Actually SGI just scavenged from cray most of what it considers useful technology. The beauty of the Origin boxes is that they play both sides. They can do the graphics heavy lifting for movie producers or they can do number crunching for accountants.
Either way this is a lot of horsepower to throw at any problem. Beowulf is cheaper for the graphics work however. Nothing else can approach the economies of scale piled up behind Linux on midrange PCs.
What's the big deal ? With the equipment available to astronomers these days the best we can do is to spot glimpses of Huge ( Jupiter Sized and larger ) planets around nearby stars.
My unscientific guess is that the Galaxy is literally swarming with small rock planets ranging in size from Mars up to 2X Earth. Manyt of these planets will have oceans of water and some life. With 200,000,000 Stars in our Galaxy and 1 in ten for planets, water, life ( as we know it ) and intelligence we would still have 200,000 sets of aliens to find.
Even if my above math ( very bad math at that:) was off by a couple orders of magnitude we would still have enough for a star trek like future.
This is a theory based on nothing whatsoever but alas. For years scientists held that the planets around Sul were such a massive fluke we would be lucky to find even 1 other star with planets in our Galaxy.
PS : Scientists tend to disagree loudly on things not yet proven.:)
The really silly thing is that the FBI claims it doesn't actually need Carnivore at all. If all you want to do is tap the Email of a suspect it's a trivial matter to have the ISP silently cc all the email going through that mailbox to the FBI.
By that logic carnivore must be doing something else. Who wants to guess whether or not it's something the feds should be doing?
The EU has had MS under investigation since before the DOJ went to court. They stated back at the start of the trial that they would wait to see how the DOJ case went before finding there own.
This is just the 2nd of a long string of anti trust actions. The downside of being an international company is that when you are accused of a crime you can be prosecuted in any or all of the countries in which you operate.
You know what is really funny about this ? Caldera will now be the 1st publicly traded Linux company with seriously large revenue on display. Who knows, they may even make some hefty profits.
SCO keeps Tarantella which gives them an immense amount of flexibility. With only a cross platform midleware type product in it's portfolio, SCO can now pick and choose partners at will. More likely however, it will try to get acquired by somebody else. Dose IBM want them ?
SCO Unixware is nice and all. If I was Caldera, I would kill it slowly. This means putting most of the development staff responsible onto more profitable future products and sending maybe 1/2 of them home ( Veteran programers don't stay unemployed ). The rest will be kept to do only bug fixing for the next 5 years or so and to move any useful technologies over to Linux.
For the record, Open Sourcing the entire OS is impossible since SCO doesn't own all it's code and never did. Even MS probably still has stuff in there. It is also a bad idea since something this huge will probably cause more trouble then anything.
The real cash cow for Caldera will be professional services. Caldera has 5 OSs to support now ( by my count ). Expand this Professional Services to support everyone else's software too and suddenly Caldera has leapfrogged into what RedHat and Linuxcare claim they want to be when they grow up.
Som how this reminds me of AOL buying Time Warner or EBay buying that old Auction house.
What is it about a fag that makes him want to tell everyone all about his private life? It is none of our business who or what you have sex with.
You don't see heterosexual or celibate people going around screaming about what they do in private do you? The other thing is race. You gays keep attaching color to sexual preferences as if they are the same thing. They are not. The fact is even race needs to be kept quite unless it is relevant. I.e. I'm black so sunscreen isn't something I need. Someone wants to have a problem with your color. Let him find out about it in your presence and have his hisy fit to your face.
I recently read an article about the association between Napster and Open Source. The author of that piece was pised that people use OSS philosophy to support Napster. Maybe they do but I have a slightly different view of the connection.
Napster is almost exclusively used by computer savvy music lovers. Right now a disturbingly large percentage of computer lovers are Linux users and most of those buy OSS philosophy, at least in part.
Just because the same set of people like something doesn't necessarily mean they are connected in the most obvious way. I.e. Geaks with Guns doesn't mean guns are part of OSS culture, the recent flapping on Linuxtoday over that testifies to this.
