Re:Why do all this free work for ONE company?
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Nokia Engineers on KHTML
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't get it. I really don't. A company releases their prodcut (a very good product in fact!) under the GPL. And when they do that, some people start to whine that "Don't do that! You are hurting the free software movement!". So releasing software as free sofware is a bad thing?
What is the problem here? TrollTech offers their product under the GPL. They also offer it under a proprietary license. They don't force anyone to use their toolkit, and you are free to fork the toolkit anytime you want to. So what is the problem here? Why is it bad to offer software under the GPL?
Assume Troll Tech's products are as good as people working with them say they are and that they should take over the world. What would we end up with? A single company monopolizing the commercial GUI development space, plus lots of people contributing free labor.
Qt is licensed under the GPL. I really fail to see how they could "monopolize" anything. or are you worried what would happen if Linux "monopolized" the OS-market? or if Red Hat "monopolized" Linux-market? Since the product (Qt, Linux or Red Hat) are GPL'ed, there will be no "monopolization" in the sense as would happen with Microsoft for example.
But people who do contribute free labor to Troll Tech should reflect on what they are doing and why they are doing it.
So I shouldn't offer any bug-reports to the kernel-folks, because that might make the product a bit better, and some company might earn some money through it?
Seriously, am I in the Twilight Zone or something? People are complaining when some company offerws kick-ass software under the GPL?
just don't see the thrill of owning one of these things
If you can see the trill of owning a regural iPod, then you should see the trill of owning one of these new iPods as well.
Seriously, this is not rocket-science! people will continue to buy iPods for the same reason they bought them before: to listen to music. It just happens that the hi-end iPods can also play back video. Or do you think that people get excited about the iPod and plan to buy one, and then find out that it can also play back video, but is a way that some people might find less than perfect? I don't think so. the video-playback is an added bonus to a device thats primary purpose is to play back music.
iPods have been selling VERY well indeed. Do you think that their sales are going to drop because they ADDED a feature to the lineup? I'm planning to buy one of these new iPods. Not because I need video-playback (hell, you can't even get the tv-shows in Finland!). But because the 6GB iPod Mini can't hold all my songs. and because they dropped the size of the regural iPod, increased the size of the screen and increased the capacity, it became a very tempting device to own. The added video-playback is a nice extra to have, sure, but it's not the feature that is most compelling for me.
Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
Academician Prokhor Zakharov "For I Have Tasted The Fruit"
Who in their right mind would get an iMac when you can get a notebook for less?
Sure you could get a x86-notebook for less, or an iBook, but those x86-notebooks are not Macs, nor do they run OS X. And to some people (notably Mac-users), that does matter. and the iMac clearly outspecs the iBook (and PowerBook). It has a lot faster processor, a lot better screen, a lot faster (and bigger) HD, a lot faster vid-card etc. etc.
Yes it does matter what OS you can use. Would you be happy if you could only run Windows95, even if some hardware-specs were better/price was lower? I bet not. And Mac-users would be pissed if they had to run Windows XP, an OS they see as clearly inferior to OS X. So they do not necessarily see that x86-hardware as an alternative to Mac.
You could get a Ford Mustang that has more HP/less price than BMW does. Does that mean that the Mustang is better? No it does not. And people who buy BMW's would never consider the Mustang to be a valid alternative to BMW.
"Due to Korn shell being one of the more popular shells written for the UNIX Operating System, Microsoft decided to include a version of it produced by Mortice Kern Systems in a UNIX integration package for Windows NT. This version was not compatible with ksh88 (a Korn shell specification), and David Korn mentioned this during a question and answer period of a Microsoft presentation during a USENIX NT conference in Seattle in 1997. Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager who was participating in the presentation, not knowing who the commenter was, insisted that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn shell. A polite debate ensued, with Sullivan continuing to insist that the man giving the criticisms was mistaken about the compatibility issues. Sullivan only backed down when an audience member stood up and mentioned that the man making the comments was David Korn."
