You can see KDE go the same way as netscape if UserLinux ever becomes popular.
KDE made a choice when it based itself on Qt. Times change and KDE's problems have changed - KDE is a good Free Software* desktop environment. But because Qt is GPL'd, it presents a barrier to proprietary development that is against the goals of UserLinux.
If being the default desktop of UserLinux is so important to KDE, why don't they re-implement their desktop ontop of an LGLP'd toolkit?
If it's not so important that they are willing to do that, then people should stop being upset. In the choice of a default there will be a winner and one or more losers. XFCE lost here too, but they're not whining. Only one desktop can be the default!
As for the Netscape comparison, I think there were other factors which led to Netscape's demise, like a bloated product (Communicator). Look how people prefer Firebird over Mozilla. There's still time for IE to be ousted - all the time in the world, from now to the end of time.
* Or is it? Look at what TrollTech say here - TT don't want you using Free Qt on inhouse projects, but the GPL says you can. This makes me distrust TrollTech.
No, they don't even need to use another distro, they can use UserLinux, which is a subset of Debian, by installing KDE (or just whatever libs are required to get the specific KDE application to work).
Thanks for that - I still think they can't do that, but you're right, corporations won't want to challenge it.
Yet another reason for Free Software people to keep away from TrollTech - they spread FUD. Interestingly they have employed a developer - Lorn Potter - to poison the opie-devel mailing list with propaganda. I don't like them.
TrollTech says that you can't use the GPL/Qt for internal applications, which is a huge FUD factor against that plan.
(This makes some sense when you consider that the GPL is a distribution licence, so an application hasn't really been "GPLed" until it has been distributed to someone.)
No, this makes no sense at all, and if TrollTech really do say that, they are wrong. I couldn't find that statement on their web site, do you have a link.
Downloading Qt from the TT website is the act of distribution, at that point the GPL gives me the right to do whatever I like with that code including linking and changing it provided I don't redistribute it. That's the GPL, TT can't change it.
The main issue is providing an environment that lends itself to development needs of businesses (the LGPL actually does us a favor here). The user aspect of that is another story. All businesses have a few proprietary inhouse software packages that they would want to port with the minimal effort and expense (and licensing is part of that).
However there is nothing stopping those business developing in-house applications in Qt as long as they don't then distribute them outside the company. The GPL only applies if you distribute.
The argument is more about enabling commercial software development. Personally I think there's something wrong with choosing a default desktop which would give one company (Trolltech) a position for financial gain, and if UserLinux took off in the way everyone hopes, with a KDE-default, I'd be surprised if you didn't see changes in pricing and/or licensing. Certainly, I'd be buying shares in TT.
The decision does not prevent anyone from using KDE and Qt components on UserLinux, does not prevent anyone from installing those components from the Debian packages, and does not prevent any of our support providers from formally supporting KDE. It doesn't take any choice away from users, who can get KDE on our platform or elsewhere.
Bruce has made the right decision, for the long term.
It should work like meta moderation. You get presented with a random set of posts to moderate - they are selected from the whole story you don't have to sort them any particular way to be fair.
And there should be sufficient moderators for each story to ensure the majority of posts get a fair crack of the whip at being moderated up (or down as the case may be).
By the way, you say you can no longer moderate anything in this thread which suggests that you have already moderated; well, consider those mod points thrown away because as soon as you post, bang, your moderation on that story is undone. Ignore me if you didn't already moderate here.
I'm surprised that one with a five-digit user ID should now be doing calculus 2. You were either born with a silver RJ-11 in your PSTN socket, or are a student of the mature type.
Never mind, I've studied calculus on about four different occasions and flunked each time. Actually, I didn't study! That's why I flunked!
Regards and good luck for your resit. Me? There's always 2005...
Make it Free Software The core UserLinux system should be 100% Free Software. The service providers will provide proprietary software according to the demand of their particular customers.
No, becuase his answer was 10 times better than yours, just like OS X is 10 times the operating system DebianGNU/Linux is. Not a troll..... Yeah, mod this a troll. I dont care. It's real.
You are a troll, but anyway.
OSX is nice and Apple put a nice UI on top of FreeBSD. That's fine. But if you think OSX is 10 times "the operating system" Debian is you have another thing coming.
People want different things from an operating system. Debian gives me:
* 100% Free Software system. Plus a large non-Free software archive should I want to go there.
* A vast choice of prepackaged software, installable within minutes over the network
* A decent packaging policy which every package must honour (or it's a bug) which ensures that every package comes with at least a README for documentation, and plays nice with all the other packages on my system.
* The ability to upgrade my entire system from a simple command (except kernel) over the network without rebooting.
