"GnuStep is an implementation of the OpenStep API, and other programs to recreate the NeXT environment on any Unix-like operating system. Applications written for GnuStep can be recompiled to target OS X with little-to-no work."
Does this mean that the converse is true? i.e. applications written for OS X can be recompiled to target GnuStep with little-to-no work?
Feels like a lot of the pain we went through to come up with the Fedora logo. The best you can hope to do is to encourage input, show your work, explain your rationale for your final choice, and get buy-in -- but ultimately, it's one of the things that you put in the hands of a professional to drive to completion
There are much better initiatives out there. Like the Millenium Project to end global poverty, or the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Are you contributing to them? I am.
But I'm a supporter of the OLPC project too -- because saving people from extreme poverty and disease is only part of the battle. The other part of the battle is giving them the tools to be competitive in a global marketplace. In a globalized capitalist world, every economy needs to figure out what their comparative advantage is. Many of the poorest nations in the world have limited natural resources, and little critical infrastructure (roads, power grid, etc.) to leverage the natural resources they do have. OLPC stands an outside chance of making *people* the comparative advantage.
It's not an either/or proposition. It's *and*. It has to be.
And I'm a software guy who loves technology and computers in general.:)
Everything about it shouts "press release", including the SEC warnings at the bottom and the press contact information. As is typical with press releases, it was picked up and run all over the place. That's what press releases are for. Anything that comes from Business Wire is a press release.
If you think it's dishonestly masquerading as "real news," that's your mistake.
Because that model, sadly, doesn't scale. It doesn't even scale well when you're trying to set up a single school, much less a whole nation of schoolchildren.
I agree with the sentiment -- "an arms race is a bad idea" -- but sadly, the sentiment is just not practical.
The crystal-clear fact is that the horse is already out of the barn. There are already *thousands* of questionable software patents out there, and they troll the depths like submarines, waiting to sink any potentially disruptive (read: useful) technology that threatens somebody's bottom line. And until the open source community can organize a real and pragmatic defense (really a potential counter-offense) against the bad patents that *already exist*, then companies who choose to contribute to the open source community will be exposed to *tremendous* risk.
The principal behind such a patent commons is the same as the principal behind the GPL: to enforce the notion of share and share alike. "You can use our patents," we say, "but only if you use them for everybody's benefit." You can't say that the GPL is fair and the idea of a patent commons for the open source community isn't. They are the same idea, applied to different areas of the law.
The abolition of software patents is a wonderful goal -- but if we hold out for *that goal or nothing*, then nothing is very likely what we'll get.
This is not necessarily true. Let's not jump the gun.
The Fedora Foundation may exist for FC5. Fedora Core is still going to be strongly guided by Red Hat, and mp3/etc. may or may not be in FC5 -- the Foundation will likely be US-based, and may not want to take a chance on patent encumbrance.
Time will tell. Fedora Foundation is an exciting prospect, but let's not overstate matters yet.
Re: software patents, there's a whole lot going wrong. More to the point, just about everyone knows it's wrong -- except for IP lawyers, for whom this is all a tremendous boon, and who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep the system that way. It's just a matter of:
1. Understanding why it's wrong; 2. Formulating a clear position; 3. Taking that position to your congressman; 4. Over and over and over.
Did you know that the USPTO has a public advisory board? Did you know that it's populated almost entirely by IP attorneys?
1. Linux system management offerings across the board are a *ton* cheaper than their counterparts for other OSes -- largely because the mechanisms for installing and uninstalling software are integrated much more tightly into the OS. RPM is built into SuSE and Red Hat in a way that installshield never will be. But hey -- price it out and see.
2. This kind of service is *precisely* what an enterprise customer pays for. The ability to roll out hundreds of packages to thousands of systems, on demand, is what differentiates a large enterprise, that can pay a lot of money, from a small mom-and-pop. Small moms-and-pops? Install an apt server for your Ubuntu packages, or whatever. Growing company? You can spend a year's salary on a sysadmin who build and run your package distribution infrastructure for 200 systems, or you can pay a fraction of that for a system built to do that in 10% of a sysadmin's time. Like, say, Red Hat Network.
For all of the insane articles that percolate to the surface on/., this article is impressively insane.
So what "various news sources" are cited here?
"News source #1" is Paul Murphy of ZDNet, who basically says "gee, I suppose it's *possible* that M$ could buy RH, but, um, not really."
