It is not correct to say that Sawfish got replaced by Metacity due to it being deciding its configurability was bad, far from it. Sure there where people who felt Sawfish went a bit overboard in that regard, but that was not the reason it got ditched as the default GNOME window manager. The reason for that was simply that after Eazel went backrupt and Sawfish maintainer John Harper had to find a new job, he ended up at Apple. And thus he couldn't maintain Sawfish anymore. The really special thing about Sawfish was that it was written in its own Lisp dialect so as part of Sawfish you got both an extra lisp interpreter and GTK+ bindings for it. All of these three went unmaintained as John went away and nobody where interested in taking over. Thus the GNOME developers had to look elsewhere for a maintained window manager, it was decided that one should aim for one written in C like the rest of the desktop libraries to lessen the chance of future maintenance prolems. To answer this call Havoc Pennington stepped up with Metacity and it was quickly adopted by a lot of GNOME developers and users and subsequently chosen as the standard. Havoc was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to a policy that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem. This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME, in the sense that there is a consensus to not allow 'random' patches add config options to the GUI without a very good reason. For instance one shouldn't add config options as a way to work around bugs or missing features in lower parts of the stack, instead one should try to fix them. In the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore fashion that for most other modules, but due to Havoc's high profile I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceived the project as a whole.
1) The license seems to say "per computer". Does that mean it's OK to install the same software in two versions of Linux on the same (dual-boot) computer? Yes, this would be fine.
2) Is there a process for me to legally move the software to a different computer (deleting it on the old one, of course). Yes, doing this would be fine. Be aware however that the plugins are sold per architecture, so if you do switch architecture as part of this move you would still need to buy the plugin again for that architecture.
3) Does the software "phone home" in any way? No, not at all. And to reply to one of the questions implied by this, we are not worried about piracy at all. Because using a pirated version of our plugins would give the user nothing that for instance just grabbing the open source codecs available for linux gives them. The way we see it people will either buy these plugins as a way to support our general work on GStreamer or they buy it cause they need something legally licensed in their jurisdiction.
4) The Indemnity clause demands that the buyer (licensee) indemnify you against anything. Where's the part where you promise that you have legally licensed the patents that you are implementing, thus indemnifying *us*?
The clause is meant as a general clause relating to issues such as 'if you install the codecs on the computer running your local nuclear plant and it blows up its not our fault' kinda events. That said I see when re-reading it that its not to well worded atm. I will talk with our lawyer to get it rewritten to make this more clear as it could be read to even cover claims of patent infringement the way it is currently worded.
5) Is the software distro-aware? If I install it on Fedora, will I know if some livna RPM tries to blow away a library? no, its not
I see a lot of people confused about why we are releasing these codecs when there are things like the open source ffmpeg codecs etc. Our goal is not to provide the community with codecs which there is absolutly no support for already as that would be foolish. Our goal is to provide a 100% legal option which I know a lot of companies who have or want to deploy linux desktops have been looking for. These companies like open source, but they also have policies in place which hinders them from deploying solutions which have clear patent issues hanging over them in their country of operations. This is unfortunatly the case with most multimedia codecs and even though we have spent a lot on resources on Xiph codecs here at Fluendo and are now working with BBC on Dirac there is still some way to go before the need for non-free codecs are gone.
So for those in a situation where they can freely use gst-ffmpeg and similar options, more power to you! For those who the lack of licensed codecs has been a hinderance or problem for adopting Linux (or Solaris) desktops at your company or institution or even private use, then we hope our plugins will be a good solution.
They paid because the judge seemed to be going to issue an injunction causing them to have to stop offering their product in the US. If this had happened the damage to their business would probably been bigger than the cost of the settlement. Which is why many think that the US court system are letting itself be used for patent blackmail.
As a side comment I think its sad how so many commenters here seem to say that since RIM used to be (still are?) a patent troll its ok for them to get hammered. It is not, while we might not like RIM, two wrongs will never make one right. Either we are against the damages caused by a broken patent system or we are not, who the victim is in any specific case is irrelevant.
Only skimmed it so far, but I wonder if their eagerness to stop copyprotection and DRM scheemes means that you can't use the GPL3 for email applications supporting GPG encrpytion, or not at least without giving away your private GPG keys:)
They GNUStep guy announcing this was just trying to have some fun, why the hell to people get some riled up by the obsoleting GNOME and KDE statement, have people completely lost their sense of humour? Congratulations to the GNUStep team on their Gorm 1.0 release! nuff said
The SCO gang should become history books writers. They would change the way we look at the history of the world. I mean Blake Stowell take on modern history would be likely to be stating something like 'Our research have found this statement from 1929 from Adolf Hitler stating that he liked Jews, this earlier statement of course invalidates everything that happened afterwards and shows that Hitler have been deeply misrepresented as a proponent for anti-semitism.'