First of all, you remap both volume up/down and channel up/down to the up & down buttons at the same time. And you put awfully lot of functionality behind the Menu-button, making that functionlaity a lot more difficult to reach. And teletext in "Menu"? Teletext is usually used to quickly check few things, burying it under menus defeats that purpose.
IIRC, PSP is bigger than the iPod. What what do you mean by "more fragile"? Aren't we talking about PSP here? The device that uses optical media, has a huge screen that just shouts "scratch me!", has dust under the screen and dead pixels....
The channel-buttons: 10 Volume: 2 Power: 1 Teletext: 1 Settings: 1 Up/Down/Left/Right/Enter: 5 Channel Up/Down: 2 Switch between two channels: 1 Input-selection: 1 PIP on/off: 1 Mute: 1
That's already 26 buttons. My remote also has 4 buttons for shortcuts to certain teletext-pages and other things, pushing the total number to 30. I also have button to change the aspect-ration of the picture, pushing the number to 31. These are all from memory, it has some other buttons as well, but I don't remember what they did. The total number is about 34-36 I think. But then again, it can also be used as a DVD/VCR-remote.
No, you do not need 34 buttons. If you really wanted to, you could survive with 13 (channel-buttons, power and sound up/down), or maybe even with just 5 (channel up/down, volume up/down and power). But you would be missing out on a lot of functionality.
Most people are not going to build their systems. And how long did it take you to buy all the components, put them together, install the software (does it come with similar software as the iMac does?), overclock the components (you said that you overclocked the machine) etc. etc.? Maybe you paid less money, but you paid more time. Also, the iMac is a all-in-one solution, whereas the machine you built is propably a bulky tower-PC with a mess of wires hanging from it's back. How's the noise-levels on that overclocked machine of yours?
Welcome to the wonderful world of x86 commodity hardware!
So, because Apple moves to x86, it means that their computers turn in to crap? Uh, OK... Or are you saying that people will use OS X in their Dell's? Unlikely. Some uber-geeks might do it, but regular Joe's will not, and Mac-fans will not do it either.
Getting dumped by their chip supplier was a death sentence for the Mac hardware.
I find it interesting that you said this right after Apple announced that sales of Mac-hardware increased by about 50% when compared to last year. If that means that Mac is "dying", I would LOVE to see what it would be like when it's thriving!
It's obvious you have never worked with xwindows before.
Well, I use it almost every day, does that count?
If you read ESR's GUI rant, you would see he talking about the CUPS GUI on a modern distribution (I believe Fedora). Then, you try to compare that with his own work from 10 years ago! Sheesh, get a clue!
Age is not a valid excuse for stupidity. So what if the GUI is 10 years old (is it?). It's still crappy and goes against the common guidelines of GUI-design.
Uh, hello?! OK/Quit on the TOP of the dialog-box? Three "Help"-buttons? In another dialog-box, the "OK/quit" has been replaced by "Save/Quit"? Consistency, anyone? Let's take a look at third screenshot shall we? The dialog-box is pretty large, but the actual content is in the middle to the window, wasting lots and lots of space. And the same style continues: lots of options visible all the time, instead of separating them to tabs (for example).
The GUI is crap, plain and simple. It goes against the established standards, it's poorly designed, it's confusing and it looks very, very bad. Instead of just ranting about crappy GUI's, maybe ESR should put his money where his mouth is, and fix his own GUI's?
The problems discovered were pretty much valid stuff for either desktop - and we tested both desktops. Once the first wave of geeks has lost interest in the site and it passes the frontpage of slashdot, you might want to go back and discover that there are KDE videos up too, if that is really important.
Thanks:)! Yes, it is important
Both desktops suffer from similar problems anyway. Test one and it very likely applies to the other as well.
I have to disagree here. Sure, both are GUI's, and all GUI's share some common problems. But the two desktops are designed around different paradigms, and it would be interesting to see comparisons of the two approaches. Gnome is designed to be simple and straightforward, whereas KDE is designed to be flexible and powerful (can't find a better adjective here). Both approaches have received their share of criticism.
