Did you happen to notice that the section 5 in that blog post was possibly talking about you? Read especially carefully the last paragraph of it. The article was well-thought and was not to defend GNOME but actually the best piece of writing I've seen in a long time. Too bad there are dismissive and nonconstructive people in at least/. discussion boards, always.
One can make a free, non patent-encumbered implementation of Flash player, and the specifications can be nowadays freely be used to do that. So the de-facto implementation is not open, but it's not restricted like H.264.
I think they are merely backing up step by step. First they only supported permissive licenses, since they could take it and close it themselves. Now the next step is GPLv2, since they clearly cannot oppose it. The new things seems to be anti-GPLv3 - that is, continuing the usual software restriction business by making open source non-open via software patents.
But clearly it's a step forwards again, a forced one. And from business perspective and keeping their existing business model they are doing just the right thing, giving up only when it's absolutely necessary, while keeping their public picture as shiny as possible. I just think we are far from getting to the point that the old proprietary software houses wouldn't try to take away the freedoms of the free software by any means possible. If only the US would lead the way with evaporating software patents...
I think the title and description give a false, tabloid-like sensational impression. Neo FreeRunner will continue to sale, and a new revision of it (A7) will even hit the shelves soon.
What has been stalled is the development of the successor of FreeRunner, formerly known as GTA03. It will not ship in 2009.
Anyway, I hope they will stay in business as they are still the only one doing a phone that is really usable as a phone with eg. Debian or whatever. It would be perfectly fine if they now scrapped _all_ their non-hw & non-kernel efforts. They are lousy at handling a software community or coding UI anyway.
As can be guessed, I'm a happy user of FreeRunner as my only daily phone, and it would be sad if one day I would be forced to use a less free phone. And yes, Android dev phone is quite far from Openmoko in reality... it's not like buying a new computer and installing a distro of your choice on it like it is with Neo.
The problem with (originally) Android-based devices is that their power management is done in a completely non-standard way. It's not that it would not be open, but passing tokenized dead mice through a wormhole is quite a pain. Will there be enough community interest to actually ever put the power management to a level that can be used by non-Android distributions?
This is where the Neo FreeRunner shines - not only you can install Debian (or Gentoo) on the device, but you can actually use it as your daily phone / GPS device / music player to a similar extent you can use the Openmoko distribution.
It's not just, or it should not just be a "fun hack" to install Debian on your phone - the point should be that you can use your phone with Debian, similar to what you done on your desktop/laptop computer. Of course, there should not be any need to hack the phone before being able to install own programs on it, but there is already the Android dev phone available so that's not the problem with Google phones.
As the game is based on open source box2d physics engine, there are also other games with partially similar feel and game play. Crayon Physics was the one with the original idea, though.
To make it worse, it was OpenMoko at first, after which it was changed to Openmoko. And that is the project, not the product.
Also another similar nitpick, it's not Openmoko FreeRunner, it's Neo FreeRunner, and more precisely FIC Neo FreeRunner.
I think I see these wrong more often than not. Then again, why they have to have "Openmoko" but "FreeRunner", and why there has to be Neo, FIC, Openmoko which all sound like they might be the manufacturer...
Now the problem with the driver isn't that it doesn't exist, or doesn't work.
Yes the problem is that. New X comes out - the driver (if gfx) does not work. You use your NAS device and attach some USB device there - the driver does not work since you assumed x86.
Only free drivers actually _work_, the others are just hacks for specific platforms. Of course financially it's often enough to limit to 32-bit x86, maybe even 64-bit x86, but it really doesn't mean the driver would "work in Linux". It's simply that quite a lot of people look through the x86 glasses.
As for the "free" word, it's clearly explained what is meant with it. And public domain, BSD and GPL are all free in that sense.
I'm personally excepting to Conduit to fulfill my needs in backing up from different sites. Of course synchronizing is different from backing up, but when I have all the data on my local machine I can backup those easily.
I'm not very keen in using Google or any other services for my calendar, contacts, photos etc. data. If I'll think I'll need on-the-fly syncing, I'll rather just setup a sync server on my home server.
Well, that's the whole issue behind discussion of Gobuntu vs. gNewsense. Currently it's being thought that it's impossible to do _everything_ inside Ubuntu, but maybe some day it will - it's definitely in Ubuntu's interests, but there are quite a lot of stuff to work on in the Ubuntu infrastucture etc. to fix all the problems.
