Regarding the point in the above comment about Mozilla being slow. Well, the standard download IS a little slow, but this is currently a work in progress and certainly hasn't been tuned for performance. Would you rather have something that works and runs a little slow or something that screams and crashes all over the place. (yes, I know that Moz runs like a dog and crashes also at times!)
If you take the current (M16) source and compile it with GCC optimizations switched ON then the performance is greatly improved.
Surely a source-compatible specification would be a lot better than a binary one. That way, along with the work being done by the Linux Standard Base project, applications would be compatible with all Linux distributions and not just the x86 ones.
Users of non-x86 distributions (of which I am one with LinuxPPC) are left out a great deal of the time by the big companies when they release Linux binaries.
Although a "common binary format" exists in the form of Java bytecode, I cannot see world+dog porting all of their apps to Java. Personally, I'm now writing all of my new apps in Java so that they run on all the platforms that I have without a lot of tweaking for each of them.
...or if Linux is the only operating system, then x86 Linux is not the only operating system!
I run Linux (LinuxPPC) on my Apple Mac G3 and get a little annoyed when companies release Linux versions of their applications and make a big thing of it, not realising that Linux itself is not just an x86 OS.
Opening the source (in a GNU way) enables people like myself to do a quick./configure; make and then be up and running. This may not quite work as well with drivers as it does with apps due to hardware differences.
I do buy closed-source Linux apps (Wordperfect (for x86) and Applixware (for PPC)), but always prefer having the source should I need to customize the app in anyway.
Maybe some form of licensing can be found (one may already exist) that will enable companies to sell commercial apps and include the source but not make it freely distributable. Whilst the GPL is an ideal, it is not a licensing panacea.
I also used to work for a company (Eurobase Systems Ltd.) that used GPL'd code in their products without distributing any source or acknowledging the source.
They used some of the source from the GNU C compiler libraries (something like regex.c as I recall).
Not sure if they still do, but certainly up until August 1998 when I left they were doing so.
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What's wrong with just downloading the source and then compiling it yourself? Admittedly it'd take a while on a 486, but it's still possible.
How about "pity the poor bastards" that don't run x86 compatibles at all... Thankfully, it compiles and runs quite happily on LinuxPPC. ;-)
Regarding the point in the above comment about Mozilla being slow. Well, the standard download IS a little slow, but this is currently a work in progress and certainly hasn't been tuned for performance. Would you rather have something that works and runs a little slow or something that screams and crashes all over the place. (yes, I know that Moz runs like a dog and crashes also at times!)
If you take the current (M16) source and compile it with GCC optimizations switched ON then the performance is greatly improved.
Surely a source-compatible specification would be a lot better than a binary one. That way, along with the work being done by the Linux Standard Base project, applications would be compatible with all Linux distributions and not just the x86 ones.
Users of non-x86 distributions (of which I am one with LinuxPPC) are left out a great deal of the time by the big companies when they release Linux binaries.
Although a "common binary format" exists in the form of Java bytecode, I cannot see world+dog porting all of their apps to Java. Personally, I'm now writing all of my new apps in Java so that they run on all the platforms that I have without a lot of tweaking for each of them.
I run Linux (LinuxPPC) on my Apple Mac G3 and get a little annoyed when companies release Linux versions of their applications and make a big thing of it, not realising that Linux itself is not just an x86 OS.
Opening the source (in a GNU way) enables people like myself to do a quick ./configure; make and then be up and running. This may not quite work as well with drivers as it does with apps due to hardware differences.
I do buy closed-source Linux apps (Wordperfect (for x86) and Applixware (for PPC)), but always prefer having the source should I need to customize the app in anyway.
Maybe some form of licensing can be found (one may already exist) that will enable companies to sell commercial apps and include the source but not make it freely distributable. Whilst the GPL is an ideal, it is not a licensing panacea.
Psion already do make a StrongArm based sub-notebook. It's called either the NetBook or Series 7 depending on which configuration you order.
There is a project underway to get Linux running on these machines also but I can't find the URL for it at the moment.
I also used to work for a company (Eurobase Systems Ltd.) that used GPL'd code in their products without distributing any source or acknowledging the source.
They used some of the source from the GNU C compiler libraries (something like regex.c as I recall).
Not sure if they still do, but certainly up until August 1998 when I left they were doing so.