> Another case I remember is the game Xevil. It used to be Free software, now it's shareware.
I don't think you intended this, but the reader could have the impression this was due to Xevil being under a BSD license; actually, it was under the GPL, and the author decided to release a major new version under a shareware license.
More to the point, the current Xevil version is under the GPL again. I'm not sure, but I believe the author decided (rightly, IMO) that the wider audience he would get from making it available without restrictions was worth more than the small amount of money available via shareware.
I download the sources from debian, and the latest sources from the real maintainers. Pick through the pkg/debian/ directory, and basicly repackage the app/lib without doing all the work by hand again.
You should take a look at the "uupdate" program, from the "devscripts" package. It automates this particular step for you (although of course if it's a dbs source or if upstream has changed their build system, you're out of luck)
Generally, on a stable system, I don't find myself having to do this..it's my experience that the versions in unstable are up-to-date enough unless I have a special need for a particular feature in a new version.
If your friends come over and watch the movie, that's fine. If your friends come over, and you give them a copy of the movie that they keep and take home with them, that's when it becomes illegal.
I don't dispute that it's illegal, but what I fail to understand is why I should feel some moral revulsion at it. If I lend a book to a friend it's OK. (right now; check back in a few years once the book industry gets their lobbying up-to-date..) If I copy a few pages out of a book and lend it to a friend, this is illegal, fine.
But trying to tell me that it's a despicable act, equivalent to breaking-and-entering or to accosting ships on the high seas, is something that just fails utterly to convince me.
Every piano teacher or conductor I have known occasionally gives their students/conductees photocopies of pieces of music which are either expensive, hard to get, or are simply one piece from a weighty volume where the student doesn't want or need the rest. Are you accusing them of being conscienceless scumbags?
But I still fail to see why users will choose something that's more user-hostile when they don't have to.
My father uses some fancy proprietary sound format because he believes it will keep him from accidentally illegally copying files. Make of it what you will.
I'd love to know how this is going to be accomplished. Prevent Windows Media Player from playing mp3s / recording over a certain bitrate? Sure. Prevent another mp3 player from doing this? How, exactly?
I don't think they need to; most people will use what they're given, and if the Microsoft Spiffy Audio Format sounds better, they'll use that.
Whoever at MS thinks Joe User will stick to 56kbp is smoking crack.
I didn't see where it said they'd do that? What it said is that the MP3s are limited to that quality, but other formats aren't. Ergo, people will use the "higher-quality" formats..
Everyone will simply use Winamp or one of the hundreds of other MP3 tools.
Which "coincidentally" broke in the new Windows version, according to the article..
This is nonsense, the GPL says no such thing. The closest thing is a statement that you must include a list of the changes you made (ie, ChangeLog entries), which is only common sense, and that the changes must be licensed under the GPL. (roughly) This is section 2 of the GPL.
I think you may have been confusing it with some other license; I know there are some free software licenses that require this, although I can't remember any examples at the moment.
Perhaps, but the trend even in chess is towards shorter time controls and faster games that run more on reflex than on deep thought. Outlive the rest it may, but at what price?
Here at Brown, we have a class where you write your own operating system kernel, entirely from scratch. Some userspace code (libc and a linker-loader) is given, but that's it. (it also runs in a clever `virtual machine' using mprotect tricks)
The kernel is actually fairly similar to Linux (or any UNIX for that matter). It used to be a C++ object-oriented microkernel, but obviously that was changed. (I think it was because of student interest, actually)
Admittedly, about all it does is boot and run programs on a System V filesystem with simple virtual memory (no swap even, unless you do extra credit), but it's still a pretty cool project:)
No, as is usually the case with such trolls, we mean only things which fit within criteria generated on the fly by the asker to exclude any free projects which might interfere with his view of the world. For instance, (see above) it must not be the work of a single genius but rather the work of a bunch of mediocre people (which immediately reduces the chances to almost nil), it must be user-friendly,...
Kinda like the people who posture about how free software programmers will never write games -- when confronted with the hundreds of available games which are already free software, they start posturing about how free games are inferior because they aren't the sorts of games they were thinking of. But that's another rant.
Daniel
Re:Apt IS great, now if we could USE it.
on
An RPM Port Of APT
·
· Score: 2
occasionally segfaults, but usually just upon exiting
Do you have any coredumps? I haven't managed to catch it in the act yet..
1) Because of the procrustean Debian install. It does walk you through each thing, which is nice. But you can't go back once you discovered you misunderstood something. And you can't go back if you fumble with your fingers. You must be perfect.
