that's sad. I always believed that ebooks, anyway an electronic form for books, would have been really successful. This apparently demonstrates the countrary. Or maybe this just underlines that the "ebook" form was not good enough. Personally I find very usefull to have ebooks, large PDF's, big text only files of something that is pubblically available. We can talk about RFC's, manuals, 80 years older novels, poems and so on. They are useful for research, studying (school/uni books cost really a lot of money nowadays), being informed and so on. The problem is always the same: authors want to always be sure to earn LOTS of money from their work. Blaming or not blaming them?
My colleagues and I had several discussions about switching to linux costs during the past years. I am not going to report everything we talked about (especially when we got "hot" and yelled using not very fair terms), but just the essentials. The cost, both for just server or even for workstations, depends a lot upon whether there's at least a professional employed there actively using linux (a geek almost necessarily) and the kind of applications needed to be "ported". In my case, a switch not only would be very expensive (30 workstations using Windows and -gosh- MS Access), but almost impossibile without thinking about an almost complete rewrite of the applications. In many other cases though the switch is not only possibile (email, wordprocessing, spreadsheet) but even very very inexpensive.
things slowly moving on, but still it's a monolith
on
Xr Renamed to Cairo
·
· Score: 1
...to be moved. The Xouvert project team, instead of being a "hot head" and planning to just develop something terribly different, fast, slow and maybe also very unstable or even NOT planning at all, decided that the first step has to be taken on april 2004. Gee... when I saw the very first page of Xouvert I was excited about this fork. Just a little later I found out that it's not a fork but a "development branch" therefore no question about license change (would't have been great to have it GPL finally?), that the development speed is surely nothing like I am used to (KDE, linux, mozilla...) and that the final result would be nothing more and nothing less than the same XFree we are using since a long ago. Yes, there have been improvements, surely many in the last two years, but I think many were/are waiting for something "different", even if unstable at the beginning (I had KDE crashing 10 times aday until january). A question: why is it so difficult to create a REAL fork from XFree? Making it GPL also would maybe make more developers decide to contribute. XFree could not get the changes and improvements back? Is it that bad when such a new software would be used by everyone instead of XFree? If it doesn't work out they might switch to X11/MIT license back and recontribute the (little) changes back to XFree.
We tried to purchase the licenses we need for our offices. In order to we looked in their site anything about the possibility to buy them (online or with other methods). We didn't succeed so we posted a couple of questions to SCO online (that was possible, even if their site seems to be a little slow).
One of the requests we made:
Hello,
We would like to purchase Linux licenses for our servers. We couldn't find a link on your home page. Is online payment possible? Can we keep using our RedHat linux installations in the meanwhile?
Thank you.
We are now waiting for a quick answer from them (their form said You will be hearing from us soon), and very very curious about their answer.
Slashdot Mirror
that's sad. I always believed that ebooks, anyway an electronic form for books, would have been really successful. This apparently demonstrates the countrary. Or maybe this just underlines that the "ebook" form was not good enough. Personally I find very usefull to have ebooks, large PDF's, big text only files of something that is pubblically available. We can talk about RFC's, manuals, 80 years older novels, poems and so on. They are useful for research, studying (school/uni books cost really a lot of money nowadays), being informed and so on. The problem is always the same: authors want to always be sure to earn LOTS of money from their work. Blaming or not blaming them?
My colleagues and I had several discussions about switching to linux costs during the past years. I am not going to report everything we talked about (especially when we got "hot" and yelled using not very fair terms), but just the essentials. The cost, both for just server or even for workstations, depends a lot upon whether there's at least a professional employed there actively using linux (a geek almost necessarily) and the kind of applications needed to be "ported". In my case, a switch not only would be very expensive (30 workstations using Windows and -gosh- MS Access), but almost impossibile without thinking about an almost complete rewrite of the applications. In many other cases though the switch is not only possibile (email, wordprocessing, spreadsheet) but even very very inexpensive.
...to be moved. The Xouvert project team, instead of being a "hot head" and planning to just develop something terribly different, fast, slow and maybe also very unstable or even NOT planning at all, decided that the first step has to be taken on april 2004. Gee... when I saw the very first page of Xouvert I was excited about this fork. Just a little later I found out that it's not a fork but a "development branch" therefore no question about license change (would't have been great to have it GPL finally?), that the development speed is surely nothing like I am used to (KDE, linux, mozilla...) and that the final result would be nothing more and nothing less than the same XFree we are using since a long ago. Yes, there have been improvements, surely many in the last two years, but I think many were/are waiting for something "different", even if unstable at the beginning (I had KDE crashing 10 times aday until january). A question: why is it so difficult to create a REAL fork from XFree? Making it GPL also would maybe make more developers decide to contribute. XFree could not get the changes and improvements back? Is it that bad when such a new software would be used by everyone instead of XFree? If it doesn't work out they might switch to X11/MIT license back and recontribute the (little) changes back to XFree.
We tried to purchase the licenses we need for our offices. In order to we looked in their site anything about the possibility to buy them (online or with other methods). We didn't succeed so we posted a couple of questions to SCO online (that was possible, even if their site seems to be a little slow).
One of the requests we made:
Hello,
We would like to purchase Linux licenses for our servers.
We couldn't find a link on your home page. Is online payment possible?
Can we keep using our RedHat linux installations in the meanwhile?
Thank you.
We are now waiting for a quick answer from them (their form said You will be hearing from us soon), and very very curious about their answer.