Mozilla.org is an organisation. Here in Britain, where English was created, polished, and perfected (Liverpool aside), we often refer to organisations and companies as plural. They are afterall a collection of people.
I'd go as far as to say that Exchange has been their key product with regards Microsoft's domination of the Enterprise and the establishment of their monopoly. Exchange's role in Microsoft's success is often massively underrated.
They're office suite has only recently become the best. They're operating system has always been technically behind others. Every other Microsoft product has had arguably superior alternatives. Everything but Exchange.
But until recently nobody, other than maybe Lotus Notes, offered worthwhile groupware solutions. The Exchange/Outlook combination has been superior to anything else and is idiotically easy to administer.
If you ask businesses why they use Microsoft (and I'm talking about the tech guys here), the vast majority will list Exchange as a primary reason.
Part of the problem is that people are looking at writing this from scratch, which is a lot of work.
However, in April 2003 the OOo Groupware team and a few Apache James developers discussed building groupware functionality into AJ.
Apache James is already a production ready POP, NNTP and SMTP server, and has partial IMAP support. It is highly componentised, being based upon the Avalon Framework.
Basically, it was determined by OOogw and a few Apache James developers that it was more than pheasible to complete the IMAP support and add iCal and iCAP, plus the necessary authentication modules (LDAP is partly there iirc, and others). This is not a difficult task because most of the foundation work is already done. It's just a matter of implementing the few protocols that are missing.
Sadly it has not been followed up by the OOogw or AJ developers because nobody really has the time - ever the problem with OSS and volunteers. If I were a Java programmer, I would make an attempt, but I'm not.
I guess this post is a feeble attempt to lure some actual Java developers to the cause.
The thing about fan remakes, is arguably more passion is put into them than the originals whose authors are often in it for the momey. Every member of a fan remake is a fan and wants to make the game as good as possible.
Personally, I'm going to wait before there's something fundamentally wrong with Gentoo before I switch.
I lean towards agreement with this statement. It's not as if Gentoo does not have a Social Contract and is closed in any way. Sure, a few private mail lists may exist, as they do in other projects, and there may be business motives behind key Gentoo developers. But at the end of the day the project is GPL, top to bottom, (hence it is forkable) and it will not go in a direction that disatisfies the non-core developers and user community, otherwise it will lose those two precious commodities and cease to exist.
And at the end of the day, people have to put bread on the table. If they find a way to do that through a GPL project, good luck to them. I say good luck to both Gentoo and Zynot, and given my excellent experiences in using Gentoo (never will I go back to something rpm based) I'll be using the best one of the two for the forseeable future.
Who knows, maybe the fork will be good and any co-operation - intentional or through GPL'd code swapping - will probably benefit both distros. (Yes, projects can co-operate in when the leads hate each other, that's the GPL for you.)
Anybody who's been involved in the Gentoo community will know what complete bull this post is.
The developers have always been friendly and helpful. And there's not scores of developers either, not when compared to Debian. I think the numbers weight in at around 40 (Gentoo) to 500 (Debian). In those numbers, the devs only have so much time and can't do everything.
The GWN (Gentoo Weekly Newsletter) only came into existance when a user stepped forward and made the time to do it. Isn't that what community projects are all about? Users helping out?
When I originally installed Gentoo (going back to September '02) I received help from numerous developers, including Seemant, who made the time to answer the irc questions of a complete Linux newbie (myself) and help me get it up and running. And from what I see in my occasional forays into #gentoo on freenode (talk about for-profit!) this holds true as much today as it did back then.
The comments on the forums... I mean, *come on*, talk about unsubstantiated crap. The forums are half of what is good about Gentoo because so much help and how-to can be found there, a *lot* of it posted by moderators and the few devs that use the forums.
It sounds like you've had a bad encounter with one dev (Kurt Lieber?) and your ideas (why don't you link them?) have been ignored. Many ideas are brought up in the forums. Many are unpractical. Many simply need somebody to implement them and the current devs do not have the time to do it.
This post can only have been modded up by people who have not experienced the Gentoo community.
