.. and that they have given a irreversible distribution right for free software, so that its usable on free software but not for proprietary software unlicensed by SUN.
Or... was that a rather evil thought? I'm not sure anymore, I'm so blinded by my zealotism.
I'm not trying to say that Red Hat is better than any other Linux-company, I'm just trying to put down the baseless whining about Red Hat being evil.
AFAIK, Red Hat has never distributed software outside the company without releasing source at the same time.
Red Hat is still among the most dedicated followers of the GPL-license. All their tools are free software.
Why are Red Hat still up there then, if all their software can be easily poached by others?
1. Brand 2. Good quality and good professionalism. Not necessarily better than anyone else, but certainly much more professional than most others. 3. Playing nice. Lots of people call fowl about anything Red Hat does, but hardly anything is much more than childish outcries.
You can bash Red Hat for some of the technical decisions they have made, but they have done nothing at all to deserve a reputation as "evil".
In fact.. UnitedLinux are trying to compete with the market leader by being more closed. At least Mandrake got that right and was sensible enough not to join this initiative.
Seriously though, couldn't they have come up with better icons than this? Even completely reusing some of KDEs or GNOMEs work would have been better. It just looks horrible.
I do understand why they have tried to make it as windowsish as possible, but having it look like a very unprofessional unpolished version of Windows does it no good at all imho.
The first two are reasonable. The other two are not. Red Hat is totally entitled to favor whatever desktop-system they want. SuSE and Mandrake favor KDE, Red Hat favor GNOME.
When it comes to application hiding, Red Hat is totally entitled to offer what choices they think are best to the user. Red Hat thinks Mozilla and openoffice are better than Konqueror and Koffice, and can show the user whatever applications they want to. They could remove Konqueror and Koffice totally if they wanted to, but they haven't done that.
The fact is that Red Hat has done just about the same things to GNOME as they have done to KDE. Galeon, Abiword and Gnumeric are secondary to Openoffice and Mozilla in Red Hat (null).
The look and feel of KDE is not turned into GNOME, they have both gotten a new common look. The icons are actually much more KDE-like than GNOME-like.
.. that can be used to spread evil all around the world. So that the next time Dr. Evil tries to take over the world we can sue him for patent infringement.
Seriously though, patenting really evil ideas and refusing to let them be implemented would be kind of nice. Too bad DRM isn't already patented by someone who seriously don't want to see it used.
I've heard this argument quite a lot of times, and I just have to ask:
How do they behave differently?
Lots of GTK+ apps behave differently, but they still share the same widget look. For instance Balsa and Evolution both work differently, but they share the same widget-look. What Red Hat has done is to unify the widget look for Qt and GTK+, so the most really relevant issues are how do Qt-widgets behave versus GTK+ widgets?
I do not really know of any differences. Does the drop-downs behave different? Does the scrollbars behave really different? GUIs have become rather unified in behaviour over the year. If Qt and GTK+ widgets still behave differently, then they really need to be unified. Perhaps the unified look will be a big drive factor to make this happen?
BTW. I know KDE and GNOME behaves differently, I'm talking at the widget level here.
Yes. Apart from the USA after the DMCA, I do not know about other countries where EULAs are enforcable.
They certainly are not in Norway. If you buy a copy of MacOS X you can do whatever you want with it as long as you do not distribute it. This is also how it should be. After buying a product it just opposes all common sense of right and wrong to not be able to use the product as you see fit. Wether that is destroying it publically, running it on your elite G4-based toaster or just putting it in the refrigerator.
The rest of Mono is not in any way Microsofts IP. It is just an implementation of specs Microsoft has opened up and sent to ECMA for standardization.
Mono is about as much Microsofts IP as Wine, that is not at all. Mono shouldn't and probably hasn't even had to turn to reverse-engineering like Wine.
Second. Neither GNOME or KDE have any plans at all to incorporate Mono into the core of the desktop. It will just be (a very nice) development platform for the two desktop environments. This means that some of the KDE and GNOME -applications might be based on Mono.
As I said, the only concievable problem would be that Microsoft has patented some of the design, and enforces it. This would again only mean that Mono has to be changed to work around the said patent.
