Works perfectly. (using it right now at home and at work.
> Doublescan modes? No chance.
> Proper Modeline Handling? In your dreams.
> Memory Leaks? Sure, have a double helping.
I've never had a problem.
> XINERAMA? Not with GL support.
Not with any of the Open Source drivers, either.
> Geforce 2 Twinview? Not even if you can get the card to work.
> TV Out? No way jose.
The only card to support these is the Matrox G400, through a *binary-only* driver from Matrox.
The NVIDIA drivers are more compliant, faster and have more features than *any* of the open source alternatives. There is simply no way that you can argue with that statement, it's just true.
Maybe the open source alternatives will catch up, but they're not there yet.
You don't *know* if open drivers will be improved either. They only get improved if someone has the knowlegde, time, and motivation to work on them. It is *not* a given that open software will be better than closed. There really aren't that many people with the low level knowledge of the kernel, X, security, OpenGL, etc. required to work on 3D drivers.
I purchased a GeForce2 the first day they were available in retail, and on that day, I had it up and running under Linux with fast, high quality drivers. How long ago was the Radeon released? Where are the drivers? They don't exist. The fact is that *none* of the current open source drivers are anywhere close to the NVIDIA drivers in terms of compliance, speed, and features. They may catch up, but at the current time, they're not up to snuff.
I make my choices on hardware and software based on technical superiority, not moral superiority. I use Linux because I believe it to be technically superior for the kinds of things I do, not because it's GNU. I use NVIDIA hardware and drivers because they are a technically superior solution.
And id *are* supporting Linux with downloadable binaries. The shrink-wrapped retail Q3 package was a total bomb and unprofitable. Why should they continue to sink money into making a retail Linux package if no-one buys it? Offering downloadable binaries is what Linux users wanted: they voted with their dollars and failed to impress the retailers. So we're back to the 'support' that id gave us for the years previous to Q3: freely downloadable, unsupported binaries. So what?
Who's left? ATI. The Radeon is the only other remotely interesting piece of commodity hardware currently available aside from the GeForce line. Matrox's and 3dfx's current offerings can only be described as mediocre at best.
NVIDIA has already got a bunch of engineers from SGI. If they go ahead and hire 3dfx's engineers, it is going to be very, very difficult for anyone to compete with that kind of talent.
Seems like using Qt/Embedded with a custom, elaborate theme would be the best approach. It supports alpha blending and antialiased fonts, has a mature, clean API, and could be retargeted for X11 or Win32 very easily.
You just need to find an artist who can create an appropriately beautiful non-standard-GUI-looking theme.
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/embedded/in de x.html
Some of the Intergraph/Intense3D/whatever-they're-called-this- week solutions do this already. Have a look here:http://www.intense3d.com/4210/4210data.asp
A couple of years ago, our lab (based on my recommendation) purchased five VA workstations. Four of the workstations shipped with bad partition tables. When I called VA about it, they didn't believe me, and I had to argue with them for days before they would even consider that there was a problem. Support was obnoxious and slow to respond.
When I took the drives back to be repartitioned and reinstalled, they dropped and destroyed one of the drives. When I got the drives back, they had been configured for single-processor workstations with the wrong ethernet card. I had asked them several times not to install lilo to the MBR, but they did anyway.
I spent more time dealing with VA hassles than if I had built and installed the machines myself. I recommended VA because I wanted to support a 'pure' Linux company, but I got burned by it, big time. All the Linux nay-sayers around the division got a big kick watching me deal with all these hassles, and they used it as ammunition to shoot down my attempts to get Linux supported officially by the division.
I really don't understand how VA has become as successful as they are given their mediocre hardware, high prices, and lousy support.
-Mark
------------------------------------------------ ------------
Mark B. Allan NASA Ames Research Center
QSS Group, Inc. Neuro-Engineering Lab
650 - 604 - 0461 (lab) Mail Stop 269-2
650 - 604 - 3594 (fax) Moffett Field, CA 94035
mallan@ptolemy--nospam--.arc.nasa.gov
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/ic/ne.html
------------------------------------------------ ------------
Compatibility with GTK is a step forward. The wording of the announcement is a step back (was it really necessary to dis GTK?)
What both teams (KDE and GNOME) should be doing is working on a common format that both toolkits can use that will make them look the same to the end user. There is no good reason why the end user has to be concerned about whether s/he's using GNOME or KDE.
In much the same way as a Windows user doesn't know whether the app s/he's using was written in Visual Basic or VC++, Linux users shouldn't need to know whether they're using GNOME or KDE.