Exactly! The iterative design process provides a working result early on and early iterations will add a lot to the potential seen in a project by those that try it, whereas it can take a lot of effort to produce only a small result in a "well designed" project.
This is especially pertinent in the open source world where a working project is often the advertising medium that will attract additional developers.
The functional and featureful Linux kernel attracts a lot of attention, enough to address the design deficiencies and slowly bypass or remove them (eg kernel modules). Early versions of it showed promise and will have brought in driver developers, extending it's reach.
The Hurd, despite being well designed, is a long way off acheiving the features and functionality of Linux. Because it has taken so long to work, few people have tried it and thought, "this is good and I can make it better!" Hence it has attracted little interest in a competitive field of limited talent and lacks the native driver support needed to show off it's current feature set to a maximum audience.
Add to that the fact that OSS software gets to it's users a lot earlier than it's closed source counterparts.
After all, it's the users who find the obscure bugs in places that the developers would never think to check.
Then, as the project develops from an early age, the community feeds back in multiple ways - feature requests, bug reports, public mail list discussions that involve non-coding developers. This contributes greatly towards a projects direction.
I'd go as far to say that the user involvement in popular OSS projects probably finds more bugs than extra developers looking at code.
Given the amount of money already spent (already in the billions) and the amount this project will go over budget (one analyst thinks the bill will be around £20 billion), I don't think 'software' is what costs that much.
The problem is that the people who sell IT solutions do so to make money, not because they care. It's the cold hard truth of capitalism. If they can get more money, they will. And the government will give it to them.
Not only that, the whole thing is a bogus statement anyway.
Surely, if the government can get free software, then the people selling software have to make their software that bit better. Surely it would be a good thing for the government to consider OSS because then any software that doesn't cut the mustard will get dropped. Only the strong will survive. Evolution for the betterment of mankind.
The problem is, the UK government throws away it's money. I should know to a degree, my Dad (who owns his own IT solutions company) tells me that government contracts are the grail because they pay so much and it hardly matters if you fail to complete anything (on time or at all).
Look at the NHS - a £6 billion budget for a nationwide system to unify hospitals. £6 billion!? The institution employs 250,000... even giving everybody a machine at £400 each you're talking little more than £100 million. Networking... decent servers and software... where the hell do they spend £6 billion? On outsourcing it to probably 13 or 14 different operators.
The government has been a long standing joke and if they listen to desparate reports like this (please don't take away our easy money) then it simply proves that those in charge either are clueless or have another agenda.
It's interesting how those UK institutes that do have a restricted budget (Universities, councils) turn to OSS and find it more than meets the bill (pun intented). How come Whitehall doesn't listen to them?
If it was only the hardware that was evolving, then yes this would be the case.
This is unlikely to be the case. Should it get to the point where the hardware is too many and too complicated for everybody to program for, you'll find generic interfaces to the hardware being implemented in generic assembly languages like table assembly.
Or perhaps firmware will develop further to ease driver creation.
There are many areas in which layers can develop to keep developing drivers possible for mortals. The industry isn't going to make things too difficult for itself.
Ever since the computer industry started, each extra level of complexity has seen an extra layer added to keep software creation manageable, and drivers are no exception.
Whilst Kristian's fears have foundation, there'll be ways around them even if it's as extreme as hobby OSes having to cooperate on driver development.
I binge drink for a couple of days every 2-3 months. I do it because it is fun. And you are suggesting I'm addicted?
Addictions are impulsive things you do repeatedly, not an occasional flourish. By your definition and kind of regularly occuring event, no matter the time span, is an addiction.
Although I would point out that disapproving of somebody's lifestyle and/or conduct is very different from judging them as people. Were I to meet this guy, I'd hold no preconceptions of who he would be.
I'd vehemently disagree with this. There is a clear distinction between a hardcore drinker and an alcoholic.
Somebody who is only a hardcore drinker is somebody who can drink a lot over a short period and not suffer severe effects. I have a few friends who will binge drink over 4-5 days and come out of that period in reasonable condition. But after that period they will return to a relatively alcohol free lifestyle.