They made a strong statement that this patent would be freely usable in any GPL-based code (and other approved licenses, like the IBM Public License, The Qt Public License. This also covers sale and other redistribution of free software.
They will probably require a patent-license for proprietary code, which is fine by me. This patent is mostly for leverage against other companies that have software patents.
Well. installing the NVidia-drivers in some distributions is as simple as downloading the RPM and clicking on it, typing in a administration password and watch it get installed.
Granted, it's pretty shameful that the user has to choose between lots of different files which he/she probably has no idea about any differences in.
The biggest problem with Linux-drivers is that there is no binary compatibility between drivers from one kernel to another. There should definitely be a common binary-compatible driver-API that works across different minor kernel-versions. By that I mean a binary-distributed driver for the 2.4.x-kernel should work across ALL 2.4.x-kernels. Currently it has to be the _exact_ same kernel (same version, same release-number, same architecture - 686, 386 or Athlon) I seriously hope this will be fixed by the next major kernel release.
>> What if drm is on by default? Could I load >> Linux on it?
> If your distro of linux supports TCPA, then > yes. TCPA is an open specification, and > there > is much chatter about developing open OSS's > that conform.
If I used your way of replying, I would call this a bold faced lie. I won't, because I reckon you are just ignorant. Microsoft has a patent on "DRM-enabled operating system", which mean they could at any time deny distribution of Linux.
>> For now they can have complete EULA >> controll with a digital enforcer.
> Yes, that is the exact idea. Someone sets > forth a contract, and you agree to it. And > then you follow it. Thats what licenses are > all about. I download a GPL program, I use > it, I follow the GPL. Pretty simple.
Again, if I used your method of arguing, I would call this a blatant lie. Since I don't, I just suspect you are ignorant, and tell you the truth:
You don't have to accept anything to use GPL-based software. Not a thing, zilch. The only time you have to accept the GPL is if you distribute the software (or derived software), something you cannot legally do with Microsoft software.
I'm ok with you disagreeing with the original poster, but calling him/her a liar is pretty offensive. Microsoft is a proven criminal monopoly that has misused their power on numerous occations. Are you actually so naive that you except all of this is just good intentions?
Yes, and basically because Internationalization (did I get it right?) is an incredibly long word that is extremely easy to misspell. Especially for the people involved in the process, because they mostly do not have english as their main language, which in fact is the reason for i18n in the first place.
This is not intended as flamebait at all. This is actually pure curiosity:
How does 64kbit listening tests apply to the bitrates people actually use?
I mean just about every mp3 is encoded at 128kbit and beyond. Some people (I can't hear the difference) claim that at least 160kbit is absolutely required for reasonable audio.
Would the test possibly have a different outcome if tested at 128 or 160kbit? I would assue (although I don't really know) that some codecs will be optimized for lower bitrates, and some for higher.
The above poster have gotten a 4 insightful, but rather should have a "-1 Dreadfully biased troll", for being way more biased than what he is bashing for being biased.
What the f*** is so insightful about bashing language on the basis of it being high-level and created by Microsoft?
C, C++, Java and C# all looks like nice languages, and even if you are sceptical you should base languages on its merits, and not who created it.
I'm really paranoid about Microsoft, I run a small norwegian Linux site, and I'm a Linux user, but this is just BS.
Besides, reasonable C-coders might prefer to code in C, but won't dismiss C# or Java as some sort of "Mickey Mouse"-language just because it is high-level. Some times you need the power of C, sometimes you just want rapid development without the hassle.
There are at least enough C-coders that think C# is great, to create Mono.
"as they open up pretty much everything they code with the GPL."
When it comes to the distribution, they open absolutely everything, not "pretty much" everything.I don't know if they have any other products that is not free software.
Otherwise you are spot on.
Ok.. so there is a GNOME-centric distribution
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 2
.. this is wrong exactly why?
Red Hat gets a lot of shit for being GNOME-centric. It includes KDE, but granted have never really made that big of an effort of integrating KDE.
Now, how many distributions out there is KDE-centric? Just about everyone! SuSE, Mandrake, Caldera, Conectiva, etc..
Can someone then please tell me what is so wrong about there being a big GNOME-centric distribution? I'd love to know, because frankly I'm a misguided fool that thinks it's great that different distributions cater to different needs.