Related to this: in the main page there was a mention of KDM/GDM-comparison in order to find out which approach is better. I for one would be interested in that data. Maybe it was already presented to KDE-devels, I don't know. But unwashed massess are interested as well (in this case, the "unwashed mass" is me).
We should care about the whole "free desktop", not just one single project really.
If that is the case, why were the tests 100% Gnome-focused? They were done on Gnome-desktop, using Gnome-tools and apps. To me that DOES seem like "caring about one single project". If this was about "whole free desktop" and not just about one single project, then I don't really see any reason why this should be focused on one single project (Gnome), while excluding the other major desktop (KDE). Or should we care about the "whole free desktop" only as long as it involves only Gnome? If we start caring about KDE as well, then we are "caring about one single project"?
If the plan is to improve the "whole free desktop", I fail to see how putting all the resources behind Gnome helps there. It's good for Gnome, but about half of the "free desktop"-users are left more or less outside. Is that the plan? KDE IS part of the "whole free desktop" (just like Gnome is), and pretending that it's not does not help anyone.
The tests were about very specific tasks. And the guidance given might apply to Gnome might not apply to KDE. Evolution received criticism regarding the icons. That feedback helps Evolution and Gnome, but it doesn't help KDE/Kontact as much. So saying that "what applies to Gnome propably applies to KDE as well" does not fly, espesially if the tasks are very specific, and feedback given is very detailed ("icons don't look so good" etc.), since while both KDE and Gnome are desktops, they differ in implementation and details (the very things the feedback was about).
Take a look at the Performance-section. Could Cairo use bits and pieces of Xara-renderer? Or could we replace Cairo with Xara's implementation? Propably not, due to licencing....
Betterdesktop is part of OpenSUSE, and OpenSUSE is KDE-focused. And like I said, they apparently did do KDE-related tests as well, but they only released their Gnome-results. To me that's pretty strange.
Is it too far fetched to think that they may be aligning themselves towards Gnome as their DE of choice?
They do say this: "Over the past year, we have conducted many usability tests on different parts of the KDE and GNOME desktops.". Too bad that they decided to only share their Gnome-findings. What happened to their finding regarding KDE?
They try to paint themselves as an project intended to help the Unix/Linux-desktop, including both KDE and Gnome. Yet their actual work is 100% Gnome-focused. And it's actually part of OpenSUSE, which itself is KDE-focused.
That's KDE's own effort, and they do not have the resources that Novell has. And apparently betterdesktop.org did conduct KDE-tests as well, but for some reason they decided to only publish their Gnome-results. Strange....
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What is the problem here? TrollTech offers their product under the GPL. They also offer it under a proprietary license. They don't force anyone to use their toolkit, and you are free to fork the toolkit anytime you want to. So what is the problem here? Why is it bad to offer software under the GPL?
Qt is licensed under the GPL. I really fail to see how they could "monopolize" anything. or are you worried what would happen if Linux "monopolized" the OS-market? or if Red Hat "monopolized" Linux-market? Since the product (Qt, Linux or Red Hat) are GPL'ed, there will be no "monopolization" in the sense as would happen with Microsoft for example.
So I shouldn't offer any bug-reports to the kernel-folks, because that might make the product a bit better, and some company might earn some money through it?
Seriously, am I in the Twilight Zone or something? People are complaining when some company offerws kick-ass software under the GPL?
If you can see the trill of owning a regural iPod, then you should see the trill of owning one of these new iPods as well.
Seriously, this is not rocket-science! people will continue to buy iPods for the same reason they bought them before: to listen to music. It just happens that the hi-end iPods can also play back video. Or do you think that people get excited about the iPod and plan to buy one, and then find out that it can also play back video, but is a way that some people might find less than perfect? I don't think so. the video-playback is an added bonus to a device thats primary purpose is to play back music.
iPods have been selling VERY well indeed. Do you think that their sales are going to drop because they ADDED a feature to the lineup? I'm planning to buy one of these new iPods. Not because I need video-playback (hell, you can't even get the tv-shows in Finland!). But because the 6GB iPod Mini can't hold all my songs. and because they dropped the size of the regural iPod, increased the size of the screen and increased the capacity, it became a very tempting device to own. The added video-playback is a nice extra to have, sure, but it's not the feature that is most compelling for me.