The install program lets you back up if you make a mistake.
debconf, which is used for configuring some parts of the system, was introduced in the latest Debian release. Because of this, what you are seeing is a first iteration; backup support has since been implemented (file bugs against packages that should support it and don't!)
(I agree that the install is not perfect)
2) Because of the X configuration module. It is an X application, which is nice. It doesn't suffer fools gladly, which is bad. If you get something wrong, you are out of luck. Maybe you can run it again after the install has completed in a broken manner.
Branden has written a supposedly automatic X 4.0 configurator. I hacked an XF86Config-4 together with spit and bailing wire before it was fully functional, and so I can't vouch for it, but I assume it'll be improved as we progress towards woody release.
3) Because Debian comes with the lousy MBR program that sits on top of LILO. My laptop is intended to dual boot between Win98 (I get $$$ from some clients for consulting there:) and Linux. Let's just call MBR 'unfriendly' and not call names.
Bah, the real problem is the gross hack that is LILO. Hopefully we'll be Grub-based in woody or woody+1.
I don't understand how you could see the problem you report, though. The Debian MBR should be totally transparent unless you choose to use its ability to boot a different partition than the usual one.
4) Because Debian uses xdm for X-based logins (assuming you didn't screw up the install!). Not nice like gdm like Storm does.
Er, gdm is in both the distribution and Helix. If you install xdm, yes, xdm will be used.
5) Because Storm comes with reasonable versions of KDE and Gnome, already configured within gdm.
Define "reasonable versions". Would you prefer that Debian rush releases out to coincide with arbitrarily selected sets of other projects? (we really don't have as long a release cycle as claimed; the appearence is because we don't try to score marketing bullet points by rushing something half-broken out the door as soon as FOO 1.2.0 is released)
6) Because Storm comes with Storm Package Manager, a friendlier version of dselect capability. With dselect I've managed to screw up things, or not be able to prevent an installation of what I didn't want. Call it user error, but I don't make those errors or have those problems with SPM.
stormpkg is in woody.
There are several other package frontends in Debian as well, based on apt.
Actually, looking at the state of aptitude, people may do just fine with dselect and apt-get... that's why it hasn't been upgraded (I guess) in a lonnng time
As I am the maintainer of aptitude, I can tell you that that isn't the case; the last version was released a few weeks ago. In addition, once I get the pre-Thanksgiving work crunch out of the way, I'll be putting out the first prerelease to a new stable series, which features a near-complete overhaul of the UI code.
The Sourceforge page hasn't been updated because I became a Debian maintainer and started distributing aptitude from the Debian FTP archives instead of an unofficial site.
Daniel
You're right that the "nostalgia" problem exists; however, what makes you think that this is evidence of it?
The 80s weren't the only time that people made games which weren't massive 3d "virtual worlds". You can find any number of modern examples of such "primitive" techniques just about anywhere. The first one that springs to mind, of course, is Nethack (which I swear I will finish one day..if I ever dare to play that black hole of time again..), but even something as simple and uncreative as lbreakout is an excellent example of an "old" game done well in a creative way. Freeciv is mostly derivative of Civilization, an 80s game, but the coders have many ambitious plans to add features that Civilization never dreamed of. Probably those will see the light of day, but even without them, it's still an engrossing and fun-to-play game (even with the "must reproduce like rabbits" syndrome)
I tried the Quake 3 demo. It had the prettiest and most "immersive" graphics I've ever seen. It's not on my hard drive anymore. Nethack, lbreakout, and Freeciv are. (and the first of those, I might add, is far more immersive overall (not graphically, of course) than Q3..)
Daniel
The basic argument is that Red Hat's and Debian's make their money from support agreements, not selling packages.
Errrr, I'm sure Debian would be happy if you sent them money, but the Debian Project doesn't make money off it. (although I'm sure some individual developers do via consulting and similar things, which more-or-less covers the "money from support" angle you're thinking of)
(reading Debian-related articles on/. today, I came across an even more ridulous related statement, that "Debian showed that Linux could be a commercial success back when people were calling RMS a Marx-wannabe" or something. Proof that the clue-level around/. has dropped even more precepitously since the last time I read the site than I had expected..)
This was mostly done using standard Debian tools, so it really shouldn't be too hard to do for Debian. Maybe one of these days I'll get round to registering as a Debian developer...
In the meantime, you could email debian-x@lists.debian.org or debian-devel@lists.debian.org and see if anyone is interested in packaging it. It sounds interesting to me, if it can do what you claim. (one question: does it handle X4? Woody will include X4..)
