This might be a bit redundant, but it seems to me that the most interesting thing about all this is that Apple seems to have hit on a business model that actually makes money off open source software.
Indeed they have. They write their own OS but use parts of open source code to make their work easier, then sell their proprietary OS on top of proprietary hardware. Remember Apple make most of their money out of hardware, not software.
There seems to be a common misconception that somehow MacOS is really an open source OS with some closed artwork/widget toolkit on top. Er, no. In fact, the vast majority of OS X is closed source. The kernel is open, but all the rest, the graphics/widget toolkit, the Cocoa APIs, Quartz, the finder, the applets, the dock, in short most of what makes MacOS X MacOS and not UNIX is closed source.
Making money out of open source code is easy. You just take somebodies code, don't tell them and use it in your own product. Voila, work saved, money made. See the company that ripped off the XVid guys for an example (except they got caught).
What's hard is actually making your own products open source (entirely open source) and still making money. RedHat manage it. CodeWeavers manage it. Apple do tell people when they use their code (well, mostly, G-Force anybody?) and they do contribute code back. However, their software is not in fact open source. It's hardly a revolutionary business model.
Mod me as a troll if you like, but that doesn't make my points any less valid.
The GNU foundation doesn't like the APSL. [gnu.org] However, debian is more aligned with OSI [opensource.org] than they are with the GNU foundation. (Correct me if this is incorrect.)
Good post, but a few points. Firstly, there's no such thing as the GNU Foundation. The GNU project is run by the Free Software Foundation. The FSF is extremely active with Debian, and indeed iirc the FSF pay the bandwidth costs for Debian amongst other things. They have always had a close relationship, which is why you can't apt-get some software if it doesn't meet their guidelines.
The FSF basically didn't like the APSL originally for a number of very good reasons. To be fair to Apple, they have eliminated most of those reasons save one, which is that if you "deploy" APSL'd software in an organisation you must publish changes. The GPL specifies you must only publish changes if it's redistributed - an important difference. Time will tell if they fix this or not.
MS would have a *hell* of a time trying to prove that no one could implement a compatible product
Interesting. Let's imagine that Wine(X) is perfect for a moment.
I take Lycoris, which looks very much like Windows XP. I integrate it with Wine, add the NTFS driver, recreate some of the apps and use the Windows Media drivers that are now floating around the net. I have just recreated a simple version of Windows, have I not? In this case, if it's possible for me to recreate Windows, then sell it, without the permission of Microsoft, does this not mean that Windows is effectively an open standard at least in some respects? If anybody can make and sell a competiting implementation, then presumably they can document it as well, making it an actual open standard.
It should be noted that MiniDisc players are far more popular in Europe than in the states. There are 3 in my house (although one is sort of broken:) and many of my friends have them. I've been on holiday and every third beach bum is listening to one.
Say what you like about the MD format, it was here before MP3 players were, and the fact that you can easily buy MiniDiscs from almost anywhere and dump a CD to them quickly and cheaply makes them popular. Or what, am I going to walk around with 10 of compact flash cards. Don't mention the iPod to me, nobody I know, I repeat, nobody can afford one. I know 1 person with an iPod, and that's because his parents are sugar-daddies, and they still bitch constantly about what it cost them (this was an 18th birthday present). A few of my other friends have MP3 players, but they are few and far between.
MiniDisc is also entrenched in the music composition scene here. My musician friends all either use (or have) multitrack MiniDisc decks.
It works out that you pay just over 10 quid a month for the BBC, with zero adverts and mostly original programming. Contrast this with Sky which is almost 100% repeats, and 30% adverts (there's roughly 5 minutes of adverts every 10-12 minutes it seems) for the same price.
Yep, and you're forgetting all the other stuff they do as well. For instance, BBC Online (big enough to require peering agreements with major ISPs), all their live events for instance the Radio 1 One Big Sundays, their whole educational thing. They do a LOT of stuff, and a truckload more behind the scenes that we never see. For instance, they did some of the research for digital TV.
Second, though it may not be popular around here: don't release the toolkit under the GPL. I'm assuming you'll want corporate developers building add-on's and whatnot for you, and Corporate America is terrified of the GPL.
If it's a commercial toolkit, you shouldn't be releasing under an open source license at all, unless you have very good reasons too.
Oh, and there's nothing scary about the GPL. If you don't want your software to "infect" others, use the LGPL, which forces any changes to be contributed back to the community (good thing!) but doesn't require you GPL your source if you link against it.
Parrot as a good VM?
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Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I was talking to Miguel de Icaza a few days ago about VMs on IRC. As you may be aware, he runs the Mono project which is creating an implementation of.NET
He claimed the design of Parrot was fundamentally flawed and pointed to it's highly unusual design and the very high number of opcodes. I was wondering exactly what you're thoughts are on Parrot. It's claimed that it'll be a good target for any language, both static and dynamic, but are you really interested in pushing this? Could you see Parrot as worthy competition to.NET in the cross-language VM space? Is having a very large number of opcodes an advantage or a disadvantage?
Re:usability and Linux for sissies
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KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I admit I am absolutely fascinated by the whole Linux phenomenon and this debate gets right to one of the core issues. Open source may indeed be "about choice" but until someone chooses to make a usable, consumer-ized distribution the world will choose to use another operating system on the desktop.
Well, this is perhaps true (and perhaps not? there are plenty of odd looking cars about), but this is exactly what's happening with companies like Lycoris and Lindows. For instance, Lindows have wrapped "Click'n'Run" around apt-get. I'd hate that name, but then again, Lindows isn't meant for me. So open source really is about choice. The people here on Slashdot may not like Lindows overly much (being mainly developers), but the customer will be able to choose the Windowsified versions of Linux if they so wish.
Linux will never be more than a geek toy and a server OS until and unless someone takes seriously the idea that its general usablity has a long way to go.
People are taking it seriously. Perhaps you missed the announcement that the GNOME Human Interface Guide has been released. It's modelled after the Apple docs of the same name, but having never seen the Apple version I don't know whether the advice contained within is similar or not. I've flicked over it, and it seems to have a lot of good information. The GNOME people also subject virtually all their work to an UI review process now, and it really does show. I'm using GNOME 2 now, and although it's still primitive in terms of features (and still too many bugs!) usability is not one of my complaints with it. KDE have something similar, though their usability effort is not yet quite ramped up as much as the GNOME team is. GNOME2 also shows how to make a usable interface that doesn't simply copy Windows or the Mac.
