The CDDL is also MPL-with-some-fixes, so it will be interesting to see how MPL2 and CDDL compare.
CDDL was definitely referenced frequently during the initial drafting of MPL 2; it resolved some problems that we knew MPL 1.1 had so it made sense to see how they had solved the problems. I'm not sure how much actual CDDL language actually survived into MPL 2 (that part of the drafting was almost two years ago now), but probably at least some.
No, that's wrong. Because the new license is compatible, when the relicensing (from MPL11/GPL/LGPL->MPL2) is complete, the software will still be licensed in a way that is compatible with GPL and LGPL code.
The only usage that will now be discouraged that was previously possible is the simple case where someone took the old code, and republished under only one license without combining it with GPL/LGPL code- in other words, they did it because they wanted it to be incompatible. (This was something that Stallman publicly stated was poor form, but some people did it anyway.) This is prohibited by the new language- you have to have a real reason now to switch the licensing, and you still have to do your first publication under both licenses instead of just one.
I have better things to do with my life than assemble a computer from scratch. I guess, to paraphrase jwz, that the only people who assemble computers from scratch are those whose time has no value (or more generously those who are too young to realize that their time has value). That may be a majority of linux users (I really have no idea), but if true, that is a sad statement.
This is, to be fair, slightly different from their supported Linux boxes- these are FreeDOS and you're expected to supply a real OS and your own support. Slashdot's first story about them appears to date from 2004; like you say, they've been selling (expensive) supported Linux boxes for a lot longer than that.
Mine is... hrm, at least two years old now? Still, nice to see it pimped here- more people should put their money where their mouth is with the big vendors and make it clear that they aren't going to use Windows on their boxes.
The crowd I was explaining it to at LWE was primarily IT people at large governments, and other people with at least some clue. [Realistically, if you can't immediately grok the value of competition, we're in pretty deep trouble to start with, regardless of the example chosen.]
No, the point really can be easily and simply driven home (especially to this crowd) by the most obvious example- Microsoft Word. Use.doc, and you get Word; use ODF and you get Open Office, Star Office, IBM's Workplace, Writely, KOffice, Abiword, and even more options- hell, your state or startups in your state can grow your own with no legal trouble whatsoever. And you can choose your operating system and other such as well, again, no problems. People aren't dumb- they don't need to be handheld on this issue. Open standards are pretty close to a no-brainer, thankfully.
Very good point. And the folks I was talking to last week were the kinds of users who are so large that they can single-handedly produce change in what standards are used, to turn the tables so that users benefit instead of producers. At least, that is what I hope happens and why I spoke;)
What I said in the talk (and I think got lost for perfectly understandable reasons of brevity on the part of the reporter) was that Linux is not ready for everyone yet. It was ready for me in 1998 (so that was the year of the linux desktop for me); it was ready for my girlfriend probably mid-2004 sometime, so that was the year of the linux desktop for her, and for Novell internally. It is certainly ready for some businesses now (as Novell proves), and has been for years, but others need any of a number of things- better usability from open office, perhaps, or better manageability when thrown at 1000 machines at a time, to give an example that had a lot of relevance when I was at Novell. For every business the reasons to be ready or not are different. So my point was not 'switch now! it is ready now!', which will always cause some people to point to their private reason not to switch, and then stop listening, but rather 'switch when you're ready, and before that, use open standards now to help you get ready to switch.
... was that 'the year of the linux desktop' will be different years for different people. For me, the year was 1998; for lots of people, it might well be 2018. But they can move that date forward by choosing open standards. The longer they keep using proprietary standards the further away the year of the linux desktop (or the year of the mac desktop, or year of $YOUR_OS_HERE) is for them.
We certainly use some open standards, but what I was getting at in the talk (I'm the speaker) was the next layer up of closed standards-.doc, ActiveX, AIM/Yahoo Chat (XMPP is not widely used at all yet), etc. Those are the things that lock you into proprietary platforms.
I'm not sure, but I believe the author of that proposal is in some way affiliated with the Center for American Progress, so it is possible that the two proposals have some genetic relationship.
"The second paragraph suggests that Deibert and his team want to use the funds to help people such as the people of China break the laws of their country. The Chinese government's track record seems to suggest that they have no problems holding a grudge (Falun Gong?). I know this is a somewhat controversial opinion, but would you want money donated by you being used in a way that is likely to piss off the Chinese government, given that you may want to deal with them in the future?"
It is safe to say that the donors know exactly what they are getting into here. Grants this large don't get given without fairly extensive understanding by both parties about what they are getting into.
[Ob. Disclosure: I work at the Berkman Center, one of the hosts of ONI. I am not privy to any specific details about the nature of this grant, though, or any strings that might be tied to it.]
Buying TrollTech wouldn't have done much for them. Liberalising the license on Qt would just have cost them money as that's TrollTechs revenue stream, and why bother when Red Hat is already funding GTK+ development quite heavily?
