The question then arises is the only GNU software software that is written by the FSF? I wonder if it isn't. Just look at names. GNOME stands for "GNU Network Object Model Environment". Clearly the gnome people want GNOME to be part of the GNU project, even if they didn't assign copyright over to the FSF.
I think it may be. At any rate, the panel is (C) the Free Software Foundation (I have the "About..." dialog up right now). I can't find an official copyright in the sources, but I suspect that gnome-libs, gnome-core, and gmc may have done this. Does anyone have more information?
Of course, the name might not be the right place to give credit so much as to indicate what the thing actually is. If that is the case, than GNU would probably be the most descriptive.
This is the way I look at it. The GNU project set out to create and collect the software necessary to make a free OS, now I'm using an OS which is built on that software.
Government of the people, by the corporations, for the corporations.
Probably at least some of these wrappers were legally developed, but thanks to the hard, innovative work of 3dfx, they have been rewarded with enough money to bypass any law they feel like by throwing lawyers at someone!
Ain't capitalism great? Makes me proud to live here...
The problem is, a large proportion of those who don't understand the model (at least, the noisier ones here) are fond of referring to research as "academic welfare", which makes it unsurprising that they also don't grok free software. Do you have any suggestion on explaining to them why this is important, or is it hopeless?:-)
What's fake about fetchmail's POP? It's the Right Way[tm]. IMO, all mail clients should drop POP support right now and use the time they save writing a decent configuration tool for fetchmail that doesn't use Tk.;-)
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time. It's this: If the Gnome RedHat packages are screwed up and hard to install, that's not Gnome's fault. It's RedHat's. The *only* installation system that most software packages need (or should) provide is "make install". Anything else results in a huge mess of bloated distribution files, incompatible installations, and broken installers. See The Other OS. This is not to say that 'make install' should be the only way to install software. We need higher-level approaches too such as package management and integration into existing systems, but this is not something that the Gnome people should worry about, other than making sure the software is flexible enough to be installed in a variety of situations, and it's not something that the mob should be coming to their gate with torches and pitchforks over. This is an issue of distribution. Distributors should be compiling the programs, tweaking them to suit local policy, integrating the documentation with the local help system, and so on. The "Gnome menu" already bothers me, but I don't mind too much because it's possible to override it with your own local menu generator (and in fact the Debian packages do just that). Even an installer wouldn't be too much of a problem--it might be a pain to use, but you'd probably only need to use it once or bypass it by compiling from source. *BUT* no-one should *demand* that Gnome have its own private install system. (and before I get leapt on by people saying I'm restricting their right to speak: I said 'should'. Not 'must'. It's an expression of the way the world ought to be rather than of how I'm going to force the world to be.)
Now, a program that was run the first time Gnome started for a user and did a little 'hand-holding', let them set up some defaults: that would be excellent.
Daniel
Any good mail clients for Linux
on
CDE vs Gnome
·
· Score: 1
I have procmail set up to drop mail into several files and Mutt checks all of them when it starts up for new mail. If I want I can get a list of the mailboxes that have new mail, and it has a few other nice features (eg, when you change mailboxes, the default one is the next one with new mail). There's an Emacs-based email reader that might be good too; I haven't used it but I've used the news interface and it's quite impressive (always IMO of course:-) )
Daniel
Any good mail clients for Linux
on
CDE vs Gnome
·
· Score: 1
Oops. I missed the 'graphical interface' bit. I can tell you *not* to use any of the ones I mentioned earlier.:-)
(what do you have against text?:-) )
Daniel
Any good mail clients for Linux
on
CDE vs Gnome
·
· Score: 1
mutt. Do you want a long list of all the ways in which this program is wonderful or is that enough?:-) [ I started using it because it's the only mailer I could find that handled attachments sanely..I tried tkrat, positilion, tkmail, and a couple other X ones beforehand.. ]
Funny...the one time I did a precompiled installed I just told apt-get to fetch the files and it worked. Of course, most of the time I recompile and install it in a cronjob while I'm asleep, so I can't comment on the current set of packages..
I think there already are some. At least I hope there are because I've installed them on several people's computers.:-) [ I personally use CVS ] I think they're at deb http://www.debian.org/~jules/gnome-stage-2 unstable main for potato, you need to change that to gnome-stage-slink for slink.