I predict that when/if this happens, that consumerized distro will be universally hated and soundly thrashed in these forums for "taking away choice," and using "too much eye candy," etc.
Well when Lindows/Lycoris etc were annouced, some people did trash them, but really most were pretty reasonable. Although these distros may take away choice by default, you don't have to choose these distros, so there's not less choice than before, but more choice!
There are, naturally, other hurdles for Linux making inroads on the desktop.
Certainly, there are lots. Package management, application quality, online training - this hasn't even been started yet, but there are far too many people who freeze at the sight of something that's different to what they're used to. The only rememedy for this is for the computer itself to handhold them through the basics, perhaps using online tutorials.
Perhaps Redhat is making more moves in that direction than I realized. I guess the signs are there...it's already been branded as the "Linux for sissies" in these forums.
It has? Could you point me to the post that brands RedHat as Linux for sissies? I haven't seen it yet.
I'm half suprised MS didn't push for an MSN contract to help push their.NET intiative.
They would have difficulty with that. MSN was designed to be a large scale consumer service and nothing else. Check out its architecture if you don't believe me. It's not at all extendable, and the whole thing relies on central servers - you couldn't even just sell a server-in-a-box.
I'm also glad IBM is smart enough to roll out their own servers rather than use that godawful jabberd that jabber.org provides. I hope they release their jabber server as free software, as the lack of a fs/os production quality jabber server has hurt deployment.
I don't really know what you're referring to here. I admin a popular jabber server, and it works great. If you need corporate level scalability, the Jabber Commercial Server is especially designed for you.
Last but not least you have the problem that Exchange is 100% proprietary. Look at all of the "fun" Samba has had trying to get smb interoperability right. I also bet Microsoft would be VERY apt to sue a company that did this into the ground. Might as well paint a target on your head.
No, really, Microsoft have a good track record here.
SAMBA - I don't know if they've been threatened or not, but I've never heard anything about it.
NTFS - not a squeak
Office file formats - this was even done by a corp (Sun) and as such are sueable. Nothing
Wine - well, if we can clone the whole of the Windows APIs and have MS not do a thing, I think we don't have to worry about Exchange
There's a good reason for this as well. Microsoft don't sue projects when they know they have no grounding for it. None of these things could be protected in court, as they are simply MS implementations of widely available and well known technologies. Most of them are just formats and interfaces.
Like the other poster said, if you want a lawsuit happy company, look at Apple. You can't even make a Mozilla skin that looks like OSX without getting letters from their lawyers, despite the fact that it was established in court a long time ago that you can't protect "look and feel".
For all their faults, abuse of the legal system through faulty lawsuits is not high on the list.
Forgive me if I doubt your sincerity. But tell me, do you have the same complaint about Linux in these forums?
No, thankfully I don't, because the time when moderators blindly modded up pro Linux posts has passed. Witness the story about the new Microsoft security holes. Lots of the highly modded posts were actually defending Microsoft, and refuting pro-Linux FUD. It's just such a shame that we haven't reached the same state with the Mac yet. I'm sure it'll stabilise. Whereas with Linux the driving force was ideology, with the Mac it's pure expense though, so we'll see (in that if you've paid £1000 for a Mac, you're not likely to mod up a post criticising your new purchase)
And surely that was you who was vehemently poo-pooing the shameless RMS ass-kissing, right?
Read my past posts if you like. I think I'm pretty fair. Sometimes I agree with RMS, and sometimes I don't. I advocate Linux because I think it's the way forward, and proprietary platforms are not - if we've learnt anything in the past 10 years it's this. I'm quite open to seeing the faults of Linux though as I see a chance to fix them (and am doing, with autopackage). Any non-Apple-ass-kissing post on apple.slashdot.org though instantly gets modded as flamebait/troll/overrated - see my first post. It's marked as Flamebait despite the fact that I was just stating my opinion, yet yours is marked as insightful for making wild assumptions about my sincerity. I mean, why do I even bother?
In theory you're right, in practice you're wrong. Application bundles completely eliminate DLL hell, which is well worth the small price of possibly using a few more megs of your 40 gig drive.
Oh please. Tell me you're not an engineer. Just throwing resources to paper over a problem is truly the Apple approach, but that doesn't mean it's good. Sharing code IS good, for many reasons. It means less duplication of effort, bugs in shared code can be distributed once and all yours apps get the fix, it's not just less disk space but also less memory. In short, reinventing the wheel each time is pointless.
There's no need for DLL hell with dependancies either. Ever used apt-get?
Finally, you seem to be under the illusion (as so many Mac users seem to be) that the whole world has a high specced machine. I have a 10gig disk, and most of it is used, so I definately appreciate this. Don't start saying things like "hard disk space is cheap", because I have a lot of things to spend my money on and not much money to spend, so forking over because programmers were lazy pisses me off.
I don't understand what you mean here. Who other than Apple should be shipping updates to Apple's OS?
What I mean is that nothing can update the OS other than a new version of it from Apple. Look at Windows, often Office/Internet Explorer upgrade the OS as well. If you install a game, it'll upgrade DirectX to the right version. With no dependancy management, if a game needs the latest version of something, it has to say "sorry, buy the latest OS version", even if that component could have just been dropped in anyway.
See above, hard drive space is incredibly cheap. The main reason I'd do a selective install is to avoid unnecessary crap strewn about my hard drive, which never occurs with app wrappers.
Jesus. That's like saying, well garage space is cheap so everybody should buy a truck, at least they won't run into "not-enough-boot-space-hell". Not everyone wants to have a huge disk they don't really need, because their apps all install a truckload of stuff they'll never use.
Aside from the utter stupidity of the concept of EULAs, you can create disk images that display dialogs before they are mounted. Or you can have the app present a dialog when it is run for the first time.
EULAs may or may not be a stupid concept (if you don't like restrictive contracts, why are you using a Mac?) but they are used in virtually all commercial software, so that's sort of tough.
With appfolders you throw away virtually ALL flexibility for a slight increase in usability. That seems like seriously dumbing things down for little gain. And yes, I have used them, and I still think this.
