That's really cold, man. You paint the KDE project as extremely elitist, when it is actually totally the opposite. KDE isn't some exclusive club of core people, any developers are welcome to join the project at any time, and have always been welcome.
Sounds like KDE is looking for folks to come along and do all the thankless, boring shit.
You have it totally backward, actually. The Quality Team project was intiated to include the large number of non-developer people who have been saying that they've always wanted to help KDE, but don't know how. KDE-QT provides a framework to actually include these interested and passionate contributors into our project. They asked for a project like this.
So you see the QT tasks as boring grunt-work. Fine, then maybe KDE-QT is not for you. But there are those who excel at this kind of thing, and actually enjoy it.
Amazing thing, this Google. I just did 'British slang "fair cop" ' and hit "I'm feeling Lucky!" (because I was), and there you have it. Fair cop, eh wot?
It'll be a shame when SCO sues Google out of business...
You've got to remember that a great many scenes used mainly CGI backdrops, and I'm not sure this category was designed to cover footage of non-live scenery and action.
That would be a good point, but I wonder if you realize how much of the scenery in th LotR trilogy was *not* CGI? In fact, I would say most of the backgrounds were not, they were either real locations or "bigatures". Edoras was actually built full-scale on that windswept hill. Helm's deep was a colossol bigature built in a quarry. Even the Black Gate and both Towers were physical models, not CGI.
Besides, most of the naval warfare shots in M&C:FSotW were actually digital, so I don't see that it is all that different from RotK in terms of cinematographic technique.
At the beginning of the show, Billy Crystal did one of his usual skits lampooning the year's movies. It started with him sitting down in a theater and turning on a camcorder. I thought to myself, oh great, another preachy antipiracy message. Unfortunately I was on the phone at the time, so I didn't really catch what message (if any) he was presenting. Can anyone clue me in?
Over 30 million people watched it from the U.S. alone, and many millions more worldwide. Just because you don't care to watch something does not mean it should not be televised.
Funny... that would make one think that patents are the enemy here, not copyrights.
Try actually reading/listening to the speech. Moglen says precisely this. You are incredibly confused if you think any Free Software advocate considers copyright law their "enemy". The GPL fundamentally *depends* on the sanctity of copyrights.
Hello? You're using Gentoo. If you want a distro that "just works" you're in the totally wrong ballpark.
Touche'. I should clarify that it isn't really the requirement that I may need to (re)compile something that bothers me; obviously as a Gentoo user I am used to that, and it's usually no more complicated than "emerge foo". It's ESR's "stone wall" that really frustrates. That is, it is not knowing what the hell I'm supposed to do in order to make something work, and being unable to obtain that information easily.
Start Digikam, select your Canon model, download pictures. No kernel recompilation there. Why are you messing with the command line? Welcome to the GUI!
Yeah, well, like I said, that's what I tried first, of course. It's only when step 3 ("download pictures") failed utterly that I resorted to more drastic measures and hours of reading dozens of conflicting pages on what to do. This resulted ultimately in my getting the CLI working (but not the GUI). I was so frustrated and sick of dealing with it, that I declared that "good enough".
Under SuSE, launch the fetchnvidia script and WOW, it installs the kernel module itself and even alters your XF86Config file! No recompile involved here either.
Yeah, that's real nice. The larger point, however, is that one should not even have to run a "fetchnvidia" script. Obvious tasks should be relegated completely to the computer. This is the "discovery" process that ESR talks about.
I've been using Linux as my main OS at both work and home for about 7 years.
Here's a list of my recent hardware config experiences on my home machine, which dual-boots Gentoo and Windows XP:
1. Canon Powershot A40 digital camera. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. On Linux, it required two kernel recompiles, and searches through several sources of information (gphoto2 manual, message boards, Google) before I finally got the command-line interface to gphoto2 to work. Never got any GUI front-end working.
2. Creative Webcam Pro NX. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. Despite hours spent banging my head on the problem, it has yet to function under Linux.
3. Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. Linux: kernel recompile, install additional Xfree86 module, tweak, retweak, and re-retweak/etc/X11/Xf86Config. All accompanied by extremely liberal doses of docu searching online, of course.
I love Linux like my brother, but seriously, hardware config on it is a huge PITFA, and provides the single largest contrast to the Windows world.