Agreed, but go back a few years and most people would say that Caldera would never start suing left and right either. I think the worry is not what a future Sun doing well is going to do, but what a future Sun in financial problems are going to do.
Funny thing is that I quit my job at a company which did license their software to start work at a company doing free software. And guess what, I am more upbeat about my new company's prospect than I ever was about the old one. Our competitive advantage comes from the skills and experiences of our employees and being able to build upon the free software out there to make our products quick, cheap and good. Our customers are using Indian and Chinese outsourced labour too and while that solves some problems for them they also feel they are getting a better deal with us for many highly specialized tasks. Sometimes throwing 50 people on a problem is not the right solution, getting the one correct person for the job is much better, even if he/she is more expensive than hiring 2 people in India. Our customers realize this.
IBM isn't helping open source out of altruism, but because they realize it is a better development model than the closed sourced one. I think few people who appreciate what IBM is doing think otherwise.
Nobody (in their right mind) is critizing Sun for releasing their software under their license or allowing people using Solaris under this license to use their patents. What they are being critized for in this regard is portraying it as something else than it actually is. Sun has as you listed done a lot of really great contributions to free software, what annoys people are misleading statements about their patent offer. Sun started comparing IBM's patent donation to all software under the current list of OSI approved licenses with their own Solaris only release, and that is what they are critized for, pretending their apple is an orange.
Anything else you want to blame on open source while your at it? World hunger? The asian tsunami? Religious bigotry?
Face it, the vast majority indian software developers are doing proprietary software development for US companies, not offering solutions based on open source software. The open source vs properietary software debate has very little to do with outsourcing.
That said outsourcing is not the big bad thing you like to paint it as. Economic growth in Asia hurts America as little as economic growth in Europe after WW2 did, in other words it do not hurt at all, in fact it a positive contribution.
But you said it yourself, all the posts which was modded as trolls where critizing RMS, not his viewpoints. In case you are unsure about the difference. A trolling post is 'RMS is a dufus' while a constructive criticism is 'I disagree with RMS on the point that the GPL is a good license'. See the difference?
RMS free software goal has never been about making stuff free as in no cost. It is about ensuring people have the freedom to tinker with and share the code. Your misunderstanding was part of the reason for the term 'open source' being coined, as to many people like you thought the issue was about cost since the word free in english tends to be associated more with gratis than with free as in freedom.
RMS doesn't mind things not being GPL, in fact in many circumstances he supports it. He openely supported making the Ogg codecs BSD/MIT style licensed for instance. What he is blasting is Sun pretending do to one thing (give patents use rights to open source community) while actually doing another thing (promising not to sue Solaris developers)
Any GNOME application would run fine in KDE, so that is not a very valid comment:)
OpenOffice do correctly not have its root in the GNOME community. The plan however is to integrate it more and more into GNOME as time goes by (this is from the OO roadmap) and a lot of the work that has been done in regards to theming etc. have been with GNOME integration in mind. A lot of this integration work also benefits KDE, but their stated goal is that of integrating as closely as possible with GNOME.
It is not about Red Hat playing nice or not. They are playing very nice. The problem is that unless those others are a clone of Red Hat in every respect then there will be problems for an ISV. An ISV knows or can find out where things are located on a Red Hat system, what processes and scripts Red Hat have available and so on. They also have a fair idea what bugs are in a given release of Red Hat and how to work around those bugs in regards to their own software. (as their own testing will show it)
It is clear that for an ISV testing on every minor distribution out there and making sure their application work is not possible. Nor is it very cost effective to spend a lot of time debugging customer issues on the same minor distributions. Which is why ISV's tend to limit their support to a one or just a few distributions. Blaming Red Hat for the world working this way is just stupid, in fact you should instead be glad that it is Red Hat who is in this position, a company who release everything they do under the GPL, and not a distribution who tries to get ahead by keeping stuff proprietary.
Sins of the father are the sins of the son
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 1
Find it kinda amusing that the article basically is a criticism against Sun for making broad statements which are either half thruths or not explained anywhere, especially against Red Hat. Then the author himself goes onto criticizing Red Hat and calling it inferior to Suse without explaining why. Maybe he should be a Solaris 10 user, seems he has the same mindset at Jonathan Schwartz:)
You can add previewing to this new GNOME file selector. The 'Send love to Eugenia' part in the screenshot from TigerT is just there so be an example of where/how to extend it. So a PDF viewing applications could extend the fileselector to include a preview window for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
nuff said :)
It is not correct to say that Sawfish got replaced by Metacity due to it being deciding its configurability was bad, far from it. Sure there
where people who felt Sawfish went a bit overboard in that regard, but that was not the reason it got
ditched as the default GNOME window manager. The reason for that was simply that after Eazel went backrupt and Sawfish maintainer John Harper
had to find a new job, he ended up at Apple. And thus he couldn't maintain Sawfish anymore. The really special thing about Sawfish was that it
was written in its own Lisp dialect so as part of Sawfish you got both an extra lisp interpreter and GTK+ bindings for it.