An alcoholic, an addict, may also show the qualities of a hardcore drinker. But an alcoholic has become emtionally/physically/somehow dependent on alcohol and is unable to resist the urges and stop after any period of drinking. They will wake up and drink til they sleep until they get help breaking that addiction.
That depends on the kind of people you deal with and the company you keep.
I get the impression from the article that Richard Stenlund has few friends and the people he deals with (bear in mind he's a computer repair person) are probably computer illiterate and just want their machines fixed, probably appearing very condescending when dealing with him when in reality they just want their PC fixed and working again.
If he's afraid to be himself in reality (he claims he can be perverted online, but not in reality) it's either personal inhibitions - possibly lacking self confidence and dignity - or the fact he is disturbed. Most people are perverts in an acceptable manner (ie no kiddie/animal porn) and plenty of people are capable of expressing it. UK viewers need only watch late night Channel 5 to find that out.
Spending 7 hours a day on a computer game is indicative of an addiction and/or a lacking social life. He needs to 'get a life' and find out that the a lot of real world is indeed a beautiful and interesting place if you get out there and find it, and a lot of people are likeable and interesting - it just depends who you mix with.
If anything, I'd say Stenlund is immature and his wife irresponsible for letting him be that way. I'd be curious to know how he met his wife - probably online. And I'm not judging either him or her - they may be very decent people. But something is seriously wrong, even by Slashdot standards.
Slashdot Mirror
More relevantly, I wonder how many international incidents will be avoided by poor translation.
Mozilla.org is an organisation. Here in Britain, where English was created, polished, and perfected (Liverpool aside), we often refer to organisations and companies as plural. They are afterall a collection of people.
I'd go as far as to say that Exchange has been their key product with regards Microsoft's domination of the Enterprise and the establishment of their monopoly. Exchange's role in Microsoft's success is often massively underrated.
They're office suite has only recently become the best. They're operating system has always been technically behind others. Every other Microsoft product has had arguably superior alternatives. Everything but Exchange.
But until recently nobody, other than maybe Lotus Notes, offered worthwhile groupware solutions. The Exchange/Outlook combination has been superior to anything else and is idiotically easy to administer.
If you ask businesses why they use Microsoft (and I'm talking about the tech guys here), the vast majority will list Exchange as a primary reason.
Part of the problem is that people are looking at writing this from scratch, which is a lot of work.
However, in April 2003 the OOo Groupware team and a few Apache James developers discussed building groupware functionality into AJ.
Apache James is already a production ready POP, NNTP and SMTP server, and has partial IMAP support. It is highly componentised, being based upon the Avalon Framework.
Basically, it was determined by OOogw and a few Apache James developers that it was more than pheasible to complete the IMAP support and add iCal and iCAP, plus the necessary authentication modules (LDAP is partly there iirc, and others). This is not a difficult task because most of the foundation work is already done. It's just a matter of implementing the few protocols that are missing.
Sadly it has not been followed up by the OOogw or AJ developers because nobody really has the time - ever the problem with OSS and volunteers. If I were a Java programmer, I would make an attempt, but I'm not.
I guess this post is a feeble attempt to lure some actual Java developers to the cause.
Mozilla.org probably do since I imagine Netscape (or their parent AOL Time Warner) pays for several full time coders for the project.
Although their efforts (whilst being very good) can't touch the ambitions of the KQ9 effort.
Seriously, check out the screenshots!
The thing about fan remakes, is arguably more passion is put into them than the originals whose authors are often in it for the momey. Every member of a fan remake is a fan and wants to make the game as good as possible.
Personally, I'm going to wait before there's something fundamentally wrong with Gentoo before I switch.
I lean towards agreement with this statement. It's not as if Gentoo does not have a Social Contract and is closed in any way. Sure, a few private mail lists may exist, as they do in other projects, and there may be business motives behind key Gentoo developers. But at the end of the day the project is GPL, top to bottom, (hence it is forkable) and it will not go in a direction that disatisfies the non-core developers and user community, otherwise it will lose those two precious commodities and cease to exist.