* Timely and comprehensive security updates to the stable release.
* A stable release that IS stable.
* The choice to downgrade to "other distro" stability and run more up-to-date software ("testing" release).
* The choice to downgrade to "from CVS" stability and run the bleeding edge ("unstable" release)
* Masses and masses of quality documentation on their website
* Unrivalled community help on mailing lists, IRC and Usenet.
* An open development system where I can report bugs, trace them through the fix cycle and speak to the actual package maintainer in the process.
* A system where I can become a package maintainer for my favourite application and have it incorporated into the main archive.
* Independence from corporate success and failure - Debian is not going to go bust, it's just going to get better.
* The ability to run the same system on x86, PowerPC, SPARC, M68k, PA-RISC,...
* Did I mention choice of software? My system is setup for me, the way I like it.
We're not all in this to make Microsoft sweat bullets, frankly some of us have smaller fish to fry (like using and enjoying our own computer systems).
What does OSX give you that Debian can't? Apart from a clutch of overpriced proprietary graphics applications.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm about to buy OSX for my girlfriends iMac. But her needs are different to mine. She needs to run a clutch of overpriced proprietary graphics apps.
And it's a really sad state of affairs, not at all what some of us hoped for.
No-one's forcing you to use Gnome or KDE. I run Openbox on my Thinkpad 600x and it is beautiful, elegant and kind to my resources. If I want to run a Gnome application like Evolution (and I do, though Mutt does mail equally well) I can do so very happily.
I used to run a full Gnome Desktop and don't get me wrong, I'm not a luddite, I love Gnome and I enjoyed using the desktop. But it makes sense to use the right tool for the job, and since Free software gives me the power to do that, I can.
It works for me, let others do as they will, though if they come seeking knowledge I am happy to educate them.
Or: does she understand the difference between a loudspeaker and a hifi system? You could explain that as loudspeakers are for audio, so a monitor is for light.
If she doesn't understand the function of a loudspeaker, then you might want to give up.
I find lot's of people just aren't interested in understanding how things work. They just want... to go on holiday^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvacation and stuff. Not saying your mum's like this, so don't take any offence!
It's a shame the marketing blurb for the Karma describes Ogg Vorbis as "a new audio compression format similar in function to MP3 or WMA. It is different from these formats because it is completely free, open-source, and non-patented." with no mention of better compression/quality tradeoffs. They mention FLAC but give no information about what it is (don't tell me, I know...).
Glad to be of help! I was a bit surprised by the "why bother" posts myself. The free software community, in my mind, is about people helping each other, not belittling the needs of each other.
You've already been advised but let me add more weight.
You see that third number in the release? 2.4.x? It keeps going up, and the main reason for it going up is to fix bugs.
When the speed of increment slows, I can feel confident there are less bugs! Other people have suffered them, found them, and fixed them! Call me a freeloader...
Actually I have reported bugs in kernels before and got them fixed. But I don't find kernel bugs on production machines, I find them on test boxes.
Of course, if your don't care too much about stability on your box, that's fine, do what you want. But in that case, what is the point of your post?:-)
Let me put it this way. I appreciate all the evidence we have which some people interpret as pointing to a chemical basis for consciousness. You don't need to repeat it to me! Honestly, I have a reasonable understanding of science; I can appreciate that an intelligent entity can be completely physical in nature. I can imagine a being which reports emotional changes based on chemicals and where no immaterial "mind" is involved.
I acknowledge all that and the rest. But what the chemical-consciousness advocates fail to address - the unacknowledged thorn in their side; the nagging doubt which scuppers their plan - is: what perceives? What is this thing that knows the colour red? If it is a chemical side-effect, where does it reside? How can a chemical side-effect actually experience qualia.
You know about qualia, I suppose; it's all those things you can't describe without resort to analogy, like colours and smells and joy and depression and love and guilt and hardness and softness and the effects of psychotropic drugs.
None of these things can be experienced by a chemical side-effect. Because they are not within the realm of mathematical science, and all the tools we have for describing the world scientifically are mathematical.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean to stalk you in this story!
You can see KDE go the same way as netscape if UserLinux ever becomes popular.
KDE made a choice when it based itself on Qt. Times change and KDE's problems have changed - KDE is a good Free Software* desktop environment. But because Qt is GPL'd, it presents a barrier to proprietary development that is against the goals of UserLinux.
If being the default desktop of UserLinux is so important to KDE, why don't they re-implement their desktop ontop of an LGLP'd toolkit?
If it's not so important that they are willing to do that, then people should stop being upset. In the choice of a default there will be a winner and one or more losers. XFCE lost here too, but they're not whining. Only one desktop can be the default!