Hopefully, some day, GNOME and KDE will move past their petty bickering and work together in a productive manner.
The 'support' that most OpenSource advocates want is open specs, and Linksys has a long history of being cooperative with the Linux community. I've got a couple of Linksys cards, and they work fine. Most tech support personnel are low paid morons and wouldn't have a clue how to troubleshoot a Linux system.
Doing a search for 'linux' on their web site comes up with the following links which might be of help to you: http://www.linksys.com/faqs/default.asp?fqid=10 http://www.linksys.com/support/support.asp?spid= 26http://www.linksys.com/support/kb.asp?kb id=116 http://www.linksys.com/support/support.asp?spid= 25
Don't be too harsh on Linksys - they were an early adopter of Linux (I was using Linksys cards under Linux over 4 years ago) and I've been pretty pleased with their products.
Why? What part of the QPL restricts internal/research projects? You're not allowed to distribute GPL code without source either, whether it has been modified or not. If you write an app that uses GNU Readline, you would be under the same restrictions as if you'd used free QT, right?
I'm not a laywer, and I'm not flaming. I'm just curious as to how you came to this conclusion. Restrictions of the QPL apply when the software is *distributed*, same as the GPL. I don't see anything in there that prevents internal use.
One huge advantage of Qt is that you can target Windows and *NIX with the same source. We use it in our lab at NASA, and have no regrets at all. I do agree that Qt is a bit pricy, but we've found that the platform flexibility allowed by Qt is worth it. I evaluated wxWindows and FLTK before commiting to Qt, and although they are both quality toolkits, Qt offered more functionality, flexibility and has a (IMO) cleaner coding style.
Unlike many other libraries, GUI libraries are complex and require a significant amount of time on the part of the programmer to learn how to use them.
This is another big advantage of Qt: it's really, really easy to learn and use. The coding style is very similar to Java, and it leads to clean, easy to read, easy to maintain code.
Java, unfortunately, just isn't there yet. It's not stable or fast enough for many of the things we need to do (although we do use Java for some projects). Because of the similarity of Java and Qt, many of our APIs and some of our apps will work with both toolkits, and some developers bounce between the two.
I'm not a laywer, and really don't care to become one, but why do you think the QPL is any different to the GPL for internal use? Section 6 has this line: These items, when distributed, are subject to the following requirements: It seems to me that Qt is find to use for internal research, as long as you don't distrubute it - same as the GPL.
In my opinion, Qt is a superior technical solution than any of the other toolkits available (free or commercial). It is expensive, but we've found it to be worth the cost on more than one occasion.
Cheers, Mark Allan http://ic-www.arc.nasa.gov/ic/projects/neuro/ifc/a ctive.html
At least one customer is NASA - our lab has two Qt development licences. One HUGE advantage of a commercial Qt licence is that you can use the exact same source code for Windows and *NIX, which has saved my butt several times. It also allows me to do 90% of my development work on my preferred platform (Linux), then port to NT or IRIX at the last minute.
Even though $2000 seems like a huge amount for an individual developer, it's a drop in the bucket for a large organization.
I view the commercial Qt licence a lot like the Cygnus commercial licence - it's a way to generate revenue so that they can continue doing what they like to do best - write code.
If you ask me, the whole open source thing is getting way to politicized. Are we lawyers or coders?
You're complaining about SiS hardware, but who wrote the poor drivers? The open source community or SiS?
SiS has opened their specs in the past, which is what the open source community wants. Don't blame them if the drivers are not up to par, blame the open source community.
Let's have a little consistency here. NVIDIA gets bashed for releasing good drivers, but they won't release their specs. SiS gets bashed because they've released their specs, but the open source drivers suck.
I'm a little confused here. SiS has opened their specs in the past so that open source developers can write drivers for their hardware. This is what all the open source advocates want.
So the SiS drivers written by the open source community suck, and people have a hard time getting their hardware to work because of the poor drivers.
Now, they annouce they will be writing their own drivers for Linux.
Why should there be any connection between drivers/support written by the open source community and drivers/support from the company creating the hardware?
SiS has give the open source community the 'support' that they want (i.e. open specs) in the past, but users complain about the crappy drivers, and say 'avoid their hardware'.
Apparently, ELSA is making a PCI GeForce in Germany: http://www.zdnet.de/produkte/artikel/komp/200004 /erazorxpci-wc.html
I seem to remember NVidia making a statement that they wanted to get into the Mac market, so they'll have to get board manufacturers to make PCI versions for that.
