Debian does not exclude Pine simply because it doesn't like the license. Pine would need to be modified in order to adhere to Debian's file system layout guidelines, but the distribution of modified Pine binaries is forbidden by the Pine license. Debian's not being anal, it's just being legal.
Wow. This slashdot has really sunk to record lows with this one. I can't believe the story got posted. Did anybody actually download the thing to see what you actually get? It's a 500k zip file! There is no Linux kernel or anything like that. By "Linux source" they meant "source for our app that will compile on Linux". They wrote the damn thing!!!! It's their code!!! Their code comes with it's own license agreement!
I use to be employed at SCO's only US tarantella distributor. We held a release party sometime in early '98 or so, as I recall (some strange pictures came out of that vodka drenched evening...something about breakdancing, but I digress). The thing with SCO is that they are yet another of those companies that can make a decent product but can't market it to save their lives. They should get together with the folks from Commodore and form a support group or something. I forget the actual number, but I remember being told that SCO had spent multiple millions of dollars developing Tarantella, but $500,000 world wide on marketing the thing. That, of course, explains why you're just hearing about it now. 8^)
IMO, Tarantella (the name and the product) is not enough to save SCO.
Sure, C++ can cause much much grief to people who don't really have a firm understanding of when different language features are appropriate and how best to take advantage of them, but the author of the article mentioned being quite happy with Qt/KDE. When C++ is applied in a skillful way, it can be very very powerful. It's just that people will often try doing too much with it. C++ is a much more complex language than most people realize, but if you really know it then you can write very very good code.
Why are you releasing your source? Is it because you want people to develop it along side your in-house people? Or is it because you want it available for peer review/bugfixing? If it is the former, then the earlier you release it the better. If you wait until the project nears release then there will just be too much code for developers to wrap their brains around. If you release early then people will be able to grab portions of the project to work on and enhance.
OTOH, if you merely want to release your code in order to allow people to fix bugs, find holes, etc, then you better have something that's both usable and well documented (on a source and end user level).
I would prefer to see the code released early so the actual development can take place in an open source environment, not just the maintenence.
I submitted this link to slashdot earlier today, but since they've posted this story they're not likely to post mine. So here it is. The article covers the Black Hat Briefing sub-conference and talks a bit about just how crazy the corporations are about finding decent security people. Definitely a decent article.
I wrote an essay a while back in laymans terms arguing the importants of adhering to open standards such as those provided by the W3C. It uses such historical examples as email (SMTP) to argue that interoperability and peer review are crucial to the continued usability of the internet. The article can be fount here and can be used as a kind of ammunition for convincing people who otherwise might not know any better than open standards really are necessary and that Microsoft's "innovations" really aren't being done with the users' interests in mind. I hope the article can be useful to people, and I would appreciate feedback on it. I am interested in continuing this argument with more articles if people are interested.
Req is no longer used at ccs. We now use rt. req had to be abandoned because it ran only on SunOS, which was not y2k compliant.
What makes you think that Req only works on SunOS? Even the README file mentions that it ran on Ultrix and was reported to have run on numerous other platforms.
Here at the College of Computer Science at Northeastern people have developed a package called Req. It is used by our systems department for tracking requests/problem reports from users. I am only familiar with it from an indirect user's point of view, meaning I've never actually seen the tracking interface in action. With a little bit of digging in the FTP site, though, I've found reference to at least web, Tk, and emacs front ends.
The FTP site is ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/sysadmin/. It doesn't seem like CCS is developing it very actively, but on the plus side it is open source.
OK, I'm replying to my own post. Call me crazy. How in god's name was my previous post interpreted as flamebait? All points were valid, I presented both sides of an arguement, and stated my opinion (and the fact that it was just my opinion!). Argh!
Or was it just because I was responding to a post that was (justifiably) considered to be flamebait? Either way, it makes little sense to me.
I don't suppose you actually read the survey, did you? Take a look. There really is no doubt that it's biased. Many of the questions a phrased in such a way as to say that you either support microsoft or you support higher software prices/slower technological progress/more laws and regulations, etc.
