The reason here is that lots of ID Software developers use Linux themselves.
Development for Linux and MacOS X is still very much different. They may both be POSIX-compatible at the core, but there are still plenty of APIs on top of them that differ..
ID Software could possibly release versions for MacOS that uses the Apple X-server.
.. they write this happening into the history of the game world.
Massive slaughter and carnage is always good for the history of fantasy worlds, and it having really happened is just a plus.
It is time to stop questioning the GPL like this
on
FSF Threatens GPL Lawsuit
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Questioning wether the GPL is "enforcable" like this is just contributing to uncertainty.
Why on earth do we question it in the first place? It is based very solidly in copyright law, a field that is pretty much tried and tested by now.
If you take copyrighted code and distribute it without consent you are doing something illegal. The GPL is no different. Without that license, the user has no distribution rights.
You are the copyright owner for code you have written, that does not change by you licensing it out with the GPL. The case where a receiver of the code, uses it against in breach of the GPL-license is pretty much a open and shut case. If the GPL is found invalid, OpenTV would not have the rights to distribute the software at all.
The opposite, where the copyright holder tries to retract the rights to use the code (which is supposed to be irriversible except when the GPL is breached), is more interesting.
"Sadly, it was DOA. Nautlius did allow me to manually associate all the icons if I so chose, but that's just too much work."
It is still a distribution issue. I've compiled GNOME from scratch several times over with garnome and have not had the same issues. * I suspect this is a problem with the FreeBSD-distribution of GNOME, and while that is sad, it should not discourage people from trying on other platforms.
"As for copying settings, I actually tried copying the entire GNOME config folder (.gnome IIRC) to another user. No go."
As I said, you need to copy.gnome* and.gco* not just.gnome. In fact,.gnome might be for the old GNOME 1.4, and.gnome2 is the one you want. This is still something you should have been able to do. A simple listing of all files that started with.gnome would have helped a lot too, as you'd probably like.gnome-desktop and.gnome-private too.
(*) From your original post, it even seemed like you mixed and matched several versions of GNOME-things.
You seem to have some obviously legitimate problems. However some of them are pretty simple issues that reading READMEs and any GNOME-user should be able to help you with.
1. The bad icons on the desktop is due to you missing "gnome-icon-theme". This is a FreeBSD (and Debian) distribution issue. Nautilus should depend on "gnome-icon-theme". Installing that package will make the default icon theme show up. Why the BSD and Debian -distributors of GNOME did not add this dependency beats me.
2. Copying settings means copying.gnome* and.gco*. They ARE copyable. If you cannot seem to copy settings, then you've skipped one of these.
3. The menu-editing problem is a genuine GNOME-problem, so might the russion-problem (that I have no idea about).
Reviews should try to uncover it and find out who does it right now which is the only thing that really matters when getting a product.
The whole Quake / Quack fiasco for ATI was enlightening, but does anyone know if ATI does this currently?
Frame rates are overrated anyway, since people buying these cards are buying new ones before their current ones go down to noticable frame rates. Features, picture quality and noise is what matters.
ATI seems to still have the upper hand, and at least for ATI cards there is some free drivers for Linux that can handle 3d-acceleration.
Oh.. I'm sorry, but fonts are a HUGE amount of work. Much more than you or the original poster realize. TTF-fonts is much more than just creating a few bitmaps, since they have to scale.
They have to be hinted to make sure they scale perfectly (which is incredibly hard).
Creating funky and flashy fonts are mostly much easier than creating very readable fonts. Microsoft paid one of the best font designers to create Verdana and Georgia (actually he was regarded as THE best), and if I remember correctly it took him at least a year.
"Personally i wasn't under the impression gnome 2.0 has THAT many plusses over any other desktop such as KDE"
You are probably talking about CDE and not KDE. Afaik KDE has never been part of any plans of HP. My guess is that HP is in no hurry to make this change, since they do not live on fancy interfaces and flashy visual effects on the desktop.