As for the Netscape comparison, I think there were other factors which led to Netscape's demise, like a bloated product (Communicator). Look how people prefer Firebird over Mozilla. There's still time for IE to be ousted - all the time in the world, from now to the end of time.
* Or is it? Look at what TrollTech say here - TT don't want you using Free Qt on inhouse projects, but the GPL says you can. This makes me distrust TrollTech.
And in what way is your post relevant to the choice of default desktop in UserLinux?
No, they don't even need to use another distro, they can use UserLinux, which is a subset of Debian, by installing KDE (or just whatever libs are required to get the specific KDE application to work).
Aisle! Not isle! Unless you buy your audio accessories from an off-shore tax-haven.
Thanks for that - I still think they can't do that, but you're right, corporations won't want to challenge it.
Yet another reason for Free Software people to keep away from TrollTech - they spread FUD. Interestingly they have employed a developer - Lorn Potter - to poison the opie-devel mailing list with propaganda. I don't like them.
TrollTech says that you can't use the GPL/Qt for internal applications, which is a huge FUD factor against that plan.
(This makes some sense when you consider that the GPL is a distribution licence, so an application hasn't really been "GPLed" until it has been distributed to someone.)
No, this makes no sense at all, and if TrollTech really do say that, they are wrong. I couldn't find that statement on their web site, do you have a link.
Downloading Qt from the TT website is the act of distribution, at that point the GPL gives me the right to do whatever I like with that code including linking and changing it provided I don't redistribute it. That's the GPL, TT can't change it.
The main issue is providing an environment that lends itself to development needs of businesses (the LGPL actually does us a favor here). The user aspect of that is another story. All businesses have a few proprietary inhouse software packages that they would want to port with the minimal effort and expense (and licensing is part of that).
However there is nothing stopping those business developing in-house applications in Qt as long as they don't then distribute them outside the company. The GPL only applies if you distribute.
The argument is more about enabling commercial software development. Personally I think there's something wrong with choosing a default desktop which would give one company (Trolltech) a position for financial gain, and if UserLinux took off in the way everyone hopes, with a KDE-default, I'd be surprised if you didn't see changes in pricing and/or licensing. Certainly, I'd be buying shares in TT.
Look, RTF Bruce's statement:
The decision does not prevent anyone from using KDE and Qt components on UserLinux, does not prevent anyone from installing those components from the Debian packages, and does not prevent any of our support providers from formally supporting KDE. It doesn't take any choice away from users, who can get KDE on our platform or elsewhere.
Bruce has made the right decision, for the long term.
It should work like meta moderation. You get presented with a random set of posts to moderate - they are selected from the whole story you don't have to sort them any particular way to be fair.
And there should be sufficient moderators for each story to ensure the majority of posts get a fair crack of the whip at being moderated up (or down as the case may be).
By the way, you say you can no longer moderate anything in this thread which suggests that you have already moderated; well, consider those mod points thrown away because as soon as you post, bang, your moderation on that story is undone. Ignore me if you didn't already moderate here.
Cheers! and Yuletide Cheer!
Mod parent up, most informative post of this story.
Thanks, this will be useful to me!
I'm surprised that one with a five-digit user ID should now be doing calculus 2. You were either born with a silver RJ-11 in your PSTN socket, or are a student of the mature type.
Never mind, I've studied calculus on about four different occasions and flunked each time. Actually, I didn't study! That's why I flunked!
Regards and good luck for your resit. Me? There's always 2005...
Uh.. from the UserLinux white paper:
Make it Free Software
The core UserLinux system should be 100% Free Software. The service providers will provide proprietary software according to the demand of their particular customers.
MacOS is not free software.
Come on, if I were you I'd be out wearing a "Sco Sux, Tux Rox" t-shirt everywhere I went. And standing tall while I was at it.
No, becuase his answer was 10 times better than yours, just like OS X is 10 times the operating system DebianGNU/Linux is. Not a troll..... Yeah, mod this a troll. I dont care. It's real.
...
You are a troll, but anyway.
OSX is nice and Apple put a nice UI on top of FreeBSD. That's fine. But if you think OSX is 10 times "the operating system" Debian is you have another thing coming.
People want different things from an operating system. Debian gives me:
* 100% Free Software system. Plus a large non-Free software archive should I want to go there.
* A vast choice of prepackaged software, installable within minutes over the network
* A decent packaging policy which every package must honour (or it's a bug) which ensures that every package comes with at least a README for documentation, and plays nice with all the other packages on my system.
* The ability to upgrade my entire system from a simple command (except kernel) over the network without rebooting.
* Timely and comprehensive security updates to the stable release.