I try to read stories like this one with objectivity. Sure, I dislike Microsoft in general, but I don't assume ahead of time that everything they ever do will be evil or FUD ridden or marketing BS. But often it turns out that it is. Microsoft is like a politician. To them, there is much at stake every time they do something like this. They want to be sure that they've got support.
I must say that I agree with the general opinion of Slashdot readers here. It does seem like Microsoft is asking baited questions.
I realize that there's not much actual information here, but I distinctly recall reading an interview with the original GIMP developer who is most responsible for the initial implementatin of GTK+. He stated that if he had the option of starting the whole thing over, then he would have build GTK on top of Xt, which would have enabled it to handle X resources and standard Xt command line args correctly. But he essentially admitted that he really didn't know what he was doing when he started GTK+. It was a project for college and a learning experience.
I find it a little bit disturbing that GNU/Linux seems to be betting its future as a desktop OS on such a toolkit.
noah
ISS "Freedom" and double occupancy room
on
Sex in Space
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· Score: 1
I don't have a reference for this; I'm pulling it all from memory. It ran in either Scientific American or Air & Space Smithsonian in 1991 or so. In any case, apparently there was originally a plan for a two person bedroom on the International Space Station. It was intended to be used for married couples working on the station. However, it was decided that there would not commonly be married couples on the station, so they removed this room from the plan...or changed its function or something like that. They didn't want it to be used by non-married couples, and they couldn't afford to have that valuable space go unused.
So it appears that they've addressed this point to some degree. It's only a matter of time before (very wealthy) people are able to go into space for pleasure, so sex in space is going to happen eventually...It sounds interesting, really! 8^)
a) Because of the adherence to standards, many (most?) web designers will immediately start using it as their reference browser for laying out pages. Therefore, pages will look 'best when viewed with Mozilla', so naturally people will want to run it.
I disagree with this. I think that standards compliance will be completely irrelevant. IE and whatever form of 'standards' it complies to, have become the de-facto standard. By the time Mozilla is officially released, expect IE to hold well over 75% of the browser market. All the web designers out there are using windows-based HTML authoring tools, which generate HTML optimized for IE. So we're more likely to find that most pages don't look right in Mozilla and look fine in IE.
I hope I'm wrong.
Noah
Re:Mozilla is the cleanest most standards complian
on
Mozilla M9 Released
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· Score: 1
People who care about the inside not the outside will use it exclusively. Aside from Lynx.
Sure, which is why MSIE will continue gaining market share. The percentage of computer users that cares about what's on the inside of a piece of software (let alone comprehends the concepts behind its constuction) is so tiny that I can easily imagine MSIE holding 90% of the market share within a year or two.
The only way this might change is if AOL starts using Mozilla. But that's not much better than what MS is doing by tying IE to Windows. Windows users won't bother going out and downloading Mozilla because they don't care to. AOL users won't go through the task of figuring out how to use another browser with AOL because they don't care. For the vast majority of computer users out there, Mozilla will be insignificant.
I hope this does not prove to be the case, but I fear it will...
I agree that Linux is ready for primetime desktop use, and I think this article proved it. Sure the guy needed some handholding from a more knowledgeable user, but guess what: He did it! The big problem everybody talks about with regards to Linux on the desktop is installation difficulty. Here's a guy who's probably never partitioned a hard drive or installed an OS in his life, has basically no Unix experience, and he's installed Linux! How much easier do you want it? Do you really think the same guy could have installed Windows without a comparable amount of help from a support person?
It will be very interesting to read what the guy has to say in the future installments of this series.
KDE and GNOME are independant attempts to create a full featured desktop environment. This goes way beyond the functionality of a window manager. KDE does include its own window manager, but GNOME does not.
Each environment has its own widget set (KDE is based on the C++ Qt library, GNOME is based on the C GTK library). There is no reason you can't have apps from both environments on your screen at once, but the point of each is to create a unified and consistant look & feel. You defeat this if you use both together.
By unified, consistant look & feel, I mean the same widget sets, but also communication between running apps. For example, if you're running KDE, and you use the control panel to modify the color settings of the environment, those changes will affect the entire environment, including apps that are currently on screen. But the changes wouldn't affect non-KDE apps. The opposite is true as well; GNOME changes to affect non-GNOME apps.