KDE 3.0 to 2.0 was not a big step and the main reason for it to go from 2.x to 3.x was the major change in Qt. KDE 1.x to 2.0 was however a huge step and changed things pretty dramatically. GNOME just went through the same step for GNOME 2.0 and the API is not expected to change much for quite some time. GNOME 2.0 came out last june. GNOME 2.2 came out 2.5 months ago, and GNOME 2.4 will be out in september, all with the same basic API.
GNOME is not even meant to change that much from 2.x to 3.x, so the API should now be reasonably stable for quite some time. It was perhaps not ready for HP in time, but it is there now.
I don't think you should put SUN in here with HP. SUN is still commited to GNOME, and have released official GNOME 2 packages for Solaris already. It is still slated for inclusion in the next version of Solaris.
SUN also have put quite a lot of money where their mouth is, and have contributed extensively to documentation and accessibility for the GNOME-platform.
"but most interesting is that the main thing Sendo couldn't handle was their own code going back to MS to be incorporated into the OS, thus losing any competitive edge."
This would also happen with the GPL. The funny thing is that this makes the SSI every bit as viral as the GPL.
The point is that viral licenses are ok as long as everything are belong to us.
Some parts of what you are saying is ok enough (although the dependency issue is horrendously outdated, and you seldomly need to compile things) but the last two points are just absurd.
"- It's free - Which usually means there isn't a company behind it that will support it."
Then what are Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and the thousands of consultancy agencies out there (like mine?
" - It's open source - So you can modify it to do what you want it to do. This, of course, takes time and money, and there isn't a company you can go to and pay them to do it."
Then what are Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and the thousands of consultancy agencies out there (like mine?
Qt is licensed with the GPL, GTK+ is licensed with the LGPL. The LGPL allows you use libraries licensed with it in non-free software, the GPL does not.
They are both free software licenses, and the FSF actually prefers the GPL, but the sad truth is that there are lots of non-free software out there, and it is not going away. The LGPL allows for non-free software to link to the libraries. Only if the libraries themselves are changed, will the authors of the non-free software have to share something (and that is just the changes to the library).
Before you bash someone else for writing something wrong, check out your facts first.
I'm happy for you. If you like what you are using that is just great!
But I think I have to clarify what your "Linux zealot" coworker is doing because it does ring a bell.
There is at least 2-3 years since I really had to download new things all the time. Now I just do it for fun. I'm actually using Linux since it IS pro-me. Yes, I like the idea of open-source, but the system and the software does appeal to me. Why? If I ever need good small pieces of software for Windows, it is almost always nagware (or shareware).
Windows forces me to be a software pirate, as it is no way I can live with what I can buy.
So far the US has been taking in WAY more lies during the war than the Iraq administration.
Secondly, the notion about you being certain of winning is just you seeing the propaganda in your media. I'm sorry but CNN is probably just as biased and full of propaganda as Iraqi Television.
The French is NOT AT ALL as isolated in their view as you think. Basically the whole world is against you in this war, the US is just too big and powerful for a real reaction.
This does not mean that we side with Saddam though. We realize that he is a really bad man, but there are plenty of bad men around and there have been plenty of bad dictators around, some of them even financially supported by the US. Hell, even Saddam was financially supported by the US.
Most of the world does not buy the whole "we are going to liberate the people of Iraq".
You do realize that most people in Iraq would probably vote for a government more like Iran do you? Would the US accept this since they have already marked Iran as part of the Axis Of Evil [tm]?
The US have plenty of blood on their hands. How many people have the US killed throughout the world in the name of "liberty"? Even helping to assasinate the newly elected president of a country just because he was a communist. Talking about "we'll liberate you, wether you like it or not!"
The US citizens need to wake up, and thankfully a lot have already done so.. like Michael Moore.