Since gNewsense is based on Ubuntu, it's pretty easy to keep track of the differences and import them to Ubuntu, just like Debian can import changes from Ubuntu back to Debian.
gNewsense is more Free Software conscious than both Debian and Ubuntu. Even Debian is really doing a practical, largely deployed distribution, and freedom is only one part of it. If some people really devote to one thing like gNewsense people are doing, they may find out problem points others aren't aware of - and they've done that already.
This is the usual comment seen every time, but really it's not about removing choice, it's about advocating the free choice. gNewsense is (also) free software, you can really do anything with it you like, including installing Adobe Flash, NVIDIA binary blobs and whatever you wish. It shouldn't be so hard to understand that FSF thinks the best way to advocate free software is not to point to installing non-free software.
I don't agree with it even myself (I like the Ubuntu / Debian way of simply separating those better), but I can surely _understand_ it.
Debian has a less strict view to the Freedom of software, or the point where leaving something out is sensible. I'm not meaning the FSF's wish to not even reference to non-free software, but eg. the current situation with the few GLX source files with non-DFSG license - it's been simply ignored apparently because the problem is rather small and anyway on a "to do" list to be corrected at some point of the future. But gNewsense doesn't accept non-free licenses at any point, even if a large functionality depends on it - so they went ahead and removed GLX (and thus, 3D support) from gNewsense 2.0.
Like stated in many other comments, gNewsense is doing an important investigation work on various pieces of software, and highlighting the few problematic points. If concenctrating on a perfect (99.9%) Free desktop like Ubuntu is doing, one cannot expect to spend huge amount of resources of doing freedomness investigation if even Debian is not doing it all, so it's good there are some people who are really checking it all.
It's hard to be perfect, and that's why it's good that there are different folks (Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, gNewsense) each looking into the freedomness of various pieces of software. That's how we make sure that we can continue to be sure to have the freedoms to use the software also in the future.
Thanks for pointing that out, seems there are rather informed people there, though still too many who even consider the non-commercial clause. But most probably you'll be choosing between cc-by-sa and gfdl, and that's great. The former is going to be a bit more work.
They still haven't decided on the license of their original articles:"All new articles will be available under an open content license yet to be determined.".
If they will go the oh-so-common route of choosing a license with "non-commercial" clause (hey, we're soo anti-commercial and soo "free"), they really won't be a competitor to Wikipedia since the reusage possibilities of Citizendium's material drops dramatically.
I would guess they will choose some free license, and choosing any other than GFDL (without invariant sections / covers) is going to be a big pain for them since they would need to handle the fact of license changing from article to article. But since they _still_ haven't chosen anything, I'd take that as a sign they really don't a) understand, b) care or c) want their material to be freely usable.
Thanks to the wonderful English language (lacking "libre"), we already have eg. Scholarpedia, "the free peer reviewed encyclopedia", "like Wikipedia" (just don't put any material on anything you're selling, oh and btw don't take more than 100 copies). I would hope for real competition from Citizendium, rather than fooling people with "free" sites and luring eg. professionals to write to them like Scholarpedia does.
The xserver-xorg-core is already version at 7.2 (or "1.2") now, with the rest of the modules going in gradually. With the modularity of X.org nowadays, it's not certain that all the newest driver work will be in, though. For example the ati driver has seen only some important patches backported to feisty, while there has been a lot of development and reworking without a proper release of xserver-xorg-video-ati lately.
Actually, "radeon" and "ati" are the exactly same driver. The confusion has arised from the fact that "ati" driver has, recently fixed in GIT though, had problems auto-detecting some recent Radeons and thus failing to give the control to the real driver (radeon). This has people led to think that they would somehow be different drivers, or that the "ati" does not support their card at all but "radeon" does.
I'd understand the "give us our whatever-blobs"-attitude better if the "half" of the proprietary drivers people want wouldn't suck so bad. On my 64-bit Ubuntu, the proprietary ATI fglrx drivers:
- Hang the whole machine every time I logout (apparently because I'm using DVI output... gosh!), so I exit that installation of Ubuntu (which is not my primary, just testing the fglrx drivers etc. there) with alt-sysrq-e/i/s/u/b because it's safer.
- Give only green stripes and a complete hang if using _both_ DVI and VGA outputs at the same time (oh my god, we never though that could happen!).
- Do not give any 3D support if I happen not to disable Composite/AIGLX in Xorg.conf.
...while the reverse-engineered drivers give my Radeon X800 card 3D acceleration, DVI output, DVI+VGA output, accelerated Beryl 3D desktop via AIGLX etc. just finely. So I just don't belive in the FUD (from eg. NVIDIA) that they are so complex and extremely difficult to write, that the worldwide OSS community couldn't do that - those handful of reverse-engineering people are already doing better drivers than ATI with all the in-house knowledge!