I think the big reason for the flamewars surrounding these environments is that having a unified environment makes it look like you're trying to eliminate apps that are not part of that environment. When you've got an all-KDE desktop, and then you introduce any non-KDE app, it's not gonna look right. It won't take on all of KDE's settings and things. So people feel like KDE is trying to claim exclusive rights to your desktop or something. I think the flamewars were really pointless and non-constructive. But the developers of both projects are attempting to resolve the issues so that KDE and GNOME can interoperate happily, and Troll Tech (the company that makes Qt) has modified its license to be more compatible with free software, so the flamewars should really be over at this point.
While the QPL (the license under which Qt 2 will be brought out), is a free license, it is not compatible with the GPL.
The plan is for KDE to change its license. That involves contacting many other free software developers who are not affiliated with KDE, though. Many KDE apps are based on other GPLed code, so the original authors must give permission for KDE to use their code under a different license. It's happening now, and the license should be resolved. Debian intends to include KDE with their main distribution when that happens, and they will include Qt 2.0 (the first QPL release).
Samba 2.0 has been in the potato distribution for ages.
Regarding Pine, Debian cannot distribute it in binary form. It is not their politics preventing it, it is U. of Washington's copyright. They prevent the redistribution of any Pine binary that has been built from modified sources. Changes were made to the Pine sources in order to properly integrate it into the Debian distribution (yes, unlike that other big distro, Debian likes it when everything works together). According to the Pine license, Debian can only distribute these changes in source form (in a diff file, for example). So that's what they do.
It would be possible for somebody to build a Pine binary package that would not require changing the sources, I'd imagine. I doubt anybody will bother to do that, though.
The Debian people most definitely do NOT have a grudge against anything non-GPL. One of the most important packages to the Debian distribution, the Perl scripting language, is not licensed under the GPL. There are numerous other standard Debian packages that are not licensed under the GPL.
Provided they make the source to their Qt based apps freely available, they don't need to pay Troll a thing for their use and redistribution of Qt. For example, Debian is not giving any money to Troll to be able to put Qt on its FTP site, that's for sure.
Contarary to popular belief, Troll Tech is not made up of a bunch of ruthless Bill Gates wannabes.
noah
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
on
Civ3 For Linux
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· Score: 1
If there was a single game I would want run on Linux, it would be one of the Civilizations. I don't know anything about 3, but I play CivNet and Civ2 so much I want to buy another machine to dedicate just to them! This is great news!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Debian does not exclude Pine simply because it doesn't like the license. Pine would need to be modified in order to adhere to Debian's file system layout guidelines, but the distribution of modified Pine binaries is forbidden by the Pine license. Debian's not being anal, it's just being legal.
noah
Wow. This slashdot has really sunk to record lows with this one. I can't believe the story got posted. Did anybody actually download the thing to see what you actually get? It's a 500k zip file! There is no Linux kernel or anything like that. By "Linux source" they meant "source for our app that will compile on Linux". They wrote the damn thing!!!! It's their code!!! Their code comes with it's own license agreement!
noah
I use to be employed at SCO's only US tarantella distributor. We held a release party sometime in early '98 or so, as I recall (some strange pictures came out of that vodka drenched evening...something about breakdancing, but I digress). The thing with SCO is that they are yet another of those companies that can make a decent product but can't market it to save their lives. They should get together with the folks from Commodore and form a support group or something. I forget the actual number, but I remember being told that SCO had spent multiple millions of dollars developing Tarantella, but $500,000 world wide on marketing the thing. That, of course, explains why you're just hearing about it now. 8^)
IMO, Tarantella (the name and the product) is not enough to save SCO.
noah
Sure, C++ can cause much much grief to people who don't really have a firm understanding of when different language features are appropriate and how best to take advantage of them, but the author of the article mentioned being quite happy with Qt/KDE. When C++ is applied in a skillful way, it can be very very powerful. It's just that people will often try doing too much with it. C++ is a much more complex language than most people realize, but if you really know it then you can write very very good code.
noah
Why are you releasing your source? Is it because you want people to develop it along side your in-house people? Or is it because you want it available for peer review/bugfixing? If it is the former, then the earlier you release it the better. If you wait until the project nears release then there will just be too much code for developers to wrap their brains around. If you release early then people will be able to grab portions of the project to work on and enhance.