All of these three went unmaintained as John went away and nobody where interested in taking over. Thus the GNOME developers had to look elsewhere
for a maintained window manager, it was decided that one should aim for one written in C like the rest of the desktop libraries to lessen the chance
of future maintenance prolems. To answer this call Havoc Pennington stepped up with Metacity and it was quickly adopted by a lot of GNOME developers and
users and subsequently chosen as the standard. Havoc was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to a policy that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem.
This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME, in the sense that there is a consensus to not allow 'random' patches
add config options to the GUI without a very good reason. For instance one shouldn't add config options as a way to work around bugs or
missing features in lower parts of the stack, instead one should try to fix them. In the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore
fashion that for most other modules, but due to Havoc's high profile I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceived
the project as a whole.
1) The license seems to say "per computer". Does that mean it's OK to install the same software in two versions of Linux on the same (dual-boot) computer?
Yes, this would be fine.
2) Is there a process for me to legally move the software to a different computer (deleting it on the old one, of course).
Yes, doing this would be fine. Be aware however that the plugins are sold per architecture, so if you do switch architecture
as part of this move you would still need to buy the plugin again for that architecture.
3) Does the software "phone home" in any way?
No, not at all. And to reply to one of the questions implied by this, we are not worried about piracy at all.
Because using a pirated version of our plugins would give the user nothing that for instance just grabbing
the open source codecs available for linux gives them. The way we see it people will either buy these plugins
as a way to support our general work on GStreamer or they buy it cause they need something legally licensed in
their jurisdiction.
4) The Indemnity clause demands that the buyer (licensee) indemnify you against anything. Where's the part where you promise that you have legally licensed the patents that you are implementing, thus indemnifying *us*?
The clause is meant as a general clause relating to issues such as 'if you install the codecs on the computer running your local nuclear plant and it blows up its not our fault' kinda events. That said I see when re-reading it that its not to well worded atm. I will talk with our lawyer to get it rewritten to make this more clear as it could be read to even cover claims of patent infringement the way it is currently worded.
5) Is the software distro-aware? If I install it on Fedora, will I know if some livna RPM tries to blow away a library?
no, its not
I see a lot of people confused about why we are releasing these codecs when there are things like the open source ffmpeg codecs etc.
Our goal is not to provide the community with codecs which there is absolutly no support for already as
that would be foolish. Our goal is to provide a 100% legal option which I know a lot of companies who have or
want to deploy linux desktops have been looking for. These companies like open source, but they also have policies in place
which hinders them from deploying solutions which have clear patent issues hanging over them in their country of operations. This is unfortunatly
the case with most multimedia codecs and even though we have spent a lot on resources on Xiph codecs here at Fluendo and are now working with BBC
on Dirac there is still some way to go before the need for non-free codecs are gone.
So for those in a situation where they can freely use gst-ffmpeg and similar options, more power to you! For those who the lack of licensed codecs
has been a hinderance or problem for adopting Linux (or Solaris) desktops at your company or institution or even private use, then we hope our plugins will be a good solution.
Christian Schaller
Fluendo
They paid because the judge seemed to be going to issue an injunction causing them to have to stop offering their product in the US. If this had happened the damage to their business would probably been bigger than the cost of the settlement. Which is why many think that the US court system are letting itself be used for patent blackmail.
As a side comment I think its sad how so many commenters here seem to say that since RIM used to be (still are?) a patent troll its ok for them to get hammered. It is not, while we might not like RIM, two wrongs will never make one right. Either we are against the damages caused by a broken patent system or we are not, who the victim is in any specific case is irrelevant.
Only skimmed it so far, but I wonder if their eagerness to stop copyprotection and DRM scheemes means that you can't use the GPL3 for email applications supporting GPG encrpytion, or not at least without giving away your private GPG keys :)
They GNUStep guy announcing this was just trying to have some fun, why the hell to people get some riled up by the obsoleting GNOME and KDE statement, have people completely lost their sense of humour? Congratulations to the GNUStep team on their Gorm 1.0 release! nuff said
The SCO gang should become history books writers. They would change the way we look at the history of the world. I mean Blake Stowell take on modern history would be likely to be stating something like 'Our research have found this statement from 1929 from Adolf Hitler stating that he liked Jews, this earlier statement of course invalidates everything that happened afterwards and shows that Hitler have been deeply misrepresented as a proponent for anti-semitism.'
