There's been work on adding Dublin Core metadata support to Inkscape, for its next release.
The need for the metadata support is entirely practical in this case:
the Open Clip Art Library requires all SVG submissions have proper metadata embedded, to ensure licensing and authorship correctness. Also, there is an SVG Clip Art Browser
that uses the metadata info for its display.
One interesting observation that's come up recently and is being discussed
on the lists is what happens when you embed several pieces of clipart into a larger document, how do you access the RDF of the individual bits in Inkscape?
I'm working at OSDL and looking forward to having Linus here on-site.:-)
We got the confirmation today that yes, he's coming, and will have a cube here with the
rest of us. I expect he'll be working from home a lot but who knows.
Linus had visited last year not long after he joined the lab, and we asked if he'd be
moving up here. At the time he said he'd had enough of cold weather for one lifetime,
so this is a surprise! (Well, not a total surprise, Portland is a great city to live in, IMHO.
Some of us figured he'd want to move up here once he had time to think about it.)
The patch in question, a boolean operations patch, is said to be PD in the article. But this attitude is a major landmine for GPL (or any other free license) projects.
Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:
We quickly double-checked that the licensing was clean, that the code was the author's original work, and that it indeed implemented the feature as promised...
And also note that before this there had been another patch that implemented
booleans that we had to reject on licensing problems with a General Polygon
Clipping library it used. We'd contacted the GPC author to see if he would
let us use it under the GPL, but his license was firm (it allowed for
educational, non-commercial use only IIRC), so we ended up not being able to
use it.
"Check licensing, then patch, and ask other questions later" doesn't quite
have the same ring though.;-)
Bryce Harrington, Inkscape's founder, wrote an article introducing his brainchild and where its development is heading
Quick correction - I was one of several people that founded the Inkscape project, but I definitely can't claim credit for the application itself. As mentioned in the article, it derives from Gill and Sodipodi, so if it is anyone's "brainchild" it would be the developers of those projects. That said, Inkscape as it is today is the amalgam of a number of people's ideas and hard work, so it is most definitely a team effort.:-)
Actually, I've started designing a one-stop school solution that will eventually provide calendaring.
Note that there's a number of projects with similar aims to be a complete Exchange replacement, including calendaring, addressbook, yada yada. This 'shotgun' approach makes sense for many, who are trying to address near-range needs of customers on a limited budget. What we're hoping to see is a 'sniper rifle' solution that specifically focuses on providing a very good calendaring solution - in fact, Kees and I think there's great value in focusing on sub elements of the calendaring system such as an IMAP-like server daemon ("icald"?) that is completely abstracted from the interface. The idea being that if the community can gain enough of these specific, focused, high quality pieces, a high quality integrated system will be straightforward for others to assemble, just as it's straightforward today for people to assemble mail systems from various existing components.
That said, it's also possible that one of the integrated solutions being developed just might hit the right combination to be able to meet all the needs, so much encouragement to any who are working on this.
Where can I contact you for more info? Sounds like you have definite design requirements.
We'd be more than happy to discuss requirements for this. The main ones are in the linked doc, though. You can reach me at bryce at osdl dot org, and kees at kees at osdl dot org. Also note that OSDL coordinates a "Data Center Linux" initiative that seeks to help companies work together to find solutions for problems like this that companies adopting Linux are facing. Info on the DCL project is available via the OSDL website.
We did a study into the state of calendaring on Linux (specifically for cross-compatibility in mixed Linux/Windows environments). It shows that calendaring is the achilles heel for Linux currently, presents some analysis of several commercial and open source packages that sort of do it, and outlines what is really needed.
Do you think the people who sell multi-thousand dollar ads using Photoshop give a crap about the $900 sticker price? The bus is cheaper than my car, but you don't see me on the bus, do you? Spring for the professional software that lets you forget about all the meaningless things like tweaking the hundred-thousand line source code and focus on delivering what your customers want.
Sure, assuming everyone who needs to use a
graphics program is up to their eyeballs in these
thousand dollar contracts, then yeah, invest in
your tools.
But this is like saying "There's no need for
bus service since people who need transportation
to work can afford a car." Some don't work.
Some work but don't make enough to buy a car.
Some don't want a car. Some aren't going to work.
And a few actually like *being* on a bus.
Today, creating art is not the exclusive realm
of professional artists, nor should it be. For
many, expensive art software is simply beyond
what they can justify for their modest needs. But
There simply aren't a lot of alternatives to
Adobe.
Without programs like Sodipodi and The GIMP,
the choice wouldn't be between a car and a bus
but between buying (or stealing) a car or not
being able to go anywhere at all.
