I stated earlier in a comment that I wonder if companies prefer gnome for legal reasons. Do the qt libraries for trolltech require the $$$ version because they are making money off their distros? It sounds like its a shift for liability to the user if that user decides to install it.
If the shipped code is GPL compatible then a distro wouldn't need to pay Trolltech any money.
Also what if companyX uses kde and suse and developes software to sell with kdevelop and QT libraries. They are now in violation of the trolltech license but they never agreed to one remember? See the slippery slope? SuSE does not want to be sued by companyX developing the software with kdevelop for failure of disclosure of the license. I am not a laywer but I am curious about this argument.
Novell is basically just following the lead of RedHat and Sun. They're not going to let Trolltech dictate prices on proprietary development. And their also not going to pass on this "liability" to their customers who might want to sell proprietary code in the future. This isn't much of a concern right now, but if desktop linux was ever to take off then you'd basically have everybody held hostage by Trolltech in terms of pricing and the future direction of the toolkit.
It was inevitable that the big corporate players would all standardize on Gnome.
The parent is not a troll. It's just the truth. The Qt license was going to bite KDE eventually. I'll argue that the KDE and Qt libraries are superior to gtk+/Gnome equivalents, but Sun, RedHat, and Novell were not going to be beholden to Trolltech for the future. It's a shame that someone like IBM didn't buy out Trolltech 7 years ago and liberalize the license.
I've been programming on Linux professionaly since '97, and I basically just use windows as a desktop at home, occassionaly dual-booting into some distro or another when I fancy, or running colinux, but if you use Firefox, already have a router, and a firewall then you're not getting viruses, trojans, spyware - at least I don't.
Now my mom's computer is another story. I almost threw kanotix on there because hers was so infested.
About 8 years ago. That was the first thing we did when we were migrating away from OS/2 and onto Linux. It would seem that the drivers and tools would be pretty mature by now. Why is this on Slashdot?
Wine is always going to be a day late and a dollar short when it comes to running windows applications properly. It has its use, but as a broad, comprehensive solution it's always going to fall short. The windows world is moving to.NET and eventually Longhorn anyway.
The whole question of the linux desktop is much more than compatibility. The whole concept of "choice" that "enthusiasts" like to banter around when talking about the linux desktop is pretty much antagonstic to linux on the desktop really taking off (it doesn't even really matter for many people that use linux). There's never been a real leader in the open desktop movement like Torvalds is with the kernel. Even the corporate efforts have been pretty meager, considering. I think it really comes down to there not being "a" linux desktop - something that can be targetted, with easy to use tools like Visual basic as the parent stated. The whole Gnome vs KDE thing has really detracted a lot from more movement in this area. There's no reason that there could've been more cooperation earlier.
Has anyone ever attempted to make vim into a library? It seems that if that was done then it would be a lot easier to write various GUI front ends. It seems to me, that a vim library library would be the model of MVC, and other people could write the controller and View, sending commands to the library.
Did you have a point to your post or haven't you figured out yet that personal anecdotes are pretty much meaningless to my post. You're not alone though
Do you have some evidence that Gates stole the interperter code? No you don't zealot. Gates was developing commercial software with Paul Allen at 14 or so. He was probably more of a hacker than you'll ever be. Go get the Dr. Dobbs CD of "Programmers at Work" to see some of his source code.
You're exactly right, but it seems there are lots of people that both want desktop linux to be popular and want all this "choice".
Who are linux distros competing against anyway? Desktop linux will always be pretty hobbyist, single digit numbers, on the desktop because there is no standard desktop linux distro. I guess so many people have been told that linux distro choice is a good thing, they don't step back and think about it for a second.
Oh well, I guess a lot of people don't care if desktop linux gets popular or not.
The demented zealots don't understand that open source is just another business model, along with proprietary, and businesses don't have to "embrace FOSS" or be snuffed out. Microsoft and Apple have to laugh at that.
There's not a built-in webserver with the IDE. There's a standalone web server called WEBRick. There is a rails IDE (radrails.org) that uses eclipse and a bunch of plugins. It's early in development but I've found it useful
Dr. Dobbs used to sell CDs called "Programmers at Work" which was a compilation of interviews of various programmers from the 70s and 80s. There was some of his assembly language listings in there. From what I hear he was a good hacker. He knew a lot of the old assembly tricks that programmers used at the time to squeeze every last byte out of those miniscule memories.