If this is true, it doesn't surprise me at all. It was only ever going to be a matter of time before a corp violated the GPL. I mean, there's a huge amount of free code out there - if you're looking at what would be for your project 6 months work right in front of you, ready to use, the temptation just to "accidentally" include it must be tremendous.
It's easy to think, who would ever know? Comparing binary compiles is a good way of testing, but it's not 100% proof. It's damn close, but would a judge know that?
Most interesting of all, will the FSF actually do what it always said it'd do, and protect this GPLd software? And will the GPL stand up in court? IANAL, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. This sort of thing needs to be dealt with swiftly however, lest other companies get the idea that it's OK.
Well, some of your points are good. But PLEASE don't make the mistake of assuming that simple is better. I've covered all these points many times before, but I'll do it again.
You will say apt-get and I'll say hallelujah, its a great thing, but why cant i just install the freaking app where I want it too, and delete it by trashing it. rpm --erase??? Who would think of that?
Oh please no! Not appfolders again! Appfolders have so many disadvantages it's not even funny. They are far, far, far too simple for even most apps, which is why there is not one, not even two but three different ways of installing software on the Mac: Drag'n'drop, Apple Installer, 3rd party installers (ie Wise). Appfolders don't meet many developers requirements. Some more disadvantages:
No dependancies. This is the biggy. Contrary to seemingly popular opinion, sharing code is a good thing, and should be encouraged. Appfolders don't let you check if something the program needs is installed, so all apps are huge and monolithic. Eurgh. It also means that only Apple can really ship updates to the OS, as users would have to manually do the update themselves. And guess what? They charge a lotta cash for the updates.
No install time customisation. Ever noticed that when you install Office, you can choose which features you want? That's a popular feature. So popular that the latest versions feature install-on-demand. Can't do that with appfolders. This makes the problem of monolithic apps even worse.
No user interaction. How do you present EULAs? (hint: can't use DMG backgrounds as they must be click through). How do you check serial codes? Oh - you need an installer/
Menu customisation anyone? I find this soooo irritiating with the Mac, I have to start all the apps from the Finder. Okay, now what if me and my brother want different list of apps? We both use lots of different apps, quite literally hundreds, and don't want them interfering with each other. The only way really is to create a subfolder and try and organise by "both use them", "I use them", "you use them". This doesn't scale to networks without all sort of horrid symlinking, which sort of defeats the point.
In short, appfolders seem like a good idea, but actually aren't.
The sad part is, most of what macosx has done could and still can be done on linux. Make a restricted distribution. Share earnings with app developers.
I don't understand this. What's a restricted distro? And last time I checked, SuSE and RedHat did actually pay their developers.
root should only be a single user mode thing. Like gentoo, make init scripts dependent on whats running and whats not. Simplify the runlevels to single-user, and multi-user. Reduce hardware complexity by certifying systems based on linux friendly manufacturers. run daemons not as root.
Huh? What? Even MacOS supports multi users not as root. Only 2 runlevels? Why???? It's not like the average user will even care. Why reduce flexibility for no increase in usability? Certifying systems? Sorry, this is the real world, a lot of people have systems that were modern once, then they upgraded, or that were built to order, or that they bought from the shop down the street and so on. The answer is to make Linux hardware support perfect - not to reduce user choice!
Get rid of the start, or hat, or whatever menu. Get rid of the XP like icons(see redhat8 beta). Give gtk a default look which dosent look like grey shit. Use a tasteful muted color scheme. Make sure pcmcia and usb and firewire just work on plug in. Use hotplug and devfs like mandrake do. Get rid of one million etc config files and use gconf and alchemist like redhat do. Simplify the gnome2.0 desktop
Wow. A lot more suggestions. Why get rid of the start menu? 95% of the world are used to it. You can always use Gnome, or E, or WindowMaker if you don't want one. The new RedHat null icons are hardly XP style, I've seen them. If you mean cartoony, well switch themes! There are plenty available. Yes, the GTK default theme is ugly, but changing that took me 1 minute on gnome 2. The theme files are tiny! Simplify Gnome 2? How simply do you want, it's about as simple as you can get. They need to add more features, which will mean more complexity! FYI GConf is just a front end to a load of XML config files;) Devfs support is not yet 100% bug free, so not all distros use it yet - it's coming, be patient.
The rest of the ideas aren pretty good, but they are hardly necessary for a slick desktop. Unified mimetyping between shell and nautilus? Yeah, it's a cool idea, but hardly critical. You want to see them? Well, you know what'd I'd say...
Well, there is a setting that will let you collect all the downloads into one window. It's not tabs, it's a list, but it's similar. I don't remember where it is, but it's fairly obvious if you look in the preferences dialog.
If that's not good enough, you can switch of kwm and replace it with a tabbed window manager that lets you collect any and all of your windows together into tabs. I think pwm is such a manager, though I could be wrong. So really you do have quite a bit of flexibility here.
I've only used Linux via the GUI for a few months (ya, ya I know...)... but why is there KDE and Gnome? Why are the two not one. The only differences I see between the two are skins, very minor UI functionality, and some utils that are unique to either or. But why can't KDE and Gnome be merged, and allow the end user to customize everything the way they want? And use the utilities they want. I like KDE's appearence, but I hate it's 'feel' when actually doing tasks.
Well, this is understandable. It's a phase we all go through, so don't worry. I went through it for instance, after a month or two of using Linux. It takes time, but you will realise the reasons for this. To try and save you time however, here is why, in a nutshell:
In the beginning there was KDE. It was free software (the GPL definition), but it was linked agianst Qt which was non free. This caused a lot of strife the community, as not only was KDE (in theory) illegal to distribute as it broke the terms of the GPL, but also the KDE developers were seen as being unreponsive to the issue. This was an important issue to many, as it would have "polluted" the platform with a core non free component. Why does this matter you say? Just imagine what would have happened if TrollTech had gone bust, or been bought out? One day Qt is there, the next it's not and you're shafted. Actually, project Harmony was set up to clone Qt (iirc), but after some considerable pressure from the community TrollTech GPL'd Qt, and all was well.