* A stable release that IS stable.
* The choice to downgrade to "other distro" stability and run more up-to-date software ("testing" release).
* The choice to downgrade to "from CVS" stability and run the bleeding edge ("unstable" release)
* Masses and masses of quality documentation on their website
* Unrivalled community help on mailing lists, IRC and Usenet.
* An open development system where I can report bugs, trace them through the fix cycle and speak to the actual package maintainer in the process.
* A system where I can become a package maintainer for my favourite application and have it incorporated into the main archive.
* Independence from corporate success and failure - Debian is not going to go bust, it's just going to get better.
* The ability to run the same system on x86, PowerPC, SPARC, M68k, PA-RISC,
* Did I mention choice of software? My system is setup for me, the way I like it.
We're not all in this to make Microsoft sweat bullets, frankly some of us have smaller fish to fry (like using and enjoying our own computer systems).
What does OSX give you that Debian can't? Apart from a clutch of overpriced proprietary graphics applications.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm about to buy OSX for my girlfriends iMac. But her needs are different to mine. She needs to run a clutch of overpriced proprietary graphics apps.
And it's a really sad state of affairs, not at all what some of us hoped for.
No-one's forcing you to use Gnome or KDE. I run Openbox on my Thinkpad 600x and it is beautiful, elegant and kind to my resources. If I want to run a Gnome application like Evolution (and I do, though Mutt does mail equally well) I can do so very happily.
I used to run a full Gnome Desktop and don't get me wrong, I'm not a luddite, I love Gnome and I enjoyed using the desktop. But it makes sense to use the right tool for the job, and since Free software gives me the power to do that, I can.
It works for me, let others do as they will, though if they come seeking knowledge I am happy to educate them.
Try not talking with your mouth full.
Or: does she understand the difference between a loudspeaker and a hifi system? You could explain that as loudspeakers are for audio, so a monitor is for light.
If she doesn't understand the function of a loudspeaker, then you might want to give up.
I find lot's of people just aren't interested in understanding how things work. They just want... to go on holiday^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvacation and stuff. Not saying your mum's like this, so don't take any offence!
It's a shame the marketing blurb for the Karma describes Ogg Vorbis as "a new audio compression format similar in function to MP3 or WMA. It is different from these formats because it is completely free, open-source, and non-patented." with no mention of better compression/quality tradeoffs. They mention FLAC but give no information about what it is (don't tell me, I know...).
Glad to be of help! I was a bit surprised by the "why bother" posts myself. The free software community, in my mind, is about people helping each other, not belittling the needs of each other.
Why bother with a "why bother" post?
QuiteInsane.
Its insanely good. I use it to scan in all my important documents. It useful multipage modes for... well, multipage documents.
Try it. It's actually been considerably revamped since I installed it, I will have to try a more recent version,
Oh, it comes in a nice debian package via apt-get.
??
I pulled 2.4.22 out of Debian unstable. Of course, it isn't (unstable).
You've already been advised but let me add more weight.
:-)
You see that third number in the release? 2.4.x? It keeps going up, and the main reason for it going up is to fix bugs.
When the speed of increment slows, I can feel confident there are less bugs! Other people have suffered them, found them, and fixed them! Call me a freeloader...
Actually I have reported bugs in kernels before and got them fixed. But I don't find kernel bugs on production machines, I find them on test boxes.
Of course, if your don't care too much about stability on your box, that's fine, do what you want. But in that case, what is the point of your post?
The only reason people trust mechanical systems more is because it's easier for them to understand.
No, it's because purely mechanical systems still work when you're battery is dead.
Physics is a field of scientific investigation.
FOSS is a social agreement.
Why are you drawing an analogy?
Let me put it this way. I appreciate all the evidence we have which some people interpret as pointing to a chemical basis for consciousness. You don't need to repeat it to me! Honestly, I have a reasonable understanding of science; I can appreciate that an intelligent entity can be completely physical in nature. I can imagine a being which reports emotional changes based on chemicals and where no immaterial "mind" is involved.
I acknowledge all that and the rest. But what the chemical-consciousness advocates fail to address - the unacknowledged thorn in their side; the nagging doubt which scuppers their plan - is: what perceives? What is this thing that knows the colour red? If it is a chemical side-effect, where does it reside? How can a chemical side-effect actually experience qualia.
You know about qualia, I suppose; it's all those things you can't describe without resort to analogy, like colours and smells and joy and depression and love and guilt and hardness and softness and the effects of psychotropic drugs.
None of these things can be experienced by a chemical side-effect. Because they are not within the realm of mathematical science, and all the tools we have for describing the world scientifically are mathematical.
ssshhhh.