Why do you need PCI? All the newer boards I know of have AGP, so you probably have a pretty slow processor. A faster processor would help you out a lot more than a faster video card. You can probably get an Athlon+motherboard for less $$ than a Voodoo5.
NVidia have been very strong supporters of OpenGL, and I would feel safe in saying that they have the best consumer-level OpenGL drivers for Windows.
On one hand, they are supplying chips for the X-Box. On the other, they are supplying chips for the Indrema box, which will be an X-Box competitor which runs Linux: http://www.indrema.com/servlet/site?page=Release _nvidia.html
I doubt that Indrema will face the XBox with any real competition, but it does run Linux, and it could be a cool thin client. The kind of Linux box you'd buy for your kids or your grandmother.
In addition to close ties to Microsoft, they have very close ties to SGI. SGI has been very active in the Linux arena recently, with contributions such as GLX, the OGL SI, XFS, in addition to kernel and compiler work. The NVidia Linux drivers have been developed in conjunction with SGI, and the drivers rock (with some caveats, but they're beta drivers)
Given Microsoft's history with 'collaborations' with companies, it's reasonable to assume the worst. But NVidia certainly has the balls to play this game, and they seem to be doing OK so far...
That is always a concern, but it's not a guaranteed outcome. 3dfx dug their own hole by being extremely proprietary for many years (why has everyone suddenly forgotten how aggressive they were at protecting their intellectual property now that they're open source?) and releasing several crappy products in a row.
There are a lot of talented people at NVidia doing a lot of interesting things. I think that, in this case, a nice lead in techical quality could give them the opportunity to do more research into different rendering methods, rather than just being in a "they have that feature, so we have to have it to!" mode.
For the last several years, consumer graphics card manufacturers have been trying to get to Infinite Reality level graphics. Now that they're almost there - what now? SGI doesn't have any new high end architectures to copy from, so what's the next step? Some large, well funded company needs to spend money and time on research to discover that next step. NVidia seems to be the best choice (especially given their relationship with SGI)
If the press release is to be believed, ATI will soon be nipping at NVidia's heels, so I'm not too worried about total market dominance. The Radeon chip will have support for 3D textures, which will have a lot of interesting uses. If the Radeon even comes close to GeForce2 quality, it will totally saturate the market thanks to ATI's distribution channels.
I really don't see the problem here. Even if you're running the Windows version, you have to download patches every few weeks to stay current anyway. So you buy the game for the data files and download the game binary for Linux. It's not on the CD and it's not supported. So what?
The point is that a native Linux version exists. This is good. I was very surprised to hear that Epic was going to do a Linux version at all, and I think it absolutely rocks that the two biggest games/engines (UT and Q3) have native Linux versions. This is the sound of a door opening. Please don't slam it shut over some 'moral' issue that is totally irrelevant under close scrutiny. Popular game engine with native Linux version == greatly increased possibility of more games under Linux && more visibility for Linux && and more people willing to give up Windows because they can play their favorite game under Linux.
UT Linux is good for Linux whether it's on the CD or not. Stop whining.
To those of you that do purchase UT: make sure you send in your registration card with 'Linux' as your OS of choice.
Cheers, Mark B. Allan
Qt commercial - Re:Yes - Re:KDevelop Vs. Jessie
on
SGI Releases IDE
·
· Score: 2
>Funny how the Qt and KDE supporters gloss over this little "problem"
Why do you see the Qt commercial licence as a "problem"?
GPL = no commercial/closed source development LGPL = anything goes.
The Qt commercial licence offers a middle ground of sorts - if you want it for free, you have to distribute source. If you want to write closed source commercial apps, there is a strong financial incentive not to. This deters the proliferation of $10-40 closed source shareware apps that plague the Windows world. As far as I know, there's nothing to deter people from creating closed source GNOME apps.
IMO, Troll Tech has found a great way to support themselves (through commercial support and licences) while providing the Open Source community with a great toolkit free of charge. If you don't pay, you have to deal with the 'GPL-like' terms of their licence. Where's the problem?
Slashdot Mirror
> SMP? Forget it.
Works perfectly. (using it right now at home and at work.
> Doublescan modes? No chance.
> Proper Modeline Handling? In your dreams.
> Memory Leaks? Sure, have a double helping.
I've never had a problem.
> XINERAMA? Not with GL support.
Not with any of the Open Source drivers, either.
> Geforce 2 Twinview? Not even if you can get the card to work.
> TV Out? No way jose.
The only card to support these is the Matrox G400, through a *binary-only* driver from Matrox.