As to complaints about the community nature of
open source development, think about it like this.
Community software is like going to a potluck at
your friend's house. Instead of having to pay
$60 for a dinner at a restaraunt, you get the food
for free, but the catch is that you're expected
to bring something to share. If you like making
stuff, it gives you a chance to show off your
skill. A potluck may not be as convenient as
a restaraunt but can be a lot more fulfilling
and fun.
While I would love to see it be true, I doubt
that software like Gimp, Sodipodi, Open Office,
Linux, and so forth would ever completely replace
proprietary alternatives. If nothing else,
professionals will always need to have that edge
beyond what 'the masses' can do, and will be more
than willing to invest in obtaining that edge.
But I think it is critical that we also have the
alternatives freely available for those who
can't have or don't want the dominant player.
Others have mentioned Gimp as a potential alternative to Photoshop.
Sodipodi is
considered to be a potential alternative to
Illustrator. Sodipodi also strives to be the
best SVG editor around, free or commercial.
However, anyone who has used either knows that
they need more work to get them up to the level
of quality artists need. These projects need your
help. Instead of forking out more C notes to
Adobe or wasting time warezing, do something
constructive.
You can make a significant contribution for as
little as a few afternoon's of your time. Write
a tutorial or a chapter for the GIMP Users Manual (GUM) or the Sodipodi User's Manual (SUM).
Publish an article about the apps for a suitable
online or print magazine. Or just teach it to
some friends. If you can code, pick a bug or
feature request and contribute a patch to address
it. If you don't code but want to, take it as an
opportunity to learn how and to be a part of
the Open Source community's successes.
Status on Sodipodi is looking good.
Work on Sodipodi has been kind of quiet over
the summer but we're hoping to see more people
getting involved in development through the
fall.
A lot of progress was made this past year,
including a Windows port and a lot of minor
features and bug fixes. Knoppix Linux
has picked it up and included it in their
distro, so we're hoping to see it pop up in
other Linux distros soon.
The development team is looking for people who
are motivated to assist in making improvements,
from minor bug fixes to new feature
implementation to major code restructurings.
Adding new features (like text-along-a-path) are
probably the best bang-for-the-buck, but we're
also looking things like breaking out the
renderer code into a separate module, setting
up a regression test capability, abstracting
the GUI code, fleshing out the extensions
system, and more.
The code is in plain C, the interface is fairly
vanilla Gtk, and the app builds on many
different platforms. There isn't a lot of
comments or documentation but the code is
not too hard to follow by itself.
Anyway, if you'd be interested in joining
in the development, pick a bug or feature to
work on and join up on the mailing list and
say hey.
The Open Source community is really starting to
use SVG more and more, including for creating
scalable windowing system elements (vectorial
icons, etc.), a Flash replacement, and who
knows what else. So there's a pretty broad
range of places that Sodipodi could be the right
tool for the job.
OSDL has been doing heavy duty testing of the kernel 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 on 1, 2, 4, and 8 processor systems, for the past 2 years. See its Kernel Testing website and tools. The particular tool that does this is the Scalable Test Platform.
There's several open source SVG editors out there.
I believe the OpenOffice drawing program includes
SVG support, for example.
The most promising SVG editor looks to be Sodipodi.
There's a small but active development community
grown up around it, and its pretty easy to get
involved and help add to it. Work is under way to
modularize a few pieces - libnr (a new SVG renderer to replace libart in Sodipodi), libcroco (a CSS library), and a new effort aimed at breaking out Sodipodi's SVG drawing canvas into something reusable.
One direction I'd love to see Sodipodi go is to
gain additional technical drawing capabilities, so
that it could be used for things that Dia isn't quite
up to - like diagrams that need an artistic flair to them.
If it's true that companies want support for
their installations so they don't have to
upgrade, then I'm betting that it's worthwhile
enough that someone could start a little
company providing support to old RH installs.
Think about it; you don't have to do NEW
development as you might if you were doing a
full distro - RedHat is paying for that. The
bugs are going to be identified and repaired by
others - you just have to patch up the software
and send it out. Wouldn't need to be that big
of a company, either, I'll bet - half a dozen
techies and a few biz types would probably do it.
If you really care about playing a good MMORPG, devote some time to one of the open source MMORPG projects like WorldForge. Or just teach yourself how to make good 3D models of game objects and put those out under the GPL for
programmers to use. (The reason there aren't a lot of great high-end open source games out there for you is because there isn't enough great high-end art for the programmers.)
If 1% of the Everquest addicts had put 1% of their dedication into helping create open source
games, the situation today would be much better than it is. It probably seems like a lot more
effort to help make a game than to simply play it, but in the end it can be much more rewarding in the sense of being a hobby/craft, instead of just a hobby/game. You still get the sense of seeing things improve, being part of a community, and building up a good reputation.
