Each layer can have a separation of code and data. Just at any layer you'll find that your data is code/data from the previous layer and quite frequently your code does little more than feed fixed data to the variable data it is receiving.
I think this dates back to the early Gnome 1 days. Compaq, Debian, Eazel, Free Software Foundation, Gnumatic, Helix Code, Henzai, Inc., IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VA Linux Systems were the guys behind Gnome 1. That's where the big company support started.
The big company Qt guys were SUSE (Novell), Turbolinux (Asian still big) Conectiva (now merged with MandrakeSoft to form Mandriva) and Caldera (SCO).
When Nokia owned Qt directly that certainly helped but Nokia was very parochial in its interests. Both Gnome and KDE are underfunded at this point.
Well OK I see your story, but your story doesn't make much sense. If you already release the code the AGPL doesn't ask you to do anything else. So what were they worried about? Lawyers usually give a more detailed analysis.
Lawyers have a problem with AGPL, which in turn can have an impact on people even deploying Free software.
Absolutely. But lawyers will only have that problem for companies that are using their own commercial stuff in combination. It does nothing to companies that are open. As an aside many people faced those same issues with the GPL in the mid 90s and early 2000s.
AGPL can actually drive people towards non-Free solutions.
It is meant to. It is meant to make it very difficult to link to free software and keep your own source closed.
XFCE is doing fine with the transition so I assume it wasn't too much of a problem. Also I quoted the guy who made the switch for LXDE and he didn't mention that issue. He mostly thinks that GTK3 is the same weight at Qt and since he liked Qt better once they were the same weight it became the better choice. Since GTK3 isn't that similar to 2 it was roughly an equal porting effort and that's why he switched.
I don't know who "PCMan" is on the LXDE team but he is the author and here is what he wrote
I, however, need to admit that working with Qt/C++ is much more pleasant and productive than messing with C/GObject/GTK+. Since GTK+ 3 breaks backward compatibility a lot and it becomes more memory hungry and slower, I don’t see much advantage of GTK+ now. GTK+ 2 is lighter, but it’s no longer true for GTK+ 3. Ironically, fixing all of the broken compatibility is even harder than porting to Qt in some cases (PCManFM IMO is one of them). So If someone is starting a whole new project and is thinking about what GUI toolkit to use, personally I might recommend Qt if you’re not targeting Gnome 3.
Update 2013-03-27: I got some feedback about the toolkit choice above. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that gtk+ is bad and did not intend to start a toolkit flame war. If you’re going to use python, C#, or other scripting language, gtk+ is still a good choice due to its mature language bindings.
Vala is attractive initially, but after trying it in real development, you’ll see the shortcomings of this approach. Because it sometimes generates incorrect C code that still compiles, we got some really hard-to-find bugs. So we need to examine the generated C code to make sure it does things right. This takes much more time than just writing plain C code myself. Besides, the generated C code is not quite human-readable and debugging becomes a problem. Another issue that’ll hit you is the problems in the library bindings. Though there exists many vala bindings for various C library, their quality is uncertain. Finally, debugging, examing, and fixing the bindings all the time takes even more time and offsets the time saved by using Vala.
To sum up, for compiled binary programs, Qt IMHO is a good choice to consider if you don’t hate C++.
The latter, what they have actually done, is (ironically) an assault on Free Software, because it will force downstream projects to change licenses or libraries, or to deal with a fork.
It only does that for non Free Software. Free Software doesn't have a problem with AGPL.
I think Debian will go AGPL without much problem. They are a free software distribution. I think RedHat will likely fork but they will call the project something else. And from I think Debian will allow individual maintainers to decide which to link to.
That's a good clarification of my answer. You are right there.
In terms of up I was thinking speed. I know there are a lot of complex issues about contention and... but Berkley is under most conditions way way faster.
This started with a thread on Debian. There are dozens of projects on Debian that use BerkleyDB. Should they be configured to 5.3 forever? If so what if there are security problems how will Debian even know? If not they go over to 6. Which means dozens of libraries switch over to AGPL....
If you are talking about thousands of lines of code changes to dozens of files... yes you should be make it public. It becomes an example for the next person looking to use an authentication system.
Alternatively you could write an authentication layer make it BSD and make that public.
Configuration files aren't under AGPL. The source code itself is. System admins don't need and generally aren't capable of making C-langauge source changes for using software in normal configs.
I should say though I don't really have any problem with Oracle making Berkley a good AGPL product, MySQL a good GPL product and Oracle a good commercial product. Berkley's big usage was the scripting community and it wouldn't shock me if many of them are comfortable with the AGPL. In some way by ditching the commercial and semi-commercial customer base they allow Berkley to focus on an easy to support niche which doesn't have conflicting interests with Oracle.
Oracle could move Berkley over to other groups like their development tools group who might get along fine with the Perl / Ruby / Python crowd.
I agree with you it is niche. It is sort of one step up from SQLLite. There are other options today but it is a good fit for that "I don't want to force a database server but I need some storage..."