In the meantime, Miguel de Icaza had set up the GNOME project. It was based on GTK which was LGPL'd all the way. They also made many different design decisions - for instance GNOME is written in C, whereas KDE is C++. This is more important than it may seem, as (it was claimed) C is easier to bind to other languages, so gnome would be more inclusive. They also based their object model on CORBA rather than C++ for instance. There are many differences.
Today, they are so different there is no hope of merging them, so forget that. They do work together though, check out freestandards.org - the standards they produce there are often better than either of the technologies the individual projects came up with. KDE and GNOME used to be completely incompatible. Today, even the dreaded clipboard problem has been solved. So they do work together, and I for one am very interested in seeing this extended to sharing code as well. We'll have to see if this is possible.
Don't see this as a bad thing, please. Yes there is duplication of effort, sometimes needless. But consider the real world. There is lots of competition in the real world. Lots of different companies compete to provide the same product, but usually in different ways. The competition between KDE and GNOME keeps them sharp.
Do people use GNOME? YES! I just jumped ship from KDE3 to GNOME2.0.1 built from Garnome. I love it to bits, before I hated GTKs flakeyness and uglyness. Now I can't get enough of it. It's beautiful. GNOME2 has had a lot of effort put into usability, and it shows. It's not perfect yet, and there are still missing bits, but I think I'm a convert. Up until now, KDE has been the clear leader really. You said you don't like the "feel" of KDE: well, I know what you mean. To me, GNOME2 just feels better, although it seriously lacks features at the moment. It depends on personal preference though. One friend of mine swears by Enlightenment.
Competition is natural, and good. In the real world, people disagree over how things should be done. As long as competition is bracketed by standards, we will move forward, and this is what's happening.
What is so fundamentally different between Gnome and KDE that doesn't allow them to be merged into one project? IMHO that's all that is required to finally get a solid Desktop presence for linux.
LOL, don't worry, we all have opinions when we move to Linux. We learn later most of those opinions are misinformed;) Remember - not everything is what it seems. Linux will have a solid desktop presence, but not yet. It's not ready. Both KDE and GNOME need a lot of polish and work, but they are good foundations on which to build. Remember: not everything is what it seems.
I'm starting to dread when Apple news makes the slashdot front page.
Yeah, me too. I get sick of reading a truckload of +5 Insightful Apple adverts. I see enough advertising for them on the TV, in the street and so on.
So when I log onto slashdot at night, it sort of annoys me that all people have to do seemingly to get cheap karma is to say "Aqua rulez", or "But MacOS is UNIX, and it looks good!".
At least there it's about 3/4 people who actually understand something about the platform
I think you mean, at least 3/4 of the people like the Mac, otherwise they wouldn't be reading that section. What you don't like is when people raise objections to the Mac, or state that they don't like it and give reasons. I don't see any reason with criticising something I don't like as long as I have reasons. Feel free to dislike it, but please don't confuse dislike with misunderstanding.
This isn't due to waiting on the CPU guys: Hektor_Troy is talking about Klipper, which monitors the clipboard and matches against regexps. If it finds you've copied a URL, it'll popup a menu with a selection of web browsers. It's neat, though I tend to turn it off. The wait is configurable by the way, 4 seconds is the default but it can be changed.
More to the point Hektor_Troy, why are you doing things this way? You can open a URL without waiting for Klippers helper functions. Just press Alt-F2 to bring up the run dialog, and then paste it into there. That'll open your default browser (normally konqueror). The text is copied to the clipboard the moment you release the mouse by the way, so you seem to be misunderstanding what's going on.
Secondly, one thing you should understand: there are two clipboards. You never need worry about the second if you don't want to, and it doesn't exist in Windows/Mac. It's called the selection buffer, and when you select some text it'll be copied there. This is what Klipper modifies. Normally you should just be able to select, press Ctrl-C to copy, go somewhere else and press paste. I've tried this as many times as I can be bothered just now, and it works fine.
The confusion arose because Qt2 contained a bug which mixed up the two. KDE3/Qt3 fixes this and so you should never see this bug again - unless you use an old app of course. There isn't much that can be done about that until all apps have been upgraded.
Having 2 clipboards is great. If Klipper didn't try to help, chances are you'd never have realised they were there. The fact that Qt used to have a bug is not a good reason for removing a feature, and neither is some people not liking it.
I'm buying an iMac with OSX installed and I was wondering whether the BSD core means that transgaming will work for me as well. Has anyone had experience with Transgaming or an equivalent on OSX?
As far as I know, not yet. Look, forget the whole BSD thing, it's largely irrelevant. MacOS is too far away from Linux to be similar, it uses different APIs for graphics for instance. Plus of course Macs are based on PPC architecture, so you'd need opcode translation which is SLOW unless you do it before you run the game. I think they teamed up with an opcode translation company to make this happen, but until it does TransGaming is Linux only.
Oh, not to mention it's based on Wine, which afaik is Linux and similar forms of UNIX only. MacOS is not UNIX enough for it.
Behind TransGaming's cross-platform solutions is a unique proprietary portability technology that facilitates the migration of games
Maybe I'm just wierd, but to my ears "proprietary" is a bad word, especially considering that their "portability solution" is based off the hard work of the Wine crew (go Wine!). This sounds like they've been taken over by the marketroids. Sad, but I hope it won't be too long until WineHQ also has DirectX compatability, even if it is x86 only.
Creating clear, scalable, attractive fonts is neither easy nor cheap -- and the people who care about and need quality fonts are users, not programmers. Given that free software is driven by the needs of technocrats and not by the desires of users, there is little likelihood that high-quality "free" fonts will emerge.
This is clearly wrong. I am a Linux developer and therefore by definition user, and I care about quality fonts. In fact, I have the MS fonts installed now. This reference to technocrats, I don't understand it, you seem to be under the impression that the Linux developers do not care if anybody uses their work? A quick glance around the KDE/GNOME mailing lists should get rid of that ill informed opinion.....
The technocrats argue that "making fonts can't be that hard" and "just whip some out in the Gimp", betraying their ignorance
You are the only one to mention the GIMP so far, and all the highly modded posts have been telling us how hard it is. This statement is just wrong.
Creating clear, scalable, attractive fonts is neither easy nor cheap -- and the people who care about and need quality fonts are users, not programmers. Given that free software is driven by the needs of technocrats and not by the desires of users, there is little likelihood that high-quality "free" fonts will emerge.