The game industry hasn't quite reached the same point as other media, where the *only* way to make it big is to prostitute yourself to the
corps - theoretically it should still be possible to make games via grassroots means.
But not unless grassroots people (i.e. YOU) put some dedication into solving it.
Also, computer games are actually *important*. Seriously. Look at the list of reasons why people are still using Windows - up in the #1 or #2 slot will often be seen, "No games". Yet ironically, many open source developers will scoff at game efforts, "The project will never fly", "It'd take too much time", "Open source can't work for games", "They should be coding it in [C|Python|Java|etc.]", et al. The plain fact is that there are not enough
creative and skilled people making open source
games.
Open source games are particularly important,
because unlike proprietary games, they have
"longevity". This is due mostly to the fact
that there are so few of them, to begin with,
but also because of the intrinsic nature of
open source. For examples, look at Hack,
NetTrek, FreeCiv, etc. Games that originated
a LONG time ago. A single good/big open source
game can have a vast and long lasting benefit
to the open source community.
Many of the problems mentioned in the
articles can be avoided via open source. Bugs
can be fixed by anyone who can read source and
has an afternoon or two to kill. If the people
running the server aren't providing decent
service, find someone else that's running a copy
of the game - or set up a copy yourself just for
you and your friends. If the game seems too long in the tool art-wise or feature-wise, well
grab a copy of the content and/or code and start making patches.
Anyway, unlike the problems of the RIAA,
Globalism, suppression of freedoms in the US, etc. etc., this is a problem that YOU can _directly_ do something about to fix, without
risking anything but some freetime.
If you have a flair for art, create some good
3D meshes. If you can do photography, build
a massive library of texture images. If you're
good at making or performing music, or have a
good voice, or just like to wander around in the
wilderness with a microphone, then create sounds
for games. If you can do code design, then come
up with modules for game logic (like a perl
module for simulating vegetation growth, or a
C code for making snazzy spell effects, or a
library to go with SDL). Design nifty looking
GUI interfaces. Make maps of an imaginary
world. Scan in your fantasy drawings and post
on the web for 3D artists to use as sources.
If you know none of this, well, at least you
can (presumably) write. And it turns out that
writing is the 100% MOST needed skill by most
open source projects, games in particular.
Write a paper summing up good ideas for certain
game rules you've seen, and your thoughts on
improving them. Invent a new race for a RPG and
put in intricate detail into every aspect of it.
Can't write? Well, likely you can read web
pages and make lists. Find some topic of
relevance to games and start building a table.
Create a spreadsheet of different kinds of
real-world flowers, with data about how they
grow. Collect a database of riddles, sorted by
difficulty. Invent a list of futuristic
handguns. Build a solar system with details
for each planet.
The important thing here is to create reusable *components*. Games are *hard* to make. They take more time than you have yourself; more time then you and your clique of
friends. (Well, except for dinky little arcade or card games, but of course those aren't what we're talking about here.) In order to make these big games, we need to leverage open source's strength of _modularity_. We as a community need to have lots of really good "bits" that someone can gather together in a year or two and turn into a good game. Or, hopefully, a bunch of people can take and turn into a bunch of different games.
If you don't like working alone, no prob - there are still a bunch of game development projects/communities out there that you can join for feedback/help/encouragement/friendship/etc.
Whatever you choose to do, please, PLEASE put
it out explicitly under the GPL license (or BSD, or Public Domain). If you do, then open source
game developers will be able to make use of it
in their game efforts. (There is tons of
content out there on the web right now, but most
of it is unusable due to license issues.)
So, next time you feel a sense of frustration
over some proprietary, closed source game, that
disempowers you from being able to fix it, grab
Blender, or emacs, or Sodipodi, or Timidity, or
whatever, and create something to help the game
developers out there.
So, anybody gonna be hiring in the Portland area in a couple months?
Oh, you want a high-paying IT job? Better start thinking about your own business, and I don't mean consulting. It's death valley for IT in Oregon right now.
The
Open Source Development Lab in Beaverton is hiring - in fact, they just posted a new job req for a Perl software developer _today_. Decent pay, non-profit, Linux, 100% IT-focused, well-supported by IBM, Intel, HP, et al., and you
get to keep copyright on what you write if you
want, so long as you also give it away under the
GPL. If you're in Oregon, why *aren't* you
trying to get hired by these guys??? There's
few such companies anywhere else in the US, after all.
The best thing the court could do IMHO to solve the problem would be to require the government to no longer use MS software. This would have a cascading effect as major gov't contractors are forced to start including use of alternative software, etc.
