Either there's a lot of flamebait going around or people don't understand Open Source / Mozilla, etc.
1) These add-ins have been written by people who have no connection to Netscape and are not part of the main Mozilla team. Therefore this will not slow down development on the layout engine as the people who are working on that (mainly Netscape employees) are still working on it. 2) Anyone can contribute to Mozilla a nd if they do this is a good thing. It's good that these extensions exist but I don't think they'll make it into the official Netscape Communicator distribution. There has been NO word from Netscape saying that they would be included and there's not even a mention of these projects yet on Mozilla.org.
Netscape said they'd produce a small standards compliant browser and I think they'll stick to that as that's the best way to regain market share from IE. Just get it into your heads that just because someone writes it doesn't mean Netscape is going to include it.
I hope that Netscape will offer a selection of download options at least one where it's just browser only, then perhaps mail, news, then perhaps an editor and a pack with everything in it for those who want it. Also remember that most of these extensions are written in XUL/Javascript so that they don't contribute as much to the bloat as traditional addons.
...and if Netscape doesn't release a browser only version and neither does Mozilla.org you can bet that someone definitely will, that's the beauty of open source. --
Just remember this is third party development, this is not Netscape Communicator 5.0 or anything. If people want to add features to an open source project it's up to them. If some one integrated IRC with gcc then there's no one that could stop them, but I can't imagine that the gcc maintainers would accept it.
I think these new developments will be available as options for Mozilla and nothing more. --
The main point is the Mozilla team are not developing these addons it is basically people outside of Netscape who are making them, this means that if they want to write an IRC/IM client for Mozilla they can do, whether the Mozilla team include it in their distribution is up to the Mozilla team and whether Netscape include it in the official Netscape distribution is their own decision.
Basically this just proves that outside developers are interested in working with Mozilla. --
The mice aren't bad but them joysticks they make just feel shoddy.
Anyway on the console front I think they'll have a hard job competing against the likes of Playstations and N64's and whatever SEGA call their console. Because although Microsoft are a recognised name in the PC world, I don't see their name getting them anywhere in the console world. It'll take a lot of marketing for them to even get a small share of this market. --
It has attracted some developers, and will attract more to bugfix, etc once it is released or nearly released.
If Sun goes by a proper open source license but keeps developing under their current style then that is a good thing. Even if no extra developers joined it's still good having the source as it'll make it easier for interested parties to submit bugfixes later or port to their preferred platform. Less people will bother even bug fixing if it's not a proper open source license --
These were my opinions in the way RedHat should allow people to use it's name. They weren't the official RedHat naming policies although it did seem like I was implying that. --
To get rid of the confusion: Official RedHat Linux - for the boxed sets only RedHat can sell RedHat Linux Free Edition - for the copiers (e.g. cheapbytes) xxx Linux based on RedHat - where xxx is any name you please and the based on redhat bit is optional. This can be used for distributions similar to RedHat but with upgrades or extra software.
The free edition should be made available as an ISO image by RedHat and to be called RedHat Free Edition you need to use this image that has been certified by RedHat (however you can't say 'certified by redhat' on the CD or people may think it's official RedHat).
Anyone else wanting to distribute RedHat derivatives have to use 'based on RedHat' or scrap the RedHat name altogether.
Users of the RedHat name should mention on the packaging that they are not official RedHat and you can't get RedHat support.
I think this would clear things up and the official CD image would certainly make things easier for people to download and burn to a CD. That's one of the many good points of Debian and a few others. I think RedHat should adopt it too. --
I think Roblimo had done a good job in the situation. The news was already going around (I heard about it before it appeared on/.) and people wanted to know. If they never posted it immediately people would say that Slashdot was pro RedHat and didn't want to say anything bad about them.
Roblimo did preliminary investigation (which we never used to get with slashdot - of course Rob (Malda) and the others were at college then so didn't have the time) so didn't just duplicate the story without checking. He indicated that he didn't know the full story and as soon as more was known a followup story was posted, this time by Hemos.
Of course as Hemos owns shares in RedHat he could have made this all up to make them look good (please note the last part was a JOKE, if you took that seriously I'm worried). --
Official RedHat with RedHat support does sound a bit long, however they should use 'Official RedHat Linux' as the title for the boxed set and ensure that other vendors don't use official in the name.
RedHat could always think of a name that RedHat download resellers could call their distribution if they wanted to keep the RedHat name. Perhaps 'RedHat free edition', this would also stop people charging too much for a $2 CD. It should be also mentioned on the CD that it is not an official RedHat distro and doesn't contain support by RedHat.