"News source #2: is "whitedust," the well-known... er, well-respected... er, who are they again? Anyway, the quote from "whitedust"...
"On the surface of it, the concept of Microsoft buying out Red Hat does indeed seem rather humorous. However as commented in the ZDnet article; Red Hat is a company that shares much the same business model as Microsoft in that essentially it makes it's (sic) living packaging and selling other people's ideas. That alone is enough to give some credabilty (sic) to the notion of some kind of thoretical ethical union one that would perhaps be less likley (sic) with any other open source developer."
So, to recap:
Coke-snorting "whitedust" website claims that Red Hat and Microsoft are a perfect pair, editorializes that purchase is imminent!
"If RH is simply customizing their OS, its making a quick and easy buck off thousands of other pieces of software they didn't have to code."
Well, as it happens, this is not at all what Red Hat is doing. And people are spending a lot of time talking about what's "fair" and "not fair", and that Red Hat is not being fair in this case. I can certainly understand how it seems that way.
On the other hand...
Red Hat is spending millions of dollars to make sure that all of this spiffy software plays nice together. And to make sure that it plays nice with Oracle and lots of other hot-stuff enterprise applications. And to make sure that when the open source community decides to move on from foo-1.0 to foo-2.0 to foo-3.3, someone is still around to patch foo-1.0 for SEVEN YEARS.
THAT TAKES A LOT OF MONEY TO DO RIGHT.
CentOS is taking all of that work -- all of the value that Red Hat *legitimately* adds, and which enterprise customers pay for, *understanding* the value proposition -- and makes it available for nothing. It's pretty cheap for CentOS to do that, too, since the only work that *really* needs to be done is to rebuild the right versions and make it all available. The "CentOS testing and QA" is hardly even necessary; it's a rubber stamp; the testing is already done upstream. CentOS adds no value. Which is, according to the strict letter of the various licenses, all perfectly legal --but is it fair?
See, there's a difference between legal and fair, and that line cuts both ways.
The 3rd party repos that have popped up to fill the gaps have provided an invaluable service. The goal of Fedora Extras is similar -- but instead of providing individual repositories, Fedora Extras will provide a centralized repository that is more tightly integrated with Fedora Core. Ultimately, anyone who can build a package that conforms to the rules will be able to contribute to Fedora Extras.
And timely? Maybe not as timely as it could have been... but better late than never.
If you think that this is "the first step towards Red Hat dropping Fedora entirely," think again.
Red Hat made a promise, almost two years ago now, to make the development process around Fedora more open. That's precisely what we're now doing.
Red Hat will continue to develop Fedora Core, and will continue to use it as the pathfinder technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat will be more aggressive in the development of Fedora Extras, which will be driven both by Red Hat and by community contributors, using open processes and an open infrastructure.
Fedora's success is Red Hat's success. Red Hat will never, ever, ever walk away from Fedora.
Somebody mod the parent up, please, if only for the following two sentences:
"Rather than calling one another on it, the postmodernists collectively wink at one another, and promise to take one another seriously, and quote one another every chance they get. It's academics by pyramid scheme."
As the author of a senior seminar entitled "Football as Neo-Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus," I could not possibly agree more.
When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull
I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?
Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and
I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel
We've all grown up too soon
Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to
Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and
I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel
We've all grown up too soon
My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?
Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and
I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel
We're all just going nowhere...
-- The Space Race is Over, from William Bloke, 1996
The original was brilliant; I sent an email to Modern Humorist months ago, in fact, telling them that they should make a T-shirt out of it. And so they did. I am now a proud owner of the original graphic on a T-shirt.
Perlguy needs to either prove that his work is original, or 'fess up, because this is just bullshit.
Look, you've got a guy here who has spent his entire career perfecting his own personalized notion of GUI desktop design, and whoopsie! Suddenly the one-click desktop, his baby, takes a *temporary* backseat to the underlying functionality -- functionality that allows a wide array of POWER USERS to CREATE all the lovely software that users are looking for in the first place. Well, waah.
Mac OS X will now stand some nominal chance of reaping the benfits of open-source development strategies -- strategies that have the largest OS maker in the world wetting their pants. This is "A Good Thing"(TM).
Chuckles here is missing the functional forest for the pretty desktop trees. Pay him no more mind.