As for Napster itself. Sure Napster users buy more music. If they didn't like music they wouldn't be going to the hassle of installing Napster, WinAmp and CDeX. Both Napster and the RIAA are claiming something which is just not true. Listening to MP3s doesn't cause people to buy more music and downloading free MP3s is not a substitute for buying CDs.
Personally, I never buy the songs I download off the internet. However, I buy all my music locally ( No credit card or confidence in EComerse ). The songs I download simply are not on the shelfs here. Specifically, I don't see any Weird Al or other comedy music.
On the other hand, I don't download Buju Banton or Bounty Killer mp3s off the net. Maybe it's to support local music or because these goys consistently give me at least 12 1st rate songs per album. somebody else tends to love the few songs, I don't like so I chalk it up to subjective preferences, rather than objective crap peddling.
As for lost revenue. I buy 2 CDs per month. I used to buy 3 before the cost went up. I don't ever buy less but I will buy more again if for some reason I have more disposable income. I suspect most people are in a similar situation. Why else would people try to play with Autocad ( U$ 3,000 ) on a 486 ? If they could afford to pay for it they would also have bought a better computer.
A none core business that doesn't make much money.
The clipart is sold cheap and frankly it must have cost something to assemble and catalog so intensely. My guess is that it lost money. Hamera on the other hand is a startup with rapid growth and the possibility of catching one of the few remaining internet stile IPOs.
Make no mistake about it there are a few of those left and Corel is likely to cash in on one. rebel.com ( Worst company renaming in my memory ) and this new corp are both likely candidates and Corel has a whopping 1/4 of each.
Yes. If you are a clever plaintiff you choose the exact place you want a trial and time it right so that your favorite judge is available.
Judges have some discretion about what cases they accept. If a technology case goes to a particular courthouse and 1 judge there knows something about the technology involved he can voluntarist to sit on it.
This happens all the time and it's why judges need to be extremely meticulous about conflict of interest. I.e. If there is a software piracy or other such computer related case in Jamaica's Supreme Court I can guess which judge will be assigned to it. If however *I* am involved he will disqualify himself on the grounds that I repair his PCs and helped him produce html versions of his legal textbooks. ( His means he wrote them ).
This case is no different except that the Judge didn't disqualify himself. The fact that he previously advised the plaintiff on DVD should have come up in his own preparation for this case.
*That* is where the conspiracy comes up. The court that hears this motion will have 1 of 2 rulings. 1. He advised Fox on DVD and can't sit on this case or 2. He didn't advise them. Judges are chosen *because* they know this sort of thing. There is also the long shot that a higher court will find an attempt to pervert the course of justice and kill the whole case. To rule that way they would need to believe that he and the plaintiffs conspired to do this.
Billy will probably register it for the marketing and sale of Sexy Undies. Either that or a support group for men with tiny dicks. The possibilities are endless.
Seriusly, I have thoght of creting a company that compeats with Victoria Secrets and naming it Microsoft. I.e. Micro sized undies made from soft material.
Specialising in stuff to make petite women seam larger than they are wold help too. Lots of horizontal stripes on panies for women with small rears.
The silly thing is that every major corporation will find out who has the new TLDs and then go out and register under each of them ASAP. ibm.sex and microsoft.shop will then be owned by guess who.
The people biding for the rights to administer these new TLDs knew this from the beginning and it's why they push so hard for it. a cope Million.com domains registered and about 20% of those will register with any new TLD that becomes available.
If you thought you saw cibersqauting and abuse with.com and.net domains you ain't seen nothing yet. Expect people to register huge piles of.sex domains to keap them from being "abused". I.e. whithouse.sex probably won't go the way of whithouse.sex even though it should:)
So OSM are you gona register natalee.sex ?
BTW : If you register your own name under.sex do you have to include *only* nude pictures, interviews etc... of people you actually had sex with or can you be more general in your approach ?
You have more choices here than you really want or need. here are a few of my favorites.
you can install Mandrake on a desktop, configuring the installation to taste then at the end of it you have the option of creating a boot diskette which will clone that installation. If that installation is from a server then you can make copies of the diskette and run around booting the PCs and letting rip.
This wouldn't give you Wordperfect Or Applix ( unless they are included in the App CDs for Mandrake ) but you can push that out with an FTP script from the server.