People who wanted to add their own extras and support to the distribution would then be encouraged to use a different name (like Mandrake), rather than using the RedHat brand name. --
The FSF do support PNG, this is what they say on their page about the GIF patent: PNG format is a patent-free compressed format. We hope it will become widely supported; then we will use it. We do have PNG versions of the images on this server
Well the application for asks for US specific things such as social security number and these things are normally specific to the country they are issued in. Even if you could get it in other countries you'd probably have to pay your bills in US dollars.
Of course, it has been pointed out that this bank does have a UK branch so they could be asked to consider offering this service to their UK customers. --
Yep, just what I was saying below but it took me longer to type it!
I've thought about this before but never got round to checking the demand in the UK or how easy/difficult it would be to set up.
If the bank that's doing this has a UK operation then we may be able to persuade them to make English versions of the same cards which would save having to set up our own UK scheme. --
It'd be great to see something like that here in the UK (and in other countries too) because a credit cards makes a great way to contribute to a cause you support (in this case Linux) without really doing anything apart from buy things you were going to buy anyway.
I wonder what the interest in such a scheme would be and if anyone is able to offer and UK specific advice on being able to set such a scheme up.
I'd be interested in: 1) How many people in the UK would use a similar style card. 2) How you'd like the money distributed (i.e. to what projects) 3) How to go about setting up such a project in the UK.
Reply to this thread or email me if you're interested. --
I wonder if the depatment of health realised that their URL looks like it would be for a UK governments Simpsons site www.doh.gov.uk!
Newcastle is the best place to live in the UK, FWIW. It has everything you need and much better than London. If you need to get to the capital there's plenty of trains and planes serve the area frequently. Newcastle has been voted the party capital of the UK and the best place to work in the UK.
On the subject of healthcare it should be free in every country as it is so important. We do have private healthcare in the UK for those with money and want to have extra benefits but free healthcare is available to all however rich or poor you are.
The only exception that I know of is road accidents. In this case the person who is responsible for the crash has to pay for the hospital bills (but by law they have to have insurance for this).
Petrol is dear, and public transport in most of the UK is crap. In London it's overcrowded. That's another reason why Newcastle is cool as it has decent public transport and fairly cheap beer.
The cost of living in the north is cheaper than in the south (I know I'm in London now and can't wait to get back to Newcastle). --
As this message appears at the top of the whois query why don't they say something along the lines of: "by using the results of this query you agree to abide by the above rules..." --
Whatever the case using the word 'dumpster' would be extremely stupid as it's really only ever used in the US. Recycle bin is fairly country neutral and trash is US but understandable by most other people.
BTW the UK versions of MacOS use a 'Wastebasket'. --
Does anyone know if 'Internet Explorer' is a trademark of Microsoft? I remember a while back that a company was suing Microsoft for using the name as they had it trademarked but Microsoft were saying that 'Internet Explorer' was a generic term see here. However the people suing MS ran out of money and so had to settle.
If MS are using that as a trademark now they really are hypocrites. --
Well I rarely have problems with Netscape on Linux (a few crashes but not very frequently) and people I know using Windows have very little problems with Netscape or IE.
I don't think Netscape is as unstable as people make out and on the Windows platform IE is more stable than Netscape but on the odd occaision IE crashes it's more likely to bring the system down.
Basically use whatever browser you prefer but it's a total load of rubbish saying Netscape crashes all the time.
As for supporting standards, why should Netscape waste time on getting standards support in the 4.x browsers? This would just slow down the development of Mozilla. IE5 isn't totally standards compliant and N4.x is even worse but until Mozilla I'm prepared to wait as if the standards currently work only on IE5 (Mozilla isn't stable yet so it doesn't count) they should not be used in web pages (except for testing standards compliance) as it ties down people to using IE.
Once Mozilla is launched we will have the standards compliance and cross platform support. If Netscape had worked on adding this to 4.7 then we'd wait a lot longer for Mozilla and as the 4.x series are based on the old layout engine it wouldn't be as small or as fast as Mozilla. --
I might point out that if Linux had the same kind of hardware support (from ISV's, not from Linux developers) you would probably see just as many faults in Linux.
That's why things like drivers (as well as the OS) should be made open source. If the drivers cause problems then someone can fix them and submit a patch rather than waiting for the ISV to fix it themselves. --
Re:interesting but lonely
on
OLS Wrap-up
·
· Score: 1
It never happened that way at the UKUUG Linux conference in England. As I assisted in organising it I may be a bit biased but I liked our single track approach to the conference because if their was a talk you didn't want to attend there were always people to talk to. A very friendly and interesting event.
As for recording the talks I think that is a good idea although video as well as audio would be better. --
Slashdot Mirror
Either there's a lot of flamebait going around or people don't understand Open Source / Mozilla, etc.