The "free software developers are elitist" argument is to be frank, bollocks, and I thought that argument had been dispatched a long time ago. Clearly not in your case. There are vast numbers of people working on the "niceties" as you call them, stuff like font antialiasing, usable interfaces, good themes and so on.
To be told that I am an "elitist" because I "ignore" the need for quality fonts is to be honest offensive, as it's not true. I am not a font designer. Perhaps I will try my hand at it - I won't knock out the next Arial, but I can only improve. Meanwhile, instead of telling me what I am, or to be more accurate, what you naively think I am, why don't you help out?
Ah, Vandalism. Marvellous way to bring people around to your way of thinking...
Hardly vandalism - that would imply that actually damaged the plaque. A bumper sticker can simply be unpeeled: what I want to know is, what did the sticker say?
Now I'm a Linux user and lover, as anybody who reads my past comments can discover. But let's be fair to Microsoft here - all this talk is of how fast KDE (actually Waldo Bastion) patched the bug, as if this makes them superior to MS.
You know what? I bet the 'soft could do this too. I mean have a guy, or team of guys available 24/7 to patch bugs. And you know what else? They'd still get flack for it, as Microsoft don't release patches straight away - for better or for worse, they do actually test them first (usually), make sure they don't kill wierd and exotic installs etc. I know they've released dodgy patches, but my point is that Microsoft isn't an overnight operation.
And more to the point, how does this patch get to people? Via autoupdate of course. The patch may have been written in 40 minutes, but it's still not available on SuSE auto update (as far as I can tell) despite the fact that Waldo works for SuSE! We really need to stop patting ourselves on the back simply because we can see the progress of the patch and Microsofters can't, otherwise this bullheaded arrogance WILL bite us on the ass.
Re:The big dogs fighting
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LWCE Wrapup
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· Score: 2
Is there really enough market for all these big companies to make money?
Probably. If not now then soon there will be. I doubt we'll be able to avoid some of the distro companies going bankrupt though, in fact I'm amazed that so far there haven't been any high profile distro companies going under.
One thing that irritates me is this reference to the slightly over 500,000 "server shipments" that Linux has, compared to several millions that Windows has. I seem to recall reading that Linux has 25% of the server market, and that was in 2000. IDC never released the figures for 2001 (why?) but this statistic about preinstalled server shipments is misleading. It makes it sound like Linux is way behind in the server arena when really (if IDC is telling the truth) it's not at all. I'd guess this is because most Linux server installs are not preshipped big corporate servers - instead being installed over Windows on a recycled box, or simply not a prebought industrial server. Am I right in this, can somebody clear up this apparently massive discrepancy?
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Indeed they have. They write their own OS but use parts of open source code to make their work easier, then sell their proprietary OS on top of proprietary hardware. Remember Apple make most of their money out of hardware, not software.
There seems to be a common misconception that somehow MacOS is really an open source OS with some closed artwork/widget toolkit on top. Er, no. In fact, the vast majority of OS X is closed source. The kernel is open, but all the rest, the graphics/widget toolkit, the Cocoa APIs, Quartz, the finder, the applets, the dock, in short most of what makes MacOS X MacOS and not UNIX is closed source.
Making money out of open source code is easy. You just take somebodies code, don't tell them and use it in your own product. Voila, work saved, money made. See the company that ripped off the XVid guys for an example (except they got caught).
What's hard is actually making your own products open source (entirely open source) and still making money. RedHat manage it. CodeWeavers manage it. Apple do tell people when they use their code (well, mostly, G-Force anybody?) and they do contribute code back. However, their software is not in fact open source. It's hardly a revolutionary business model.
Mod me as a troll if you like, but that doesn't make my points any less valid.
Good post, but a few points. Firstly, there's no such thing as the GNU Foundation. The GNU project is run by the Free Software Foundation. The FSF is extremely active with Debian, and indeed iirc the FSF pay the bandwidth costs for Debian amongst other things. They have always had a close relationship, which is why you can't apt-get some software if it doesn't meet their guidelines.
The FSF basically didn't like the APSL originally for a number of very good reasons. To be fair to Apple, they have eliminated most of those reasons save one, which is that if you "deploy" APSL'd software in an organisation you must publish changes. The GPL specifies you must only publish changes if it's redistributed - an important difference. Time will tell if they fix this or not.
Interesting. Let's imagine that Wine(X) is perfect for a moment.
I take Lycoris, which looks very much like Windows XP. I integrate it with Wine, add the NTFS driver, recreate some of the apps and use the Windows Media drivers that are now floating around the net. I have just recreated a simple version of Windows, have I not? In this case, if it's possible for me to recreate Windows, then sell it, without the permission of Microsoft, does this not mean that Windows is effectively an open standard at least in some respects? If anybody can make and sell a competiting implementation, then presumably they can document it as well, making it an actual open standard.
Not a troll, just perhaps food for thought.
That brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "almighty piss up"
It should be noted that MiniDisc players are far more popular in Europe than in the states. There are 3 in my house (although one is sort of broken :) and many of my friends have them. I've been on holiday and every third beach bum is listening to one.
Say what you like about the MD format, it was here before MP3 players were, and the fact that you can easily buy MiniDiscs from almost anywhere and dump a CD to them quickly and cheaply makes them popular. Or what, am I going to walk around with 10 of compact flash cards. Don't mention the iPod to me, nobody I know, I repeat, nobody can afford one. I know 1 person with an iPod, and that's because his parents are sugar-daddies, and they still bitch constantly about what it cost them (this was an 18th birthday present). A few of my other friends have MP3 players, but they are few and far between.
MiniDisc is also entrenched in the music composition scene here. My musician friends all either use (or have) multitrack MiniDisc decks.
Yep, and you're forgetting all the other stuff they do as well. For instance, BBC Online (big enough to require peering agreements with major ISPs), all their live events for instance the Radio 1 One Big Sundays, their whole educational thing. They do a LOT of stuff, and a truckload more behind the scenes that we never see. For instance, they did some of the research for digital TV.
If it's a commercial toolkit, you shouldn't be releasing under an open source license at all, unless you have very good reasons too.