Another nice option is to install on one PC configure and tweak it to death then use DD and wget to create an image of the hard drive on the server ( this assumes the server has a better network connection than the workstations and includes a blazing fast RAID ( with 2500 workstations you need that anyway ).
you can then create a boot diskette with a script that simply partitions the hard drive and dumps that image off the server to it. This is easily the fastest way to clone an installation to a pile of PCs.
As for software I disagree about the Window manager but it's totally your choice. I would use KDE mostly because it comes with all the utilities you would want your users foundling and it has that familiar Windows 9x feel by default.
64 megs is more than enough to handle this stuff. One hint though is to use a 1 gig swap partition ( which you can likely afford on modern machines ). That way runaway leakware (caught) Netscape (cough) won't take your machines down too quickly.
The initial role out isn't that critical though. What is really fun is the latter updates. Trust me on this one, you *will* want to push KDE-2.0 and KOffice 1.0 ( despite plans to the contrary, I suspect they won't ship together ). Other cool things you will want to push to these desktops latter include Mozilla and the next generation of JVMs.
Fortunately you can likely live with the current Kernel for a few years.
Finally I would use Mandrake Update or something similar with your own server set as the mirror so you can butcher security holes as soon as they are discovered with little if any hassle.
All the best and tell me where to send my resume if you can't do this stuff by yourself.
Re:SCO isn't lying about Y2K
on
Endgame For SCO
·
· Score: 1
despite what the article says SCO really was hit by lingering Y2K issues.
You see my Only SCO using customer upgraded to 5.0.5 last year to be Y2K compliant. On February 29th this year the system clock had not tiked over. If other SCO consultants and users had the same experience that would likely drop sales revenue into the toilet. Anyone with even a ghost of a chance to use a different OS will switch.
I think we should file a class action suite against Slashdot for the loss of our keyboards. How do these people sleep at night knowing they have cause do many gallons of drool to clog, short circuit and rust the keyboards of nerds.
The loss of earnings is staggering and the share human trauma of being unable to use you computer is just mind bugling.
Rumor has it that they have signed a deal with the guys making the "Happy Hacking Keyboard" to increase sales.
Mac OS X will be a single OS with a Unique feel. Sure it is a Unix OS but it isn't ever going to be Solaris, SCO, BSD or Linux. It's Mac OS X. Nothing more or less.
In other words, Mac OS X doesn't mean more Desktop Unix. It means Desktop Macs have a Unix Like OS underneath.
KDE on the other hand has the potential to move any workstation and some server Unixes closer to the desktop. After all it's just a very portable UI.
The source is out there. (Re:and about harmony...)
on
Happy Birthday, KDE
·
· Score: 1
The last CVS check in to the Harmony tree was on the night before The draft of the QPL and the intent to go open source came out.
Those people who actually cared about License issues and were willing to put code into solutions found the QPL good enough and quit to go work on KDE. All the people complaining about the death of Harmony combined are not worth 1 of those developers.
I.e. If you care the last version of the Harmony source tree is *STILL* on ftp.kde.org
Go get it or shut up.
Happy birthday and the best is yet to come.
on
Happy Birthday, KDE
·
· Score: 5
KDE has been fun since the beginning. Even back in the days of KDE-beta1 it was the nicest desktop available for Linux and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then.
I mean how many beta quality apps on Linux have the decency to pop up a dialog box saying "This feature isn't here yet" ? These people have combined the best features of Free Software development ( Bazaar Debugging, Responsiveness to clear and sensible user requests and a willingness to postpone releases until the software works. ) With the best features of Proprietary development ( Competent design comities, detailed stile guides, clear and newbi friendly documentation of everything from Library interfaces to "How to use this help menu" ).
Best of all KDE has been lively and active about building cool software. Through all the flamewars and the license disputes, through all the condemnation, censorship and verbal abuse the KDE team has kept on hacking.
Sure they took the time out to push for greater clarity and yes they made it a point of duty to produce excellent software. The web site asks at the very top; "Is Unix ready for the desktop", The resounding response from this corner of Cyberspace is "Yes, but only with KDE".
Through share quality of code the influence of the KDE team has grown exponentially over these last few years. Grown to the point where they, not Debian but they the KDE core can get vendors to change licenses. It's grown to the point where Borland's new Kylix is basically a RAD tool for KDE apps.
