Indeed, GNOME 2.6 will only be announced after the tarballs have been verified not to be compromised. And the good news is that so far at least there's no evidence for that being the case.
So you can buy it discounted with no support, or expensive with support. Why would anybody take the first option? There are plenty of free distributions with updates and no support...
By using RHEL or RHAS we can continue to use Red Hat Network, while the same option won't be available for Fedora. And RHN is much more than just the mere theoretical availability of updates; it's guaranteed access to updates when they're available and allows for automatic or scheduled installs, system grouping and grouped update policies, and so on.
One thing that annoyed the hell out of me in the past was that when I needed updates to patch servers as soon as possible, the ftp servers were all full and the mirrors didn't have the fixes yet etc, which was more than just a little frustrating. With RHN I suddenly had priority access to updates and could get them in no time at all times, and also schedule their install or even install them automatically upon availability. That made a major difference. I need no telephone support, but I cannot live without RHN anymore, so a RHEL or RHAS without support fits this use perfectly.
Yes, providing five year commercial-level support agreements in exchange for actual money is greedy and should be outlawed. Or something...
The FSF and the GNU project actually encourages commercial interests and business models in the free software arena. Funny that Debian, from the description of the previous poster, seemingly cannot tolerate that, but has to do such statements.
So true. Also, in my experience, community support works fine for a lot of things, but rarely for anything but the latest versions of stuff. It's too common to see "hmm, that's an interesting problem, and I don't know anything about it. But hey, it's a two year old version, why don't you upgrade to something newer and see if that solves it"?
Being told to upgrade to an API-incompatible newer version to solve even the most trivial problems with old software is not a very helpful answer if you have that two year old version on a big number of machines and the amount of work needed to do the move and conversion and support it to the users would a hundred times exceed the amount of work for just fixing the problem in the old code. That's where support contracts or support guarantees shine: to support stuff and versions that the community has since long left behind.
Red Hat is not dropping desktop support. Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS is clearly aimed for the (corporate) desktop. What Red Hat is dropping is selling products to home users, as RHEL, the only product that Red Hat will be selling from now on, clearly isn't really targetted at those.
Yast is under a VERY liberal lisence. It's just not GPL.
It's not about it not being GPL. The Yast license does not classify as a free license at all, and that for a very fundamental reason.
The Yast license can only be considered liberal if you ignore the hundreds of truly free licenses out there in the free software world that SuSE could have chosen but did not.
Possibly some developers will bring Fedora to Sparc.
I don't know of any concrete efforts yet, but it certainly seems possible (see the relevant entry on the FAQ page), given interested individuals with the proper knowledge.
So what Red Hat did was invent another trademark that they were willing to give away, but they naturally had to remove all references to "Red Hat" in order to protect that trademark from losing its protection.
I shouldn't reply to my own posts, but Red Hat seemingly isn't "giving away" the Fedora trademark. They're just more permissive with it than with the "Red Hat" one, which they most likely couldn't afford to lose.
The key to the mystery is trademark law... IANAL, but they cannot let anyone sell modified versions called anything "Red Hat", or they will soon lose their "Red Hat" trademark.
Letting anyone use your trademark as name for anything but your product is the best way to lose that trademark, since trademarks need to be kept distinctive, and if they aren't they're no longer trademarks (can anyone say 'Xerox'?). That's just not a fact of life, it's regulated in trademark law. If you would get trademark protection on the name "polaar", you'd better not let anyone else use that name at their own liking, or you'd lose your trademark protection.
So what Red Hat did was invent another trademark that they were willing to give away, but they naturally had to remove all references to "Red Hat" in order to protect that trademark from losing its protection.
I'm not sure Red Hat has abondoned their desktop line at all. If they had, BlueCurve would be a sure waste of money, would it? The RH desktop is alive and kicking with RHEL WS, albeit perhaps not aimed at the home user anymore.
So are Red Hat and Sun, my friend. Go look at ChangeLogs and MAINTAINERS files. Ximian is just one part of it.
Measuring how big that part is is of course difficult and close to pointless, but for anyone actually involved in GNOME it's absolutely clear that Ximian is just one of the acting parties, and not even the biggest one at that.