Sez Leto2, "Why is it that "my" community is always there when it comes to ruining legitimate businesses?"
This seems a fair question -- but let's look at who's doing the ruination here.
Clearly, the current utility of this device is marginal at best. The CC is *not* a terribly useful device in and of itself; its *only* uses to the customer, as usage would be allowed by DC, are: (a) to scan the half-dozen sweepstakes codes that come in the package; (b) to scan the codes in Wired and Forbes once a month; (c) to scan products for more neat-o advertising, like we don't get enough of that. The actual *value* to the customer is truly, truly marginal, no matter what the DC marketroids might have talked themselves into believing.
What does this mean? Well, it means that unless DC gets *unbelievable* penetration and is able to *fundamentally* change the usage patterns of a hundred million computer users, the CC will be useless 99.9% of the time. And a device that is generally useless on your desktop gets removed, right?
So the next logical step is to improve the overall utility of this device -- which is *exactly* what/. users have been doing. If some clever person writes, say, a GPL'd household inventory control application for the CC, the value of the CC suddenly goes through the roof, doesn't it?
DC has acted incredibly shortsightedly throughout this fiasco, and it isn't as though their failures are attributable solely to/., either. The installation procedure is horrible, horrible, horrible. The client software is horrible, horrible, horrible. And their tactics to scare the geek community have been, to date, pathetic, and belie fundamental misunderstandings about who they're dealing with.
DC had another path, you know. Remember when everyone first got the CC, how cool everyone thought it was? DC could have said, "yes! We're giving you a cool toy for nothing, do with it as you will, and in exchange, please let us market to you." It's been proven again and again that the *vast* majority of users DON'T CARE about handing over a little piece of their privacy if they get something of clear value in return! But instead they tried to be sneaky, and they got into a pissing contest with the smartest people on the internet, and what do you know, now they smell like piss.
And it's not as though DC is beyond saving, either. But they need to get a lot smarter, a lot faster, before they run out of money. Hey, America loves to give second chances to the truly penitent. We're suckers that way.
Slashdot Mirror
"GnuStep is an implementation of the OpenStep API, and other programs to recreate the NeXT environment on any Unix-like operating system. Applications written for GnuStep can be recompiled to target OS X with little-to-no work."
Does this mean that the converse is true? i.e. applications written for OS X can be recompiled to target GnuStep with little-to-no work?
...and this is the first story I see?
I'll pass, thanks.
Yep. Which is why it's pretty much Number One on the hitlist for the new Fedora Infrastructure chief.
Bzzt. The prototype I played with last Tuesday did, in fact, have a URL bar in the browser.
:)
Nice try, though.
P.S. it's unbelievably cool in person.
+1.
Feels like a lot of the pain we went through to come up with the Fedora logo. The best you can hope to do is to encourage input, show your work, explain your rationale for your final choice, and get buy-in -- but ultimately, it's one of the things that you put in the hands of a professional to drive to completion
There are much better initiatives out there. Like the Millenium Project to end global poverty, or the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Are you contributing to them? I am.
:)
But I'm a supporter of the OLPC project too -- because saving people from extreme poverty and disease is only part of the battle. The other part of the battle is giving them the tools to be competitive in a global marketplace. In a globalized capitalist world, every economy needs to figure out what their comparative advantage is. Many of the poorest nations in the world have limited natural resources, and little critical infrastructure (roads, power grid, etc.) to leverage the natural resources they do have. OLPC stands an outside chance of making *people* the comparative advantage.
It's not an either/or proposition. It's *and*. It has to be.
And I'm a software guy who loves technology and computers in general.
There's nothing disingenuous about this. We released it as a press release on our own site:
a a.html
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2006/f
Everything about it shouts "press release", including the SEC warnings at the bottom and the press contact information. As is typical with press releases, it was picked up and run all over the place. That's what press releases are for. Anything that comes from Business Wire is a press release.
If you think it's dishonestly masquerading as "real news," that's your mistake.
Because that model, sadly, doesn't scale. It doesn't even scale well when you're trying to set up a single school, much less a whole nation of schoolchildren.
OK, I can't help but wonder if this entire post wasn't just an excuse to include this one sentence:
"For instance, I once dated a girl that was recruited from Norway to be on the BYU ski team."
I agree with the sentiment -- "an arms race is a bad idea" -- but sadly, the sentiment is just not practical.