The NVIDIA drivers are more compliant, faster and have more features than *any* of the open source alternatives. There is simply no way that you can argue with that statement, it's just true.
Maybe the open source alternatives will catch up, but they're not there yet.
You don't *know* if open drivers will be improved either. They only get improved if someone has the knowlegde, time, and motivation to work on them. It is *not* a given that open software will be better than closed. There really aren't that many people with the low level knowledge of the kernel, X, security, OpenGL, etc. required to work on 3D drivers.
I purchased a GeForce2 the first day they were available in retail, and on that day, I had it up and running under Linux with fast, high quality drivers. How long ago was the Radeon released? Where are the drivers? They don't exist. The fact is that *none* of the current open source drivers are anywhere close to the NVIDIA drivers in terms of compliance, speed, and features. They may catch up, but at the current time, they're not up to snuff.
I make my choices on hardware and software based on technical superiority, not moral superiority. I use Linux because I believe it to be technically superior for the kinds of things I do, not because it's GNU. I use NVIDIA hardware and drivers because they are a technically superior solution.
And id *are* supporting Linux with downloadable binaries. The shrink-wrapped retail Q3 package was a total bomb and unprofitable. Why should they continue to sink money into making a retail Linux package if no-one buys it? Offering downloadable binaries is what Linux users wanted: they voted with their dollars and failed to impress the retailers. So we're back to the 'support' that id gave us for the years previous to Q3: freely downloadable, unsupported binaries. So what?
-Mark
Who's left? ATI. The Radeon is the only other remotely interesting piece of commodity hardware currently available aside from the GeForce line. Matrox's and 3dfx's current offerings can only be described as mediocre at best.
NVIDIA has already got a bunch of engineers from SGI. If they go ahead and hire 3dfx's engineers, it is going to be very, very difficult for anyone to compete with that kind of talent.
-Mark
I wish there would be a little consistency in the community with regards to licenses:
A. "We use the GPL as a legal means to prevent commercial entities from using our code. They must respect the law and play by our rules."
B. "If we don't like the judgement of law, we will ignore it (i.e. DeCSS). We will continue to develop and distribute illegal code."
So the community expects commercial entities to abide by the law, but the Free Software movement should ignore the law if they don't like it?
Whatever.
Seems like using Qt/Embedded with a custom, elaborate theme would be the best approach. It supports alpha blending and antialiased fonts, has a mature, clean API, and could be retargeted for X11 or Win32 very easily.
n de x.html
You just need to find an artist who can create an appropriately beautiful non-standard-GUI-looking theme.
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/embedded/i
Cheers,
Mark
Some of the Intergraph/Intense3D/whatever-they're-called-this- week solutions do this already. Have a look here:http://www.intense3d.com/4210/4210data.asp
A couple of years ago, our lab (based on my recommendation) purchased five VA workstations. Four of the workstations shipped with bad partition tables. When I called VA about it, they didn't believe me, and I had to argue with them for days before they would even consider that there was a problem. Support was obnoxious and slow to respond.
- ------------
- ------------
When I took the drives back to be repartitioned and reinstalled, they dropped and destroyed one of the drives. When I got the drives back, they had been configured for single-processor workstations with the wrong ethernet card. I had asked them several times not to install lilo to the MBR, but they did anyway.
I spent more time dealing with VA hassles than if I had built and installed the machines myself. I recommended VA because I wanted to support a 'pure' Linux company, but I got burned by it, big time. All the Linux nay-sayers around the division got a big kick watching me deal with all these hassles, and they used it as ammunition to shoot down my attempts to get Linux supported officially by the division.
I really don't understand how VA has become as successful as they are given their mediocre hardware, high prices, and lousy support.
-Mark
-----------------------------------------------
Mark B. Allan NASA Ames Research Center
QSS Group, Inc. Neuro-Engineering Lab
650 - 604 - 0461 (lab) Mail Stop 269-2
650 - 604 - 3594 (fax) Moffett Field, CA 94035
mallan@ptolemy--nospam--.arc.nasa.gov
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/ic/ne.html
-----------------------------------------------
Compatibility with GTK is a step forward. The wording of the announcement is a step back (was it really necessary to dis GTK?)
What both teams (KDE and GNOME) should be doing is working on a common format that both toolkits can use that will make them look the same to the end user. There is no good reason why the end user has to be concerned about whether s/he's using GNOME or KDE.
In much the same way as a Windows user doesn't know whether the app s/he's using was written in Visual Basic or VC++, Linux users shouldn't need to know whether they're using GNOME or KDE.