I agree with you. The Gnome 2 crowd was a terrible crowd for Gnome 3. I honestly am of the opinion the Gnome 2 crowd wasn't good crowd for Gnome 2. Part of the problem was Ubuntu having picked Gnome over KDE. Ubuntu had developed a community of Linux enthusiasts. Gnome foundation never envisioned Gnome as a DE for computer enthusiasts of any stripe. Gnome for them was meant to be a general purpose desktop where functionality for Linux powerusers was sacrificed to ease of use for the general population.
Gnome in the Gnome 1 and Gnome 2 days had been very focused on winning the battle for usage among Linux desktop users and system admins (i.e. generally computer enthusiasts) against KDE. And that had constrained it somewhat. Gnome 3 wasn't going to be similarly constrained because at the time Gnome 3 was defined Gnome's problem was getting to non-enthusiasts and beating systems like iOS or BB7.
The Gnome foundation should have encouraged distributions to have maintained Gnome 2 particularly Ubuntu. In many ways the same mistake KDE made with KDE 4. The real problem was compounded by the fact their relationship with Canonical was in the toilette at the time.
Can you be more specific? Like for example churches calling for state funding of religious institutions. Fundamentalists calling for government oppression of other religions. Etc...
Given you don't even know these various terms like SCAF and NSF you might want to check the arrogance a bit. I'm not confused. I understand what democracies have. You might want to look a bit into how they got it.
At the current moment, you're probably right, the military in control is almost certainly better than Morsi. But countries that grant too much power to the military are in for trouble, and probably sooner rather than later........
I'm not saying Egypt isn't in trouble. I think there are some huge problems with the NSF. On the other hand having a partnership between a military and a political system is how most countries are governed. The NSF reflects the military's interests which allows SCAF to yield to them in a way they couldn't with an Islamist government. That might lead to more civilian control not less.
Of course, the news outlets that might reveal such things have all been shut down.
Facebook, twitter... and good quality papers are working fine. What's shut down are systems of mass organizing the poor. No one is shutting down systems for getting information out down. The military is imposing minimal censorship.
They are in the midst of establishing martial law. Of course they are shutting down news outlets right now. In a few weeks they likely will restore those news outlets and my guess is the pro-Morsi outlets will not be subject to anywhere near the level of intimidation that anti-Morsi outlets were during his rein.
What's the problem with a military dictatorship?
Nobody is discussing a military dictatorship. Everyone on all sides is talking about a new democratic form of government with the military playing an interim role. My comment is I think the military are a good influence on the NSF, a democratic political coalition of popularly elected parties and public interest groups.
I'm not redefining... During the 1960s and 70s it was not uncommon among antiwar protesters and certainly in most other countries to refer to the "US invasion of South Vietnam". If you were looking for me to backdown, no. That was an invasion.
No, a classic invasion consists of massed armies of tanks crossing the border while the sky is blackend with incoming air attacks
No it isn't. Most invasions have local groups of supporters or involve a very weakened society. It is vary rare that any army attacks an army of a strong state at full force to take their land. Those sorts of wars almost always exceed the cost of waging them. Those rare anomalous occurrences are usually a result of a political miscalculation and an inability to reverse course. The far far more common situation is the one that is economically useful.
I would agree with you that fundamentalism is across all religions. Religious Christians and Jews however have accepted the notion of secular state. They may want more religion in society but they reject a union between church and state. They want a state that represents all people. That isn't true for Islamic fundamentalists.
Egypt is a rather conservative religious country. Had Morsi just wanted to do what a Christian fundamentalist would have wanted to do, he likely would have been wildly popular.
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Each layer can have a separation of code and data. Just at any layer you'll find that your data is code/data from the previous layer and quite frequently your code does little more than feed fixed data to the variable data it is receiving.
LISP has had pretty good compilers for several decades. It isn't just a scripting language.
I think this dates back to the early Gnome 1 days. Compaq, Debian, Eazel, Free Software Foundation, Gnumatic, Helix Code, Henzai, Inc., IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VA Linux Systems were the guys behind Gnome 1. That's where the big company support started.
The big company Qt guys were SUSE (Novell), Turbolinux (Asian still big) Conectiva (now merged with MandrakeSoft to form Mandriva) and Caldera (SCO).
When Nokia owned Qt directly that certainly helped but Nokia was very parochial in its interests. Both Gnome and KDE are underfunded at this point.
Well OK I see your story, but your story doesn't make much sense. If you already release the code the AGPL doesn't ask you to do anything else. So what were they worried about? Lawyers usually give a more detailed analysis.
Absolutely. But lawyers will only have that problem for companies that are using their own commercial stuff in combination. It does nothing to companies that are open. As an aside many people faced those same issues with the GPL in the mid 90s and early 2000s.
It is meant to. It is meant to make it very difficult to link to free software and keep your own source closed.
XFCE is doing fine with the transition so I assume it wasn't too much of a problem. Also I quoted the guy who made the switch for LXDE and he didn't mention that issue. He mostly thinks that GTK3 is the same weight at Qt and since he liked Qt better once they were the same weight it became the better choice. Since GTK3 isn't that similar to 2 it was roughly an equal porting effort and that's why he switched.