Oh, and there's nothing scary about the GPL. If you don't want your software to "infect" others, use the LGPL, which forces any changes to be contributed back to the community (good thing!) but doesn't require you GPL your source if you link against it.
He claimed the design of Parrot was fundamentally flawed and pointed to it's highly unusual design and the very high number of opcodes. I was wondering exactly what you're thoughts are on Parrot. It's claimed that it'll be a good target for any language, both static and dynamic, but are you really interested in pushing this? Could you see Parrot as worthy competition to .NET in the cross-language VM space? Is having a very large number of opcodes an advantage or a disadvantage?
Well, this is perhaps true (and perhaps not? there are plenty of odd looking cars about), but this is exactly what's happening with companies like Lycoris and Lindows. For instance, Lindows have wrapped "Click'n'Run" around apt-get. I'd hate that name, but then again, Lindows isn't meant for me. So open source really is about choice. The people here on Slashdot may not like Lindows overly much (being mainly developers), but the customer will be able to choose the Windowsified versions of Linux if they so wish.
Linux will never be more than a geek toy and a server OS until and unless someone takes seriously the idea that its general usablity has a long way to go.
People are taking it seriously. Perhaps you missed the announcement that the GNOME Human Interface Guide has been released. It's modelled after the Apple docs of the same name, but having never seen the Apple version I don't know whether the advice contained within is similar or not. I've flicked over it, and it seems to have a lot of good information. The GNOME people also subject virtually all their work to an UI review process now, and it really does show. I'm using GNOME 2 now, and although it's still primitive in terms of features (and still too many bugs!) usability is not one of my complaints with it. KDE have something similar, though their usability effort is not yet quite ramped up as much as the GNOME team is. GNOME2 also shows how to make a usable interface that doesn't simply copy Windows or the Mac.
I predict that when/if this happens, that consumerized distro will be universally hated and soundly thrashed in these forums for "taking away choice," and using "too much eye candy," etc.
Well when Lindows/Lycoris etc were annouced, some people did trash them, but really most were pretty reasonable. Although these distros may take away choice by default, you don't have to choose these distros, so there's not less choice than before, but more choice!
There are, naturally, other hurdles for Linux making inroads on the desktop.
Certainly, there are lots. Package management, application quality, online training - this hasn't even been started yet, but there are far too many people who freeze at the sight of something that's different to what they're used to. The only rememedy for this is for the computer itself to handhold them through the basics, perhaps using online tutorials.
Perhaps Redhat is making more moves in that direction than I realized. I guess the signs are there...it's already been branded as the "Linux for sissies" in these forums.
It has? Could you point me to the post that brands RedHat as Linux for sissies? I haven't seen it yet.
They would have difficulty with that. MSN was designed to be a large scale consumer service and nothing else. Check out its architecture if you don't believe me. It's not at all extendable, and the whole thing relies on central servers - you couldn't even just sell a server-in-a-box.
I'm also glad IBM is smart enough to roll out their own servers rather than use that godawful jabberd that jabber.org provides. I hope they release their jabber server as free software, as the lack of a fs/os production quality jabber server has hurt deployment.
I don't really know what you're referring to here. I admin a popular jabber server, and it works great. If you need corporate level scalability, the Jabber Commercial Server is especially designed for you.
No, really, Microsoft have a good track record here.
There's a good reason for this as well. Microsoft don't sue projects when they know they have no grounding for it. None of these things could be protected in court, as they are simply MS implementations of widely available and well known technologies. Most of them are just formats and interfaces.
Like the other poster said, if you want a lawsuit happy company, look at Apple. You can't even make a Mozilla skin that looks like OSX without getting letters from their lawyers, despite the fact that it was established in court a long time ago that you can't protect "look and feel".
For all their faults, abuse of the legal system through faulty lawsuits is not high on the list.
No, thankfully I don't, because the time when moderators blindly modded up pro Linux posts has passed. Witness the story about the new Microsoft security holes. Lots of the highly modded posts were actually defending Microsoft, and refuting pro-Linux FUD. It's just such a shame that we haven't reached the same state with the Mac yet. I'm sure it'll stabilise. Whereas with Linux the driving force was ideology, with the Mac it's pure expense though, so we'll see (in that if you've paid £1000 for a Mac, you're not likely to mod up a post criticising your new purchase)
And surely that was you who was vehemently poo-pooing the shameless RMS ass-kissing, right?
Read my past posts if you like. I think I'm pretty fair. Sometimes I agree with RMS, and sometimes I don't. I advocate Linux because I think it's the way forward, and proprietary platforms are not - if we've learnt anything in the past 10 years it's this. I'm quite open to seeing the faults of Linux though as I see a chance to fix them (and am doing, with autopackage). Any non-Apple-ass-kissing post on apple.slashdot.org though instantly gets modded as flamebait/troll/overrated - see my first post. It's marked as Flamebait despite the fact that I was just stating my opinion, yet yours is marked as insightful for making wild assumptions about my sincerity. I mean, why do I even bother?
Oh please. Tell me you're not an engineer. Just throwing resources to paper over a problem is truly the Apple approach, but that doesn't mean it's good. Sharing code IS good, for many reasons. It means less duplication of effort, bugs in shared code can be distributed once and all yours apps get the fix, it's not just less disk space but also less memory. In short, reinventing the wheel each time is pointless.
There's no need for DLL hell with dependancies either. Ever used apt-get?
Finally, you seem to be under the illusion (as so many Mac users seem to be) that the whole world has a high specced machine. I have a 10gig disk, and most of it is used, so I definately appreciate this. Don't start saying things like "hard disk space is cheap", because I have a lot of things to spend my money on and not much money to spend, so forking over because programmers were lazy pisses me off.
I don't understand what you mean here. Who other than Apple should be shipping updates to Apple's OS?
What I mean is that nothing can update the OS other than a new version of it from Apple. Look at Windows, often Office/Internet Explorer upgrade the OS as well. If you install a game, it'll upgrade DirectX to the right version. With no dependancy management, if a game needs the latest version of something, it has to say "sorry, buy the latest OS version", even if that component could have just been dropped in anyway.
See above, hard drive space is incredibly cheap. The main reason I'd do a selective install is to avoid unnecessary crap strewn about my hard drive, which never occurs with app wrappers.