A rough and unscientific test would be to actually grepping the e-mail addresses on the foundation membership list. There are of course several caveats with this method; these are all contributors but grepping doesn't tell the level of involvement, and many contributors may have registered with another e-mail address than their company one. I know that's true in at least two cases below. Anyway, here are the results:
Sun: 33
Ximian: 23
Red Hat: 5 (but important contributors like hadess and DV, and perhaps some more, seem to not have registered with their redhat.com addresses)
HP doesn't give a rats ass about GNOME anymore, Mandrake has always perferred KDE, and IBM isn't really involved much with the Linux desktop at a whole.
They're still sponsors, which is the only thing I claimed.
Re:It's all over for Ximian
on
Novell Buys Ximian
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Novell [...] has purchased one of the few Linux desktops
Novell acquired Ximian, not GNOME. Ximian is not GNOME, they're only one of the companies behind it. Other significant companies behind GNOME include Sun and Red Hat who also contribute loads of resources, and also many additional sponsors like HP, Mandrake, and IBM. Not to mention the huge amount of independant volunteers, that made the project even possible to begin with.
So there seems to be a huge difference with GNOME compared to the examples you mentioned -- this one will undoubtly survive even without Novell, should they decide to leave it for some reason.
All that this effort would need is common theming and common app/config launchers.
Then Gnome and KDE would be very similar, but would also remain separate. KDE would use Konq for file/web, Gnome would use Nautilus/Mozilla respectively, etc.
Then users could mix and match components, developers could choose which development architecture they want, and users would see a consistent desktop with common themes and fonts.
Common themes and a common look is nice and all, but it doesn't help much as long as the desktops and applications behave differently and have different features. As long as you have different behaviors and different sets of features, you don't have any cross-desktop consistency. It would still be a nightmare to even do a simple task like helping a user to set his home page to something different, only to discover that the way of changing home page seems to be done differently in the browser that the user happens to be running, and of course the user also cannot help with identifying the particular browser he is using so that you can find out how to it in that browser. Or any other support matter. All this in despite of you and the other user both installing and using the same distribution!
That's why it is important not only to have a common look but also to have a set of common, pre-defined and supported applications easily available, and preferrably only one of each kind. Think about it from the support angle. It makes sense.
So, they're aware of it. But why does it act this way?
The N in GNOME stands for "Network". GNOME isn't just a panel and some applications. It's also a bunch of libraries and some of them need a functional network setup for inter-process communication, even if it's just a "one-computer network" with your standalone desktop machine: The network model still applies.
Any setup in which the alleged hostname of the machine is not to be found on the same network the machine happens to be on is, by definition, invalid. And personally, I think it's a bit too much to request for GNOME to also magically debug and rectify illegal network configurations; that's not the purpose of a desktop environment.
Wouldn't that effectively penalize anyone not on an active network? (i.e. dialup, etc)
No, in a standalone configuration Red Hat defaults to use the hostname of "localhost.localdomain" which is configured to be valid. Hence, any configuration in which the hostname suddenly is a name that is not configured to be on the network must be an error that has been caused by a bad configuration of the user/administrator (pilot error). Red Hat works fine in a standalone environment out-of-the-box .
Maybe because there are third-party apps that use KDE libraries, just like there are third-party apps that use GNOME libraries. I just wish more people would realize that wanting to have GNOME and/or KDE installed is not always necessarily the same as wanting to have the look-and-feel of GNOME/KDE.
They are not using GNOME defaults. Mozilla, the default web browser, isn't a GNOME application, while Galeon is. They seem to be using a match inbetween with sensible defaults that work in both environments, so these conspiracy theories just seem to be just that: conspiracy theories.
on Red Hat? That's one command. You'll have to have the -f (for force) there, since the kernel is by default in the package skip list and not to be upgraded unless you explicitly say so.
Re:Uh, none of these comments are about the story
on
Perl 5.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I do, and a majority of this world's population also do so that their written language can be displayed. If you are going to process even a tiny bit of that in any non-broken way, you do too.
Metacity is to gnome as kwin is to KDE. Metacity uses the gnome libs and stuff like that.