I'm a GNOME-user, and I love Red Hat for their work on GNOME, and their level of integration with it. Red Hat is the best distribution out there for me. If you are a KDE-user, then why not try out Mandrake, SuSE, Conectiva, etc..? They might be a better choice for you.
Re:usability and Linux for sissies
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 2
Eh.. I have problems with people arguing that MacOS X gives you choice, while sometimes the same people bitch about GNOME taking away choices (I'm not trying to imply that this includes you, because I frankly do not know).
The interface of OSX is pretty and functional, and it does NOT have an extreme amount of options. It doesn't even have focus follows mouse does it?
I would not miss these things. I think the GNOME-project is right about minimalizing options, I just think it's strange that OSX gets praised for the same things GNOME gets bitchslapped for.
.. the specific ones in question will probably have to replaced, or they are _knowingly_ infringing.
Then they can take this stand: "We don't include code that infringes upon patents we know about, but we do not have time to check up on patents so obvious that we implemented it without knowing about the patent."
Is it time for the obligatory
on
Vi IMproved -- Vim
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
emacs vs. vi pun?
Oh.. why bother, the weight of all that fighting is keeping me down.
If AOL/TW actually believe they'll go after Davezilla in order to create precedence, there is nothing stopping the big evil mamozilla of a companzilla from chopping in some gazilla in Davezillas defense, is there?
Slashdot Mirror
.. towards BSD and against Linux.
The truth is that BSD vs. Linux matters very little. They are both free software, and can mostly run the same apps.
What matters are the apps. As long as you have Apache, Postgresql, openssl etc. it matters little wether or not the core is Linux or BSD.
When you have KDE, GNOME and bash it matters very little that the core is BSD instead of Linux or vica versa.
Based on this, people should be able to choose the OS on purely technical reasons. Linux is better for some things, BSD is better for others.
Frankly I don't care much for the whole BSD vs. Linux "war". If one of them "takes over the world" I'll be happy.
Oh.. not again.
Why does everyone assume that using Intel-chips would make the computer compatible with PCs?
Apple could design the hardware in a very specific non-compatible way and just take advantage of the fact that Intel-chips are a commodity.
.. whole reason behind the quote from the Red Hat developer about "crapland" in KDE.
The KDE-naming scheme is sort of a legal crapland. Namely the Killustrator, Krayon, etc.-issues.
GNOME and GTK+-developers are of course also sometimes guilty of this.
Why does everything have to be named "K-something" or "G-something"? I don't find it catchy at all.
.. and that they have given a irreversible distribution right for free software, so that its usable on free software but not for proprietary software unlicensed by SUN.
Or... was that a rather evil thought? I'm not sure anymore, I'm so blinded by my zealotism.
I'm not trying to say that Red Hat is better than any other Linux-company, I'm just trying to put down the baseless whining about Red Hat being evil.
AFAIK, Red Hat has never distributed software outside the company without releasing source at the same time.
Red Hat is still among the most dedicated followers of the GPL-license. All their tools are free software.
Why are Red Hat still up there then, if all their software can be easily poached by others?
1. Brand
2. Good quality and good professionalism. Not necessarily better than anyone else, but certainly much more professional than most others.
3. Playing nice. Lots of people call fowl about anything Red Hat does, but hardly anything is much more than childish outcries.
You can bash Red Hat for some of the technical decisions they have made, but they have done nothing at all to deserve a reputation as "evil".
In fact.. UnitedLinux are trying to compete with the market leader by being more closed. At least Mandrake got that right and was sensible enough not to join this initiative.
Mandrake is NOT into the "purely-desktop"-market. Have you seen whats included on those Mandrake CDs? Apache, PHP, postgresql, mail-servers, etc..
Mandrake tries to make a "jack of all trades" distribution, just like Red Hat and SuSE. I personally welcome the pure desktop-solutions.
.. dear god my eyes hurt!
Seriously though, couldn't they have come up with better icons than this? Even completely reusing some of KDEs or GNOMEs work would have been better. It just looks horrible.
I do understand why they have tried to make it as windowsish as possible, but having it look like a very unprofessional unpolished version of Windows does it no good at all imho.