Jesus. That's like saying, well garage space is cheap so everybody should buy a truck, at least they won't run into "not-enough-boot-space-hell". Not everyone wants to have a huge disk they don't really need, because their apps all install a truckload of stuff they'll never use.
Aside from the utter stupidity of the concept of EULAs, you can create disk images that display dialogs before they are mounted. Or you can have the app present a dialog when it is run for the first time.
EULAs may or may not be a stupid concept (if you don't like restrictive contracts, why are you using a Mac?) but they are used in virtually all commercial software, so that's sort of tough.
With appfolders you throw away virtually ALL flexibility for a slight increase in usability. That seems like seriously dumbing things down for little gain. And yes, I have used them, and I still think this.
It's easy to think, who would ever know? Comparing binary compiles is a good way of testing, but it's not 100% proof. It's damn close, but would a judge know that?
Most interesting of all, will the FSF actually do what it always said it'd do, and protect this GPLd software? And will the GPL stand up in court? IANAL, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. This sort of thing needs to be dealt with swiftly however, lest other companies get the idea that it's OK.
You will say apt-get and I'll say hallelujah, its a great thing, but why cant i just install the freaking app where I want it too, and delete it by trashing it. rpm --erase??? Who would think of that?
Oh please no! Not appfolders again! Appfolders have so many disadvantages it's not even funny. They are far, far, far too simple for even most apps, which is why there is not one, not even two but three different ways of installing software on the Mac: Drag'n'drop, Apple Installer, 3rd party installers (ie Wise). Appfolders don't meet many developers requirements. Some more disadvantages:
In short, appfolders seem like a good idea, but actually aren't.
The sad part is, most of what macosx has done could and still can be done on linux. Make a restricted distribution. Share earnings with app developers.
I don't understand this. What's a restricted distro? And last time I checked, SuSE and RedHat did actually pay their developers.
root should only be a single user mode thing. Like gentoo, make init scripts dependent on whats running and whats not. Simplify the runlevels to single-user, and multi-user. Reduce hardware complexity by certifying systems based on linux friendly manufacturers. run daemons not as root.
Huh? What? Even MacOS supports multi users not as root. Only 2 runlevels? Why???? It's not like the average user will even care. Why reduce flexibility for no increase in usability? Certifying systems? Sorry, this is the real world, a lot of people have systems that were modern once, then they upgraded, or that were built to order, or that they bought from the shop down the street and so on. The answer is to make Linux hardware support perfect - not to reduce user choice!
Get rid of the start, or hat, or whatever menu. Get rid of the XP like icons(see redhat8 beta). Give gtk a default look which dosent look like grey shit. Use a tasteful muted color scheme. Make sure pcmcia and usb and firewire just work on plug in. Use hotplug and devfs like mandrake do. Get rid of one million etc config files and use gconf and alchemist like redhat do. Simplify the gnome2.0 desktop
Wow. A lot more suggestions. Why get rid of the start menu? 95% of the world are used to it. You can always use Gnome, or E, or WindowMaker if you don't want one. The new RedHat null icons are hardly XP style, I've seen them. If you mean cartoony, well switch themes! There are plenty available. Yes, the GTK default theme is ugly, but changing that took me 1 minute on gnome 2. The theme files are tiny! Simplify Gnome 2? How simply do you want, it's about as simple as you can get. They need to add more features, which will mean more complexity! FYI GConf is just a front end to a load of XML config files ;) Devfs support is not yet 100% bug free, so not all distros use it yet - it's coming, be patient.
The rest of the ideas aren pretty good, but they are hardly necessary for a slick desktop. Unified mimetyping between shell and nautilus? Yeah, it's a cool idea, but hardly critical. You want to see them? Well, you know what'd I'd say ...
If that's not good enough, you can switch of kwm and replace it with a tabbed window manager that lets you collect any and all of your windows together into tabs. I think pwm is such a manager, though I could be wrong. So really you do have quite a bit of flexibility here.
Well, this is understandable. It's a phase we all go through, so don't worry. I went through it for instance, after a month or two of using Linux. It takes time, but you will realise the reasons for this. To try and save you time however, here is why, in a nutshell:
In the beginning there was KDE. It was free software (the GPL definition), but it was linked agianst Qt which was non free. This caused a lot of strife the community, as not only was KDE (in theory) illegal to distribute as it broke the terms of the GPL, but also the KDE developers were seen as being unreponsive to the issue. This was an important issue to many, as it would have "polluted" the platform with a core non free component. Why does this matter you say? Just imagine what would have happened if TrollTech had gone bust, or been bought out? One day Qt is there, the next it's not and you're shafted. Actually, project Harmony was set up to clone Qt (iirc), but after some considerable pressure from the community TrollTech GPL'd Qt, and all was well.
In the meantime, Miguel de Icaza had set up the GNOME project. It was based on GTK which was LGPL'd all the way. They also made many different design decisions - for instance GNOME is written in C, whereas KDE is C++. This is more important than it may seem, as (it was claimed) C is easier to bind to other languages, so gnome would be more inclusive. They also based their object model on CORBA rather than C++ for instance. There are many differences.
Today, they are so different there is no hope of merging them, so forget that. They do work together though, check out freestandards.org - the standards they produce there are often better than either of the technologies the individual projects came up with. KDE and GNOME used to be completely incompatible. Today, even the dreaded clipboard problem has been solved. So they do work together, and I for one am very interested in seeing this extended to sharing code as well. We'll have to see if this is possible.
Don't see this as a bad thing, please. Yes there is duplication of effort, sometimes needless. But consider the real world. There is lots of competition in the real world. Lots of different companies compete to provide the same product, but usually in different ways. The competition between KDE and GNOME keeps them sharp.
Do people use GNOME? YES! I just jumped ship from KDE3 to GNOME2.0.1 built from Garnome. I love it to bits, before I hated GTKs flakeyness and uglyness. Now I can't get enough of it. It's beautiful. GNOME2 has had a lot of effort put into usability, and it shows. It's not perfect yet, and there are still missing bits, but I think I'm a convert. Up until now, KDE has been the clear leader really. You said you don't like the "feel" of KDE: well, I know what you mean. To me, GNOME2 just feels better, although it seriously lacks features at the moment. It depends on personal preference though. One friend of mine swears by Enlightenment.