OTOH, if you merely want to release your code in order to allow people to fix bugs, find holes, etc, then you better have something that's both usable and well documented (on a source and end user level).
I would prefer to see the code released early so the actual development can take place in an open source environment, not just the maintenence.
noah
I submitted this link to slashdot earlier today, but since they've posted this story they're not likely to post mine. So here it is. The article covers the Black Hat Briefing sub-conference and talks a bit about just how crazy the corporations are about finding decent security people. Definitely a decent article.
noah
I wrote an essay a while back in laymans terms arguing the importants of adhering to open standards such as those provided by the W3C. It uses such historical examples as email (SMTP) to argue that interoperability and peer review are crucial to the continued usability of the internet. The article can be fount here and can be used as a kind of ammunition for convincing people who otherwise might not know any better than open standards really are necessary and that Microsoft's "innovations" really aren't being done with the users' interests in mind. I hope the article can be useful to people, and I would appreciate feedback on it. I am interested in continuing this argument with more articles if people are interested.
Noah
Req is no longer used at ccs. We now use rt. req had to be abandoned because it ran only on SunOS, which was not y2k compliant.
What makes you think that Req only works on SunOS? Even the README file mentions that it ran on Ultrix and was reported to have run on numerous other platforms.
noah
Here at the College of Computer Science at Northeastern people have developed a package called Req. It is used by our systems department for tracking requests/problem reports from users. I am only familiar with it from an indirect user's point of view, meaning I've never actually seen the tracking interface in action. With a little bit of digging in the FTP site, though, I've found reference to at least web, Tk, and emacs front ends.
The FTP site is ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/sysadmin/. It doesn't seem like CCS is developing it very actively, but on the plus side it is open source.
noah
OK, I'm replying to my own post. Call me crazy. How in god's name was my previous post interpreted as flamebait? All points were valid, I presented both sides of an arguement, and stated my opinion (and the fact that it was just my opinion!). Argh!
Or was it just because I was responding to a post that was (justifiably) considered to be flamebait? Either way, it makes little sense to me.
noah
--frustrated!
I don't suppose you actually read the survey, did you? Take a look. There really is no doubt that it's biased. Many of the questions a phrased in such a way as to say that you either support microsoft or you support higher software prices/slower technological progress/more laws and regulations, etc.
I try to read stories like this one with objectivity. Sure, I dislike Microsoft in general, but I don't assume ahead of time that everything they ever do will be evil or FUD ridden or marketing BS. But often it turns out that it is. Microsoft is like a politician. To them, there is much at stake every time they do something like this. They want to be sure that they've got support.
I must say that I agree with the general opinion of Slashdot readers here. It does seem like Microsoft is asking baited questions.
noah
--posted with Mozilla M13! Check it out!
I realize that there's not much actual information here, but I distinctly recall reading an interview with the original GIMP developer who is most responsible for the initial implementatin of GTK+. He stated that if he had the option of starting the whole thing over, then he would have build GTK on top of Xt, which would have enabled it to handle X resources and standard Xt command line args correctly. But he essentially admitted that he really didn't know what he was doing when he started GTK+. It was a project for college and a learning experience.
I find it a little bit disturbing that GNU/Linux seems to be betting its future as a desktop OS on such a toolkit.
noah
So it appears that they've addressed this point to some degree. It's only a matter of time before (very wealthy) people are able to go into space for pleasure, so sex in space is going to happen eventually...It sounds interesting, really! 8^)
noah
for laying out pages. Therefore, pages will look 'best when viewed with Mozilla', so naturally people will want to run it.
I disagree with this. I think that standards compliance will be completely irrelevant. IE and whatever form of 'standards' it complies to, have become the de-facto standard. By the time Mozilla is officially released, expect IE to hold well over 75% of the browser market. All the web designers out there are using windows-based HTML authoring tools, which generate HTML optimized for IE. So we're more likely to find that most pages don't look right in Mozilla and look fine in IE.