I'm not sure I buy that, though... RH is funding GTK devel, but not nearly to the level TrollTech is. I've heard suggestions the number of paid staff on QT could be as high as ten times that on GTK. And really, what Novell wants/needs is an answer for ISVs- and gtk's documentation and cross-platform-ness, if nothing else, are not up to snuff for that market, and would take some time to get there. So Trolltech could have offered a much faster route into the heart of ISV-dom. Of course, if Novell had made Trolltech the platform, they would have been splitting an already very small market, so maybe that weighed against it.
Novell believes that long-term, they must have a credible Linux desktop to create a full Linux ecosystem that they can sell- they realize that if they sell 'only' servers, they are hosed. That already happened once with Netware. So that's why they had to make some sort of desktop buy.
Realistically, Nat and Miguel buy them corporate desktop credibility that the SuSE guys don't have, particularly in the US- they present well (better than basically anyone, they are Names, they have a long track record of focusing on the desktop (whereas SuSE never seriously tried to sell on the desktop.) So, yes, there have been growing/integration pains, and yes, buying Trolltech could have solved the licensing problem and certainly would have integrated better, but in the end, it would have pitted Novell against Sun and Red Hat- not a particularly appealing position to be in.
[And the Mono argument, FWIW, is a pretty long-term one- if MS gets what they want, every programmer in the world will be learning C# in school within 4-5 years. Even discounting the language religious wars about productivity and such, that seems like a pretty good reason to have a C# compiler and runtime to me...]
SuSE grew on me as a distro while I was at Novell, but it still lags Red Hat, Debian, and Cobalt in the netcraft ratings, and Fedora will overtake it very, very soon if current growth patterns hold up. Worse, netcraft shows Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, and Gentoo all growing faster than SuSE. Is netcraft perfect? No. But it certainly suggests that SuSE is, at best, keeping up, and not pulling ahead. SuSE needs to work harder on innovating (both technologically, procedurally, and to a lesser extent, in marketing those other changes to the community) if it is going to catch up.
The large majority of the company's engineering is still in Utah, despite the addition of a couple hundred Linux engineers outside of Utah in the two acquisitions. The new HQ (in Waltham, MA) is more for the corporate types.
Now, grip and digital dj were not exactly the easiest programs in the world to use, but they had the idea for audio CD->ripping->music management database in late 1998- itunes didn't 'innovate' the same idea for two more years, in January of 2001.
Haha. That's actually what is happening. Novell is moving a very, very large amount of traffic right now, supposedly more than they've ever moved before.
Slashdot Mirror
The CDDL is also MPL-with-some-fixes, so it will be interesting to see how MPL2 and CDDL compare.
CDDL was definitely referenced frequently during the initial drafting of MPL 2; it resolved some problems that we knew MPL 1.1 had so it made sense to see how they had solved the problems. I'm not sure how much actual CDDL language actually survived into MPL 2 (that part of the drafting was almost two years ago now), but probably at least some.
No, that's wrong. Because the new license is compatible, when the relicensing (from MPL11/GPL/LGPL->MPL2) is complete, the software will still be licensed in a way that is compatible with GPL and LGPL code.
The only usage that will now be discouraged that was previously possible is the simple case where someone took the old code, and republished under only one license without combining it with GPL/LGPL code- in other words, they did it because they wanted it to be incompatible. (This was something that Stallman publicly stated was poor form, but some people did it anyway.) This is prohibited by the new language- you have to have a real reason now to switch the licensing, and you still have to do your first publication under both licenses instead of just one.
When someone writes the history of the new media and the new communities, /. - and CmdrTaco will get its own chapter. And that's no small thing.
Still, I'm sad you didn't hang around long enough to use ICANN's new TLD program to get the .dot TLD... ;)
I need to steal that acronym.
I like computers, and I still can't imagine anything more dull. But to each their own, I guess.
I have better things to do with my life than assemble a computer from scratch. I guess, to paraphrase jwz, that the only people who assemble computers from scratch are those whose time has no value (or more generously those who are too young to realize that their time has value). That may be a majority of linux users (I really have no idea), but if true, that is a sad statement.
This is, to be fair, slightly different from their supported Linux boxes- these are FreeDOS and you're expected to supply a real OS and your own support. Slashdot's first story about them appears to date from 2004; like you say, they've been selling (expensive) supported Linux boxes for a lot longer than that.
Mine is... hrm, at least two years old now? Still, nice to see it pimped here- more people should put their money where their mouth is with the big vendors and make it clear that they aren't going to use Windows on their boxes.
Rational Rose is open standards software... how? Because it outputs UML? Seriously? Someone please tell me I'm missing something here.
The crowd I was explaining it to at LWE was primarily IT people at large governments, and other people with at least some clue. [Realistically, if you can't immediately grok the value of competition, we're in pretty deep trouble to start with, regardless of the example chosen.]
No, the point really can be easily and simply driven home (especially to this crowd) by the most obvious example- Microsoft Word. Use .doc, and you get Word; use ODF and you get Open Office, Star Office, IBM's Workplace, Writely, KOffice, Abiword, and even more options- hell, your state or startups in your state can grow your own with no legal trouble whatsoever. And you can choose your operating system and other such as well, again, no problems. People aren't dumb- they don't need to be handheld on this issue. Open standards are pretty close to a no-brainer, thankfully.