The reason was that flash-player was GPL, swfdec is LGPL.
You are sounding like you think that is a loss for authors of GPL code. Its not.
Agreed, but go back a few years and most people would say that Caldera would never start suing left and right either. I think the worry is not what a future Sun doing well is going to do, but what a future Sun in financial problems are going to do.
Funny thing is that I quit my job at a company which did license their software to start work at a company doing free software. And guess what, I am more upbeat about my new company's prospect than I ever was about the old one. Our competitive advantage comes from the skills and experiences of our employees and being able to build upon the free software out there to make our products quick, cheap and good. Our customers are using Indian and Chinese outsourced labour too and while that solves some problems for them they also feel they are getting a better deal with us for many highly specialized tasks. Sometimes throwing 50 people on a problem is not the right solution, getting the one correct person for the job is much better, even if he/she is more expensive than hiring 2 people in India. Our customers realize this.
IBM isn't helping open source out of altruism, but because they realize it is a better development model than the closed sourced one. I think few people who appreciate what IBM is doing think otherwise.
Nobody (in their right mind) is critizing Sun for releasing their software under their license or allowing people using Solaris under this license to use their patents. What they are being critized for in this regard is portraying it as something else than it actually is. Sun has as you listed done a lot of really great contributions to free software, what annoys people are misleading statements about their patent offer. Sun started comparing IBM's patent donation to all software under the current list of OSI approved licenses with their own Solaris only release, and that is what they are critized for, pretending their apple is an orange.
Anything else you want to blame on open source while your at it? World hunger? The asian tsunami? Religious bigotry?
Face it, the vast majority indian software developers are doing proprietary software development for US companies, not offering solutions based on open source software. The open source vs properietary software debate has very little to do with outsourcing.
That said outsourcing is not the big bad thing you like to paint it as. Economic growth in Asia hurts America as little as economic growth in Europe after WW2 did, in other words it do not hurt at all, in fact it a positive contribution.
But you said it yourself, all the posts which was modded as trolls where critizing RMS, not his viewpoints. In case you are unsure about the difference. A trolling post is 'RMS is a dufus' while a constructive criticism is 'I disagree with RMS on the point that the GPL is a good license'. See the difference?
RMS free software goal has never been about making stuff free as in no cost. It is about ensuring people have the freedom to tinker with and share the code. Your misunderstanding was part of the reason for the term 'open source' being coined, as to many people like you thought the issue was about cost since the word free in english tends to be associated more with gratis than with free as in freedom.
RMS doesn't mind things not being GPL, in fact in many circumstances he supports it. He openely supported making the Ogg codecs BSD/MIT style licensed for instance. What he is blasting is Sun pretending do to one thing (give patents use rights to open source community) while actually doing another thing (promising not to sue Solaris developers)
Well Troy accepted the horse and they where not so happy for it afterwards. Not all 'gifts' are equal.
Any GNOME application would run fine in KDE, so that is not a very valid comment :)
OpenOffice do correctly not have its root in the GNOME community. The plan however is to integrate it more and more into GNOME as time goes by (this is from the OO roadmap) and a lot of the work that has been done in regards to theming etc. have been with GNOME integration in mind. A lot of this integration work also benefits KDE, but their stated goal is that of integrating as closely as possible with GNOME.
It is clear that for an ISV testing on every minor distribution out there and making sure their application work is not possible. Nor is it very cost effective to spend a lot of time debugging customer issues on the same minor distributions. Which is why ISV's tend to limit their support to a one or just a few distributions. Blaming Red Hat for the world working this way is just stupid, in fact you should instead be glad that it is Red Hat who is in this position, a company who release everything they do under the GPL, and not a distribution who tries to get ahead by keeping stuff proprietary.
Find it kinda amusing that the article basically is a criticism against Sun for making broad statements which are either half thruths or not explained anywhere, especially against Red Hat. Then the author himself goes onto criticizing Red Hat and calling it inferior to Suse without explaining why. Maybe he should be a Solaris 10 user, seems he has the same mindset at Jonathan Schwartz :)
GNOME vector graphics is SVG, see librsvg.sf.net for details.
You can add previewing to this new GNOME file selector. The 'Send love to Eugenia' part in the screenshot from TigerT is just there so be an example of where/how to extend it. So a PDF viewing applications could extend the fileselector to include a preview window for instance.
We must be doing something right if zealots like you are getting riled up like this :)
The German article linked has more details on going from WinNT to Linux/FLOSS/Samba et.al, with less detail RedHat/Ximian/GNOME/SuSE/Mandrake/KDE.
The
EU article mentioned in Kurts mail, has more focus on RedHat/Ximian/GNOME than Suse/Mandrake/KDE.