I do symphatize with the people who just want "stuff to work", and know that NVIDIA proprietary drivers happen to be better quality at this time, but all my experiences with binary blobs has been so bad that I will take reverse-engineered drivers anytime, even for NVIDIA.
For those who haven't read it yet, David Airlied's LCA 2007 talk is a really good and entertaining piece: http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied/talks/lca07/nouveau. odp (yes, server's mime-type is probably wrong, you have to save it first)
The only thing that bothers me is that they add to the confusion by not dismissing the general "proprietary drivers == 3D desktop" point of view. In summary, Intel integrated graphics have 3D desktop with the free drivers, ATI Radeon up to quite new X850-series have 3D desktop with the free drivers, and by the time of feisty+1 we just might have 3D desktop working on the free Nouveau drivers for NVIDIA cards. Not the top speed of course in case of reverse-engineered ATI/NVIDIA drivers, but enough.
The situation is even more interesting considering that the proprietary ATI drivers (that are required for the X1000-series to have even 2D support) don't support Composite with AIGLX, the default in Ubuntu and X.org, while the reverse-engineered open source driver does. I think it is one aspect that has been affecting this decision - why include proprietary drivers if they don't even work.
It is to be admitted though that NVIDIA has such a large market share (probably 20-30% of all desktop and laptop PCs, compared to ca. 50% with Intel integrated graphics), that it partly makes the issue "3D needs proprietary drivers"-like, until Nouveau gets usable.
There's an improved version of Chart coming to OOo finally in the version 2.3, which should be released in September of this year. It should be good enough for most purposes it's currently not. It's been development for a long time, since the Chart module basically hasn't changed much since OOo 1.0.
Hopefully they'll revamp the equation editor at some point too. It has good potential, but clearly it's another module that hasn't been touched for a long, long time.
I remembered Chaos instantly, and it really was great! I algo got it via Your Sinclair cassette, and it was incredible that something as good as that came free with the magazine. It was on top of my gaming list for years, and I have it on my computer (to run via some of the Spectrum emulators for *nix) at this very moment, too.
One example is bleep.com, which offers FLAC versions of some releases. I've bought a couple of them, but unfortunately the selection is quite small (all of Autechre and then some). Maybe the transferring of FLAC music to portable device (eg. convert to Ogg Vorbis) is too much of a hassle for ordinary people. Me, of course, have an iAudio player that plays FLAC out of the box.
Other than that, emusic.com provides over a million MP3s with no DRM used, but I won't buy music in a patent-restricted format. And with the superioty of FLAC (after all, I'm _paying_ for the music, I'd expect perfect quality), I'm not sure if I'd pay for Ogg Vorbis songs, either.
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Did you happen to notice that the section 5 in that blog post was possibly talking about you? Read especially carefully the last paragraph of it. The article was well-thought and was not to defend GNOME but actually the best piece of writing I've seen in a long time. Too bad there are dismissive and nonconstructive people in at least /. discussion boards, always.
One can make a free, non patent-encumbered implementation of Flash player, and the specifications can be nowadays freely be used to do that. So the de-facto implementation is not open, but it's not restricted like H.264.
I think they are merely backing up step by step. First they only supported permissive licenses, since they could take it and close it themselves. Now the next step is GPLv2, since they clearly cannot oppose it. The new things seems to be anti-GPLv3 - that is, continuing the usual software restriction business by making open source non-open via software patents.
But clearly it's a step forwards again, a forced one. And from business perspective and keeping their existing business model they are doing just the right thing, giving up only when it's absolutely necessary, while keeping their public picture as shiny as possible. I just think we are far from getting to the point that the old proprietary software houses wouldn't try to take away the freedoms of the free software by any means possible. If only the US would lead the way with evaporating software patents...
I think the title and description give a false, tabloid-like sensational impression. Neo FreeRunner will continue to sale, and a new revision of it (A7) will even hit the shelves soon.
What has been stalled is the development of the successor of FreeRunner, formerly known as GTA03. It will not ship in 2009.
Anyway, I hope they will stay in business as they are still the only one doing a phone that is really usable as a phone with eg. Debian or whatever. It would be perfectly fine if they now scrapped _all_ their non-hw & non-kernel efforts. They are lousy at handling a software community or coding UI anyway.
As can be guessed, I'm a happy user of FreeRunner as my only daily phone, and it would be sad if one day I would be forced to use a less free phone. And yes, Android dev phone is quite far from Openmoko in reality... it's not like buying a new computer and installing a distro of your choice on it like it is with Neo.