While I would encourage VMWare to go the freed software route, I'm not going to. Why? Because the only reason you use VMWare in the first place is to run nonfreed software!
Actually, not true. I'd like to use a VMWare-ish program to play around with the Hurd or FreeBSD without having to reallocate my partitions and/or install bleeding-edge OSes (like Hurd) without having to risk them, eg, going mad and overwriting/dev/hda. I can imagine a lot of possibilities for kernel (not device driver probably) developers, too.
I suspect that this is due (on all sides) primarily to frustration with repeating oneself over and over and over to people who refuse to listen past the first word, which is fairly common here. (although less so since the new moderation system went into effect)
I'd guess that it is actually possible to make money selling free software, the reasons being:
People will pay for the convenience of having a physical copy of their software
People will pay to get an 'official' copy (this strikes me as a little odd but it happens)
..that said, selling documentation and support and so on in addition to the software probably would be necessary, but I'm not convinced that either method (software or documentation) is sufficient by itself.
Making Windows windows integrate with the X11 desktop would also be nice (sort of like OS/2's seamless feature); this is actually not that hard to do.
Hmm. What do you mean? I can't think (offhand) of *any* way to do this in a VMWare-style program since the virtual machine and physical machine are entirely separate and unaware of each other (except for a network connection). You'd need something like X11 that displays using a client-server model.
Hmm, as I said I don't have much experience with this but I'd think that well-formed HTML would not be particularly difficult to parse, especially given that there are a number of XML libraries available to jumpstart a parser anyway. It's just a matter of remembering what context you're in, whether tags can be implicitly closed,... Trivial might be going a little far though, I admit.
And of course in my world ill-formed HTML would be spit out by browsers anyway. Too bad I don't live in my world.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I would hate to have it become really popular and then have someone start dictating what its name
should be.
Which clause of the GPL says that again?
Daniel
The question then arises is the only GNU software software that is written by the FSF? I wonder if it
isn't. Just look at names. GNOME stands for "GNU Network Object Model Environment". Clearly
the gnome people want GNOME to be part of the GNU project, even if they didn't assign copyright
over to the FSF.
I think it may be. At any rate, the panel is (C) the Free Software Foundation (I have the "About..." dialog up right now). I can't find an official copyright in the sources, but I suspect that gnome-libs, gnome-core, and gmc may have done this. Does anyone have more information?
Of course, the name might not be the right place to give credit so much as to indicate what the
thing actually is. If that is the case, than GNU would probably be the most descriptive.
This is the way I look at it. The GNU project set out to create and collect the software necessary to make a free OS, now I'm using an OS which is built on that software.
Daniel
Government of the people, by the corporations, for the corporations.
Probably at least some of these wrappers were legally developed, but thanks to the hard, innovative work of 3dfx, they have been rewarded with enough money to bypass any law they feel like by throwing lawyers at someone!
Ain't capitalism great? Makes me proud to live here...
</sasrcasm>
Daniel
In
the USA, this burdon is placed on the accusor, not on the accused.
Only when the accuser has less money.
Daniel
Actually, it often does.
Daniel
That's...just...sick. How can a board game do that? It's not that taxing to copy tiles to the screen. (PLUG: FreeCiv runs fine on my P166!)
:-)
Methinks a less bloated OS won't help a bloated game. Think Netscape.
Daniel
Doesn't CTP play nice with esddsp?
Daniel
The problem is, a large proportion of those who don't understand the model (at least, the noisier ones here) are fond of referring to research as "academic welfare", which makes it unsurprising that they also don't grok free software. Do you have any suggestion on explaining to them why this is important, or is it hopeless? :-)
Daniel
Ah, I see. I think that a penguin is better than a neutral but ugly logo, though. :-)
Daniel
I agree too, for what it's worth. Although I prefer the current line-art penguin until a better logo shows up..
Daniel
What's fake about fetchmail's POP? It's the Right Way[tm]. IMO, all mail clients should drop POP support right now and use the time they save writing a decent configuration tool for fetchmail that doesn't use Tk. ;-)
Daniel
Uh? What's weird about that? It's what it is, assuming he's running a RedHat system.
:-)
Now, if he's actually running BSD or Debian or Suse or something then I agree, that would be weird.
Daniel
I wish I could easily install the latest Gnumeric
... no. That's not a given. If you have a spare partition sitting around, try out Debian--they've got proper Gnome packages, too. :-)
(a Gnome application) with a click or two; but, hey, it's Unix.