There is nothing that sure about the victory of the US. The Iraq government are taking this war into the cities, which of course is a very cynical thing to do, but something the US knew before they started this war. This will probably lead to HUGE casualities on both sides, and the US might very well be forced to retreat because of this.
"You put a window manager on your distro that doesn't even have a webpage? Many of us loyal RH users had gotten quite used to Sawfish. So used to it, in fact, that I had used GIMP to create many of my own themes."
Boohoo. Get over it. Red Hat assumed that this Window Manager was in fact so simple and integrated that most people would never even have to think about it being called "Metacity" og what it really was, and they were mostly correct. Mandrake did the exact same thing. As it turned out, there were plenty of themes available for Metacity even though the theme documentation was late.
"So at this point I will also remind you that with 8.0 you took the terminal icon off of the desktop and the menubar and hid it 3 or 4 levels deep in the menu."
They added the terminal at the same level as all other important applications ("Applications"->"System Tools"->"Terminal". Anyone who actually needed the terminal could just drag and drop it to the panel from there, something you would only have to do ONCE.
The target audience of Red Hat includes many people who would actually be _scared_ if accidently opening a terminal. It is a power users tool, and while I use it all the time I see no reason for it to be included on the panel by default. For Gentoo and Slackware, yes, for Red Hat, no.
I'm sure you have worse complaints than this, but what you have mentioned certainly do not deserve the harsh words you used.
When it comes to gcc 2.96 the first version was broken but subsequent versions were in fact very, very good. It was also about the only compiler at the time that worked on all the platforms Red hat needed to support. Fiasco? Apart from a few loud people at Slashdot and the moronic Mplayer-people, noone actually cared and the compiler was actually quite good. Mandrake used it too.
Don't get me wrong, I am an Open Source advocate, but is this really a charity worthy of tax deductions?
Charity for me is something that you don't expect anything in return from, but this is certainly not the case with OSS-charities.
With these OSS-charities you get a product in return, and it might even be something you base your business on.
If you are a consultancy-agency developing systems using Xing-codecs for profit, it would seem strange if giving money to Xing is counted as a charity. Can you actually do this?
No. Safari is AFAIK not GPL. This is possible because KHTML (The Konqueror rendering engine) is LGPL-licensed, and this allows for it being dynamically linked into a closed source application.
Personally I'd say that they SHOULD release it as GPL.
If they ever made Windows Free Software (as defined by the FSF), then a huge part of Stallman's war will have been won, no matter if this was the way he visioned it or not.
This would be a huge, monumental win for Free Software, because the most visual basis of almost all desktop computers in the world would be free software.
While I do think you should be sceptical about this article, you are making the same mistake that most people do when considering development and software:
You assume that most of the developers create packaged software for you to buy at your local store.
This is simply not the case. A huge percent of all developers work on custom software meant for installation at some Company X, either as employees or consultants.
While the amount of installations of packaged software is most certainly higher, the amount of man hours and revenue in custom software is much, much higher per installation.
Since lots of software are now migrated to Web interfaces, Linux makes a lot of sense. It does not mean that most computers around the world run Linux, but it means that the servers that provide the software is very often running Linux.
"The machine did not come with a power cord. The machine came with RH 7.2, and partitioned incorrectly. The machine also came with the wrong GigE card. I contacted the company, and for $145 they sent me the "right" GigE card. The only problem, is that the driver for the card is only ported to kernel 2.4.20 and I have to run 2.4.9, so I must now contact either the people that sold me the card and/or the card people for some kind of backport of the driver to kernel 2.4.9."
I'm sorry, but this is just plain crappy service that you can get anywhere. Take your business to a better company, there are actually plenty of companies professional enough to actually supply what the customer asks for even if they are Linux-based.
I seriously doubt that there is anything about Linux itself that makes sure the power cords are not shipped with the server.
Slashdot Mirror
What does F* stand for?
$1200? That is a bit steep for that hardware. Do they throw in a limo and some nice champagne as well?
The reason here is that lots of ID Software developers use Linux themselves.