Very good point. And the folks I was talking to last week were the kinds of users who are so large that they can single-handedly produce change in what standards are used, to turn the tables so that users benefit instead of producers. At least, that is what I hope happens and why I spoke ;)
What I said in the talk (and I think got lost for perfectly understandable reasons of brevity on the part of the reporter) was that Linux is not ready for everyone yet. It was ready for me in 1998 (so that was the year of the linux desktop for me); it was ready for my girlfriend probably mid-2004 sometime, so that was the year of the linux desktop for her, and for Novell internally. It is certainly ready for some businesses now (as Novell proves), and has been for years, but others need any of a number of things- better usability from open office, perhaps, or better manageability when thrown at 1000 machines at a time, to give an example that had a lot of relevance when I was at Novell. For every business the reasons to be ready or not are different. So my point was not 'switch now! it is ready now!', which will always cause some people to point to their private reason not to switch, and then stop listening, but rather 'switch when you're ready, and before that, use open standards now to help you get ready to switch.
... was that 'the year of the linux desktop' will be different years for different people. For me, the year was 1998; for lots of people, it might well be 2018. But they can move that date forward by choosing open standards. The longer they keep using proprietary standards the further away the year of the linux desktop (or the year of the mac desktop, or year of $YOUR_OS_HERE) is for them.
We certainly use some open standards, but what I was getting at in the talk (I'm the speaker) was the next layer up of closed standards- .doc, ActiveX, AIM/Yahoo Chat (XMPP is not widely used at all yet), etc. Those are the things that lock you into proprietary platforms.
I'm not sure, but I believe the author of that proposal is in some way affiliated with the Center for American Progress, so it is possible that the two proposals have some genetic relationship.
"The second paragraph suggests that Deibert and his team want to use the funds to help people such as the people of China break the laws of their country. The Chinese government's track record seems to suggest that they have no problems holding a grudge (Falun Gong?). I know this is a somewhat controversial opinion, but would you want money donated by you being used in a way that is likely to piss off the Chinese government, given that you may want to deal with them in the future?"
It is safe to say that the donors know exactly what they are getting into here. Grants this large don't get given without fairly extensive understanding by both parties about what they are getting into.
[Ob. Disclosure: I work at the Berkman Center, one of the hosts of ONI. I am not privy to any specific details about the nature of this grant, though, or any strings that might be tied to it.]
I'm not sure I buy that, though... RH is funding GTK devel, but not nearly to the level TrollTech is. I've heard suggestions the number of paid staff on QT could be as high as ten times that on GTK. And really, what Novell wants/needs is an answer for ISVs- and gtk's documentation and cross-platform-ness, if nothing else, are not up to snuff for that market, and would take some time to get there. So Trolltech could have offered a much faster route into the heart of ISV-dom. Of course, if Novell had made Trolltech the platform, they would have been splitting an already very small market, so maybe that weighed against it.
Novell believes that long-term, they must have a credible Linux desktop to create a full Linux ecosystem that they can sell- they realize that if they sell 'only' servers, they are hosed. That already happened once with Netware. So that's why they had to make some sort of desktop buy.
Realistically, Nat and Miguel buy them corporate desktop credibility that the SuSE guys don't have, particularly in the US- they present well (better than basically anyone, they are Names, they have a long track record of focusing on the desktop (whereas SuSE never seriously tried to sell on the desktop.) So, yes, there have been growing/integration pains, and yes, buying Trolltech could have solved the licensing problem and certainly would have integrated better, but in the end, it would have pitted Novell against Sun and Red Hat- not a particularly appealing position to be in.
[And the Mono argument, FWIW, is a pretty long-term one- if MS gets what they want, every programmer in the world will be learning C# in school within 4-5 years. Even discounting the language religious wars about productivity and such, that seems like a pretty good reason to have a C# compiler and runtime to me...]
SuSE grew on me as a distro while I was at Novell, but it still lags Red Hat, Debian, and Cobalt in the netcraft ratings, and Fedora will overtake it very, very soon if current growth patterns hold up. Worse, netcraft shows Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, and Gentoo all growing faster than SuSE. Is netcraft perfect? No. But it certainly suggests that SuSE is, at best, keeping up, and not pulling ahead. SuSE needs to work harder on innovating (both technologically, procedurally, and to a lesser extent, in marketing those other changes to the community) if it is going to catch up.
The large majority of the company's engineering is still in Utah, despite the addition of a couple hundred Linux engineers outside of Utah in the two acquisitions. The new HQ (in Waltham, MA) is more for the corporate types.
I saw this being demo'd at LWE. I have to say it was the coolest demo I saw at LWE, by a long shot. Hard to to it justice on the web..
Now, grip and digital dj were not exactly the easiest programs in the world to use, but they had the idea for audio CD->ripping->music management database in late 1998- itunes didn't 'innovate' the same idea for two more years, in January of 2001.
Haha. That's actually what is happening. Novell is moving a very, very large amount of traffic right now, supposedly more than they've ever moved before.
NLD is not like the old XD; it is a full stack OS, like SUSE (it basically /is/ suse) or RH. Or debian.