Just goes to show that focusing on making quality free software is the key. As long as it's not all BSD licensed so people can stop it's growth as soon as a coins clink you will be fine.
Here's to KDE-2.0 and the next level of Desktop advancement on my favorite OS. *nix, because Linux isn't the solution to every problem. Given time ( 3 more years by my estimate ) and KDE will supplant CDE as the "standard" Unix desktop. This weather or not it becomes the standard on Linux.
And speaking of that other desktop. I won't, not today, It's KDE's day and I'll save my other glowing words for the other peoples day.
Bad Licenses are good for free software. This is the #1 reason why Linux and Apache are so relatively unpopular for Fortune 500 web sites compared to the sites of smaller enterprises.
You see a Huge company with 150,000 employees and a few Billion in annual profits doesn't buy software under the same restrictions as the rest of us. They don't suffer from bad licenses like we do.
Case in point. Nameless Big Company [NBC] buys a site license for NT. Latter it decides to create a web presence and simply grabs an NT CD and installs. As far as the internal developers are concerned NT Server is free because The site license essentially means paying for an estimated total number of servers with no penalty for adding more in the short term.
Even the CDs are different. I.e. No serial numbers to enter on the Corporate edition of MSOffice 97 when I had to install that.
Support is different too. They give the likes of NBC a different tech support number from the regular one. People answer that phone promptly and technicians come on site if needed ( for a pre established fee ).
Even Source code. yes. NBC can get the source code to windows if they ask for it. Sure it costs money but not nearly as much as that enterprise wide site license.
In short, bad licenses force ordinary users into open source and would have done the same to NBC. Except they get a not-so-bad license.
"Life Sucks. Then you die" -: Wolverine must have been talking to the small businesses who mistakenly believe that the fortune 500 became successful by choosing these tools ( which were only invented recently anyway ) and buy accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually SGI just scavenged from cray most of what it considers useful technology. The beauty of the Origin boxes is that they play both sides. They can do the graphics heavy lifting for movie producers or they can do number crunching for accountants.
Either way this is a lot of horsepower to throw at any problem. Beowulf is cheaper for the graphics work however. Nothing else can approach the economies of scale piled up behind Linux on midrange PCs.
What's the big deal ? With the equipment available to astronomers these days the best we can do is to spot glimpses of Huge ( Jupiter Sized and larger ) planets around nearby stars.
:) was off by a couple orders of magnitude we would still have enough for a star trek like future.
:)
My unscientific guess is that the Galaxy is literally swarming with small rock planets ranging in size from Mars up to 2X Earth. Manyt of these planets will have oceans of water and some life. With 200,000,000 Stars in our Galaxy and 1 in ten for planets, water, life ( as we know it ) and intelligence we would still have 200,000 sets of aliens to find.
Even if my above math ( very bad math at that
This is a theory based on nothing whatsoever but alas. For years scientists held that the planets around Sul were such a massive fluke we would be lucky to find even 1 other star with planets in our Galaxy.
PS : Scientists tend to disagree loudly on things not yet proven.
The really silly thing is that the FBI claims it doesn't actually need Carnivore at all. If all you want to do is tap the Email of a suspect it's a trivial matter to have the ISP silently cc all the email going through that mailbox to the FBI.
By that logic carnivore must be doing something else. Who wants to guess whether or not it's something the feds should be doing?
The EU has had MS under investigation since before the DOJ went to court. They stated back at the start of the trial that they would wait to see how the DOJ case went before finding there own.
This is just the 2nd of a long string of anti trust actions. The downside of being an international company is that when you are accused of a crime you can be prosecuted in any or all of the countries in which you operate.
In with the new.
You know what is really funny about this ? Caldera will now be the 1st publicly traded Linux company with seriously large revenue on display. Who knows, they may even make some hefty profits.
SCO keeps Tarantella which gives them an immense amount of flexibility. With only a cross platform midleware type product in it's portfolio, SCO can now pick and choose partners at will. More likely however, it will try to get acquired by somebody else. Dose IBM want them ?