Daniel
Add deb-src lines for unstable to your sources.list (just like deb lines, but they start with deb-src instead of deb:) ), then update and run (as root or in fakeroot):
Counting "different" as more important than "better" flatly contradicts the whole point of how bazaar mode software development works, and that's why we haven't yet seen any spectacular games coming from the Internet.
The author has clearly not played Koules or Liquid Wars. Now, I'm not sure that there are "better", but they're certainly "different" -- in fact, I don't think I've seen games like them anywhere else. Both these games are free software. I believe this is a simple counterexample to the above assertion.
Actually, chess can run into the same problem: people patching computer algorithms into their client. In fact, it can be worse: the player can run an analyzer at the same time as the client and ask for hints without even bothering to modify the client!
I think the only real way to deal with losers is to not play with them. Technological solutions to the problem (including hidden source) are bandaid solutions.
many of the links are game components, not actual games.
Maybe you're having trouble counting, but I wasn't aware that many==one:) Crystal Space was the only game "component" that I listed, and it includes several small games as well as being the foundation of several other free projects (which aren't far enough along to check on the progress of)
Many of the games are not really modern-commercial-style as discussed
This presumes that this is a bad thing..I don't mind attractive graphics (which most of those games (aside from NetHack, which is too cool to need them:) ) have, incidentally), but I don't see why lots of extraneous pictures and movie clips are necessary.
and probably the biggest challenge in making a game is not "doing it", but finishing it
Finishing it in what way? When is a program finished? Freeciv has been a perfectly respectable Civ clone for years, but has a VERY active development team and just recently released a major upgrade.
my point is limited to disagreement that they settle the question of whether OSS will produce commercial-style modern games
Oh, there will certainly be no "commercial-style" games, but they will certainly be modern. Nothing raises my hackles more than seeing these two equated, as though anything without a huge corporation behind it is the equivalent of living in an unpainted and unsanitary wooden shack.
Slashdot Mirror
Careening slightly offtopic...
> Another case I remember is the game Xevil. It used to be Free software, now it's shareware.
I don't think you intended this, but the reader could have the impression this was due to Xevil being under a BSD license; actually, it was under the GPL, and the author decided to release a major new version under a shareware license.
More to the point, the current Xevil version is under the GPL again. I'm not sure, but I believe the author decided (rightly, IMO) that the wider audience he would get from making it available without restrictions was worth more than the small amount of money available via shareware.
Daniel
I download the sources from debian, and the latest sources from the real maintainers. Pick through the pkg/debian/ directory, and basicly repackage the app/lib without doing all the work by hand again.
You should take a look at the "uupdate" program, from the "devscripts" package. It automates this particular step for you (although of course if it's a dbs source or if upstream has changed their build system, you're out of luck)
Generally, on a stable system, I don't find myself having to do this..it's my experience that the versions in unstable are up-to-date enough unless I have a special need for a particular feature in a new version.
Daniel
Bruce was a former head of the Debian project, and thus is obviously biased as to which distribution HP should use.
Daniel
If your friends come over and watch the movie, that's fine. If your friends come over, and you give them a copy of the movie that they keep and take home with them, that's when it becomes illegal.
I don't dispute that it's illegal, but what I fail to understand is why I should feel some moral revulsion at it. If I lend a book to a friend it's OK. (right now; check back in a few years once the book industry gets their lobbying up-to-date..) If I copy a few pages out of a book and lend it to a friend, this is illegal, fine.
But trying to tell me that it's a despicable act, equivalent to breaking-and-entering or to accosting ships on the high seas, is something that just fails utterly to convince me.
Every piano teacher or conductor I have known occasionally gives their students/conductees photocopies of pieces of music which are either expensive, hard to get, or are simply one piece from a weighty volume where the student doesn't want or need the rest. Are you accusing them of being conscienceless scumbags?
Daniel
But I still fail to see why users will choose something that's more user-hostile when they don't have to.
My father uses some fancy proprietary sound format because he believes it will keep him from accidentally illegally copying files. Make of it what you will.
Daniel
I'd love to know how this is going to be accomplished. Prevent Windows Media Player from playing mp3s / recording over a certain bitrate? Sure. Prevent another mp3 player from doing this? How, exactly?
I don't think they need to; most people will use what they're given, and if the Microsoft Spiffy Audio Format sounds better, they'll use that.
Daniel
Whoever at MS thinks Joe User will stick to 56kbp is smoking crack.
I didn't see where it said they'd do that? What it said is that the MP3s are limited to that quality, but other formats aren't. Ergo, people will use the "higher-quality" formats..