The crystal-clear fact is that the horse is already out of the barn. There are already *thousands* of questionable software patents out there, and they troll the depths like submarines, waiting to sink any potentially disruptive (read: useful) technology that threatens somebody's bottom line. And until the open source community can organize a real and pragmatic defense (really a potential counter-offense) against the bad patents that *already exist*, then companies who choose to contribute to the open source community will be exposed to *tremendous* risk.
The principal behind such a patent commons is the same as the principal behind the GPL: to enforce the notion of share and share alike. "You can use our patents," we say, "but only if you use them for everybody's benefit." You can't say that the GPL is fair and the idea of a patent commons for the open source community isn't. They are the same idea, applied to different areas of the law.
The abolition of software patents is a wonderful goal -- but if we hold out for *that goal or nothing*, then nothing is very likely what we'll get.
This is not necessarily true. Let's not jump the gun.
The Fedora Foundation may exist for FC5. Fedora Core is still going to be strongly guided by Red Hat, and mp3/etc. may or may not be in FC5 -- the Foundation will likely be US-based, and may not want to take a chance on patent encumbrance.
Time will tell. Fedora Foundation is an exciting prospect, but let's not overstate matters yet.
Re: software patents, there's a whole lot going wrong. More to the point, just about everyone knows it's wrong -- except for IP lawyers, for whom this is all a tremendous boon, and who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep the system that way. It's just a matter of:
1. Understanding why it's wrong;
2. Formulating a clear position;
3. Taking that position to your congressman;
4. Over and over and over.
Did you know that the USPTO has a public advisory board? Did you know that it's populated almost entirely by IP attorneys?
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/007may05/features/
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhn/tour/
Two things to keep in mind:
1. Linux system management offerings across the board are a *ton* cheaper than their counterparts for other OSes -- largely because the mechanisms for installing and uninstalling software are integrated much more tightly into the OS. RPM is built into SuSE and Red Hat in a way that installshield never will be. But hey -- price it out and see.
2. This kind of service is *precisely* what an enterprise customer pays for. The ability to roll out hundreds of packages to thousands of systems, on demand, is what differentiates a large enterprise, that can pay a lot of money, from a small mom-and-pop. Small moms-and-pops? Install an apt server for your Ubuntu packages, or whatever. Growing company? You can spend a year's salary on a sysadmin who build and run your package distribution infrastructure for 200 systems, or you can pay a fraction of that for a system built to do that in 10% of a sysadmin's time. Like, say, Red Hat Network.
For all of the insane articles that percolate to the surface on /., this article is impressively insane.
So what "various news sources" are cited here?
"News source #1" is Paul Murphy of ZDNet, who basically says "gee, I suppose it's *possible* that M$ could buy RH, but, um, not really."
"News source #2: is "whitedust," the well-known... er, well-respected... er, who are they again? Anyway, the quote from "whitedust"...
"On the surface of it, the concept of Microsoft buying out Red Hat does indeed seem rather humorous. However as commented in the ZDnet article; Red Hat is a company that shares much the same business model as Microsoft in that essentially it makes it's (sic) living packaging and selling other people's ideas. That alone is enough to give some credabilty (sic) to the notion of some kind of thoretical ethical union one that would perhaps be less likley (sic) with any other open source developer."
So, to recap:
Coke-snorting "whitedust" website claims that Red Hat and Microsoft are a perfect pair, editorializes that purchase is imminent!
Really, truly, impressively insane.
"If RH is simply customizing their OS, its making a quick and easy buck off thousands of other pieces of software they didn't have to code."
Well, as it happens, this is not at all what Red Hat is doing. And people are spending a lot of time talking about what's "fair" and "not fair", and that Red Hat is not being fair in this case. I can certainly understand how it seems that way.
On the other hand...
Red Hat is spending millions of dollars to make sure that all of this spiffy software plays nice together. And to make sure that it plays nice with Oracle and lots of other hot-stuff enterprise applications. And to make sure that when the open source community decides to move on from foo-1.0 to foo-2.0 to foo-3.3, someone is still around to patch foo-1.0 for SEVEN YEARS.
THAT TAKES A LOT OF MONEY TO DO RIGHT.