The U.S. government is probably THE biggest software company in the world, I'd wager, and its purchasing practices are probably many times more powerful than anything the court can do.
NetFlix alone helped justify the cost of getting an HDTV for me - I find I spend more hours per week watching Netflix-supplied content than anything else, and most DVD's are in widescreen formats.
It works out to be cheaper than Blockbuster if you like watching lots of movies, and is more flexible than the pay channels.
I wish they had more content though, as you can pretty quickly run through all the movies you haven't seen already.;-)
Thanks! Be certain to post this via the award
nomination form. (We ask for phone numbers and such, in case we need to gather additional info about the nomination.)
What we want is something, which just allows the 7 of us to join up online. We need to role dice, send secret messages, chat, character management, combat situation setup, push pictures (from GM), movement of characters and that the Game Master has total control over all of this. (additional points on the desire list is: webcam conferencing, audio chat and GM controlled background music depending on situation).
Is WorldForge the right direction to look? Is something like this already available using the WF engine? Half the group are coders, so how much work might it take to develop such an app built on WF?
WorldForge has a very broad set of ambitions, and in fact what you describe sounds very cool and very much like something we'd want to be able to provide to the world. Some of it can be done via IRC, and in fact WF has done some gaming this way. Our game server STAGE will support being able to do this eventually, but it does not do this yet. Mostly it's just an issue of getting enough folks who are interested in creating it involved in WF. We can teach you how to do it and provide the tools and design ideas to implement it.
My question is, what is the decision-making process you folks go through to get all the development troops working on the same code, when some of them want to code in Elves and others want to code in Stormtroopers? And how is/was the Elves vs Stormtroopers decision reached?
We reached a rough concensus, then wrote it down and are sticking to it.;-)
The compromise we came up with was to modularize and generalize the hell out of the code, so it can be used for either. The cost? Such code is a heck of a lot harder to design and takes a heck of a lot longer to write. But the benefit, of course, is that then it can be used for a lot of really creative ideas that probably would never have seen the light of day without it.
In general, when approaching a problem we first encourage people to try a variety of solutions and compete. This usually shakes out a few good options, from which a decision is pretty easily made. We'd follow that same approach when choosing game concepts - give us a solid, detailed, implementable design document, or artwork collection, or engine, or whatever, and we'll support it. In general, we believe that more choice means more goodness, and we try to follow that principle as much as we can.
I had forgotten its existence until this Slashdot article. I slipped on over, expecting something new and...nope, pretty much the same as when I last checked it out.
Couple reasons for this. First, development at WorldForge (like most open source projects) is kinda seasonal, and so over the summer development was in fact slow. Second, most of our website developers have been focused on our next generation website (you can preview here and here/A>).
However, there *has* been a great deal of low level achievements - libraries, server code, databases, etc. And activity has really picked up a huge amount of steam over the last month, now that summer's over and everyone's ready for more development. Most people are extremely enthused about our new game Mason, which just entered implementation.
I would like to see something really cool come of this but games are just not an area where open source works well.
Common fallacy. *Some* types of games may not do well if following open source principles. Plots are difficult to keep secret, and of course it is by definition no prob to determine all of the rule algorithms, AI secrets, etc. But in my opinion, relying on "secrets" to make a game fun is foolish and destined to break as soon as someone posts a spoiler list to the Internet. I believe most *good* game designs would have no particular issue with open source development, any more so than a photoshop-clone or an alternative desktop. It's just a matter of getting enough folks to put the work into chipping in to create it.
Another oft-cited reason why open source games "can't be" is that they are by nature multi-disciplinary. You need musicians, writers, and artists, in addition to programmers. But I feel this is just a difficulty of mindset. Other game projects have had difficulty finding and coordinating such people, but WorldForge hasn't; there are lots of these people out there, and while the idea of allowing their work to be shared under the GPL is novel to them, many are willing to work under that condition anyway.
It really boggles me why people who can be so gung-ho about open sourcing everything under the sun would stop shy of games? FreeCiv, TuxRacer, NetHack, and thousands of smaller games prove that such assertions are in fact false. Yeah, making good games is difficult, but not nearly as hard as making a good operating system, web browser, office suite, or desktop system, which I think we can agree that are well within our community's grasp.
WorldForge *will* succeed. It might take us a heck of a long time, but we set out our plans and objectives a couple years ago and have been achieving the milestones slowly but surely. Trust me, we too would like to see results come more swiftly. The only thing we need to accelerate is your help.:-)
Here's a report on performance of some of these file systems: http://www.osdl.org/reports/journal_fs/. Obviously, performance is only one factor to consider when choosing a file system, so YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
There's been work on adding Dublin Core metadata support to Inkscape, for its next release.