1) These add-ins have been written by people who have no connection to Netscape and are not part of the main Mozilla team.
Therefore this will not slow down development on the layout engine as the people who are working on that (mainly Netscape employees) are still working on it.
2) Anyone can contribute to Mozilla a nd if they do this is a good thing. It's good that these extensions exist but I don't think they'll make it into the official Netscape Communicator distribution. There has been NO word from Netscape saying that they would be included and there's not even a mention of these projects yet on Mozilla.org.
Netscape said they'd produce a small standards compliant browser and I think they'll stick to that as that's the best way to regain market share from IE. Just get it into your heads that just because someone writes it doesn't mean Netscape is going to include it.
I hope that Netscape will offer a selection of download options at least one where it's just browser only, then perhaps mail, news, then perhaps an editor and a pack with everything in it for those who want it. Also remember that most of these extensions are written in XUL/Javascript so that they don't contribute as much to the bloat as traditional addons.
...and if Netscape doesn't release a browser only version and neither does Mozilla.org you can bet that someone definitely will, that's the beauty of open source.
--
http://www.mozillazine.org/tal kback.html?article=775
--
Just remember this is third party development, this is not Netscape Communicator 5.0 or anything. If people want to add features to an open source project it's up to them. If some one integrated IRC with gcc then there's no one that could stop them, but I can't imagine that the gcc maintainers would accept it.
I think these new developments will be available as options for Mozilla and nothing more.
--
The main point is the Mozilla team are not developing these addons it is basically people outside of Netscape who are making them, this means that if they want to write an IRC/IM client for Mozilla they can do, whether the Mozilla team include it in their distribution is up to the Mozilla team and whether Netscape include it in the official Netscape distribution is their own decision.
Basically this just proves that outside developers are interested in working with Mozilla.
--
I think it would be quite hard to prove either way who created something first.
--
The mice aren't bad but them joysticks they make just feel shoddy.
Anyway on the console front I think they'll have a hard job competing against the likes of Playstations and N64's and whatever SEGA call their console. Because although Microsoft are a recognised name in the PC world, I don't see their name getting them anywhere in the console world. It'll take a lot of marketing for them to even get a small share of this market.
--
It has attracted some developers, and will attract more to bugfix, etc once it is released or nearly released.
If Sun goes by a proper open source license but keeps developing under their current style then that is a good thing. Even if no extra developers joined it's still good having the source as it'll make it easier for interested parties to submit bugfixes later or port to their preferred platform. Less people will bother even bug fixing if it's not a proper open source license
--
These were my opinions in the way RedHat should allow people to use it's name. They weren't the official RedHat naming policies although it did seem like I was implying that.
--
To get rid of the confusion:
Official RedHat Linux - for the boxed sets only RedHat can sell
RedHat Linux Free Edition - for the copiers (e.g. cheapbytes)
xxx Linux based on RedHat - where xxx is any name you please and the based on redhat bit is optional. This can be used for distributions similar to RedHat but with upgrades or extra software.
The free edition should be made available as an ISO image by RedHat and to be called RedHat Free Edition you need to use this image that has been certified by RedHat (however you can't say 'certified by redhat' on the CD or people may think it's official RedHat).
Anyone else wanting to distribute RedHat derivatives have to use 'based on RedHat' or scrap the RedHat name altogether.
Users of the RedHat name should mention on the packaging that they are not official RedHat and you can't get RedHat support.
I think this would clear things up and the official CD image would certainly make things easier for people to download and burn to a CD. That's one of the many good points of Debian and a few others. I think RedHat should adopt it too.
--
What about 'I can't believe it's not RedHat' or 'I can't believe it's not McDonalds'?
--
I think Roblimo had done a good job in the situation. The news was already going around (I heard about it before it appeared on /.) and people wanted to know. If they never posted it immediately people would say that Slashdot was pro RedHat and didn't want to say anything bad about them.
Roblimo did preliminary investigation (which we never used to get with slashdot - of course Rob (Malda) and the others were at college then so didn't have the time) so didn't just duplicate the story without checking. He indicated that he didn't know the full story and as soon as more was known a followup story was posted, this time by Hemos.
Of course as Hemos owns shares in RedHat he could have made this all up to make them look good (please note the last part was a JOKE, if you took that seriously I'm worried).
--
Official RedHat with RedHat support does sound a bit long, however they should use 'Official RedHat Linux' as the title for the boxed set and ensure that other vendors don't use official in the name.
RedHat could always think of a name that RedHat download resellers could call their distribution if they wanted to keep the RedHat name. Perhaps 'RedHat free edition', this would also stop people charging too much for a $2 CD. It should be also mentioned on the CD that it is not an official RedHat distro and doesn't contain support by RedHat.