Hopefully, some day, GNOME and KDE will move past their petty bickering and work together in a productive manner.
Cheers,
Mark B. Allan
The 'support' that most OpenSource advocates want is open specs, and Linksys has a long history of being cooperative with the Linux community. I've got a couple of Linksys cards, and they work fine. Most tech support personnel are low paid morons and wouldn't have a clue how to troubleshoot a Linux system.
= 26http://www.linksys.com/support/kb.asp?kb id=116 = 25
Doing a search for 'linux' on their web site comes up with the following links which might be of help to you:
http://www.linksys.com/faqs/default.asp?fqid=10
http://www.linksys.com/support/support.asp?spid
http://www.linksys.com/support/support.asp?spid
Don't be too harsh on Linksys - they were an early adopter of Linux (I was using Linksys cards under Linux over 4 years ago) and I've been pretty pleased with their products.
Cheers,
Mark
Why? What part of the QPL restricts internal/research projects? You're not allowed to distribute GPL code without source either, whether it has been modified or not. If you write an app that uses GNU Readline, you would be under the same restrictions as if you'd used free QT, right?
I'm not a laywer, and I'm not flaming. I'm just curious as to how you came to this conclusion. Restrictions of the QPL apply when the software is *distributed*, same as the GPL. I don't see anything in there that prevents internal use.
Cheers,
Mark
One huge advantage of Qt is that you can target Windows and *NIX with the same source. We use it in our lab at NASA, and have no regrets at all. I do agree that Qt is a bit pricy, but we've found that the platform flexibility allowed by Qt is worth it. I evaluated wxWindows and FLTK before commiting to Qt, and although they are both quality toolkits, Qt offered more functionality, flexibility and has a (IMO) cleaner coding style.
Unlike many other libraries, GUI libraries are complex and require a significant amount of time on the part of the programmer to learn how to use them.This is another big advantage of Qt: it's really, really easy to learn and use. The coding style is very similar to Java, and it leads to clean, easy to read, easy to maintain code.
Java, unfortunately, just isn't there yet. It's not stable or fast enough for many of the things we need to do (although we do use Java for some projects). Because of the similarity of Java and Qt, many of our APIs and some of our apps will work with both toolkits, and some developers bounce between the two.
I'm not a laywer, and really don't care to become one, but why do you think the QPL is any different to the GPL for internal use? Section 6 has this line: These items, when distributed, are subject to the following requirements: It seems to me that Qt is find to use for internal research, as long as you don't distrubute it - same as the GPL.
In my opinion, Qt is a superior technical solution than any of the other toolkits available (free or commercial). It is expensive, but we've found it to be worth the cost on more than one occasion.
Cheers, Mark Allan http://ic-www.arc.nasa.gov/ic/projects/neuro/ifc/At least one customer is NASA - our lab has two Qt development licences. One HUGE advantage of a commercial Qt licence is that you can use the exact same source code for Windows and *NIX, which has saved my butt several times. It also allows me to do 90% of my development work on my preferred platform (Linux), then port to NT or IRIX at the last minute.
c /active.html
Even though $2000 seems like a huge amount for an individual developer, it's a drop in the bucket for a large organization.
I view the commercial Qt licence a lot like the Cygnus commercial licence - it's a way to generate revenue so that they can continue doing what they like to do best - write code.
If you ask me, the whole open source thing is getting way to politicized. Are we lawyers or coders?
Cheers,
Mark Allan
http://ic-www.arc.nasa.gov/ic/projects/neuro/if
A quote from the message I was responding to:
"It worked just great in windows,"
Therefore, the Linux drivers were at fault, no?
You can't blame hardware with fully open specs if it works great in Windows, but performs poorly in Linux.
You're complaining about SiS hardware, but who wrote the poor drivers? The open source community or SiS?
SiS has opened their specs in the past, which is what the open source community wants. Don't blame them if the drivers are not up to par, blame the open source community.
Let's have a little consistency here. NVIDIA gets bashed for releasing good drivers, but they won't release their specs. SiS gets bashed because they've released their specs, but the open source drivers suck.
What's it going to be?
I'm a little confused here. SiS has opened their specs in the past so that open source developers can write drivers for their hardware. This is what all the open source advocates want.
So the SiS drivers written by the open source community suck, and people have a hard time getting their hardware to work because of the poor drivers.
Now, they annouce they will be writing their own drivers for Linux.
Why should there be any connection between drivers/support written by the open source community and drivers/support from the company creating the hardware?