The need for the metadata support is entirely practical in this case: the Open Clip Art Library requires all SVG submissions have proper metadata embedded, to ensure licensing and authorship correctness. Also, there is an SVG Clip Art Browser that uses the metadata info for its display.
One interesting observation that's come up recently and is being discussed on the lists is what happens when you embed several pieces of clipart into a larger document, how do you access the RDF of the individual bits in Inkscape?
I'm working at OSDL and looking forward to having Linus here on-site. :-)
We got the confirmation today that yes, he's coming, and will have a cube here with the
rest of us. I expect he'll be working from home a lot but who knows.
Linus had visited last year not long after he joined the lab, and we asked if he'd be moving up here. At the time he said he'd had enough of cold weather for one lifetime, so this is a surprise! (Well, not a total surprise, Portland is a great city to live in, IMHO. Some of us figured he'd want to move up here once he had time to think about it.)
Perhapse you missed in the paragraph above the one you quoted:
And also note that before this there had been another patch that implemented booleans that we had to reject on licensing problems with a General Polygon Clipping library it used. We'd contacted the GPC author to see if he would let us use it under the GPL, but his license was firm (it allowed for educational, non-commercial use only IIRC), so we ended up not being able to use it.
"Check licensing, then patch, and ask other questions later" doesn't quite have the same ring though. ;-)
Bryce Harrington, Inkscape's founder, wrote an article introducing his brainchild and where its development is heading
Quick correction - I was one of several people that founded the Inkscape project, but I definitely can't claim credit for the application itself. As mentioned in the article, it derives from Gill and Sodipodi, so if it is anyone's "brainchild" it would be the developers of those projects. That said, Inkscape as it is today is the amalgam of a number of people's ideas and hard work, so it is most definitely a team effort. :-)
For 2D drawing editing maybe try the Inkscape SVG editor (http://www.inkscape.org)
Actually, I've started designing a one-stop school solution that will eventually provide calendaring.
Note that there's a number of projects with
similar aims to be a complete Exchange
replacement, including calendaring, addressbook,
yada yada. This 'shotgun' approach makes sense
for many, who are trying to address near-range
needs of customers on a limited budget. What
we're hoping to see is a 'sniper rifle' solution
that specifically focuses on providing a very
good calendaring solution - in fact, Kees and I
think there's great value in focusing on sub
elements of the calendaring system such as an
IMAP-like server daemon ("icald"?) that is
completely abstracted from the interface. The
idea being that if the community can gain enough
of these specific, focused, high quality pieces,
a high quality integrated system will be
straightforward for others to assemble, just as
it's straightforward today for people to assemble
mail systems from various existing components.
That said, it's also possible that one of the
integrated solutions being developed just might
hit the right combination to be able to meet all
the needs, so much encouragement to any who are
working on this.
Where can I contact you for more info? Sounds like you have definite design requirements.
We'd be more than happy to discuss requirements
for this. The main ones are in the linked doc,
though. You can reach me at bryce at osdl dot
org, and kees at kees at osdl dot org. Also note
that OSDL coordinates a "Data Center Linux"
initiative that seeks to help companies work
together to find solutions for problems like this
that companies adopting Linux are facing. Info on
the DCL project is available via the OSDL website.
We did a study into the state of calendaring on
l ts /calendaring.pdf
l ts /summary.html
Linux (specifically for cross-compatibility in
mixed Linux/Windows environments). It shows
that calendaring is the achilles heel for Linux
currently, presents some analysis of several
commercial and open source packages that sort of
do it, and outlines what is really needed.
http://www.osdl.org/projects/cmptblclndrng/resu
Additional info available at the website:
http://www.osdl.org/projects/cmptblclndrng/resu
Do you think the people who sell multi-thousand dollar ads using Photoshop give a crap about the $900 sticker price? The bus is cheaper than my car, but you don't see me on the bus, do you? Spring for the professional software that lets you forget about all the meaningless things like tweaking the hundred-thousand line source code and focus on delivering what your customers want.
Sure, assuming everyone who needs to use a graphics program is up to their eyeballs in these thousand dollar contracts, then yeah, invest in your tools.
But this is like saying "There's no need for bus service since people who need transportation to work can afford a car." Some don't work. Some work but don't make enough to buy a car. Some don't want a car. Some aren't going to work. And a few actually like *being* on a bus.
Today, creating art is not the exclusive realm of professional artists, nor should it be. For many, expensive art software is simply beyond what they can justify for their modest needs. But There simply aren't a lot of alternatives to Adobe.