The first two are reasonable. The other two are not. Red Hat is totally entitled to favor whatever desktop-system they want. SuSE and Mandrake favor KDE, Red Hat favor GNOME.
When it comes to application hiding, Red Hat is totally entitled to offer what choices they think are best to the user. Red Hat thinks Mozilla and openoffice are better than Konqueror and Koffice, and can show the user whatever applications they want to. They could remove Konqueror and Koffice totally if they wanted to, but they haven't done that.
The fact is that Red Hat has done just about the same things to GNOME as they have done to KDE. Galeon, Abiword and Gnumeric are secondary to Openoffice and Mozilla in Red Hat (null).
The look and feel of KDE is not turned into GNOME, they have both gotten a new common look. The icons are actually much more KDE-like than GNOME-like.
Why is it that only KDE-users have complained?
You could always install RPM for Gentoo.
.. that can be used to spread evil all around the world. So that the next time Dr. Evil tries to take over the world we can sue him for patent infringement.
Seriously though, patenting really evil ideas and refusing to let them be implemented would be kind of nice. Too bad DRM isn't already patented by someone who seriously don't want to see it used.
I've heard this argument quite a lot of times, and I just have to ask:
How do they behave differently?
Lots of GTK+ apps behave differently, but they still share the same widget look. For instance Balsa and Evolution both work differently, but they share the same widget-look.
What Red Hat has done is to unify the widget look for Qt and GTK+, so the most really relevant issues are how do Qt-widgets behave versus GTK+ widgets?
I do not really know of any differences. Does the drop-downs behave different? Does the scrollbars behave really different? GUIs have become rather unified in behaviour over the year. If Qt and GTK+ widgets still behave differently, then they really need to be unified. Perhaps the unified look will be a big drive factor to make this happen?
BTW. I know KDE and GNOME behaves differently, I'm talking at the widget level here.
Yes. Apart from the USA after the DMCA, I do not know about other countries where EULAs are enforcable.
They certainly are not in Norway. If you buy a copy of MacOS X you can do whatever you want with it as long as you do not distribute it. This is also how it should be. After buying a product it just opposes all common sense of right and wrong to not be able to use the product as you see fit. Wether that is destroying it publically, running it on your elite G4-based toaster or just putting it in the refrigerator.
Eeh.. that could only happen due to patents.
The rest of Mono is not in any way Microsofts IP. It is just an implementation of specs Microsoft has opened up and sent to ECMA for standardization.
Mono is about as much Microsofts IP as Wine, that is not at all. Mono shouldn't and probably hasn't even had to turn to reverse-engineering like Wine.
Second. Neither GNOME or KDE have any plans at all to incorporate Mono into the core of the desktop. It will just be (a very nice) development platform for the two desktop environments. This means that some of the KDE and GNOME -applications might be based on Mono.
As I said, the only concievable problem would be that Microsoft has patented some of the design, and enforces it. This would again only mean that Mono has to be changed to work around the said patent.
They made a strong statement that this patent would be freely usable in any GPL-based code (and other approved licenses, like the IBM Public License, The Qt Public License. This also covers sale and other redistribution of free software.
They will probably require a patent-license for proprietary code, which is fine by me. This patent is mostly for leverage against other companies that have software patents.
Well. installing the NVidia-drivers in some distributions is as simple as downloading the RPM and clicking on it, typing in a administration password and watch it get installed.
Granted, it's pretty shameful that the user has to choose between lots of different files which he/she probably has no idea about any differences in.
The biggest problem with Linux-drivers is that there is no binary compatibility between drivers from one kernel to another.
There should definitely be a common binary-compatible driver-API that works across different minor kernel-versions.
By that I mean a binary-distributed driver for the 2.4.x-kernel should work across ALL 2.4.x-kernels. Currently it has to be the _exact_ same kernel (same version, same release-number, same architecture - 686, 386 or Athlon) I seriously hope this will be fixed by the next major kernel release.
You are at least equally full of crap.
>> What if drm is on by default? Could I load
>> Linux on it?
> If your distro of linux supports TCPA, then
> yes. TCPA is an open specification, and
> there
> is much chatter about developing open OSS's
> that conform.
