I've read it last week...
on
Rebel Code
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· Score: 1
It's an excellent book: extensive, very precise - it reports many funny anecdots about projects (Linux, GNOME, KDE, Apache... ) and actors (Linus, Richard...). It also covers stories that are generally hidden by big Open-Source medias, such as the Mandrakesoft's beginning (very interesting). I can recommend it! All people interested in Linux and Open-Source should read this book in order to understand what Free-Software/Open-Source is.
A large extract of the book is available here at Penguin.co.uk (note that it includes many typos which are not in the printed book.
I think this is real good news: it shows that MS is more and more nervous about Linux and Free-Software. In the meantime, we have to fight hard because they could have the power to start legal suits against GPL or any open-source license.
I remember that in his autobiography, Bill Gates wrote somewhere that he was scared not to know the day when Microsoft will be at the top and start to fall. I think the day has came and he hasn't realize yet. I'm very surprised that Microsoft reacts this way because I think it's the worse way for them to react to Open-Source. Instead, I think they should put all Microsoft products in Open-Source, that would be a revolution and they would become extremely popular for doing that. And I don't see what would be dangerous for them in doing that, they'd just have to accept the idea to gain less money in licences, and more in e-services.
However, my wish is to see Linux succeed so I hope they won't change their attitude:-)
I'm afraid that all those posts on Slashdot (which are echoed in all the press) are really bad-bad-bad for Linux. Those are standard cuts-off in industry during mergers and restructurations and don't show at all that Linux is going bad. I don't know why Slashdot's Editors give so much importance to those news. And I feel unconfortable just like knowing that VA Linux, the owner of Slashdot is also a competitor to SuSE and TurboLinux/LinuxCare who are all deeply involved in Linux services, just like VA. We don't see bad news coming from others such as Mandrakesoft/RedHat/Caldera.
Also, there are currently many giant and exciting Linux and Open-Source projects these days but the mood is bad in the Linux newssites - especially here - and I don't understand why. Maybe it is just the psychological consequences of the Nasdaq fall.
Anyway, wait and see. "Qui vivra verra" in French.
(disclaimer: I'm not posting that to bash or start a troll - I'm just getting repetitive strange feelings with those kind of news)
In this article at The Register: "MandrakeSoft, France's long-time favourite boxed Linux distribution in terms of retail sales is now also number one in the US, according to company officials citing PC Data figure"
seriously... Gnutella is a great concept but after trying it, you can't imagine to use it for downloading songs. Gnutella is really a big mess, with much child-porn, and doesn't have categories as far as I know. If there are no categories, it's gonna be a big mess and until there are some search engines as efficient as google, it won't be very usable.
Why not providing default categories such as video, audio etc. the same way as it's done under yahoo, and also why not giving some informations about files (file type, bitrate for mp3s and oggs etc.)
As we all know, Napster is not anymore a "free" service: it's been bought by a major records company and will soon be available only to those who pay a fee. So we have to think about using the real free alternative which is OpenNapster.
I've also found a short and efficient tutorial about how to use OpenNapster on Cosmosonic.com (currently only in French).
Use systems such as MandrakeExpert.com where you can give a note to provider of the service you have bought (here it is online services, but you can imagine all kind of services).
I agree that Mandrake is generally more innovative than Red Hat, and surprinsingly really not less stable, even for server use. I think the reason is that Mandrake, like Debian, has an extremely active and positive community of users and developers. Maybe the slight difference between the Debian community and the Linux-Mandrake is that while Debian relies on users and developpers, Mandrake pushes its community to get involved in various innovative open-source projects. And by the way, they have just released MandrakeExpert.com which is a wonderful way to value this community of users and of the other hand to give it back because each transaction, if not free, can have one part redirected to an open-source project (such as Apache). That's incredible.