I wonder if Sun will play the copying game as they did with Java 5 after C# came out.
I've argued that Sun might want to quietly start researching what's next after Java. I know about Fortress, but to me the description came off as more of a new distributed Fortran than a general purpose language - maybe I'm wrong there.
So Dolphin (7.0) VM is supposed to address some issues regarding dynamic languages. If I can play armchair quarterback, I would go ahead and come up with an "agile" language of their own (along with Java) and release that with dolphin (2008 or so?). Sun probably won't adopt groovy or any other open source project because of NIVH syndrome, and it doesn't have to be dynamically typed or anything, but look at languages like Python and Ruby and understand why people like those languages.
The reason I bring this up is because continually playing the catchup game with Microsoft seems to be a losing proposition. Microsoft never had the same philosophy of a dumbed-down C++ like Java did. And corporate has always liked the idea of a dumbed-down language where the programmer is an interchangeable cog.
I guess what I'm really saying is that I just see Java going into COBOL-legacy mode fast because it seems to really be a niche, server language already. Maybe it's time to start talking about what comes after Java
The UK must be different in regards to employeer-employee implicit contracts or this guy is just full of it. Because in the US, unless its explicit in the contract, employeers don't own what you write on your on time.
I'm not buying the early 80s video game industry analogy. Yeah, he's pretty much right about the plethora of crap that was turned out that resulted in the early 80s video game industry crash, but I just don't buy that you can compare it to free as in beer software
I'd argue though that a lack of people working together in the OSS world does put it at a disadvantage compared to Apple or Microsoft. There's a finite number of developers that have the skills and or inclination to contribute to significant OSS projects. Look at the OpenOffice problem, where they've got probably 1 or 2 volunteer programmers. Of course that's not OO's only problem. The code base is a mess.
By the way, lots of people miss the old bedroom programmer video game days. Some kid hacking 6502 assembly in his bedroom could make hundreds of thousands of dollars (John Harris). Read Hackers - great book
I agree that open source is going to kill some smaller software companies while Microsoft will continue to make billions
And I think governments that don't analyze their needs carefully are going to be in for a rude awakening by thinking that free software as in beer and speech is going to magically save them money. Munich is having major problems in their switch.
It's a very specious argument that linux gets you out of "lock-in". You're locked into OpenOffice and with its problems, and lack of resources you could be asking for trouble.
Miguel didn't say anything about "infuriating" in his blog. I'm sure the anonymous coward or ScuttleMonkey (whoever added that) was really infuriated (rolls eyes) over this.
So much wasted energy on rabid hatred of Microsoft. Give it a rest
Ok, so what is up with XPCOM and XUL? Coming from a c++, systems background i've always resisted this "webapp" crap, but obviously this is what the suits want.
The question is, with Firefox being a 4 meg download on windows, how come Mozilla hasn't become a "platform"? I've heard shitty, changing interfaces, bad docs, etc...what's the scoop?
For years, and years I've been talking about the "deployment" issue with my colleagues. Runtimes suck, but i'd love to have a total flexibility...eventually, where i can put a lot of client logic or not a lot of client logic, but the point is its my choice.
Anyway, here's a cool XUL app that i'm sure many of you have seen......later on...i can't find it, but it's at spreadfirefox.com.
If you're still checking out the replies send me an email at plisken63134@yahoo.com. I think you're a nutcase, but for some reason I think you're salvagable.
By the way, I'm a real liberal - not a fucking republican.
These changes to the GPL were all about forcing filmakers and musicians to socialize their media. Not.
I never claimed it was. I was commenting on the Stallman minion blathering.
Tell me, aCapitalist, did Stallman's previous attempts to put politics into the license fail?S
What politics was that? There was nothing explicitly political in the license itself and now there would be.
You seem to be on the side of DRM and patents. How typical of a Capitalist.
DRM is better than than this braindead scheme put out by Stallman's minion. I've never been a big fan of software patents as they are currently awarded.
Without the license its illegal to use the software. However, its perfectly legal for me to have the BSA audit your company for all infringing software and fine/sue you for 100x its retail price, which could be anything considering the value of intellectual property in your lovely capitalist society.
Haha, you have no power. You can't get the BSA to do anything.
Since you've shown you understand very little about copyright, software licenses and specificly the GPL v3. If you still think you're right, either prove that capitalism is better than socialism or take your McCarthyism elsewhere.