I long for the day when I get a new gizmo, plug it into my box, and it "just works". Man, that would be so cool.
I'll play Devil's Advocate here. Perhaps those outside the industry have an axe to grinde because they were never let in. Or maybe they believe that lead is the root cause for all of society's ills. Or maybe they can profit by replacing lead in various products. These people would not be from the lead industry, but would have expertise in the field and would be unquestionably biased.
I acknowledge all of these possibilities, and you raise a good point. However, when the lead scientists which have no obvious prima facie bias are rejected from a panel and fired from their jobs, and their replacements are all on the payroll of the lead industry, this is troubling in the extreme.
Assuming that no opinion could be unbiased, the best a manager could do is hear from 'both' sides.
Except that we aren't talking about matters of opinion here, that's the whole point! The data *can* be honestly interpreted by following the scientific method. And who is the "manager" that you are talking about? We're talking about recommendations that have serious ramifications on people's health (not coincidentally, the people affected are largely the children of the poor). Every effort should be made to ensure that the decisions are based on the best scientific conclusions, and that the conclusions are not polluted by corporate influence.
And your response is no better! By your reasoning, research into the effects of lead on human physiology would be a waste of time, since it doesn't take an expert to figure it out. If human physiology is that easy: tell us the cure for cancer. Didn't think so...
I think you misunderstood me. I didn't say that expertise is not required, I said that *getting money from the lead industry* is not required for one to obtain expertise on lead.
You said (paraphrasing) "who better to investigate lead than the experts in the lead industry, who have the expertise?". My point is, there are scientists who are experts in lead, despite the fact that they have no ties to the lead industry. These same scientists (who find that lead is quite dangerous) were dismissed from their positions and replaced by those who *do* have ties to the lead industry (who, lo and behold, find that lead is much less dangerous. Amazing!).
Do you see the problem with that? If you want unbiased research results, the researchers should not be financially beholden to *any* interested party related to the subject of the investigation. It's just common sense.
As you know, the BSD license explicitly allows for license changes. So as a user of the BSD license, you should not care if someone GPL's a derivative work. Besides, *your* code can be closed-sourced. It just can't be closed-sourced *and* linked to Qt. Again, this is as it should be, because Trolltech gets to decide the fate of their code, and you get to decide the fate of yours. Isn't that nice?
No, you still don't get it. You can release a binary, the binary is just GPL'd because it links to a GPL library. Your source code (i.e., the code you personally wrote) can be licensed under BSD in this case. There's no problem, it's just a little weird that your source code and the linked binary have different license terms.
Several core KDE apps have source code licensed under a "permissive" license: kicker (BSD), klipper (Artistic), ksmserver (BSD), and even kwin (BSD). Oh, wait, I just double-checked kwin; it's been relicensed GPL for KDE 3.2, but the kdebase/kwin/LICENSE file still presents the text of the old 3.1 BSD license.
So go ahead, write BSD'd apps and link them to GPL'd Qt, there's no problem doing that!
So, did you purposely interchange "Linus" and "Linux" in your post, or are you just a sloppy typist? I've seen "Linux Torvalds" several times on/.; I can never tell if it's an accidental spoonerism or people are just trying to be cute. So, which is it?
Sorry I gave that anti-corporate impression. The point I was trying to make is that Apple can choose to help with KOffice or not, but I don't think that making the license for KOffice less restrictive to try to seduce them into doing so would be a good move for KOffice. If you lowered the barrier against proprietary use of the codebase, sure you might attract additional corporate developers, but you wouldn't gain anything from it (if they were going to give back, they would have joined up when it was Free Software, no?)
It's not like KHTML. KOffice can't be easily linked to other code that you can keep private. So I don't think that making KOffice LGPL'd would change anything. To get the situation originally advocated would require something like BSD, IIUC.
You're right. It was great that Apple chose to use KHTML and that in doing so, it joined our community and played by our rules. Kudos to them!
I will be equally impressed and gratified if they choose to join us again with developing KOffice. That will be a great day, because KOffice is always starved for developer eyeballs. However, I don't see why KOffice needs to give up the protection of the GPL for this to happen. It's not like KHTML, where Apple can easily link proprietary code to a basic KOffice foundation. That's not practical; KOffice isn't a library.