I hope I'm wrong.
Noah
Sure, which is why MSIE will continue gaining market share. The percentage of computer users that cares about what's on the inside of a piece of software (let alone comprehends the concepts behind its constuction) is so tiny that I can easily imagine MSIE holding 90% of the market share within a year or two.
The only way this might change is if AOL starts using Mozilla. But that's not much better than what MS is doing by tying IE to Windows. Windows users won't bother going out and downloading Mozilla because they don't care to. AOL users won't go through the task of figuring out how to use another browser with AOL because they don't care.
For the vast majority of computer users out there, Mozilla will be insignificant.
I hope this does not prove to be the case, but I fear it will...
Noah
I agree that Linux is ready for primetime desktop use, and I think this article proved it. Sure the guy needed some handholding from a more knowledgeable user, but guess what: He did it! The big problem everybody talks about with regards to Linux on the desktop is installation difficulty. Here's a guy who's probably never partitioned a hard drive or installed an OS in his life, has basically no Unix experience, and he's installed Linux! How much easier do you want it? Do you really think the same guy could have installed Windows without a comparable amount of help from a support person?
It will be very interesting to read what the guy has to say in the future installments of this series.
noah
Each environment has its own widget set (KDE is based on the C++ Qt library, GNOME is based on the C GTK library). There is no reason you can't have apps from both environments on your screen at once, but the point of each is to create a unified and consistant look & feel. You defeat this if you use both together.
By unified, consistant look & feel, I mean the same widget sets, but also communication between running apps. For example, if you're running KDE, and you use the control panel to modify the color settings of the environment, those changes will affect the entire environment, including apps that are currently on screen. But the changes wouldn't affect non-KDE apps. The opposite is true as well; GNOME changes to affect non-GNOME apps.
I think the big reason for the flamewars surrounding these environments is that having a unified environment makes it look like you're trying to eliminate apps that are not part of that environment. When you've got an all-KDE desktop, and then you introduce any non-KDE app, it's not gonna look right. It won't take on all of KDE's settings and things. So people feel like KDE is trying to claim exclusive rights to your desktop or something. I think the flamewars were really pointless and non-constructive. But the developers of both projects are attempting to resolve the issues so that KDE and GNOME can interoperate happily, and Troll Tech (the company that makes Qt) has modified its license to be more compatible with free software, so the flamewars should really be over at this point.
noah
with the GPL.
The plan is for KDE to change its license. That involves contacting many other free software developers who are not affiliated with KDE, though. Many KDE apps are based on other GPLed code, so the original authors must give permission for KDE to use their code under a different license. It's happening now, and the license should be resolved. Debian intends to include KDE with their main distribution when that happens, and they will include Qt 2.0 (the first QPL release).
noah
Samba 2.0 has been in the potato distribution for ages.
Regarding Pine, Debian cannot distribute it in binary form. It is not their politics preventing it, it is U. of Washington's copyright. They prevent the redistribution of any Pine binary that has been built from modified sources. Changes were made to the Pine sources in order to properly integrate it into the Debian distribution (yes, unlike that other big distro, Debian likes it when everything works together). According to the Pine license, Debian can only distribute these changes in source form (in a diff file, for example). So that's what they do.
It would be possible for somebody to build a Pine binary package that would not require changing the sources, I'd imagine. I doubt anybody will bother to do that, though.
The Debian people most definitely do NOT have a grudge against anything non-GPL. One of the most important packages to the Debian distribution, the Perl scripting language, is not licensed under the GPL. There are numerous other standard Debian packages that are not licensed under the GPL.
noah
Provided they make the source to their Qt based apps freely available, they don't need to pay Troll a thing for their use and redistribution of Qt. For example, Debian is not giving any money to Troll to be able to put Qt on its FTP site, that's for sure.
Contarary to popular belief, Troll Tech is not made up of a bunch of ruthless Bill Gates wannabes.
noah
If there was a single game I would want run on Linux, it would be one of the Civilizations. I don't know anything about 3, but I play CivNet and Civ2 so much I want to buy another machine to dedicate just to them! This is great news!!!
noah