Development for Linux and MacOS X is still very much different. They may both be POSIX-compatible at the core, but there are still plenty of APIs on top of them that differ..
ID Software could possibly release versions for MacOS that uses the Apple X-server.
.. they write this happening into the history of the game world.
Massive slaughter and carnage is always good for the history of fantasy worlds, and it having really happened is just a plus.
Questioning wether the GPL is "enforcable" like this is just contributing to uncertainty.
Why on earth do we question it in the first place? It is based very solidly in copyright law, a field that is pretty much tried and tested by now.
If you take copyrighted code and distribute it without consent you are doing something illegal. The GPL is no different. Without that license, the user has no distribution rights.
You are the copyright owner for code you have written, that does not change by you licensing it out with the GPL. The case where a receiver of the code, uses it against in breach of the GPL-license is pretty much a open and shut case. If the GPL is found invalid, OpenTV would not have the rights to distribute the software at all.
The opposite, where the copyright holder tries to retract the rights to use the code (which is supposed to be irriversible except when the GPL is breached), is more interesting.
Are you listening to what I'm saying? You need .gco* and not just .gnome2.
This contains the GNOME configuration system (GConf), which is stored in XML-files.
"Sadly, it was DOA. Nautlius did allow me to manually associate all the icons if I so chose, but that's just too much work."
.gnome* and .gco* not just .gnome. In fact, .gnome might be for the old GNOME 1.4, and .gnome2 is the one you want. This is still something you should have been able to do. A simple listing of all files that started with .gnome would have helped a lot too, as you'd probably like .gnome-desktop and .gnome-private too.
It is still a distribution issue. I've compiled GNOME from scratch several times over with garnome and have not had the same issues. *
I suspect this is a problem with the FreeBSD-distribution of GNOME, and while that is sad, it should not discourage people from trying on other platforms.
"As for copying settings, I actually tried copying the entire GNOME config folder (.gnome IIRC) to another user. No go."
As I said, you need to copy
(*) From your original post, it even seemed like you mixed and matched several versions of GNOME-things.
You seem to have some obviously legitimate problems. However some of them are pretty simple issues that reading READMEs and any GNOME-user should be able to help you with.
.gnome* and .gco*. They ARE copyable. If you cannot seem to copy settings, then you've skipped one of these.
1. The bad icons on the desktop is due to you missing "gnome-icon-theme". This is a FreeBSD (and Debian) distribution issue. Nautilus should depend on "gnome-icon-theme". Installing that package will make the default icon theme show up. Why the BSD and Debian -distributors of GNOME did not add this dependency beats me.
2. Copying settings means copying
3. The menu-editing problem is a genuine GNOME-problem, so might the russion-problem (that I have no idea about).
Reviews should try to uncover it and find out who does it right now which is the only thing that really matters when getting a product.
The whole Quake / Quack fiasco for ATI was enlightening, but does anyone know if ATI does this currently?
Frame rates are overrated anyway, since people buying these cards are buying new ones before their current ones go down to noticable frame rates. Features, picture quality and noise is what matters.
ATI seems to still have the upper hand, and at least for ATI cards there is some free drivers for Linux that can handle 3d-acceleration.
Oh.. I'm sorry, but fonts are a HUGE amount of work. Much more than you or the original poster realize. TTF-fonts is much more than just creating a few bitmaps, since they have to scale.
They have to be hinted to make sure they scale perfectly (which is incredibly hard).
Creating funky and flashy fonts are mostly much easier than creating very readable fonts. Microsoft paid one of the best font designers to create Verdana and Georgia (actually he was regarded as THE best), and if I remember correctly it took him at least a year.
"Personally i wasn't under the impression gnome 2.0 has THAT many plusses over any other desktop such as KDE"
You are probably talking about CDE and not KDE. Afaik KDE has never been part of any plans of HP. My guess is that HP is in no hurry to make this change, since they do not live on fancy interfaces and flashy visual effects on the desktop.