Without programs like Sodipodi and The GIMP, the choice wouldn't be between a car and a bus but between buying (or stealing) a car or not being able to go anywhere at all.
As to complaints about the community nature of open source development, think about it like this. Community software is like going to a potluck at your friend's house. Instead of having to pay $60 for a dinner at a restaraunt, you get the food for free, but the catch is that you're expected to bring something to share. If you like making stuff, it gives you a chance to show off your skill. A potluck may not be as convenient as a restaraunt but can be a lot more fulfilling and fun.
While I would love to see it be true, I doubt that software like Gimp, Sodipodi, Open Office, Linux, and so forth would ever completely replace proprietary alternatives. If nothing else, professionals will always need to have that edge beyond what 'the masses' can do, and will be more than willing to invest in obtaining that edge. But I think it is critical that we also have the alternatives freely available for those who can't have or don't want the dominant player.
Others have mentioned Gimp as a potential alternative to Photoshop. Sodipodi is considered to be a potential alternative to Illustrator. Sodipodi also strives to be the best SVG editor around, free or commercial.
However, anyone who has used either knows that they need more work to get them up to the level of quality artists need. These projects need your help. Instead of forking out more C notes to Adobe or wasting time warezing, do something constructive.
You can make a significant contribution for as little as a few afternoon's of your time. Write a tutorial or a chapter for the GIMP Users Manual (GUM) or the Sodipodi User's Manual (SUM). Publish an article about the apps for a suitable online or print magazine. Or just teach it to some friends. If you can code, pick a bug or feature request and contribute a patch to address it. If you don't code but want to, take it as an opportunity to learn how and to be a part of the Open Source community's successes.
I imagine you know, but it is (version 0.30) included with SuSE 8.2 Pro.
Wow, thanks, I didn't know.
Status on Sodipodi is looking good. Work on Sodipodi has been kind of quiet over the summer but we're hoping to see more people getting involved in development through the fall.
A lot of progress was made this past year, including a Windows port and a lot of minor features and bug fixes. Knoppix Linux has picked it up and included it in their distro, so we're hoping to see it pop up in other Linux distros soon.
The development team is looking for people who are motivated to assist in making improvements, from minor bug fixes to new feature implementation to major code restructurings. Adding new features (like text-along-a-path) are probably the best bang-for-the-buck, but we're also looking things like breaking out the renderer code into a separate module, setting up a regression test capability, abstracting the GUI code, fleshing out the extensions system, and more.
The code is in plain C, the interface is fairly vanilla Gtk, and the app builds on many different platforms. There isn't a lot of comments or documentation but the code is not too hard to follow by itself.
Anyway, if you'd be interested in joining in the development, pick a bug or feature to work on and join up on the mailing list and say hey.
The Open Source community is really starting to use SVG more and more, including for creating scalable windowing system elements (vectorial icons, etc.), a Flash replacement, and who knows what else. So there's a pretty broad range of places that Sodipodi could be the right tool for the job.
OSDL has been doing heavy duty testing of the kernel 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 on 1, 2, 4, and 8
processor systems, for the past 2 years. See
its Kernel
Testing website and tools. The particular tool
that does this is the Scalable Test Platform.
Bryce
The most promising SVG editor looks to be Sodipodi. There's a small but active development community grown up around it, and its pretty easy to get involved and help add to it. Work is under way to modularize a few pieces - libnr (a new SVG renderer to replace libart in Sodipodi), libcroco (a CSS library), and a new effort aimed at breaking out Sodipodi's SVG drawing canvas into something reusable.
One direction I'd love to see Sodipodi go is to gain additional technical drawing capabilities, so that it could be used for things that Dia isn't quite up to - like diagrams that need an artistic flair to them.
If it's true that companies want support for their installations so they don't have to upgrade, then I'm betting that it's worthwhile enough that someone could start a little company providing support to old RH installs.
Think about it; you don't have to do NEW development as you might if you were doing a full distro - RedHat is paying for that. The bugs are going to be identified and repaired by others - you just have to patch up the software and send it out. Wouldn't need to be that big of a company, either, I'll bet - half a dozen techies and a few biz types would probably do it.
If you really care about playing a good MMORPG, devote some time to one of the open source MMORPG projects like WorldForge. Or just teach yourself how to make good 3D models of game objects and put those out under the GPL for programmers to use. (The reason there aren't a lot of great high-end open source games out there for you is because there isn't enough great high-end art for the programmers.)
If 1% of the Everquest addicts had put 1% of their dedication into helping create open source games, the situation today would be much better than it is. It probably seems like a lot more effort to help make a game than to simply play it, but in the end it can be much more rewarding in the sense of being a hobby/craft, instead of just a hobby/game. You still get the sense of seeing things improve, being part of a community, and building up a good reputation.