There's a huge stack of excellent code on the typical desktop, yet nobody else requires the sort of licensing TrollTech do. If you're going to take that position for Qt, why not also take it for the [other projects]?
As someone else in this thread put it: Developers, and not/. posters, get to pick how their code is licensed. I respect the licensing decisions that Trolltech, Linus, RMS, the X consortium, Apple, Sun, etc. have made, and furthermore, I understand the motivation in Trolltech's case. Sure it would be nicer for commercial developers if the license was less restrictive toward proprietary use, but unlike every other developer you and I have discussed, TT is a company whose core business is this piece of software. They can't give it away to everybody because they aren't a volunteer community, and they aren't a company selling hardware. I understand that. I think opening it up to non-proprietary use is a fantastic and noble thing for them to do, and my hat's off to them for it.
Are you replying to me or the parent post? I would say I 100% agree; the KOffice developers have chosen the GPL as their license, and it isn't the parent poster's place to lament that it isn't more "liberal".
Since KOffice is GPL, they would be forced to open the source code to their entire application. It couldn't be where they take the LGPL KHTML and link things to it
I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.
Now, assuming you are not the CEO of the company, why exactly is this a desireable situation again? The above seems like an unequivocally bad deal for the community of developers, and I say, thank goodness the GPL prevents such shenanigans.
since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license
If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit? TT is gracious enough to allow free (beer and speech) usage of Qt for noncommercial uses, and their commercial license fees are by most accounts very reasonable. It isn't as if they are starved for customers.
You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development
What the hell are you talking about? Assuming you aren't referring to illegal MS application development, can you please explain this? How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?
He's already made the comparison, last time SCO was attacked. His cred is gone already, and in case you didn't notice, he does tend to say ridiculous things that have no basis in reality.
Slashdot Mirror
That's really cold, man. You paint the KDE project as extremely elitist, when it is actually totally the opposite. KDE isn't some exclusive club of core people, any developers are welcome to join the project at any time, and have always been welcome.
Sounds like KDE is looking for folks to come along and do all the thankless, boring shit.
You have it totally backward, actually. The Quality Team project was intiated to include the large number of non-developer people who have been saying that they've always wanted to help KDE, but don't know how. KDE-QT provides a framework to actually include these interested and passionate contributors into our project.
They asked for a project like this.
So you see the QT tasks as boring grunt-work. Fine, then maybe KDE-QT is not for you. But there are those who excel at this kind of thing, and actually enjoy it.
The KDE project itself doesn't do any packaging at all; they only release source-code tarballs. kde-redhat is an independent project.
I have some herbal viagra and some penis lengthener pills they could buy from me...
I HATE YOU!!! STOP SENDING ME EMAIL!!!
DIE DIE DIE!!!
Now look here, my good chap....
Amazing thing, this Google. I just did 'British slang "fair cop" ' and hit "I'm feeling Lucky!" (because I was), and there you have it. Fair cop, eh wot?
It'll be a shame when SCO sues Google out of business...
You've got to remember that a great many scenes used mainly CGI backdrops, and I'm not sure this category was designed to cover footage of non-live scenery and action.
That would be a good point, but I wonder if you realize how much of the scenery in th LotR trilogy was *not* CGI? In fact, I would say most of the backgrounds were not, they were either real locations or "bigatures". Edoras was actually built full-scale on that windswept hill. Helm's deep was a colossol bigature built in a quarry. Even the Black Gate and both Towers were physical models, not CGI.
Besides, most of the naval warfare shots in M&C:FSotW were actually digital, so I don't see that it is all that different from RotK in terms of cinematographic technique.
At the beginning of the show, Billy Crystal did one of his usual skits lampooning the year's movies. It started with him sitting down in a theater and turning on a camcorder. I thought to myself, oh great, another preachy antipiracy message. Unfortunately I was on the phone at the time, so I didn't really catch what message (if any) he was presenting. Can anyone clue me in?
Then don't show it on TV.
Over 30 million people watched it from the U.S. alone, and many millions more worldwide. Just because you don't care to watch something does not mean it should not be televised.
Funny... that would make one think that patents are the enemy here, not copyrights.
Try actually reading/listening to the speech. Moglen says precisely this. You are incredibly confused if you think any Free Software advocate considers copyright law their "enemy". The GPL fundamentally *depends* on the sanctity of copyrights.