It's already been proved countless times around the world already. I know you neo-commies think "If we just try it this one way, it'll work". Nobody is buying your crap.
So you think Linux is irrelevant? What about GCC, Emacs, OpenOffice, KDE, GNOME, etc. Where would they be today without the (L)GPL? Can you guess who wrote those licenses? I'll give you a hint, his initials are R, M, and S.
You're completely demented. I could care less about Emacs, how much Stallman code is still in GCC? and Stallman has nothing to do with OO, KDE, or Gnome or Linux(Stallman is bitter he doesn't have his own kernel).
There's nothing magic about the GPL where these projects would somehow not exist without it. You need to use reason - something you socialists/communists hate doing.
The guy's point about the spacebar made me think that maybe a redesign of the keyboard is in order. Yeah, there's Dvorak but when talking about the GUI it doesn't have much effect.
One of the reasons I hate Emacs and love Vim is becaue the CTRL key is such a pain to get to (I remapped Caps Lock to Esc and vice versa). But it almost seems like we need a usability study to figure out what keys, how many keys, and where they should be most conveniently positioned to interact with a desktop.
I think most of the keyboards we use are pretty much the same as they were back in the green screen days.
"We're fundamentally opposed to DRM. We think it's a dead end for society," Greve said, adding all software should be free to use and that artists could be paid for their films and music by a general 'taxation' on Internet connections.
I guess Greve is a new minion/spokesperson for Stallman.
First off, I'm sure filmakers and musicians will be oh so happy to "socialize" their media. Not.
But Stallman's attempt to put his politics into the license will result in utter failure. DRM is here whether Stallman or slashdotters like it or not, and any attempt to "punish" these people will just result in utter failure for the GPL v3 - even if the license is legal.
This stuff coupled with extending the viralness of GPL v3 in relation to web services will just result in people using GPL v2 and making GPL v3 completely irrelevant and Stallman and the FSF even more irrelevant than they are today.
Slashdot Mirror
I stated earlier in a comment that I wonder if companies prefer gnome for legal reasons. Do the qt libraries for trolltech require the $$$ version because they are making money off their distros? It sounds like its a shift for liability to the user if that user decides to install it.
If the shipped code is GPL compatible then a distro wouldn't need to pay Trolltech any money.
Also what if companyX uses kde and suse and developes software to sell with kdevelop and QT libraries. They are now in violation of the trolltech license but they never agreed to one remember? See the slippery slope? SuSE does not want to be sued by companyX developing the software with kdevelop for failure of disclosure of the license. I am not a laywer but I am curious about this argument.
Novell is basically just following the lead of RedHat and Sun. They're not going to let Trolltech dictate prices on proprietary development. And their also not going to pass on this "liability" to their customers who might want to sell proprietary code in the future. This isn't much of a concern right now, but if desktop linux was ever to take off then you'd basically have everybody held hostage by Trolltech in terms of pricing and the future direction of the toolkit.
It was inevitable that the big corporate players would all standardize on Gnome.
The parent is not a troll. It's just the truth. The Qt license was going to bite KDE eventually. I'll argue that the KDE and Qt libraries are superior to gtk+/Gnome equivalents, but Sun, RedHat, and Novell were not going to be beholden to Trolltech for the future. It's a shame that someone like IBM didn't buy out Trolltech 7 years ago and liberalize the license.
I've been programming on Linux professionaly since '97, and I basically just use windows as a desktop at home, occassionaly dual-booting into some distro or another when I fancy, or running colinux, but if you use Firefox, already have a router, and a firewall then you're not getting viruses, trojans, spyware - at least I don't.
Now my mom's computer is another story. I almost threw kanotix on there because hers was so infested.
About 8 years ago. That was the first thing we did when we were migrating away from OS/2 and onto Linux. It would seem that the drivers and tools would be pretty mature by now. Why is this on Slashdot?
Wine is always going to be a day late and a dollar short when it comes to running windows applications properly. It has its use, but as a broad, comprehensive solution it's always going to fall short. The windows world is moving to .NET and eventually Longhorn anyway.
The whole question of the linux desktop is much more than compatibility. The whole concept of "choice" that "enthusiasts" like to banter around when talking about the linux desktop is pretty much antagonstic to linux on the desktop really taking off (it doesn't even really matter for many people that use linux). There's never been a real leader in the open desktop movement like Torvalds is with the kernel. Even the corporate efforts have been pretty meager, considering. I think it really comes down to there not being "a" linux desktop - something that can be targetted, with easy to use tools like Visual basic as the parent stated. The whole Gnome vs KDE thing has really detracted a lot from more movement in this area. There's no reason that there could've been more cooperation earlier.