The game industry hasn't quite reached the same point as other media, where the *only* way to make it big is to prostitute yourself to the corps - theoretically it should still be possible to make games via grassroots means. But not unless grassroots people (i.e. YOU) put some dedication into solving it.
Also, computer games are actually *important*. Seriously. Look at the list of reasons why people are still using Windows - up in the #1 or #2 slot will often be seen, "No games". Yet ironically, many open source developers will scoff at game efforts, "The project will never fly", "It'd take too much time", "Open source can't work for games", "They should be coding it in [C|Python|Java|etc.]", et al. The plain fact is that there are not enough creative and skilled people making open source games.
Open source games are particularly important, because unlike proprietary games, they have "longevity". This is due mostly to the fact that there are so few of them, to begin with, but also because of the intrinsic nature of open source. For examples, look at Hack, NetTrek, FreeCiv, etc. Games that originated a LONG time ago. A single good/big open source game can have a vast and long lasting benefit to the open source community.
Many of the problems mentioned in the articles can be avoided via open source. Bugs can be fixed by anyone who can read source and has an afternoon or two to kill. If the people running the server aren't providing decent service, find someone else that's running a copy of the game - or set up a copy yourself just for you and your friends. If the game seems too long in the tool art-wise or feature-wise, well grab a copy of the content and/or code and start making patches.
Anyway, unlike the problems of the RIAA, Globalism, suppression of freedoms in the US, etc. etc., this is a problem that YOU can _directly_ do something about to fix, without risking anything but some freetime.
If you have a flair for art, create some good 3D meshes. If you can do photography, build a massive library of texture images. If you're good at making or performing music, or have a good voice, or just like to wander around in the wilderness with a microphone, then create sounds for games. If you can do code design, then come up with modules for game logic (like a perl module for simulating vegetation growth, or a C code for making snazzy spell effects, or a library to go with SDL). Design nifty looking GUI interfaces. Make maps of an imaginary world. Scan in your fantasy drawings and post on the web for 3D artists to use as sources.
If you know none of this, well, at least you can (presumably) write. And it turns out that writing is the 100% MOST needed skill by most open source projects, games in particular. Write a paper summing up good ideas for certain game rules you've seen, and your thoughts on improving them. Invent a new race for a RPG and put in intricate detail into every aspect of it.
Can't write? Well, likely you can read web pages and make lists. Find some topic of relevance to games and start building a table. Create a spreadsheet of different kinds of real-world flowers, with data about how they grow. Collect a database of riddles, sorted by difficulty. Invent a list of futuristic handguns. Build a solar system with details for each planet.
The important thing here is to create reusable *components*. Games are *hard* to make. They take more time than you have yourself; more time then you and your clique of friends. (Well, except for dinky little arcade or card games, but of course those aren't what we're talking about here.) In order to make these big games, we need to leverage open source's strength of _modularity_. We as a community need to have lots of really good "bits" that someone can gather together in a year or two and turn into a good game. Or, hopefully, a bunch of people can take and turn into a bunch of different games.
If you don't like working alone, no prob - there are still a bunch of game development projects/communities out there that you can join for feedback/help/encouragement/friendship/etc.
Whatever you choose to do, please, PLEASE put it out explicitly under the GPL license (or BSD, or Public Domain). If you do, then open source game developers will be able to make use of it in their game efforts. (There is tons of content out there on the web right now, but most of it is unusable due to license issues.)
So, next time you feel a sense of frustration over some proprietary, closed source game, that disempowers you from being able to fix it, grab Blender, or emacs, or Sodipodi, or Timidity, or whatever, and create something to help the game developers out there.
Oh, you want a high-paying IT job? Better start thinking about your own business, and I don't mean consulting. It's death valley for IT in Oregon right now. The
Open Source Development Lab in Beaverton is hiring - in fact, they just posted a new job req for a Perl software developer _today_. Decent pay, non-profit, Linux, 100% IT-focused, well-supported by IBM, Intel, HP, et al., and you get to keep copyright on what you write if you want, so long as you also give it away under the GPL. If you're in Oregon, why *aren't* you trying to get hired by these guys??? There's few such companies anywhere else in the US, after all.
OSDL (http://www.osdl.org/) is hiring
right now, particularly looking for people
with perl/C/Linux development and sysadmin
experience.
OSDL's a non-profit in Beaverton, Or, focused on helping provide tools,
patches, etc. to make Linux better.
Needs exactly the sort of
people described in this article as
looking for exactly this kind of company.