Competition is natural, and good. In the real world, people disagree over how things should be done. As long as competition is bracketed by standards, we will move forward, and this is what's happening.
What is so fundamentally different between Gnome and KDE that doesn't allow them to be merged into one project? IMHO that's all that is required to finally get a solid Desktop presence for linux.
LOL, don't worry, we all have opinions when we move to Linux. We learn later most of those opinions are misinformed ;) Remember - not everything is what it seems. Linux will have a solid desktop presence, but not yet. It's not ready. Both KDE and GNOME need a lot of polish and work, but they are good foundations on which to build. Remember: not everything is what it seems.
Yeah, me too. I get sick of reading a truckload of +5 Insightful Apple adverts. I see enough advertising for them on the TV, in the street and so on.
So when I log onto slashdot at night, it sort of annoys me that all people have to do seemingly to get cheap karma is to say "Aqua rulez", or "But MacOS is UNIX, and it looks good!".
At least there it's about 3/4 people who actually understand something about the platform
I think you mean, at least 3/4 of the people like the Mac, otherwise they wouldn't be reading that section. What you don't like is when people raise objections to the Mac, or state that they don't like it and give reasons. I don't see any reason with criticising something I don't like as long as I have reasons. Feel free to dislike it, but please don't confuse dislike with misunderstanding.
More to the point Hektor_Troy, why are you doing things this way? You can open a URL without waiting for Klippers helper functions. Just press Alt-F2 to bring up the run dialog, and then paste it into there. That'll open your default browser (normally konqueror). The text is copied to the clipboard the moment you release the mouse by the way, so you seem to be misunderstanding what's going on.
Secondly, one thing you should understand: there are two clipboards. You never need worry about the second if you don't want to, and it doesn't exist in Windows/Mac. It's called the selection buffer, and when you select some text it'll be copied there. This is what Klipper modifies. Normally you should just be able to select, press Ctrl-C to copy, go somewhere else and press paste. I've tried this as many times as I can be bothered just now, and it works fine.
The confusion arose because Qt2 contained a bug which mixed up the two. KDE3/Qt3 fixes this and so you should never see this bug again - unless you use an old app of course. There isn't much that can be done about that until all apps have been upgraded.
Having 2 clipboards is great. If Klipper didn't try to help, chances are you'd never have realised they were there. The fact that Qt used to have a bug is not a good reason for removing a feature, and neither is some people not liking it.
As far as I know, not yet. Look, forget the whole BSD thing, it's largely irrelevant. MacOS is too far away from Linux to be similar, it uses different APIs for graphics for instance. Plus of course Macs are based on PPC architecture, so you'd need opcode translation which is SLOW unless you do it before you run the game. I think they teamed up with an opcode translation company to make this happen, but until it does TransGaming is Linux only.
Oh, not to mention it's based on Wine, which afaik is Linux and similar forms of UNIX only. MacOS is not UNIX enough for it.
Maybe I'm just wierd, but to my ears "proprietary" is a bad word, especially considering that their "portability solution" is based off the hard work of the Wine crew (go Wine!). This sounds like they've been taken over by the marketroids. Sad, but I hope it won't be too long until WineHQ also has DirectX compatability, even if it is x86 only.
This is clearly wrong. I am a Linux developer and therefore by definition user, and I care about quality fonts. In fact, I have the MS fonts installed now. This reference to technocrats, I don't understand it, you seem to be under the impression that the Linux developers do not care if anybody uses their work? A quick glance around the KDE/GNOME mailing lists should get rid of that ill informed opinion.....
The technocrats argue that "making fonts can't be that hard" and "just whip some out in the Gimp", betraying their ignorance
You are the only one to mention the GIMP so far, and all the highly modded posts have been telling us how hard it is. This statement is just wrong.
Creating clear, scalable, attractive fonts is neither easy nor cheap -- and the people who care about and need quality fonts are users, not programmers. Given that free software is driven by the needs of technocrats and not by the desires of users, there is little likelihood that high-quality "free" fonts will emerge.
The "free software developers are elitist" argument is to be frank, bollocks, and I thought that argument had been dispatched a long time ago. Clearly not in your case. There are vast numbers of people working on the "niceties" as you call them, stuff like font antialiasing, usable interfaces, good themes and so on.
To be told that I am an "elitist" because I "ignore" the need for quality fonts is to be honest offensive, as it's not true. I am not a font designer. Perhaps I will try my hand at it - I won't knock out the next Arial, but I can only improve. Meanwhile, instead of telling me what I am, or to be more accurate, what you naively think I am, why don't you help out?
Oh, that's right. You're not motivated enough.
Hardly vandalism - that would imply that actually damaged the plaque. A bumper sticker can simply be unpeeled: what I want to know is, what did the sticker say?
"Shit happens" perhaps? ;)
You know what? I bet the 'soft could do this too. I mean have a guy, or team of guys available 24/7 to patch bugs. And you know what else? They'd still get flack for it, as Microsoft don't release patches straight away - for better or for worse, they do actually test them first (usually), make sure they don't kill wierd and exotic installs etc. I know they've released dodgy patches, but my point is that Microsoft isn't an overnight operation.
And more to the point, how does this patch get to people? Via autoupdate of course. The patch may have been written in 40 minutes, but it's still not available on SuSE auto update (as far as I can tell) despite the fact that Waldo works for SuSE! We really need to stop patting ourselves on the back simply because we can see the progress of the patch and Microsofters can't, otherwise this bullheaded arrogance WILL bite us on the ass.
Probably. If not now then soon there will be. I doubt we'll be able to avoid some of the distro companies going bankrupt though, in fact I'm amazed that so far there haven't been any high profile distro companies going under.
One thing that irritates me is this reference to the slightly over 500,000 "server shipments" that Linux has, compared to several millions that Windows has. I seem to recall reading that Linux has 25% of the server market, and that was in 2000. IDC never released the figures for 2001 (why?) but this statistic about preinstalled server shipments is misleading. It makes it sound like Linux is way behind in the server arena when really (if IDC is telling the truth) it's not at all. I'd guess this is because most Linux server installs are not preshipped big corporate servers - instead being installed over Windows on a recycled box, or simply not a prebought industrial server. Am I right in this, can somebody clear up this apparently massive discrepancy?