SCO Unixware is nice and all. If I was Caldera, I would kill it slowly. This means putting most of the development staff responsible onto more profitable future products and sending maybe 1/2 of them home ( Veteran programers don't stay unemployed ). The rest will be kept to do only bug fixing for the next 5 years or so and to move any useful technologies over to Linux.
For the record, Open Sourcing the entire OS is impossible since SCO doesn't own all it's code and never did. Even MS probably still has stuff in there. It is also a bad idea since something this huge will probably cause more trouble then anything.
The real cash cow for Caldera will be professional services. Caldera has 5 OSs to support now ( by my count ). Expand this Professional Services to support everyone else's software too and suddenly Caldera has leapfrogged into what RedHat and Linuxcare claim they want to be when they grow up.
Som how this reminds me of AOL buying Time Warner or EBay buying that old Auction house.
Out with the old. In with the new. Indead.
What was realy funy was that IBM had a huge planetwide "Linux/390 Install fest" over the last few weaks.
In "testing" the P3-1.133 GHz, did you try over clocking an 850 MHz P3 to 1.133 GHz ?
Did it "perform" any worse ?
What is it about a fag that makes him want to tell everyone all about his private life? It is none of our business who or what you have sex with.
You don't see heterosexual or celibate people going around screaming about what they do in private do you? The other thing is race. You gays keep attaching color to sexual preferences as if they are the same thing. They are not. The fact is even race needs to be kept quite unless it is relevant. I.e. I'm black so sunscreen isn't something I need. Someone wants to have a problem with your color. Let him find out about it in your presence and have his hisy fit to your face.
I recently read an article about the association between Napster and Open Source. The author of that piece was pised that people use OSS philosophy to support Napster. Maybe they do but I have a slightly different view of the connection.
Napster is almost exclusively used by computer savvy music lovers. Right now a disturbingly large percentage of computer lovers are Linux users and most of those buy OSS philosophy, at least in part.
Just because the same set of people like something doesn't necessarily mean they are connected in the most obvious way. I.e. Geaks with Guns doesn't mean guns are part of OSS culture, the recent flapping on Linuxtoday over that testifies to this.
As for Napster itself. Sure Napster users buy more music. If they didn't like music they wouldn't be going to the hassle of installing Napster, WinAmp and CDeX. Both Napster and the RIAA are claiming something which is just not true. Listening to MP3s doesn't cause people to buy more music and downloading free MP3s is not a substitute for buying CDs.
Personally, I never buy the songs I download off the internet. However, I buy all my music locally ( No credit card or confidence in EComerse ). The songs I download simply are not on the shelfs here. Specifically, I don't see any Weird Al or other comedy music.
On the other hand, I don't download Buju Banton or Bounty Killer mp3s off the net. Maybe it's to support local music or because these goys consistently give me at least 12 1st rate songs per album. somebody else tends to love the few songs, I don't like so I chalk it up to subjective preferences, rather than objective crap peddling.
As for lost revenue. I buy 2 CDs per month. I used to buy 3 before the cost went up. I don't ever buy less but I will buy more again if for some reason I have more disposable income. I suspect most people are in a similar situation. Why else would people try to play with Autocad ( U$ 3,000 ) on a 486 ? If they could afford to pay for it they would also have bought a better computer.
A none core business that doesn't make much money.
The clipart is sold cheap and frankly it must have cost something to assemble and catalog so intensely. My guess is that it lost money. Hamera on the other hand is a startup with rapid growth and the possibility of catching one of the few remaining internet stile IPOs.
Make no mistake about it there are a few of those left and Corel is likely to cash in on one. rebel.com ( Worst company renaming in my memory ) and this new corp are both likely candidates and Corel has a whopping 1/4 of each.
then the whole case is in jepordy.
Yes. If you are a clever plaintiff you choose the exact place you want a trial and time it right so that your favorite judge is available.
Judges have some discretion about what cases they accept. If a technology case goes to a particular courthouse and 1 judge there knows something about the technology involved he can voluntarist to sit on it.
This happens all the time and it's why judges need to be extremely meticulous about conflict of interest. I.e. If there is a software piracy or other such computer related case in Jamaica's Supreme Court I can guess which judge will be assigned to it. If however *I* am involved he will disqualify himself on the grounds that I repair his PCs and helped him produce html versions of his legal textbooks. ( His means he wrote them ).