Me too. So you, I, and the four other people like us were not affected. The overwhelming majority of PC purchasers were.
And me three. But it's not my(or you) problem if other make people make those decisions.
Has anyone ever attempted to make vim into a library? It seems that if that was done then it would be a lot easier to write various GUI front ends. It seems to me, that a vim library library would be the model of MVC, and other people could write the controller and View, sending commands to the library.
Uhhmm...wrong editor. None of that CTRL-META-BLAH-SHIFT-I_MUST_BE_AN_ALIEN_TO_USE_TH
Guess what. You don't have to use intellisense if you don't want to. That was easy wasn't it.
Did you have a point to your post or haven't you figured out yet that personal anecdotes are pretty much meaningless to my post. You're not alone though
Do you have some evidence that Gates stole the interperter code? No you don't zealot. Gates was developing commercial software with Paul Allen at 14 or so. He was probably more of a hacker than you'll ever be. Go get the Dr. Dobbs CD of "Programmers at Work" to see some of his source code.
You're exactly right, but it seems there are lots of people that both want desktop linux to be popular and want all this "choice".
Who are linux distros competing against anyway? Desktop linux will always be pretty hobbyist, single digit numbers, on the desktop because there is no standard desktop linux distro. I guess so many people have been told that linux distro choice is a good thing, they don't step back and think about it for a second.
Oh well, I guess a lot of people don't care if desktop linux gets popular or not.
The demented zealots don't understand that open source is just another business model, along with proprietary, and businesses don't have to "embrace FOSS" or be snuffed out. Microsoft and Apple have to laugh at that.
There's not a built-in webserver with the IDE. There's a standalone web server called WEBRick. There is a rails IDE (radrails.org) that uses eclipse and a bunch of plugins. It's early in development but I've found it useful
Dr. Dobbs used to sell CDs called "Programmers at Work" which was a compilation of interviews of various programmers from the 70s and 80s.
There was some of his assembly language listings in there. From what I hear he was a good hacker. He knew a lot of the old assembly tricks that programmers used at the time to squeeze every last byte out of those miniscule memories.
I wonder if Sun will play the copying game as they did with Java 5 after C# came out.
I've argued that Sun might want to quietly start researching what's next after Java. I know about Fortress, but to me the description came off as more of a new distributed Fortran than a general purpose language - maybe I'm wrong there.
So Dolphin (7.0) VM is supposed to address some issues regarding dynamic languages. If I can play armchair quarterback, I would go ahead and come up with an "agile" language of their own (along with Java) and release that with dolphin (2008 or so?). Sun probably won't adopt groovy or any other open source project because of NIVH syndrome, and it doesn't have to be dynamically typed or anything, but look at languages like Python and Ruby and understand why people like those languages.
The reason I bring this up is because continually playing the catchup game with Microsoft seems to be a losing proposition. Microsoft never had the same philosophy of a dumbed-down C++ like Java did. And corporate has always liked the idea of a dumbed-down language where the programmer is an interchangeable cog.
I guess what I'm really saying is that I just see Java going into COBOL-legacy mode fast because it seems to really be a niche, server language already. Maybe it's time to start talking about what comes after Java
First for the invalid:
The UK must be different in regards to employeer-employee implicit contracts or this guy is just full of it. Because in the US, unless its explicit in the contract, employeers don't own what you write on your on time.
I'm not buying the early 80s video game industry analogy. Yeah, he's pretty much right about the plethora of crap that was turned out that resulted in the early 80s video game industry crash, but I just don't buy that you can compare it to free as in beer software
I'd argue though that a lack of people working together in the OSS world does put it at a disadvantage compared to Apple or Microsoft. There's a finite number of developers that have the skills and or inclination to contribute to significant OSS projects. Look at the OpenOffice problem, where they've got probably 1 or 2 volunteer programmers. Of course that's not OO's only problem. The code base is a mess.
By the way, lots of people miss the old bedroom programmer video game days. Some kid hacking 6502 assembly in his bedroom could make hundreds of thousands of dollars (John Harris). Read Hackers - great book
I agree that open source is going to kill some smaller software companies while Microsoft will continue to make billions
And I think governments that don't analyze their needs carefully are going to be in for a rude awakening by thinking that free software as in beer and speech is going to magically save them money. Munich is having major problems in their switch.