If I used your way of replying, I would call this a bold faced lie. I won't, because I reckon you are just ignorant. Microsoft has a patent on "DRM-enabled operating system", which mean they could at any time deny distribution of Linux.
>> For now they can have complete EULA
>> controll with a digital enforcer.
> Yes, that is the exact idea. Someone sets
> forth a contract, and you agree to it. And > then you follow it. Thats what licenses are > all about. I download a GPL program, I use > it, I follow the GPL. Pretty simple.
Again, if I used your method of arguing, I would call this a blatant lie. Since I don't, I just suspect you are ignorant, and tell you the truth:
You don't have to accept anything to use GPL-based software. Not a thing, zilch. The only time you have to accept the GPL is if you distribute the software (or derived software), something you cannot legally do with Microsoft software.
I'm ok with you disagreeing with the original poster, but calling him/her a liar is pretty offensive. Microsoft is a proven criminal monopoly that has misused their power on numerous occations. Are you actually so naive that you except all of this is just good intentions?
Yes, and basically because Internationalization (did I get it right?) is an incredibly long word that is extremely easy to misspell. Especially for the people involved in the process, because they mostly do not have english as their main language, which in fact is the reason for i18n in the first place.
Gaute
This is not intended as flamebait at all. This is actually pure curiosity:
How does 64kbit listening tests apply to the bitrates people actually use?
I mean just about every mp3 is encoded at 128kbit and beyond. Some people (I can't hear the difference) claim that at least 160kbit is absolutely required for reasonable audio.
Would the test possibly have a different outcome if tested at 128 or 160kbit? I would assue (although I don't really know) that some codecs will be optimized for lower bitrates, and some for higher.
The above poster have gotten a 4 insightful, but rather should have a "-1 Dreadfully biased troll", for being way more biased than what he is bashing for being biased.
What the f*** is so insightful about bashing language on the basis of it being high-level and created by Microsoft?
C, C++, Java and C# all looks like nice languages, and even if you are sceptical you should base languages on its merits, and not who created it.
I'm really paranoid about Microsoft, I run a small norwegian Linux site, and I'm a Linux user, but this is just BS.
Besides, reasonable C-coders might prefer to code in C, but won't dismiss C# or Java as some sort of "Mickey Mouse"-language just because it is high-level. Some times you need the power of C, sometimes you just want rapid development without the hassle.
There are at least enough C-coders that think C# is great, to create Mono.
"as they open up pretty much everything they code with the GPL."
When it comes to the distribution, they open absolutely everything, not "pretty much" everything.I don't know if they have any other products that is not free software.
Otherwise you are spot on.
.. this is wrong exactly why?
Red Hat gets a lot of shit for being GNOME-centric. It includes KDE, but granted have never really made that big of an effort of integrating KDE.
Now, how many distributions out there is KDE-centric? Just about everyone! SuSE, Mandrake, Caldera, Conectiva, etc..
Can someone then please tell me what is so wrong about there being a big GNOME-centric distribution? I'd love to know, because frankly I'm a misguided fool that thinks it's great that different distributions cater to different needs.
I'm a GNOME-user, and I love Red Hat for their work on GNOME, and their level of integration with it. Red Hat is the best distribution out there for me. If you are a KDE-user, then why not try out Mandrake, SuSE, Conectiva, etc..? They might be a better choice for you.
Eh.. I have problems with people arguing that MacOS X gives you choice, while sometimes the same people bitch about GNOME taking away choices (I'm not trying to imply that this includes you, because I frankly do not know).
The interface of OSX is pretty and functional, and it does NOT have an extreme amount of options. It doesn't even have focus follows mouse does it?
I would not miss these things. I think the GNOME-project is right about minimalizing options, I just think it's strange that OSX gets praised for the same things GNOME gets bitchslapped for.
.. the specific ones in question will probably have to replaced, or they are _knowingly_ infringing.
Then they can take this stand:
"We don't include code that infringes upon patents we know about, but we do not have time to check up on patents so obvious that we implemented it without knowing about the patent."
emacs vs. vi pun?
Oh.. why bother, the weight of all that fighting is keeping me down.
If AOL/TW actually believe they'll go after Davezilla in order to create precedence, there is nothing stopping the big evil mamozilla of a companzilla from chopping in some gazilla in Davezillas defense, is there?