SiS has give the open source community the 'support' that they want (i.e. open specs) in the past, but users complain about the crappy drivers, and say 'avoid their hardware'.
I don't get it.
Apparently, ELSA is making a PCI GeForce in Germany:4 /erazorxpci-wc.html
http://www.zdnet.de/produkte/artikel/komp/20000
I seem to remember NVidia making a statement that they wanted to get into the Mac market, so they'll have to get board manufacturers to make PCI versions for that.
Why do you need PCI? All the newer boards I know of have AGP, so you probably have a pretty slow processor. A faster processor would help you out a lot more than a faster video card. You can probably get an Athlon+motherboard for less $$ than a Voodoo5.
Cheers,
Mark
They seem more like fence-sitters to me.
e _nvidia.html
NVidia have been very strong supporters of OpenGL, and I would feel safe in saying that they have the best consumer-level OpenGL drivers for Windows.
On one hand, they are supplying chips for the X-Box. On the other, they are supplying chips for the Indrema box, which will be an X-Box competitor which runs Linux:
http://www.indrema.com/servlet/site?page=Releas
I doubt that Indrema will face the XBox with any real competition, but it does run Linux, and it could be a cool thin client. The kind of Linux box you'd buy for your kids or your grandmother.
In addition to close ties to Microsoft, they have very close ties to SGI. SGI has been very active in the Linux arena recently, with contributions such as GLX, the OGL SI, XFS, in addition to kernel and compiler work. The NVidia Linux drivers have been developed in conjunction with SGI, and the drivers rock (with some caveats, but they're beta drivers)
Given Microsoft's history with 'collaborations' with companies, it's reasonable to assume the worst. But NVidia certainly has the balls to play this game, and they seem to be doing OK so far...
Cheers,
Mark
That is always a concern, but it's not a guaranteed outcome. 3dfx dug their own hole by being extremely proprietary for many years (why has everyone suddenly forgotten how aggressive they were at protecting their intellectual property now that they're open source?) and releasing several crappy products in a row.
There are a lot of talented people at NVidia doing a lot of interesting things. I think that, in this case, a nice lead in techical quality could give them the opportunity to do more research into different rendering methods, rather than just being in a "they have that feature, so we have to have it to!" mode.
For the last several years, consumer graphics card manufacturers have been trying to get to Infinite Reality level graphics. Now that they're almost there - what now? SGI doesn't have any new high end architectures to copy from, so what's the next step? Some large, well funded company needs to spend money and time on research to discover that next step. NVidia seems to be the best choice (especially given their relationship with SGI)
If the press release is to be believed, ATI will soon be nipping at NVidia's heels, so I'm not too worried about total market dominance. The Radeon chip will have support for 3D textures, which will have a lot of interesting uses. If the Radeon even comes close to GeForce2 quality, it will totally saturate the market thanks to ATI's distribution channels.
Cheers,
Mark
I really don't see the problem here. Even if you're running the Windows version, you have to download patches every few weeks to stay current anyway. So you buy the game for the data files and download the game binary for Linux. It's not on the CD and it's not supported. So what?
The point is that a native Linux version exists. This is good. I was very surprised to hear that Epic was going to do a Linux version at all, and I think it absolutely rocks that the two biggest games/engines (UT and Q3) have native Linux versions. This is the sound of a door opening. Please don't slam it shut over some 'moral' issue that is totally irrelevant under close scrutiny. Popular game engine with native Linux version == greatly increased possibility of more games under Linux && more visibility for Linux && and more people willing to give up Windows because they can play their favorite game under Linux.
UT Linux is good for Linux whether it's on the CD or not. Stop whining.
To those of you that do purchase UT: make sure you send in your registration card with 'Linux' as your OS of choice.
Cheers,
Mark B. Allan
>Funny how the Qt and KDE supporters gloss over this little "problem"
Why do you see the Qt commercial licence as a "problem"?
GPL = no commercial/closed source development
LGPL = anything goes.
The Qt commercial licence offers a middle ground of sorts - if you want it for free, you have to distribute source. If you want to write closed source commercial apps, there is a strong financial incentive not to. This deters the proliferation of $10-40 closed source shareware apps that plague the Windows world. As far as I know, there's nothing to deter people from creating closed source GNOME apps.
IMO, Troll Tech has found a great way to support themselves (through commercial support and licences) while providing the Open Source community with a great toolkit free of charge. If you don't pay, you have to deal with the 'GPL-like' terms of their licence. Where's the problem?
MBA