CentOS is taking all of that work -- all of the value that Red Hat *legitimately* adds, and which enterprise customers pay for, *understanding* the value proposition -- and makes it available for nothing. It's pretty cheap for CentOS to do that, too, since the only work that *really* needs to be done is to rebuild the right versions and make it all available. The "CentOS testing and QA" is hardly even necessary; it's a rubber stamp; the testing is already done upstream. CentOS adds no value. Which is, according to the strict letter of the various licenses, all perfectly legal --but is it fair?
See, there's a difference between legal and fair, and that line cuts both ways.
--g
Yep. Exactly right.
The 3rd party repos that have popped up to fill the gaps have provided an invaluable service. The goal of Fedora Extras is similar -- but instead of providing individual repositories, Fedora Extras will provide a centralized repository that is more tightly integrated with Fedora Core. Ultimately, anyone who can build a package that conforms to the rules will be able to contribute to Fedora Extras.
And timely? Maybe not as timely as it could have been... but better late than never.
If you think that this is "the first step towards Red Hat dropping Fedora entirely," think again.
Red Hat made a promise, almost two years ago now, to make the development process around Fedora more open. That's precisely what we're now doing.
Red Hat will continue to develop Fedora Core, and will continue to use it as the pathfinder technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat will be more aggressive in the development of Fedora Extras, which will be driven both by Red Hat and by community contributors, using open processes and an open infrastructure.
Fedora's success is Red Hat's success. Red Hat will never, ever, ever walk away from Fedora.
Somebody mod the parent up, please, if only for the following two sentences:
"Rather than calling one another on it, the postmodernists collectively wink at one another, and promise to take one another seriously, and quote one another every chance they get. It's academics by pyramid scheme."
As the author of a senior seminar entitled "Football as Neo-Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus," I could not possibly agree more.
OK, let me get this straight:
"I live in Chapel Hill, NC so we are all too aware of Helme's (sic) politics."
And then:
"My question is this. Is Senator Helmes running, able to run, for re-election again?"
Is this typical of the well-informed Chapel Hill electorate?
When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull
I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?
Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and
I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel
We've all grown up too soon
Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to
Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and
I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel
We've all grown up too soon
My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?
Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and
I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel
We're all just going nowhere...
-- The Space Race is Over, from William Bloke, 1996
Perlguy needs to either prove that his work is original, or 'fess up, because this is just bullshit.
Mac OS X will now stand some nominal chance of reaping the benfits of open-source development strategies -- strategies that have the largest OS maker in the world wetting their pants. This is "A Good Thing"(TM).
Chuckles here is missing the functional forest for the pretty desktop trees. Pay him no more mind.
This seems a fair question -- but let's look at who's doing the ruination here.
Clearly, the current utility of this device is marginal at best. The CC is *not* a terribly useful device in and of itself; its *only* uses to the customer, as usage would be allowed by DC, are: (a) to scan the half-dozen sweepstakes codes that come in the package; (b) to scan the codes in Wired and Forbes once a month; (c) to scan products for more neat-o advertising, like we don't get enough of that. The actual *value* to the customer is truly, truly marginal, no matter what the DC marketroids might have talked themselves into believing.
What does this mean? Well, it means that unless DC gets *unbelievable* penetration and is able to *fundamentally* change the usage patterns of a hundred million computer users, the CC will be useless 99.9% of the time. And a device that is generally useless on your desktop gets removed, right?
So the next logical step is to improve the overall utility of this device -- which is *exactly* what /. users have been doing. If some clever person writes, say, a GPL'd household inventory control application for the CC, the value of the CC suddenly goes through the roof, doesn't it?
DC has acted incredibly shortsightedly throughout this fiasco, and it isn't as though their failures are attributable solely to /., either. The installation procedure is horrible, horrible, horrible. The client software is horrible, horrible, horrible. And their tactics to scare the geek community have been, to date, pathetic, and belie fundamental misunderstandings about who they're dealing with.
DC had another path, you know. Remember when everyone first got the CC, how cool everyone thought it was? DC could have said, "yes! We're giving you a cool toy for nothing, do with it as you will, and in exchange, please let us market to you." It's been proven again and again that the *vast* majority of users DON'T CARE about handing over a little piece of their privacy if they get something of clear value in return! But instead they tried to be sneaky, and they got into a pissing contest with the smartest people on the internet, and what do you know, now they smell like piss.
And it's not as though DC is beyond saving, either. But they need to get a lot smarter, a lot faster, before they run out of money. Hey, America loves to give second chances to the truly penitent. We're suckers that way.