And at the end of the day, people have to put bread on the table. If they find a way to do that through a GPL project, good luck to them. I say good luck to both Gentoo and Zynot, and given my excellent experiences in using Gentoo (never will I go back to something rpm based) I'll be using the best one of the two for the forseeable future.
Who knows, maybe the fork will be good and any co-operation - intentional or through GPL'd code swapping - will probably benefit both distros. (Yes, projects can co-operate in when the leads hate each other, that's the GPL for you.)
How the hell is this '5, Interesting'?
Anybody who's been involved in the Gentoo community will know what complete bull this post is.
The developers have always been friendly and helpful. And there's not scores of developers either, not when compared to Debian. I think the numbers weight in at around 40 (Gentoo) to 500 (Debian). In those numbers, the devs only have so much time and can't do everything.
The GWN (Gentoo Weekly Newsletter) only came into existance when a user stepped forward and made the time to do it. Isn't that what community projects are all about? Users helping out?
When I originally installed Gentoo (going back to September '02) I received help from numerous developers, including Seemant, who made the time to answer the irc questions of a complete Linux newbie (myself) and help me get it up and running. And from what I see in my occasional forays into #gentoo on freenode (talk about for-profit!) this holds true as much today as it did back then.
The comments on the forums... I mean, *come on*, talk about unsubstantiated crap. The forums are half of what is good about Gentoo because so much help and how-to can be found there, a *lot* of it posted by moderators and the few devs that use the forums.
It sounds like you've had a bad encounter with one dev (Kurt Lieber?) and your ideas (why don't you link them?) have been ignored. Many ideas are brought up in the forums. Many are unpractical. Many simply need somebody to implement them and the current devs do not have the time to do it.
This post can only have been modded up by people who have not experienced the Gentoo community.
Exactly! The iterative design process provides a working result early on and early iterations will add a lot to the potential seen in a project by those that try it, whereas it can take a lot of effort to produce only a small result in a "well designed" project.
This is especially pertinent in the open source world where a working project is often the advertising medium that will attract additional developers.
The functional and featureful Linux kernel attracts a lot of attention, enough to address the design deficiencies and slowly bypass or remove them (eg kernel modules). Early versions of it showed promise and will have brought in driver developers, extending it's reach.
The Hurd, despite being well designed, is a long way off acheiving the features and functionality of Linux. Because it has taken so long to work, few people have tried it and thought, "this is good and I can make it better!" Hence it has attracted little interest in a competitive field of limited talent and lacks the native driver support needed to show off it's current feature set to a maximum audience.
it only makes sense to create an open source version of the core platform.
I thought there were already open source java's out there...
I guess Blackdown and Kaffe are mirages.
Add to that the fact that OSS software gets to it's users a lot earlier than it's closed source counterparts.
After all, it's the users who find the obscure bugs in places that the developers would never think to check.
Then, as the project develops from an early age, the community feeds back in multiple ways - feature requests, bug reports, public mail list discussions that involve non-coding developers. This contributes greatly towards a projects direction.
I'd go as far to say that the user involvement in popular OSS projects probably finds more bugs than extra developers looking at code.
Given the amount of money already spent (already in the billions) and the amount this project will go over budget (one analyst thinks the bill will be around £20 billion), I don't think 'software' is what costs that much.
The problem is that the people who sell IT solutions do so to make money, not because they care. It's the cold hard truth of capitalism. If they can get more money, they will. And the government will give it to them.
Not only that, the whole thing is a bogus statement anyway.
Surely, if the government can get free software, then the people selling software have to make their software that bit better. Surely it would be a good thing for the government to consider OSS because then any software that doesn't cut the mustard will get dropped. Only the strong will survive. Evolution for the betterment of mankind.
The problem is, the UK government throws away it's money. I should know to a degree, my Dad (who owns his own IT solutions company) tells me that government contracts are the grail because they pay so much and it hardly matters if you fail to complete anything (on time or at all).
Look at the NHS - a £6 billion budget for a nationwide system to unify hospitals. £6 billion!? The institution employs 250,000... even giving everybody a machine at £400 each you're talking little more than £100 million. Networking... decent servers and software... where the hell do they spend £6 billion? On outsourcing it to probably 13 or 14 different operators.