This case is no different except that the Judge didn't disqualify himself. The fact that he previously advised the plaintiff on DVD should have come up in his own preparation for this case.
*That* is where the conspiracy comes up. The court that hears this motion will have 1 of 2 rulings. 1. He advised Fox on DVD and can't sit on this case or 2. He didn't advise them. Judges are chosen *because* they know this sort of thing. There is also the long shot that a higher court will find an attempt to pervert the course of justice and kill the whole case. To rule that way they would need to believe that he and the plaintiffs conspired to do this.
Leave it to the French.
Billy will probably register it for the marketing and sale of Sexy Undies. Either that or a support group for men with tiny dicks. The possibilities are endless.
Seriusly, I have thoght of creting a company that compeats with Victoria Secrets and naming it Microsoft. I.e. Micro sized undies made from soft material.
Specialising in stuff to make petite women seam larger than they are wold help too. Lots of horizontal stripes on panies for women with small rears.
Hmm... I'll go looking for venture capital now.
The silly thing is that every major corporation will find out who has the new TLDs and then go out and register under each of them ASAP. ibm.sex and microsoft.shop will then be owned by guess who.
.com domains registered and about 20% of those will register with any new TLD that becomes available.
.com and .net domains you ain't seen nothing yet. Expect people to register huge piles of .sex domains to keap them from being "abused". I.e. whithouse.sex probably won't go the way of whithouse.sex even though it should :)
.sex do you have to include *only* nude pictures, interviews etc... of people you actually had sex with or can you be more general in your approach ?
The people biding for the rights to administer these new TLDs knew this from the beginning and it's why they push so hard for it. a cope Million
If you thought you saw cibersqauting and abuse with
So OSM are you gona register natalee.sex ?
BTW : If you register your own name under
You have more choices here than you really want or need. here are a few of my favorites.
you can install Mandrake on a desktop, configuring the installation to taste then at the end of it you have the option of creating a boot diskette which will clone that installation. If that installation is from a server then you can make copies of the diskette and run around booting the PCs and letting rip.
This wouldn't give you Wordperfect Or Applix ( unless they are included in the App CDs for Mandrake ) but you can push that out with an FTP script from the server.
Another nice option is to install on one PC configure and tweak it to death then use DD and wget to create an image of the hard drive on the server ( this assumes the server has a better network connection than the workstations and includes a blazing fast RAID ( with 2500 workstations you need that anyway ).
you can then create a boot diskette with a script that simply partitions the hard drive and dumps that image off the server to it. This is easily the fastest way to clone an installation to a pile of PCs.
As for software I disagree about the Window manager but it's totally your choice. I would use KDE mostly because it comes with all the utilities you would want your users foundling and it has that familiar Windows 9x feel by default.
64 megs is more than enough to handle this stuff. One hint though is to use a 1 gig swap partition ( which you can likely afford on modern machines ). That way runaway leakware (caught) Netscape (cough) won't take your machines down too quickly.
The initial role out isn't that critical though. What is really fun is the latter updates. Trust me on this one, you *will* want to push KDE-2.0 and KOffice 1.0 ( despite plans to the contrary, I suspect they won't ship together ). Other cool things you will want to push to these desktops latter include Mozilla and the next generation of JVMs.
Fortunately you can likely live with the current Kernel for a few years.
Finally I would use Mandrake Update or something similar with your own server set as the mirror so you can butcher security holes as soon as they are discovered with little if any hassle.
All the best and tell me where to send my resume if you can't do this stuff by yourself.
Could be.
I only sold them hardware and
that tested OK.
despite what the article says SCO really was hit by lingering Y2K issues.
You see my Only SCO using customer upgraded to 5.0.5 last year to be Y2K compliant. On February 29th this year the system clock had not tiked over. If other SCO consultants and users had the same experience that would likely drop sales revenue into the toilet. Anyone with even a ghost of a chance to use a different OS will switch.
I think we should file a class action suite against Slashdot for the loss of our keyboards. How do these people sleep at night knowing they have cause do many gallons of drool to clog, short circuit and rust the keyboards of nerds.