KDE 3.0 to 2.0 was not a big step and the main reason for it to go from 2.x to 3.x was the major change in Qt. KDE 1.x to 2.0 was however a huge step and changed things pretty dramatically. GNOME just went through the same step for GNOME 2.0 and the API is not expected to change much for quite some time. GNOME 2.0 came out last june. GNOME 2.2 came out 2.5 months ago, and GNOME 2.4 will be out in september, all with the same basic API.
GNOME is not even meant to change that much from 2.x to 3.x, so the API should now be reasonably stable for quite some time. It was perhaps not ready for HP in time, but it is there now.
I don't think you should put SUN in here with HP. SUN is still commited to GNOME, and have released official GNOME 2 packages for Solaris already. It is still slated for inclusion in the next version of Solaris.
SUN also have put quite a lot of money where their mouth is, and have contributed extensively to documentation and accessibility for the GNOME-platform.
"but most interesting is that the main thing Sendo couldn't handle was their own code going back to MS to be incorporated into the OS, thus losing any competitive edge."
This would also happen with the GPL. The funny thing is that this makes the SSI every bit as viral as the GPL.
The point is that viral licenses are ok as long as everything are belong to us.
Some parts of what you are saying is ok enough (although the dependency issue is horrendously outdated, and you seldomly need to compile things) but the last two points are just absurd.
"- It's free - Which usually means there isn't a company behind it that will support it."
Then what are Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and the thousands of consultancy agencies out there (like mine?
" - It's open source - So you can modify it to do what you want it to do. This, of course, takes time and money, and there isn't a company you can go to and pay them to do it."
Then what are Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and the thousands of consultancy agencies out there (like mine?
... it is WRONG.
Qt is licensed with the GPL, GTK+ is licensed with the LGPL.
The LGPL allows you use libraries licensed with it in non-free software, the GPL does not.
They are both free software licenses, and the FSF actually prefers the GPL, but the sad truth is that there are lots of non-free software out there, and it is not going away. The LGPL allows for non-free software to link to the libraries. Only if the libraries themselves are changed, will the authors of the non-free software have to share something (and that is just the changes to the library).
Before you bash someone else for writing something wrong, check out your facts first.
I'm happy for you. If you like what you are using that is just great!
But I think I have to clarify what your "Linux zealot" coworker is doing because it does ring a bell.
There is at least 2-3 years since I really had to download new things all the time. Now I just do it for fun. I'm actually using Linux since it IS pro-me. Yes, I like the idea of open-source, but the system and the software does appeal to me. Why? If I ever need good small pieces of software for Windows, it is almost always nagware (or shareware).
Windows forces me to be a software pirate, as it is no way I can live with what I can buy.
So far the US has been taking in WAY more lies during the war than the Iraq administration.
Secondly, the notion about you being certain of winning is just you seeing the propaganda in your media. I'm sorry but CNN is probably just as biased and full of propaganda as Iraqi Television.
The French is NOT AT ALL as isolated in their view as you think. Basically the whole world is against you in this war, the US is just too big and powerful for a real reaction.
This does not mean that we side with Saddam though. We realize that he is a really bad man, but there are plenty of bad men around and there have been plenty of bad dictators around, some of them even financially supported by the US. Hell, even Saddam was financially supported by the US.
Most of the world does not buy the whole "we are going to liberate the people of Iraq".
You do realize that most people in Iraq would probably vote for a government more like Iran do you? Would the US accept this since they have already marked Iran as part of the Axis Of Evil [tm]?
The US have plenty of blood on their hands. How many people have the US killed throughout the world in the name of "liberty"? Even helping to assasinate the newly elected president of a country just because he was a communist. Talking about "we'll liberate you, wether you like it or not!"
The US citizens need to wake up, and thankfully a lot have already done so.. like Michael Moore.