People who wanted to add their own extras and support to the distribution would then be encouraged to use a different name (like Mandrake), rather than using the RedHat brand name.
--
The FSF do support PNG, this is what they say on their page about the GIF patent:
PNG format is a patent-free compressed format. We hope it will become widely supported; then
we will use it. We do have PNG versions of the images on this server
--
I contacted the Linux Fund people and they are planning to have their card available in the UK although not until January.
The reply I got was:
Yes, we are planing on launching in January.
Benjamin
At 03:48 PM 8/27/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Are you planning to offer your Linux credit card in the UK?
> [rest snipped]
--
Well the application for asks for US specific things such as social security number and these things are normally specific to the country they are issued in. Even if you could get it in other countries you'd probably have to pay your bills in US dollars.
Of course, it has been pointed out that this bank does have a UK branch so they could be asked to consider offering this service to their UK customers.
--
Yep, just what I was saying below but it took me longer to type it!
I've thought about this before but never got round to checking the demand in the UK or how easy/difficult it would be to set up.
If the bank that's doing this has a UK operation then we may be able to persuade them to make English versions of the same cards which would save having to set up our own UK scheme.
--
It'd be great to see something like that here in the UK (and in other countries too) because a credit cards makes a great way to contribute to a cause you support (in this case Linux) without really doing anything apart from buy things you were going to buy anyway.
I wonder what the interest in such a scheme would be and if anyone is able to offer and UK specific advice on being able to set such a scheme up.
I'd be interested in:
1) How many people in the UK would use a similar style card.
2) How you'd like the money distributed (i.e. to what projects)
3) How to go about setting up such a project in the UK.
Reply to this thread or email me if you're interested.
--
AFAIK Linus uses RedHat but it doesn't really matter.
--
I wonder if the depatment of health realised that their URL looks like it would be for a UK governments Simpsons site www.doh.gov.uk!
Newcastle is the best place to live in the UK, FWIW. It has everything you need and much better than London. If you need to get to the capital there's plenty of trains and planes serve the area frequently. Newcastle has been voted the party capital of the UK and the best place to work in the UK.
On the subject of healthcare it should be free in every country as it is so important. We do have private healthcare in the UK for those with money and want to have extra benefits but free healthcare is available to all however rich or poor you are.
The only exception that I know of is road accidents. In this case the person who is responsible for the crash has to pay for the hospital bills (but by law they have to have insurance for this).
Petrol is dear, and public transport in most of the UK is crap. In London it's overcrowded. That's another reason why Newcastle is cool as it has decent public transport and fairly cheap beer.
The cost of living in the north is cheaper than in the south (I know I'm in London now and can't wait to get back to Newcastle).
--
As this message appears at the top of the whois query why don't they say something along the lines of: "by using the results of this query you agree to abide by the above rules..."
--
Whatever the case using the word 'dumpster' would be extremely stupid as it's really only ever used in the US. Recycle bin is fairly country neutral and trash is US but understandable by most other people.
BTW the UK versions of MacOS use a 'Wastebasket'.
--
If MS are using that as a trademark now they really are hypocrites.
--
Well I rarely have problems with Netscape on Linux (a few crashes but not very frequently) and people I know using Windows have very little problems with Netscape or IE.
I don't think Netscape is as unstable as people make out and on the Windows platform IE is more stable than Netscape but on the odd occaision IE crashes it's more likely to bring the system down.
Basically use whatever browser you prefer but it's a total load of rubbish saying Netscape crashes all the time.
As for supporting standards, why should Netscape waste time on getting standards support in the 4.x browsers? This would just slow down the development of Mozilla. IE5 isn't totally standards compliant and N4.x is even worse but until Mozilla I'm prepared to wait as if the standards currently work only on IE5 (Mozilla isn't stable yet so it doesn't count) they should not be used in web pages (except for testing standards compliance) as it ties down people to using IE.
Once Mozilla is launched we will have the standards compliance and cross platform support. If Netscape had worked on adding this to 4.7 then we'd wait a lot longer for Mozilla and as the 4.x series are based on the old layout engine it wouldn't be as small or as fast as Mozilla.
--
That's why things like drivers (as well as the OS) should be made open source. If the drivers cause problems then someone can fix them and submit a patch rather than waiting for the ISV to fix it themselves.
--
It never happened that way at the UKUUG Linux conference in England. As I assisted in organising it I may be a bit biased but I liked our single track approach to the conference because if their was a talk you didn't want to attend there were always people to talk to. A very friendly and interesting event.
As for recording the talks I think that is a good idea although video as well as audio would be better.
--