The loss of earnings is staggering and the share human trauma of being unable to use you computer is just mind bugling.
Rumor has it that they have signed a deal with the guys making the "Happy Hacking Keyboard" to increase sales.
Mac OS X will be a single OS with a Unique feel. Sure it is a Unix OS but it isn't ever going to be Solaris, SCO, BSD or Linux. It's Mac OS X. Nothing more or less.
In other words, Mac OS X doesn't mean more Desktop Unix. It means Desktop Macs have a Unix Like OS underneath.
KDE on the other hand has the potential to move any workstation and some server Unixes closer to the desktop. After all it's just a very portable UI.
The last CVS check in to the Harmony tree was on the night before The draft of the QPL and the intent to go open source came out.
Those people who actually cared about License issues and were willing to put code into solutions found the QPL good enough and quit to go work on KDE. All the people complaining about the death of Harmony combined are not worth 1 of those developers.
I.e. If you care the last version of the Harmony source tree is *STILL* on ftp.kde.org
Go get it or shut up.
KDE has been fun since the beginning. Even back in the days of KDE-beta1 it was the nicest desktop available for Linux and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then.
I mean how many beta quality apps on Linux have the decency to pop up a dialog box saying "This feature isn't here yet" ? These people have combined the best features of Free Software development ( Bazaar Debugging, Responsiveness to clear and sensible user requests and a willingness to postpone releases until the software works. ) With the best features of Proprietary development ( Competent design comities, detailed stile guides, clear and newbi friendly documentation of everything from Library interfaces to "How to use this help menu" ).
Best of all KDE has been lively and active about building cool software. Through all the flamewars and the license disputes, through all the condemnation, censorship and verbal abuse the KDE team has kept on hacking.
Sure they took the time out to push for greater clarity and yes they made it a point of duty to produce excellent software. The web site asks at the very top; "Is Unix ready for the desktop", The resounding response from this corner of Cyberspace is "Yes, but only with KDE".
Through share quality of code the influence of the KDE team has grown exponentially over these last few years. Grown to the point where they, not Debian but they the KDE core can get vendors to change licenses. It's grown to the point where Borland's new Kylix is basically a RAD tool for KDE apps.
Just goes to show that focusing on making quality free software is the key. As long as it's not all BSD licensed so people can stop it's growth as soon as a coins clink you will be fine.
Here's to KDE-2.0 and the next level of Desktop advancement on my favorite OS. *nix, because Linux isn't the solution to every problem. Given time ( 3 more years by my estimate ) and KDE will supplant CDE as the "standard" Unix desktop. This weather or not it becomes the standard on Linux.
And speaking of that other desktop. I won't, not today, It's KDE's day and I'll save my other glowing words for the other peoples day.
What are you talking about.
Or at least evidence.
I have friends who work for
large corps that have source
code licenses to diferent MS
OS products.
Bad Licenses are good for free software. This is the #1 reason why Linux and Apache are so relatively unpopular for Fortune 500 web sites compared to the sites of smaller enterprises.
You see a Huge company with 150,000 employees and a few Billion in annual profits doesn't buy software under the same restrictions as the rest of us. They don't suffer from bad licenses like we do.
Case in point. Nameless Big Company [NBC] buys a site license for NT. Latter it decides to create a web presence and simply grabs an NT CD and installs. As far as the internal developers are concerned NT Server is free because The site license essentially means paying for an estimated total number of servers with no penalty for adding more in the short term.
Even the CDs are different. I.e. No serial numbers to enter on the Corporate edition of MSOffice 97 when I had to install that.
Support is different too. They give the likes of NBC a different tech support number from the regular one. People answer that phone promptly and technicians come on site if needed ( for a pre established fee ).
Even Source code. yes. NBC can get the source code to windows if they ask for it. Sure it costs money but not nearly as much as that enterprise wide site license.
In short, bad licenses force ordinary users into open source and would have done the same to NBC. Except they get a not-so-bad license.
"Life Sucks. Then you die" -: Wolverine must have been talking to the small businesses who mistakenly believe that the fortune 500 became successful by choosing these tools ( which were only invented recently anyway ) and buy accordingly.