There is nothing that sure about the victory of the US. The Iraq government are taking this war into the cities, which of course is a very cynical thing to do, but something the US knew before they started this war. This will probably lead to HUGE casualities on both sides, and the US might very well be forced to retreat because of this.
"You put a window manager on your distro that doesn't even have a webpage? Many of us loyal RH users had gotten quite used to Sawfish. So used to it, in fact, that I had used GIMP to create many of my own themes."
Boohoo. Get over it. Red Hat assumed that this Window Manager was in fact so simple and integrated that most people would never even have to think about it being called "Metacity" og what it really was, and they were mostly correct. Mandrake did the exact same thing. As it turned out, there were plenty of themes available for Metacity even though the theme documentation was late.
"So at this point I will also remind you that with 8.0 you took the terminal icon off of the desktop and the menubar and hid it 3 or 4 levels deep in the menu."
They added the terminal at the same level as all other important applications ("Applications"->"System Tools"->"Terminal". Anyone who actually needed the terminal could just drag and drop it to the panel from there, something you would only have to do ONCE.
The target audience of Red Hat includes many people who would actually be _scared_ if accidently opening a terminal. It is a power users tool, and while I use it all the time I see no reason for it to be included on the panel by default. For Gentoo and Slackware, yes, for Red Hat, no.
I'm sure you have worse complaints than this, but what you have mentioned certainly do not deserve the harsh words you used.
When it comes to gcc 2.96 the first version was broken but subsequent versions were in fact very, very good. It was also about the only compiler at the time that worked on all the platforms Red hat needed to support. Fiasco? Apart from a few loud people at Slashdot and the moronic Mplayer-people, noone actually cared and the compiler was actually quite good. Mandrake used it too.
Don't get me wrong, I am an Open Source advocate, but is this really a charity worthy of tax deductions?
Charity for me is something that you don't expect anything in return from, but this is certainly not the case with OSS-charities.
With these OSS-charities you get a product in return, and it might even be something you base your business on.
If you are a consultancy-agency developing systems using Xing-codecs for profit, it would seem strange if giving money to Xing is counted as a charity. Can you actually do this?
No. Safari is AFAIK not GPL. This is possible because KHTML (The Konqueror rendering engine) is LGPL-licensed, and this allows for it being dynamically linked into a closed source application.
Personally I'd say that they SHOULD release it as GPL.
If they ever made Windows Free Software (as defined by the FSF), then a huge part of Stallman's war will have been won, no matter if this was the way he visioned it or not.
This would be a huge, monumental win for Free Software, because the most visual basis of almost all desktop computers in the world would be free software.
Will it happen? No.
Or the Nigeria scams.
"well judge, I thought I was cheating a poor country out of their much needed cash, and I found out that I was being conned"
While I do think you should be sceptical about this article, you are making the same mistake that most people do when considering development and software:
You assume that most of the developers create packaged software for you to buy at your local store.
This is simply not the case. A huge percent of all developers work on custom software meant for installation at some Company X, either as employees or consultants.
While the amount of installations of packaged software is most certainly higher, the amount of man hours and revenue in custom software is much, much higher per installation.
Since lots of software are now migrated to Web interfaces, Linux makes a lot of sense. It does not mean that most computers around the world run Linux, but it means that the servers that provide the software is very often running Linux.
"The machine did not come with a power cord. The machine came with RH 7.2, and partitioned incorrectly. The machine also came with the wrong GigE card. I contacted the company, and for $145 they sent me the "right" GigE card. The only problem, is that the driver for the card is only ported to kernel 2.4.20 and I have to run 2.4.9, so I must now contact either the people that sold me the card and/or the card people for some kind of backport of the driver to kernel 2.4.9."
I'm sorry, but this is just plain crappy service that you can get anywhere. Take your business to a better company, there are actually plenty of companies professional enough to actually supply what the customer asks for even if they are Linux-based.
I seriously doubt that there is anything about Linux itself that makes sure the power cords are not shipped with the server.