I don't know who "PCMan" is on the LXDE team but he is the author and here is what he wrote
It only does that for non Free Software. Free Software doesn't have a problem with AGPL.
I think Debian will go AGPL without much problem. They are a free software distribution. I think RedHat will likely fork but they will call the project something else. And from I think Debian will allow individual maintainers to decide which to link to.
That's a good clarification of my answer. You are right there.
In terms of up I was thinking speed. I know there are a lot of complex issues about contention and... but Berkley is under most conditions way way faster.
This started with a thread on Debian. There are dozens of projects on Debian that use BerkleyDB. Should they be configured to 5.3 forever? If so what if there are security problems how will Debian even know? If not they go over to 6. Which means dozens of libraries switch over to AGPL....
If you are talking about thousands of lines of code changes to dozens of files ... yes you should be make it public. It becomes an example for the next person looking to use an authentication system.
Alternatively you could write an authentication layer make it BSD and make that public.
Configuration files aren't under AGPL. The source code itself is. System admins don't need and generally aren't capable of making C-langauge source changes for using software in normal configs.
I should say though I don't really have any problem with Oracle making Berkley a good AGPL product, MySQL a good GPL product and Oracle a good commercial product. Berkley's big usage was the scripting community and it wouldn't shock me if many of them are comfortable with the AGPL. In some way by ditching the commercial and semi-commercial customer base they allow Berkley to focus on an easy to support niche which doesn't have conflicting interests with Oracle.
Oracle could move Berkley over to other groups like their development tools group who might get along fine with the Perl / Ruby / Python crowd.
I agree. It isn't being "greedy". This is something the /. crowd should applaud.
I agree with you it is niche. It is sort of one step up from SQLLite. There are other options today but it is a good fit for that "I don't want to force a database server but I need some storage..."
I agree with you. The Gnome 2 crowd was a terrible crowd for Gnome 3. I honestly am of the opinion the Gnome 2 crowd wasn't good crowd for Gnome 2. Part of the problem was Ubuntu having picked Gnome over KDE. Ubuntu had developed a community of Linux enthusiasts. Gnome foundation never envisioned Gnome as a DE for computer enthusiasts of any stripe. Gnome for them was meant to be a general purpose desktop where functionality for Linux powerusers was sacrificed to ease of use for the general population.
Gnome in the Gnome 1 and Gnome 2 days had been very focused on winning the battle for usage among Linux desktop users and system admins (i.e. generally computer enthusiasts) against KDE. And that had constrained it somewhat. Gnome 3 wasn't going to be similarly constrained because at the time Gnome 3 was defined Gnome's problem was getting to non-enthusiasts and beating systems like iOS or BB7.
The Gnome foundation should have encouraged distributions to have maintained Gnome 2 particularly Ubuntu. In many ways the same mistake KDE made with KDE 4. The real problem was compounded by the fact their relationship with Canonical was in the toilette at the time.
Can you be more specific? Like for example churches calling for state funding of religious institutions. Fundamentalists calling for government oppression of other religions. Etc...
Huh? Attila grew up just east of the volga river. Genghis grew up in Mongolia. Neither was an animist.
Given you don't even know these various terms like SCAF and NSF you might want to check the arrogance a bit. I'm not confused. I understand what democracies have. You might want to look a bit into how they got it.
I'm not saying Egypt isn't in trouble. I think there are some huge problems with the NSF. On the other hand having a partnership between a military and a political system is how most countries are governed. The NSF reflects the military's interests which allows SCAF to yield to them in a way they couldn't with an Islamist government. That might lead to more civilian control not less.
Facebook, twitter... and good quality papers are working fine. What's shut down are systems of mass organizing the poor. No one is shutting down systems for getting information out down. The military is imposing minimal censorship.
They are in the midst of establishing martial law. Of course they are shutting down news outlets right now. In a few weeks they likely will restore those news outlets and my guess is the pro-Morsi outlets will not be subject to anywhere near the level of intimidation that anti-Morsi outlets were during his rein.
Nobody is discussing a military dictatorship. Everyone on all sides is talking about a new democratic form of government with the military playing an interim role. My comment is I think the military are a good influence on the NSF, a democratic political coalition of popularly elected parties and public interest groups.
I'm not redefining ... During the 1960s and 70s it was not uncommon among antiwar protesters and certainly in most other countries to refer to the "US invasion of South Vietnam". If you were looking for me to backdown, no. That was an invasion.
No it isn't. Most invasions have local groups of supporters or involve a very weakened society. It is vary rare that any army attacks an army of a strong state at full force to take their land. Those sorts of wars almost always exceed the cost of waging them. Those rare anomalous occurrences are usually a result of a political miscalculation and an inability to reverse course. The far far more common situation is the one that is economically useful.
I would agree with you that fundamentalism is across all religions. Religious Christians and Jews however have accepted the notion of secular state. They may want more religion in society but they reject a union between church and state. They want a state that represents all people. That isn't true for Islamic fundamentalists.
Egypt is a rather conservative religious country. Had Morsi just wanted to do what a Christian fundamentalist would have wanted to do, he likely would have been wildly popular.