No. kwin is the default window manager in KDE. Sawfish is the default window manager in GNOME (although it's likely that it will be Metacity in the future).
Just because something uses gnome libraries doesn't make it the default or recommended GNOME software that's included in core GNOME, whether it's a mail client or window manager.
If people are contributing code for free, why the need for money?
Even if you contribute labor for free, there are still other costs, even for a non-profit. Think servers and bandwidth for gnome.org. That's just one example.
Actually, there are lots of other languages in the rest of world. In many of them the "g" certainly should be pronounced and anyone not pronouncing it would be considered a person with speech problems.
I assume you only thought of English pronounciation of GNOME?;-)
Actually, the GNOME donations page *did* launch now. See the announcement on foundation-list. It's not a new idea and you could send cheques to a postal address before, but the Friends of GNOME program page with PayPal donations is brand new.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, GNOME 2.6 will only be announced after the tarballs have been verified not to be compromised. And the good news is that so far at least there's no evidence for that being the case.
One word: RHN.
By using RHEL or RHAS we can continue to use Red Hat Network, while the same option won't be available for Fedora. And RHN is much more than just the mere theoretical availability of updates; it's guaranteed access to updates when they're available and allows for automatic or scheduled installs, system grouping and grouped update policies, and so on.
One thing that annoyed the hell out of me in the past was that when I needed updates to patch servers as soon as possible, the ftp servers were all full and the mirrors didn't have the fixes yet etc, which was more than just a little frustrating. With RHN I suddenly had priority access to updates and could get them in no time at all times, and also schedule their install or even install them automatically upon availability. That made a major difference. I need no telephone support, but I cannot live without RHN anymore, so a RHEL or RHAS without support fits this use perfectly.
The FSF and the GNU project actually encourages commercial interests and business models in the free software arena. Funny that Debian, from the description of the previous poster, seemingly cannot tolerate that, but has to do such statements.
Being told to upgrade to an API-incompatible newer version to solve even the most trivial problems with old software is not a very helpful answer if you have that two year old version on a big number of machines and the amount of work needed to do the move and conversion and support it to the users would a hundred times exceed the amount of work for just fixing the problem in the old code. That's where support contracts or support guarantees shine: to support stuff and versions that the community has since long left behind.
Red Hat is not dropping desktop support. Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS is clearly aimed for the (corporate) desktop. What Red Hat is dropping is selling products to home users, as RHEL, the only product that Red Hat will be selling from now on, clearly isn't really targetted at those.
It's not about it not being GPL. The Yast license does not classify as a free license at all, and that for a very fundamental reason.
The Yast license can only be considered liberal if you ignore the hundreds of truly free licenses out there in the free software world that SuSE could have chosen but did not.
Possibly some developers will bring Fedora to Sparc.
I don't know of any concrete efforts yet, but it certainly seems possible (see the relevant entry on the FAQ page), given interested individuals with the proper knowledge.
I shouldn't reply to my own posts, but Red Hat seemingly isn't "giving away" the Fedora trademark. They're just more permissive with it than with the "Red Hat" one, which they most likely couldn't afford to lose.
Letting anyone use your trademark as name for anything but your product is the best way to lose that trademark, since trademarks need to be kept distinctive, and if they aren't they're no longer trademarks (can anyone say 'Xerox'?). That's just not a fact of life, it's regulated in trademark law. If you would get trademark protection on the name "polaar", you'd better not let anyone else use that name at their own liking, or you'd lose your trademark protection.
So what Red Hat did was invent another trademark that they were willing to give away, but they naturally had to remove all references to "Red Hat" in order to protect that trademark from losing its protection.
I don't believe so, it should be possible by using up2date. Upgrading by using the installer is still the recommended method I think, though.
I don't call Fedora an abandonment.
I'm not sure Red Hat has abondoned their desktop line at all. If they had, BlueCurve would be a sure waste of money, would it? The RH desktop is alive and kicking with RHEL WS, albeit perhaps not aimed at the home user anymore.
So are Red Hat and Sun, my friend. Go look at ChangeLogs and MAINTAINERS files. Ximian is just one part of it.