It's a very specious argument that linux gets you out of "lock-in". You're locked into OpenOffice and with its problems, and lack of resources you could be asking for trouble.
Miguel didn't say anything about "infuriating" in his blog. I'm sure the anonymous coward or ScuttleMonkey (whoever added that) was really infuriated (rolls eyes) over this.
So much wasted energy on rabid hatred of Microsoft. Give it a rest
Ok, so what is up with XPCOM and XUL? Coming from a c++, systems background i've always resisted this "webapp" crap, but obviously this is what the suits want.
The question is, with Firefox being a 4 meg download on windows, how come Mozilla hasn't become a "platform"? I've heard shitty, changing interfaces, bad docs, etc...what's the scoop?
For years, and years I've been talking about the "deployment" issue with my colleagues. Runtimes suck, but i'd love to have a total flexibility...eventually, where i can put a lot of client logic or not a lot of client logic, but the point is its my choice.
Anyway, here's a cool XUL app that i'm sure many of you have seen......later on...i can't find it, but it's at spreadfirefox.com.
If you're still checking out the replies send me an email at plisken63134@yahoo.com. I think you're a nutcase, but for some reason I think you're salvagable.
By the way, I'm a real liberal - not a fucking republican.
Typical of a neocommie - supporting terrorists and looters.
Seek professional help for your obvious problem.
These changes to the GPL were all about forcing filmakers and musicians to socialize their media. Not.
I never claimed it was. I was commenting on the Stallman minion blathering.
Tell me, aCapitalist, did Stallman's previous attempts to put politics into the license fail?S
What politics was that? There was nothing explicitly political in the license itself and now there would be.
You seem to be on the side of DRM and patents. How typical of a Capitalist.
DRM is better than than this braindead scheme put out by Stallman's minion. I've never been a big fan of software patents as they are currently awarded.
Without the license its illegal to use the software. However, its perfectly legal for me to have the BSA audit your company for all infringing software and fine/sue you for 100x its retail price, which could be anything considering the value of intellectual property in your lovely capitalist society.
Haha, you have no power. You can't get the BSA to do anything.
Since you've shown you understand very little about copyright, software licenses and specificly the GPL v3. If you still think you're right, either prove that capitalism is better than socialism or take your McCarthyism elsewhere.
It's already been proved countless times around the world already. I know you neo-commies think "If we just try it this one way, it'll work". Nobody is buying your crap.
So you think Linux is irrelevant? What about GCC, Emacs, OpenOffice, KDE, GNOME, etc. Where would they be today without the (L)GPL? Can you guess who wrote those licenses? I'll give you a hint, his initials are R, M, and S.
You're completely demented. I could care less about Emacs, how much Stallman code is still in GCC? and Stallman has nothing to do with OO, KDE, or Gnome or Linux(Stallman is bitter he doesn't have his own kernel).
There's nothing magic about the GPL where these projects would somehow not exist without it. You need to use reason - something you socialists/communists hate doing.
The guy's point about the spacebar made me think that maybe a redesign of the keyboard is in order. Yeah, there's Dvorak but when talking about the GUI it doesn't have much effect.
One of the reasons I hate Emacs and love Vim is becaue the CTRL key is such a pain to get to (I remapped Caps Lock to Esc and vice versa). But it almost seems like we need a usability study to figure out what keys, how many keys, and where they should be most conveniently positioned to interact with a desktop.
I think most of the keyboards we use are pretty much the same as they were back in the green screen days.
"We're fundamentally opposed to DRM. We think it's a dead end for society," Greve said, adding all software should be free to use and that artists could be paid for their films and music by a general 'taxation' on Internet connections.
I guess Greve is a new minion/spokesperson for Stallman.
First off, I'm sure filmakers and musicians will be oh so happy to "socialize" their media. Not.
But Stallman's attempt to put his politics into the license will result in utter failure. DRM is here whether Stallman or slashdotters like it or not, and any attempt to "punish" these people will just result in utter failure for the GPL v3 - even if the license is legal.
This stuff coupled with extending the viralness of GPL v3 in relation to web services will just result in people using GPL v2 and making GPL v3 completely irrelevant and Stallman and the FSF even more irrelevant than they are today.