Everyone will simply use Winamp or one of the hundreds of other MP3 tools.
Which "coincidentally" broke in the new Windows version, according to the article..
Daniel
Oceana is at war with Eastasia. Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia.
Daniel
This is nonsense, the GPL says no such thing. The closest thing is a statement that you must include a list of the changes you made (ie, ChangeLog entries), which is only common sense, and that the changes must be licensed under the GPL. (roughly) This is section 2 of the GPL.
See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html for more information.
I think you may have been confusing it with some other license; I know there are some free software licenses that require this, although I can't remember any examples at the moment.
Daniel
Perhaps, but the trend even in chess is towards shorter time controls and faster games that run more on reflex than on deep thought. Outlive the rest it may, but at what price?
Daniel
I don't know about BASIC, but it can be done in POSIX sh. A very cute hack, if also completely useless.
Daniel
Here at Brown, we have a class where you write your own operating system kernel, entirely from scratch. Some userspace code (libc and a linker-loader) is given, but that's it. (it also runs in a clever `virtual machine' using mprotect tricks)
:)
The kernel is actually fairly similar to Linux (or any UNIX for that matter). It used to be a C++ object-oriented microkernel, but obviously that was changed. (I think it was because of student interest, actually)
Admittedly, about all it does is boot and run programs on a System V filesystem with simple virtual memory (no swap even, unless you do extra credit), but it's still a pretty cool project
Daniel
but puting aside for a second stability and security issues
This reminds me of a famous joke about the Titantic..
"So how was the trip, aside from the iceberg?"
Daniel
No, as is usually the case with such trolls, we mean only things which fit within criteria generated on the fly by the asker to exclude any free projects which might interfere with his view of the world. For instance, (see above) it must not be the work of a single genius but rather the work of a bunch of mediocre people (which immediately reduces the chances to almost nil), it must be user-friendly, ...
Kinda like the people who posture about how free software programmers will never write games -- when confronted with the hundreds of available games which are already free software, they start posturing about how free games are inferior because they aren't the sorts of games they were thinking of. But that's another rant.
Daniel
occasionally segfaults, but usually just upon exiting
Do you have any coredumps? I haven't managed to catch it in the act yet..
Daniel
Actually, SPM doesn't buy you much compared to other modern frontends like aptitude (great, but text-based)
Could you explain the "but", please? >=)
Feature. !=. Bug.
Daniel (aptitude maintainer)
1) Because of the procrustean Debian install. It does walk you through each thing, which is nice. But you can't go back once you discovered you misunderstood something. And you can't go back if you fumble with your fingers. You must be perfect.
:) and Linux. Let's just call MBR 'unfriendly' and not call names.
The install program lets you back up if you make a mistake.
debconf, which is used for configuring some parts of the system, was introduced in the latest Debian release. Because of this, what you are seeing is a first iteration; backup support has since been implemented (file bugs against packages that should support it and don't!)
(I agree that the install is not perfect)
2) Because of the X configuration module. It is an X application, which is nice. It doesn't suffer fools gladly, which is bad. If you get something wrong, you are out of luck. Maybe you can run it again after the install has completed in a broken manner.
Branden has written a supposedly automatic X 4.0 configurator. I hacked an XF86Config-4 together with spit and bailing wire before it was fully functional, and so I can't vouch for it, but I assume it'll be improved as we progress towards woody release.
3) Because Debian comes with the lousy MBR program that sits on top of LILO. My laptop is intended to dual boot between Win98 (I get $$$ from some clients for consulting there
Bah, the real problem is the gross hack that is LILO. Hopefully we'll be Grub-based in woody or woody+1.
I don't understand how you could see the problem you report, though. The Debian MBR should be totally transparent unless you choose to use its ability to boot a different partition than the usual one.
4) Because Debian uses xdm for X-based logins (assuming you didn't screw up the install!). Not nice like gdm like Storm does.
Er, gdm is in both the distribution and Helix. If you install xdm, yes, xdm will be used.
5) Because Storm comes with reasonable versions of KDE and Gnome, already configured within gdm.
Define "reasonable versions". Would you prefer that Debian rush releases out to coincide with arbitrarily selected sets of other projects? (we really don't have as long a release cycle as claimed; the appearence is because we don't try to score marketing bullet points by rushing something half-broken out the door as soon as FOO 1.2.0 is released)
6) Because Storm comes with Storm Package Manager, a friendlier version of dselect capability. With dselect I've managed to screw up things, or not be able to prevent an installation of what I didn't want. Call it user error, but I don't make those errors or have those problems with SPM.
stormpkg is in woody.