Well, my text was a quote from SMAC :)
Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
Academician Prokhor Zakharov
"For I Have Tasted The Fruit"
"Dr Elvin predicted..."
For a moment I read that as "Dr Evil"...
Sure you could get a x86-notebook for less, or an iBook, but those x86-notebooks are not Macs, nor do they run OS X. And to some people (notably Mac-users), that does matter. and the iMac clearly outspecs the iBook (and PowerBook). It has a lot faster processor, a lot better screen, a lot faster (and bigger) HD, a lot faster vid-card etc. etc.
Yes it does matter what OS you can use. Would you be happy if you could only run Windows95, even if some hardware-specs were better/price was lower? I bet not. And Mac-users would be pissed if they had to run Windows XP, an OS they see as clearly inferior to OS X. So they do not necessarily see that x86-hardware as an alternative to Mac.
You could get a Ford Mustang that has more HP/less price than BMW does. Does that mean that the Mustang is better? No it does not. And people who buy BMW's would never consider the Mustang to be a valid alternative to BMW.
"Due to Korn shell being one of the more popular shells written for the UNIX Operating System, Microsoft decided to include a version of it produced by Mortice Kern Systems in a UNIX integration package for Windows NT. This version was not compatible with ksh88 (a Korn shell specification), and David Korn mentioned this during a question and answer period of a Microsoft presentation during a USENIX NT conference in Seattle in 1997. Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager who was participating in the presentation, not knowing who the commenter was, insisted that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn shell. A polite debate ensued, with Sullivan continuing to insist that the man giving the criticisms was mistaken about the compatibility issues. Sullivan only backed down when an audience member stood up and mentioned that the man making the comments was David Korn."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korn
AFAIK, they are not. They thought about it, but decided not to do it.
As opposed to the various US administrations
First of all, you remap both volume up/down and channel up/down to the up & down buttons at the same time. And you put awfully lot of functionality behind the Menu-button, making that functionlaity a lot more difficult to reach. And teletext in "Menu"? Teletext is usually used to quickly check few things, burying it under menus defeats that purpose.
Yeah, if you like brown. Lots of brown.
Soon. This was consumer-oriented event, not Pro-oriented. Upgraded PB's and PM's will follow up shortly.
IIRC, PSP is bigger than the iPod. What what do you mean by "more fragile"? Aren't we talking about PSP here? The device that uses optical media, has a huge screen that just shouts "scratch me!", has dust under the screen and dead pixels....
The channel-buttons: 10
Volume: 2
Power: 1
Teletext: 1
Settings: 1
Up/Down/Left/Right/Enter: 5
Channel Up/Down: 2
Switch between two channels: 1
Input-selection: 1
PIP on/off: 1
Mute: 1
That's already 26 buttons. My remote also has 4 buttons for shortcuts to certain teletext-pages and other things, pushing the total number to 30. I also have button to change the aspect-ration of the picture, pushing the number to 31. These are all from memory, it has some other buttons as well, but I don't remember what they did. The total number is about 34-36 I think. But then again, it can also be used as a DVD/VCR-remote.
No, you do not need 34 buttons. If you really wanted to, you could survive with 13 (channel-buttons, power and sound up/down), or maybe even with just 5 (channel up/down, volume up/down and power). But you would be missing out on a lot of functionality.
Most people are not going to build their systems. And how long did it take you to buy all the components, put them together, install the software (does it come with similar software as the iMac does?), overclock the components (you said that you overclocked the machine) etc. etc.? Maybe you paid less money, but you paid more time. Also, the iMac is a all-in-one solution, whereas the machine you built is propably a bulky tower-PC with a mess of wires hanging from it's back. How's the noise-levels on that overclocked machine of yours?
So, because Apple moves to x86, it means that their computers turn in to crap? Uh, OK... Or are you saying that people will use OS X in their Dell's? Unlikely. Some uber-geeks might do it, but regular Joe's will not, and Mac-fans will not do it either.