Do you think Red Hat wants to go to the desktop market? Do you think it is a potential danger to Linux-Mandrake? (which appears to me as the current de facto Linux-desktop distribution standard)
Maintain the distro? It's mostly Debian...!
on
Stormix Bankruptcy
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· Score: 1
Don't you think there are already many maintainers?;)
LWN: "Why did you originally intend to be a non-profit?"
Haas: "Control. A non-profit organization has no owners. A for-profit corporation is partially owned by the stockholders, who may be people that may not have the best interests of Linux in mind. They may not even know what Linux is."
To me it's quite hard to accept as an answer just because it's _free_software_ ! Free-Software doesn't allow much control by nature because as soon as you are not happy with a free-software project, you can start another f.s. project on the top of the other one with your own ideas. Secondly - for instance - imagine that Red Hat or Mandrakesoft, which are pure example of pure free-software companies with profit interest (they release all their code as GPL),imagine they die: their work wouldn't be lost, everything could survive. My feeling is hard to explain, but I don't believe in Haas' argument here, just because it's free-software. Anyway, LinuxPPC going non-profit is ok to me - there are different ways of life!:-)
>Actually, Paris-Lyon is short-distance enough
>that a TGV does make sense, because I believe it
>takes about 2.5 hours nowadays to travel that
>distance by TGV.
I takes exactly 2 hours and 4 minutes for 426 km (which gives an average speed of about 213 kmph). The top speed on this line is 300 kmph.
That was not intended to be funny at all. I can understand that some people don't like it. In the meantime, I'm sure *many* others like it. I especially like all their redesigns of the Mandrake penguin such as:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/images/util6.gif and
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/images/util7.gif (both found on their website).
All other redesigns of TuX have been insipid while Mandrakesoft's redesign of the Linux penguin is funny, expressive and provides positive image of Linux.
There is Gimp, and photoshop-like tools such as Killustrator and Sketch which are good tools (not as good as Illustrator, that's true). Anyway, the article doesn't say if running Illustrator inside Linux+Plex86+Windows or running Linux+Wine+Illustrator is forbiden;)
it was designed by Mandrakesoft's designers... They definately do the best graphisms related to Linux. See inside the latest Mandrake! A bit simple but I love those graphisms and they associate Linux with highly-positive image which is good for Linux...
Yes... ship fashionable free-software with a proprietary operating-system, apply all the license stuff so you can... earn money! I think all Linux makers should do that as well to earn more money.
Because it's very stable and in fact it's really more stable than gimp 1.02: I couldn't not make 1.1.25 crash yet while it was very easy to make 1.02 crash. So I think Gimp 1.2.0 has no reason to wait anymore! The 1.1.25 RPM package is available here:
Slashdot Mirror
A large extract of the book is available here at Penguin.co.uk (note that it includes many typos which are not in the printed book.
You can buy it directly here on Amazon.
So does Mandrakesoft which seems to be growing extremely fast... in silence!
I remember that in his autobiography, Bill Gates wrote somewhere that he was scared not to know the day when Microsoft will be at the top and start to fall. I think the day has came and he hasn't realize yet. I'm very surprised that Microsoft reacts this way because I think it's the worse way for them to react to Open-Source. Instead, I think they should put all Microsoft products in Open-Source, that would be a revolution and they would become extremely popular for doing that. And I don't see what would be dangerous for them in doing that, they'd just have to accept the idea to gain less money in licences, and more in e-services.
However, my wish is to see Linux succeed so I hope they won't change their attitude :-)
Also, there are currently many giant and exciting Linux and Open-Source projects these days but the mood is bad in the Linux newssites - especially here - and I don't understand why. Maybe it is just the psychological consequences of the Nasdaq fall.
Anyway, wait and see. "Qui vivra verra" in French.
(disclaimer: I'm not posting that to bash or start a troll - I'm just getting repetitive strange feelings with those kind of news)
sorry - I couldn't resist :-}
It's cleaner, with many other cases etc. Enjoy!
On Mandrake website, for Linux-Mandrake uses... See their page, it's instructive.