Uh,
("apt-get install gnumeric" or "apt-get upgrade" aren't exactly mouse-clicks but they're close!)
Daniel
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time. It's this:
If the Gnome RedHat packages are screwed up and hard to install, that's not Gnome's fault. It's RedHat's.
The *only* installation system that most software packages need (or should) provide is "make install". Anything else results in a huge mess of bloated distribution files, incompatible installations, and broken installers. See The Other OS.
This is not to say that 'make install' should be the only way to install software. We need higher-level approaches too such as package management and integration into existing systems, but this is not something that the Gnome people should worry about, other than making sure the software is flexible enough to be installed in a variety of situations, and it's not something that the mob should be coming to their gate with torches and pitchforks over. This is an issue of distribution. Distributors should be compiling the programs, tweaking them to suit local policy, integrating the documentation with the local help system, and so on.
The "Gnome menu" already bothers me, but I don't mind too much because it's possible to override it with your own local menu generator (and in fact the Debian packages do just that). Even an installer wouldn't be too much of a problem--it might be a pain to use, but you'd probably only need to use it once or bypass it by compiling from source. *BUT* no-one should *demand* that Gnome have its own private install system. (and before I get leapt on by people saying I'm restricting their right to speak: I said 'should'. Not 'must'. It's an expression of the way the world ought to be rather than of how I'm going to force the world to be.)
Now, a program that was run the first time Gnome started for a user and did a little 'hand-holding', let them set up some defaults: that would be excellent.
Daniel
I have procmail set up to drop mail into several files and Mutt checks all of them when it starts up for new mail. If I want I can get a list of the mailboxes that have new mail, and it has a few other nice features (eg, when you change mailboxes, the default one is the next one with new mail). There's an Emacs-based email reader that might be good too; I haven't used it but I've used the news interface and it's quite impressive (always IMO of course :-) )
Daniel
Oops. I missed the 'graphical interface' bit. I can tell you *not* to use any of the ones I mentioned earlier. :-)
:-) )
(what do you have against text?
Daniel
mutt. Do you want a long list of all the ways in which this program is wonderful or is that enough? :-) [ I started using it because it's the only mailer I could find that handled attachments sanely..I tried tkrat, positilion, tkmail, and a couple other X ones beforehand.. ]
Daniel
Funny...the one time I did a precompiled installed I just told apt-get to fetch the files and it worked. Of course, most of the time I recompile and install it in a cronjob while I'm asleep, so I can't comment on the current set of packages..
Daniel
I think there already are some. At least I hope there are because I've installed them on several people's computers. :-) [ I personally use CVS ] I think they're at
deb http://www.debian.org/~jules/gnome-stage-2 unstable main
for potato, you need to change that to gnome-stage-slink for slink.
Daniel
While I would encourage VMWare to go the freed software
/dev/hda. I can imagine a lot of possibilities for kernel (not device driver probably) developers, too.
route, I'm not going to. Why? Because the only reason you use VMWare in the first place is to run
nonfreed software!
Actually, not true. I'd like to use a VMWare-ish program to play around with the Hurd or FreeBSD without having to reallocate my partitions and/or install bleeding-edge OSes (like Hurd) without having to risk them, eg, going mad and overwriting
Daniel
I suspect that this is due (on all sides) primarily to frustration with repeating oneself over and over and over to people who refuse to listen past the first word, which is fairly common here. (although less so since the new moderation system went into effect)
Daniel
Daniel
Making Windows windows integrate with the X11 desktop would also be nice (sort of
like OS/2's seamless feature); this is actually not that hard to do.
Hmm. What do you mean? I can't think (offhand) of *any* way to do this in a VMWare-style program since the virtual machine and physical machine are entirely separate and unaware of each other (except for a network connection). You'd need something like X11 that displays using a client-server model.
Daniel
Ok, I should remember that not everyone is limited to 48MB of memory. :-)
Daniel
Hmm, as I said I don't have much experience with this but I'd think that well-formed HTML would not be particularly difficult to parse, especially given that there are a number of XML libraries available to jumpstart a parser anyway. It's just a matter of remembering what context you're in, whether tags can be implicitly closed, ...
:-)
Trivial might be going a little far though, I admit.
And of course in my world ill-formed HTML would be spit out by browsers anyway. Too bad I don't live in my world.
Daniel