The best thing the court could do IMHO to solve
the problem would be to require the government
to no longer use MS software. This would have
a cascading effect as major gov't contractors
are forced to start including use of alternative
software, etc.
The U.S. government is probably THE biggest
software company in the world, I'd wager, and
its purchasing practices are probably many times
more powerful than anything the court can do.
NetFlix alone helped justify the cost of
;-)
getting an HDTV for me - I find I spend
more hours per week watching Netflix-supplied content than anything else, and most DVD's are in widescreen
formats.
It works out to be cheaper than Blockbuster if you like watching lots of
movies, and is more flexible than the
pay channels.
I wish they had more content though, as
you can pretty quickly run through all the
movies you haven't seen already.
Thanks! Be certain to post this via the award nomination form. (We ask for phone numbers and such, in case we need to gather additional info about the nomination.)
What we want is something, which just allows the 7 of us to join up online. We need to role dice, send secret messages, chat, character management, combat situation setup, push pictures (from GM), movement of characters and that the Game Master has total control over all of this. (additional points on the desire list is: webcam conferencing, audio chat and GM controlled background music depending on situation).
Is WorldForge the right direction to look? Is something like this already available using the WF engine? Half the group are coders, so how much work might it take to develop such an app built on WF?
WorldForge has a very broad set of ambitions, and in fact what you describe sounds very cool and very much like something we'd want to be able to provide to the world. Some of it can be done via IRC, and in fact WF has done some gaming this way. Our game server STAGE will support being able to do this eventually, but it does not do this yet. Mostly it's just an issue of getting enough folks who are interested in creating it involved in WF. We can teach you how to do it and provide the tools and design ideas to implement it.
We reached a rough concensus, then wrote it down and are sticking to it. ;-)
The compromise we came up with was to modularize and generalize the hell out of the code, so it can be used for either. The cost? Such code is a heck of a lot harder to design and takes a heck of a lot longer to write. But the benefit, of course, is that then it can be used for a lot of really creative ideas that probably would never have seen the light of day without it.
In general, when approaching a problem we first encourage people to try a variety of solutions and compete. This usually shakes out a few good options, from which a decision is pretty easily made. We'd follow that same approach when choosing game concepts - give us a solid, detailed, implementable design document, or artwork collection, or engine, or whatever, and we'll support it. In general, we believe that more choice means more goodness, and we try to follow that principle as much as we can.
Couple reasons for this. First, development at WorldForge (like most open source projects) is kinda seasonal, and so over the summer development was in fact slow. Second, most of our website developers have been focused on our next generation website (you can preview here and here/A>).
However, there *has* been a great deal of low level achievements - libraries, server code, databases, etc. And activity has really picked up a huge amount of steam over the last month, now that summer's over and everyone's ready for more development. Most people are extremely enthused about our new game Mason, which just entered implementation.
I would like to see something really cool come of this but games are just not an area where open source works well.
Common fallacy. *Some* types of games may not do well if following open source principles. Plots are difficult to keep secret, and of course it is by definition no prob to determine all of the rule algorithms, AI secrets, etc. But in my opinion, relying on "secrets" to make a game fun is foolish and destined to break as soon as someone posts a spoiler list to the Internet. I believe most *good* game designs would have no particular issue with open source development, any more so than a photoshop-clone or an alternative desktop. It's just a matter of getting enough folks to put the work into chipping in to create it.
Another oft-cited reason why open source games "can't be" is that they are by nature multi-disciplinary. You need musicians, writers, and artists, in addition to programmers. But I feel this is just a difficulty of mindset. Other game projects have had difficulty finding and coordinating such people, but WorldForge hasn't; there are lots of these people out there, and while the idea of allowing their work to be shared under the GPL is novel to them, many are willing to work under that condition anyway.
It really boggles me why people who can be so gung-ho about open sourcing everything under the sun would stop shy of games? FreeCiv, TuxRacer, NetHack, and thousands of smaller games prove that such assertions are in fact false. Yeah, making good games is difficult, but not nearly as hard as making a good operating system, web browser, office suite, or desktop system, which I think we can agree that are well within our community's grasp.
WorldForge *will* succeed. It might take us a heck of a long time, but we set out our plans and objectives a couple years ago and have been achieving the milestones slowly but surely. Trust me, we too would like to see results come more swiftly. The only thing we need to accelerate is your help. :-)
Here's a report on performance of some of these file systems: http://www.osdl.org/reports/journal_fs/. Obviously, performance is only one factor to consider when choosing a file system, so YMMV.
Here's an analysis report on some of the various file systems, graphing the results for easier digestion. :-)
http://www.osdl.org/reports/journal_fs/