The government has been a long standing joke and if they listen to desparate reports like this (please don't take away our easy money) then it simply proves that those in charge either are clueless or have another agenda.
It's interesting how those UK institutes that do have a restricted budget (Universities, councils) turn to OSS and find it more than meets the bill (pun intented). How come Whitehall doesn't listen to them?
Judging from the way you look (isn't that the way we all review other people?) you offer nothing new.
50% boring,
50% interesting.
Honestly... if you look THAT similar to lots of other people, can you really offer enough to justify your existence to anyone other than your parents?
Give me something really new... Ossie Osbourne new... for a maturing person, and I'll pay attention.
If it was only the hardware that was evolving, then yes this would be the case.
This is unlikely to be the case. Should it get to the point where the hardware is too many and too complicated for everybody to program for, you'll find generic interfaces to the hardware being implemented in generic assembly languages like table assembly.
Or perhaps firmware will develop further to ease driver creation.
There are many areas in which layers can develop to keep developing drivers possible for mortals. The industry isn't going to make things too difficult for itself.
Ever since the computer industry started, each extra level of complexity has seen an extra layer added to keep software creation manageable, and drivers are no exception.
Whilst Kristian's fears have foundation, there'll be ways around them even if it's as extreme as hobby OSes having to cooperate on driver development.
I binge drink for a couple of days every 2-3 months. I do it because it is fun. And you are suggesting I'm addicted?
Addictions are impulsive things you do repeatedly, not an occasional flourish. By your definition and kind of regularly occuring event, no matter the time span, is an addiction.
Touche.
Although I would point out that disapproving of somebody's lifestyle and/or conduct is very different from judging them as people. Were I to meet this guy, I'd hold no preconceptions of who he would be.
I'd vehemently disagree with this. There is a clear distinction between a hardcore drinker and an alcoholic.
Somebody who is only a hardcore drinker is somebody who can drink a lot over a short period and not suffer severe effects. I have a few friends who will binge drink over 4-5 days and come out of that period in reasonable condition. But after that period they will return to a relatively alcohol free lifestyle.
An alcoholic, an addict, may also show the qualities of a hardcore drinker. But an alcoholic has become emtionally/physically/somehow dependent on alcohol and is unable to resist the urges and stop after any period of drinking. They will wake up and drink til they sleep until they get help breaking that addiction.
That depends on the kind of people you deal with and the company you keep.
I get the impression from the article that Richard Stenlund has few friends and the people he deals with (bear in mind he's a computer repair person) are probably computer illiterate and just want their machines fixed, probably appearing very condescending when dealing with him when in reality they just want their PC fixed and working again.
If he's afraid to be himself in reality (he claims he can be perverted online, but not in reality) it's either personal inhibitions - possibly lacking self confidence and dignity - or the fact he is disturbed. Most people are perverts in an acceptable manner (ie no kiddie/animal porn) and plenty of people are capable of expressing it. UK viewers need only watch late night Channel 5 to find that out.
Spending 7 hours a day on a computer game is indicative of an addiction and/or a lacking social life. He needs to 'get a life' and find out that the a lot of real world is indeed a beautiful and interesting place if you get out there and find it, and a lot of people are likeable and interesting - it just depends who you mix with.
If anything, I'd say Stenlund is immature and his wife irresponsible for letting him be that way. I'd be curious to know how he met his wife - probably online. And I'm not judging either him or her - they may be very decent people. But something is seriously wrong, even by Slashdot standards.
...am I forced to turn off my Gameboy Advance SP?
You obviously didn't look at the architecture diagram on the mozilla roadmap page, did you.
Yes, the roadmap was linked to by the mozillazine article.
Ignorant comments are probably responsible for more wasted time than spam email.
Oops, messed up there... meant to include Crystal Space too.
Why pay for a 3d engine when you can get them for free?
PHProjekt looks fairly decent.
They should get paid for successful reviews... ie those that do not get over turned.
Although can a patent be over turned?