In this article at The Register: "MandrakeSoft, France's long-time favourite boxed Linux distribution in terms of retail sales is now also number one in the US, according to company officials citing PC Data figure"
with the "opportunity" to lose most of the 60 millions Napster users? I would be surprised :->
Why not providing default categories such as video, audio etc. the same way as it's done under yahoo, and also why not giving some informations about files (file type, bitrate for mp3s and oggs etc.)
What do you think?
I've also found a short and efficient tutorial about how to use OpenNapster on Cosmosonic.com (currently only in French).
Use systems such as MandrakeExpert.com where you can give a note to provider of the service you have bought (here it is online services, but you can imagine all kind of services).
And for your information, you can already find 2.4 kernel by default in Cooker for a long time. (RPMS on ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrak e-devel/cooker/Mandrake/RPMS/
I agree that Mandrake is generally more innovative than Red Hat, and surprinsingly really not less stable, even for server use. I think the reason is that Mandrake, like Debian, has an extremely active and positive community of users and developers. Maybe the slight difference between the Debian community and the Linux-Mandrake is that while Debian relies on users and developpers, Mandrake pushes its community to get involved in various innovative open-source projects. And by the way, they have just released MandrakeExpert.com which is a wonderful way to value this community of users and of the other hand to give it back because each transaction, if not free, can have one part redirected to an open-source project (such as Apache). That's incredible.
Do you think Red Hat wants to go to the desktop market? Do you think it is a potential danger to Linux-Mandrake? (which appears to me as the current de facto Linux-desktop distribution standard)
Don't you think there are already many maintainers? ;)
Haas: "Control. A non-profit organization has no owners. A for-profit corporation is partially owned by the stockholders, who may be people that may not have the best interests of Linux in mind. They may not even know what Linux is."
To me it's quite hard to accept as an answer just because it's _free_software_ ! Free-Software doesn't allow much control by nature because as soon as you are not happy with a free-software project, you can start another f.s. project on the top of the other one with your own ideas. Secondly - for instance - imagine that Red Hat or Mandrakesoft, which are pure example of pure free-software companies with profit interest (they release all their code as GPL),imagine they die: their work wouldn't be lost, everything could survive. My feeling is hard to explain, but I don't believe in Haas' argument here, just because it's free-software. Anyway, LinuxPPC going non-profit is ok to me - there are different ways of life! :-)
>Actually, Paris-Lyon is short-distance enough >that a TGV does make sense, because I believe it >takes about 2.5 hours nowadays to travel that >distance by TGV. I takes exactly 2 hours and 4 minutes for 426 km (which gives an average speed of about 213 kmph). The top speed on this line is 300 kmph.
"irreverent" - I don't see the point here, especially not for Mandrakesoft logos.
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/images/util6.gif and
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/images/util7.gif (both found on their website).
All other redesigns of TuX have been insipid while Mandrakesoft's redesign of the Linux penguin is funny, expressive and provides positive image of Linux.
There is Gimp, and photoshop-like tools such as Killustrator and Sketch which are good tools (not as good as Illustrator, that's true). Anyway, the article doesn't say if running Illustrator inside Linux+Plex86+Windows or running Linux+Wine+Illustrator is forbiden ;)
it was designed by Mandrakesoft's designers... They definately do the best graphisms related to Linux. See inside the latest Mandrake! A bit simple but I love those graphisms and they associate Linux with highly-positive image which is good for Linux...
Chmouel, you didn't package the latest 2.4.0 yet? https://kenobi.mandrakesoft.com/~chmou/kernel24/
Yes... ship fashionable free-software with a proprietary operating-system, apply all the license stuff so you can... earn money! I think all Linux makers should do that as well to earn more money.
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrak e/7.2/i586/Mandrake/RPMS/gimp-1.1.25-13mdk.i586.rp m
and should install on most RPM based Linux distros on pentium and more machines.