Measuring how big that part is is of course difficult and close to pointless, but for anyone actually involved in GNOME it's absolutely clear that Ximian is just one of the acting parties, and not even the biggest one at that.
A rough and unscientific test would be to actually grepping the e-mail addresses on the foundation membership list. There are of course several caveats with this method; these are all contributors but grepping doesn't tell the level of involvement, and many contributors may have registered with another e-mail address than their company one. I know that's true in at least two cases below. Anyway, here are the results:
HP doesn't give a rats ass about GNOME anymore, Mandrake has always perferred KDE, and IBM isn't really involved much with the Linux desktop at a whole.
They're still sponsors, which is the only thing I claimed.
Novell acquired Ximian, not GNOME. Ximian is not GNOME, they're only one of the companies behind it. Other significant companies behind GNOME include Sun and Red Hat who also contribute loads of resources, and also many additional sponsors like HP, Mandrake, and IBM. Not to mention the huge amount of independant volunteers, that made the project even possible to begin with.
So there seems to be a huge difference with GNOME compared to the examples you mentioned -- this one will undoubtly survive even without Novell, should they decide to leave it for some reason.
Then you don't use a Red Hat kernel and are out on your own.
Common themes and a common look is nice and all, but it doesn't help much as long as the desktops and applications behave differently and have different features. As long as you have different behaviors and different sets of features, you don't have any cross-desktop consistency. It would still be a nightmare to even do a simple task like helping a user to set his home page to something different, only to discover that the way of changing home page seems to be done differently in the browser that the user happens to be running, and of course the user also cannot help with identifying the particular browser he is using so that you can find out how to it in that browser. Or any other support matter. All this in despite of you and the other user both installing and using the same distribution!
That's why it is important not only to have a common look but also to have a set of common, pre-defined and supported applications easily available, and preferrably only one of each kind. Think about it from the support angle. It makes sense.
The N in GNOME stands for "Network". GNOME isn't just a panel and some applications. It's also a bunch of libraries and some of them need a functional network setup for inter-process communication, even if it's just a "one-computer network" with your standalone desktop machine: The network model still applies.
Any setup in which the alleged hostname of the machine is not to be found on the same network the machine happens to be on is, by definition, invalid. And personally, I think it's a bit too much to request for GNOME to also magically debug and rectify illegal network configurations; that's not the purpose of a desktop environment.
Wouldn't that effectively penalize anyone not on an active network? (i.e. dialup, etc)
No, in a standalone configuration Red Hat defaults to use the hostname of "localhost.localdomain" which is configured to be valid. Hence, any configuration in which the hostname suddenly is a name that is not configured to be on the network must be an error that has been caused by a bad configuration of the user/administrator (pilot error). Red Hat works fine in a standalone environment out-of-the-box .
Maybe because there are third-party apps that use KDE libraries, just like there are third-party apps that use GNOME libraries. I just wish more people would realize that wanting to have GNOME and/or KDE installed is not always necessarily the same as wanting to have the look-and-feel of GNOME/KDE.
They are not using GNOME defaults. Mozilla, the default web browser, isn't a GNOME application, while Galeon is. They seem to be using a match inbetween with sensible defaults that work in both environments, so these conspiracy theories just seem to be just that: conspiracy theories.
up2date -f kernel
on Red Hat? That's one command. You'll have to have the -f (for force) there, since the kernel is by default in the package skip list and not to be upgraded unless you explicitly say so.
I do, and a majority of this world's population also do so that their written language can be displayed. If you are going to process even a tiny bit of that in any non-broken way, you do too.
No. kwin is the default window manager in KDE. Sawfish is the default window manager in GNOME (although it's likely that it will be Metacity in the future).
Just because something uses gnome libraries doesn't make it the default or recommended GNOME software that's included in core GNOME, whether it's a mail client or window manager.
Even if you contribute labor for free, there are still other costs, even for a non-profit. Think servers and bandwidth for gnome.org. That's just one example.
I assume you only thought of English pronounciation of GNOME? ;-)
Actually, the GNOME donations page *did* launch now. See the announcement on foundation-list. It's not a new idea and you could send cheques to a postal address before, but the Friends of GNOME program page with PayPal donations is brand new.