Hello? You're using Gentoo. If you want a distro that "just works" you're in the totally wrong ballpark.
Touche'. I should clarify that it isn't really the requirement that I may need to (re)compile something that bothers me; obviously as a Gentoo user I am used to that, and it's usually no more complicated than "emerge foo". It's ESR's "stone wall" that really frustrates. That is, it is not knowing what the hell I'm supposed to do in order to make something work, and being unable to obtain that information easily.
Start Digikam, select your Canon model, download pictures. No kernel recompilation there. Why are you messing with the command line? Welcome to the GUI!
Yeah, well, like I said, that's what I tried first, of course. It's only when step 3 ("download pictures") failed utterly that I resorted to more drastic measures and hours of reading dozens of conflicting pages on what to do. This resulted ultimately in my getting the CLI working (but not the GUI). I was so frustrated and sick of dealing with it, that I declared that "good enough".
Under SuSE, launch the fetchnvidia script and WOW, it installs the kernel module itself and even alters your XF86Config file! No recompile involved here either.
Yeah, that's real nice. The larger point, however, is that one should not even have to run a "fetchnvidia" script. Obvious tasks should be relegated completely to the computer. This is the "discovery" process that ESR talks about.
I've been using Linux as my main OS at both work and home for about 7 years.
/etc/X11/Xf86Config. All accompanied by extremely liberal doses of docu searching online, of course.
Here's a list of my recent hardware config experiences on my home machine, which dual-boots Gentoo and Windows XP:
1. Canon Powershot A40 digital camera. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. On Linux, it required two kernel recompiles, and searches through several sources of information (gphoto2 manual, message boards, Google) before I finally got the command-line interface to gphoto2 to work. Never got any GUI front-end working.
2. Creative Webcam Pro NX. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. Despite hours spent banging my head on the problem, it has yet to function under Linux.
3. Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. Linux: kernel recompile, install additional Xfree86 module, tweak, retweak, and re-retweak
I love Linux like my brother, but seriously, hardware config on it is a huge PITFA, and provides the single largest contrast to the Windows world.
I long for the day when I get a new gizmo, plug it into my box, and it "just works". Man, that would be so cool.
Anyone know how to make GUI programming more interesting?
sure do!
I'll play Devil's Advocate here. Perhaps those outside the industry have an axe to grinde because they were never let in. Or maybe they believe that lead is the root cause for all of society's ills. Or maybe they can profit by replacing lead in various products. These people would not be from the lead industry, but would have expertise in the field and would be unquestionably biased.
I acknowledge all of these possibilities, and you raise a good point. However, when the lead scientists which have no obvious prima facie bias are rejected from a panel and fired from their jobs, and their replacements are all on the payroll of the lead industry, this is troubling in the extreme.
Assuming that no opinion could be unbiased, the best a manager could do is hear from 'both' sides.
Except that we aren't talking about matters of opinion here, that's the whole point! The data *can* be honestly interpreted by following the scientific method. And who is the "manager" that you are talking about? We're talking about recommendations that have serious ramifications on people's health (not coincidentally, the people affected are largely the children of the poor). Every effort should be made to ensure that the decisions are based on the best scientific conclusions, and that the conclusions are not polluted by corporate influence.
And your response is no better! By your reasoning, research into the effects of lead on human physiology would be a waste of time, since it doesn't take an expert to figure it out. If human physiology is that easy: tell us the cure for cancer. Didn't think so...
I think you misunderstood me. I didn't say that expertise is not required, I said that *getting money from the lead industry* is not required for one to obtain expertise on lead.
You said (paraphrasing) "who better to investigate lead than the experts in the lead industry, who have the expertise?". My point is, there are scientists who are experts in lead, despite the fact that they have no ties to the lead industry. These same scientists (who find that lead is quite dangerous) were dismissed from their positions and replaced by those who *do* have ties to the lead industry (who, lo and behold, find that lead is much less dangerous. Amazing!).
Do you see the problem with that? If you want unbiased research results, the researchers should not be financially beholden to *any* interested party related to the subject of the investigation. It's just common sense.
You don't have to receive research grants from the lead industry to be an expert on lead and its effects on human physiology.
I think you had better grep the linked Groklaw article for "2.6"...
