the fish applet? I would think that it is not much.
You noticed how it was linking with a number of libraries. Did you know that two programs using the same shared library share the code segment of the library. If you add up the memory usage of all the GNOME programs the way you are measuring it, they will get a number much larger than the actual memory usage. Shared libraries are good.
As for the fish applet, if you are writing the applet panel interface, you would want to test it with a simple applet (such as one that simply displays a pixmap to its screen area, and has a few menu items on its context menu), rather than a complex one such as mini comander, so that problems can be isolated easily.
If you do not like the fish applet, why would you put it in your panel?
The C bindings are the most mature. There are C++ bindings in development. Take a look at the ORBit-C++ module in the GNOME CVS tree (http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/ is your friend). For information about the other bindings, the orbit mailing list is probably the best place to ask.
For a start, the info file format is no more proprietary than HTML (it is basically a subset of TeX with a macro package). And as for why they did not use HTML, probably because the web did not exist (or was not as popular) back then.
Info was a replacement for man pages (which do not have indexes, cross references, etc). Not the web.
Then delete the offending keybinding in the window manager's config file.
When you say gnome is slow, which parts are slow? If you run it without gmc, is it still slow? If you run it without panel does it speed up? Or do you find the apps slow? One of the nice things about gnome (and kde) is that you don't have to run everything all the time.
Lat I checked, enlightenment was passing the mouse clicks to gmc through the GNOME wm hints. If enlightenment does not pass the mouse clicks to gmc, then gmc will not display menus.
Yes, the root window is the wm teritory, so apps need the wm's cooperation to make use of it. That is why the gnome wm hints (soon to be replaced with a desktop neutral set of hints, which is a joint effort between wm and desktop authors) were created.