There are several other package frontends in Debian as well, based on apt.
Daniel
Actually, looking at the state of aptitude, people may do just fine with dselect and apt-get... that's why it hasn't been upgraded (I guess) in a lonnng time As I am the maintainer of aptitude, I can tell you that that isn't the case; the last version was released a few weeks ago. In addition, once I get the pre-Thanksgiving work crunch out of the way, I'll be putting out the first prerelease to a new stable series, which features a near-complete overhaul of the UI code. The Sourceforge page hasn't been updated because I became a Debian maintainer and started distributing aptitude from the Debian FTP archives instead of an unofficial site. Daniel
You're right that the "nostalgia" problem exists; however, what makes you think that this is evidence of it? The 80s weren't the only time that people made games which weren't massive 3d "virtual worlds". You can find any number of modern examples of such "primitive" techniques just about anywhere. The first one that springs to mind, of course, is Nethack (which I swear I will finish one day..if I ever dare to play that black hole of time again..), but even something as simple and uncreative as lbreakout is an excellent example of an "old" game done well in a creative way. Freeciv is mostly derivative of Civilization, an 80s game, but the coders have many ambitious plans to add features that Civilization never dreamed of. Probably those will see the light of day, but even without them, it's still an engrossing and fun-to-play game (even with the "must reproduce like rabbits" syndrome) I tried the Quake 3 demo. It had the prettiest and most "immersive" graphics I've ever seen. It's not on my hard drive anymore. Nethack, lbreakout, and Freeciv are. (and the first of those, I might add, is far more immersive overall (not graphically, of course) than Q3..) Daniel
The basic argument is that Red Hat's and Debian's make their money from support agreements, not selling packages.
/. today, I came across an even more ridulous related statement, that "Debian showed that Linux could be a commercial success back when people were calling RMS a Marx-wannabe" or something. Proof that the clue-level around /. has dropped even more precepitously since the last time I read the site than I had expected..)
Errrr, I'm sure Debian would be happy if you sent them money, but the Debian Project doesn't make money off it. (although I'm sure some individual developers do via consulting and similar things, which more-or-less covers the "money from support" angle you're thinking of)
(reading Debian-related articles on
Daniel
This was mostly done using standard Debian tools, so it really shouldn't be too hard to do for Debian. Maybe one of these days I'll get round to registering as a Debian developer... In the meantime, you could email debian-x@lists.debian.org or debian-devel@lists.debian.org and see if anyone is interested in packaging it. It sounds interesting to me, if it can do what you claim. (one question: does it handle X4? Woody will include X4..) Daniel
apt-get -b source portsentry
apt-get -b source aide
Daniel
Counting "different" as more important than "better" flatly contradicts the whole point of how bazaar mode software development works, and that's why we haven't yet seen any spectacular games coming from the Internet.
The author has clearly not played Koules or Liquid Wars. Now, I'm not sure that there are "better", but they're certainly "different" -- in fact, I don't think I've seen games like them anywhere else. Both these games are free software. I believe this is a simple counterexample to the above assertion.
Daniel
Actually, chess can run into the same problem: people patching computer algorithms into their client. In fact, it can be worse: the player can run an analyzer at the same time as the client and ask for hints without even bothering to modify the client!
I think the only real way to deal with losers is to not play with them. Technological solutions to the problem (including hidden source) are bandaid solutions.
Daniel
many of the links are game components, not actual games.
:) Crystal Space was the only game "component" that I listed, and it includes several small games as well as being the foundation of several other free projects (which aren't far enough along to check on the progress of)
:) ) have, incidentally), but I don't see why lots of extraneous pictures and movie clips are necessary.
Maybe you're having trouble counting, but I wasn't aware that many==one
Many of the games are not really modern-commercial-style as discussed
This presumes that this is a bad thing..I don't mind attractive graphics (which most of those games (aside from NetHack, which is too cool to need them
and probably the biggest challenge in making a game is not "doing it", but finishing it
Finishing it in what way? When is a program finished? Freeciv has been a perfectly respectable Civ clone for years, but has a VERY active development team and just recently released a major upgrade.
my point is limited to disagreement that they settle the question of whether OSS will produce commercial-style modern games
Oh, there will certainly be no "commercial-style" games, but they will certainly be modern. Nothing raises my hackles more than seeing these two equated, as though anything without a huge corporation behind it is the equivalent of living in an unpainted and unsanitary wooden shack.
Daniel