Sure! Same place, same time?
I find it interesting that you said this right after Apple announced that sales of Mac-hardware increased by about 50% when compared to last year. If that means that Mac is "dying", I would LOVE to see what it would be like when it's thriving!
HAH! Anyone who believes that is either blind or stupid (or both)!
Well, I use it almost every day, does that count?
Age is not a valid excuse for stupidity. So what if the GUI is 10 years old (is it?). It's still crappy and goes against the common guidelines of GUI-design.
Uh, hello?! OK/Quit on the TOP of the dialog-box? Three "Help"-buttons? In another dialog-box, the "OK/quit" has been replaced by "Save/Quit"? Consistency, anyone? Let's take a look at third screenshot shall we? The dialog-box is pretty large, but the actual content is in the middle to the window, wasting lots and lots of space. And the same style continues: lots of options visible all the time, instead of separating them to tabs (for example).
The GUI is crap, plain and simple. It goes against the established standards, it's poorly designed, it's confusing and it looks very, very bad. Instead of just ranting about crappy GUI's, maybe ESR should put his money where his mouth is, and fix his own GUI's?
Thanks
I have to disagree here. Sure, both are GUI's, and all GUI's share some common problems. But the two desktops are designed around different paradigms, and it would be interesting to see comparisons of the two approaches. Gnome is designed to be simple and straightforward, whereas KDE is designed to be flexible and powerful (can't find a better adjective here). Both approaches have received their share of criticism.
Related to this: in the main page there was a mention of KDM/GDM-comparison in order to find out which approach is better. I for one would be interested in that data. Maybe it was already presented to KDE-devels, I don't know. But unwashed massess are interested as well (in this case, the "unwashed mass" is me).
If that is the case, why were the tests 100% Gnome-focused? They were done on Gnome-desktop, using Gnome-tools and apps. To me that DOES seem like "caring about one single project". If this was about "whole free desktop" and not just about one single project, then I don't really see any reason why this should be focused on one single project (Gnome), while excluding the other major desktop (KDE). Or should we care about the "whole free desktop" only as long as it involves only Gnome? If we start caring about KDE as well, then we are "caring about one single project"?
If the plan is to improve the "whole free desktop", I fail to see how putting all the resources behind Gnome helps there. It's good for Gnome, but about half of the "free desktop"-users are left more or less outside. Is that the plan? KDE IS part of the "whole free desktop" (just like Gnome is), and pretending that it's not does not help anyone.
The tests were about very specific tasks. And the guidance given might apply to Gnome might not apply to KDE. Evolution received criticism regarding the icons. That feedback helps Evolution and Gnome, but it doesn't help KDE/Kontact as much. So saying that "what applies to Gnome propably applies to KDE as well" does not fly, espesially if the tasks are very specific, and feedback given is very detailed ("icons don't look so good" etc.), since while both KDE and Gnome are desktops, they differ in implementation and details (the very things the feedback was about).
Take a look at the Performance-section. Could Cairo use bits and pieces of Xara-renderer? Or could we replace Cairo with Xara's implementation? Propably not, due to licencing....
Isn't ESR responsible for GUI-abominations like this? I fail to see what authority he has to talk about poor design on open source interfaces....
Betterdesktop is part of OpenSUSE, and OpenSUSE is KDE-focused. And like I said, they apparently did do KDE-related tests as well, but they only released their Gnome-results. To me that's pretty strange.
They do say this: "Over the past year, we have conducted many usability tests on different parts of the KDE and GNOME desktops.". Too bad that they decided to only share their Gnome-findings. What happened to their finding regarding KDE?
They try to paint themselves as an project intended to help the Unix/Linux-desktop, including both KDE and Gnome. Yet their actual work is 100% Gnome-focused. And it's actually part of OpenSUSE, which itself is KDE-focused.
That's KDE's own effort, and they do not have the resources that Novell has. And apparently betterdesktop.org did conduct KDE-tests as well, but for some reason they decided to only publish their Gnome-results. Strange....