So?
As you know, the BSD license explicitly allows for license changes. So as a user of the BSD license, you should not care if someone GPL's a derivative work. Besides, *your* code can be closed-sourced. It just can't be closed-sourced *and* linked to Qt. Again, this is as it should be, because Trolltech gets to decide the fate of their code, and you get to decide the fate of yours. Isn't that nice?
No, you still don't get it. You can release a binary, the binary is just GPL'd because it links to a GPL library. Your source code (i.e., the code you personally wrote) can be licensed under BSD in this case. There's no problem, it's just a little weird that your source code and the linked binary have different license terms.
Several core KDE apps have source code licensed under a "permissive" license: kicker (BSD), klipper (Artistic), ksmserver (BSD), and even kwin (BSD). Oh, wait, I just double-checked kwin; it's been relicensed GPL for KDE 3.2, but the kdebase/kwin/LICENSE file still presents the text of the old 3.1 BSD license.
So go ahead, write BSD'd apps and link them to GPL'd Qt, there's no problem doing that!
So, did you purposely interchange "Linus" and "Linux" in your post, or are you just a sloppy typist? I've seen "Linux Torvalds" several times on /.; I can never tell if it's an accidental spoonerism or people are just trying to be cute. So, which is it?
However, isn't it true that only version 2 is free for open source usage?
t ml
No, that's the opposite of true. Where did you hear that?
You can download Qt 3.3 GPL version for unix here:
http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/x11.h
Sorry I gave that anti-corporate impression. The point I was trying to make is that Apple can choose to help with KOffice or not, but I don't think that making the license for KOffice less restrictive to try to seduce them into doing so would be a good move for KOffice. If you lowered the barrier against proprietary use of the codebase, sure you might attract additional corporate developers, but you wouldn't gain anything from it (if they were going to give back, they would have joined up when it was Free Software, no?)
It's not like KHTML. KOffice can't be easily linked to other code that you can keep private. So I don't think that making KOffice LGPL'd would change anything. To get the situation originally advocated would require something like BSD, IIUC.
You're right. It was great that Apple chose to use KHTML and that in doing so, it joined our community and played by our rules. Kudos to them!
I will be equally impressed and gratified if they choose to join us again with developing KOffice. That will be a great day, because KOffice is always starved for developer eyeballs. However, I don't see why KOffice needs to give up the protection of the GPL for this to happen. It's not like KHTML, where Apple can easily link proprietary code to a basic KOffice foundation. That's not practical; KOffice isn't a library.
There's a huge stack of excellent code on the typical desktop, yet nobody else requires the sort of licensing TrollTech do. If you're going to take that position for Qt, why not also take it for the [other projects]?
/. posters, get to pick how their code is licensed. I respect the licensing decisions that Trolltech, Linus, RMS, the X consortium, Apple, Sun, etc. have made, and furthermore, I understand the motivation in Trolltech's case. Sure it would be nicer for commercial developers if the license was less restrictive toward proprietary use, but unlike every other developer you and I have discussed, TT is a company whose core business is this piece of software. They can't give it away to everybody because they aren't a volunteer community, and they aren't a company selling hardware. I understand that. I think opening it up to non-proprietary use is a fantastic and noble thing for them to do, and my hat's off to them for it.
As someone else in this thread put it: Developers, and not
Are you replying to me or the parent post? I would say I 100% agree; the KOffice developers have chosen the GPL as their license, and it isn't the parent poster's place to lament that it isn't more "liberal".
Since KOffice is GPL, they would be forced to open the source code to their entire application. It couldn't be where they take the LGPL KHTML and link things to it
I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.
Now, assuming you are not the CEO of the company, why exactly is this a desireable situation again? The above seems like an unequivocally bad deal for the community of developers, and I say, thank goodness the GPL prevents such shenanigans.
since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license
If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit? TT is gracious enough to allow free (beer and speech) usage of Qt for noncommercial uses, and their commercial license fees are by most accounts very reasonable. It isn't as if they are starved for customers.
You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development
What the hell are you talking about? Assuming you aren't referring to illegal MS application development, can you please explain this? How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?
He's already made the comparison, last time SCO was attacked. His cred is gone already, and in case you didn't notice, he does tend to say ridiculous things that have no basis in reality.