I was just thinking the same. It's not really a competitor to Wikipedia in a larger context, even though it might have some value to a random surfer.
The problem with (originally) Android-based devices is that their power management is done in a completely non-standard way. It's not that it would not be open, but passing tokenized dead mice through a wormhole is quite a pain. Will there be enough community interest to actually ever put the power management to a level that can be used by non-Android distributions?
This is where the Neo FreeRunner shines - not only you can install Debian (or Gentoo) on the device, but you can actually use it as your daily phone / GPS device / music player to a similar extent you can use the Openmoko distribution.
It's not just, or it should not just be a "fun hack" to install Debian on your phone - the point should be that you can use your phone with Debian, similar to what you done on your desktop/laptop computer. Of course, there should not be any need to hack the phone before being able to install own programs on it, but there is already the Android dev phone available so that's not the problem with Google phones.
As the game is based on open source box2d physics engine, there are also other games with partially similar feel and game play. Crayon Physics was the one with the original idea, though.
Nokia Internet Tablet and Openmoko Neo FreeRunner owners might be interested in Numpty Physics: http://numptyphysics.garage.maemo.org/ & http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/rantalai/freerunner/numptyphysics/
The MPEG-LA point had nothing to do with the MKV container format, but what Theora adds compared to other video codecs.
To make it worse, it was OpenMoko at first, after which it was changed to Openmoko. And that is the project, not the product. Also another similar nitpick, it's not Openmoko FreeRunner, it's Neo FreeRunner, and more precisely FIC Neo FreeRunner. I think I see these wrong more often than not. Then again, why they have to have "Openmoko" but "FreeRunner", and why there has to be Neo, FIC, Openmoko which all sound like they might be the manufacturer...
Now the problem with the driver isn't that it doesn't exist, or doesn't work.
Yes the problem is that. New X comes out - the driver (if gfx) does not work. You use your NAS device and attach some USB device there - the driver does not work since you assumed x86. Only free drivers actually _work_, the others are just hacks for specific platforms. Of course financially it's often enough to limit to 32-bit x86, maybe even 64-bit x86, but it really doesn't mean the driver would "work in Linux". It's simply that quite a lot of people look through the x86 glasses. As for the "free" word, it's clearly explained what is meant with it. And public domain, BSD and GPL are all free in that sense.
I'm personally excepting to Conduit to fulfill my needs in backing up from different sites. Of course synchronizing is different from backing up, but when I have all the data on my local machine I can backup those easily.
I'm not very keen in using Google or any other services for my calendar, contacts, photos etc. data. If I'll think I'll need on-the-fly syncing, I'll rather just setup a sync server on my home server.
Well, that's the whole issue behind discussion of Gobuntu vs. gNewsense. Currently it's being thought that it's impossible to do _everything_ inside Ubuntu, but maybe some day it will - it's definitely in Ubuntu's interests, but there are quite a lot of stuff to work on in the Ubuntu infrastucture etc. to fix all the problems. Since gNewsense is based on Ubuntu, it's pretty easy to keep track of the differences and import them to Ubuntu, just like Debian can import changes from Ubuntu back to Debian.
gNewsense is more Free Software conscious than both Debian and Ubuntu. Even Debian is really doing a practical, largely deployed distribution, and freedom is only one part of it. If some people really devote to one thing like gNewsense people are doing, they may find out problem points others aren't aware of - and they've done that already.
This is the usual comment seen every time, but really it's not about removing choice, it's about advocating the free choice. gNewsense is (also) free software, you can really do anything with it you like, including installing Adobe Flash, NVIDIA binary blobs and whatever you wish. It shouldn't be so hard to understand that FSF thinks the best way to advocate free software is not to point to installing non-free software. I don't agree with it even myself (I like the Ubuntu / Debian way of simply separating those better), but I can surely _understand_ it.
Debian has a less strict view to the Freedom of software, or the point where leaving something out is sensible. I'm not meaning the FSF's wish to not even reference to non-free software, but eg. the current situation with the few GLX source files with non-DFSG license - it's been simply ignored apparently because the problem is rather small and anyway on a "to do" list to be corrected at some point of the future. But gNewsense doesn't accept non-free licenses at any point, even if a large functionality depends on it - so they went ahead and removed GLX (and thus, 3D support) from gNewsense 2.0. Like stated in many other comments, gNewsense is doing an important investigation work on various pieces of software, and highlighting the few problematic points. If concenctrating on a perfect (99.9%) Free desktop like Ubuntu is doing, one cannot expect to spend huge amount of resources of doing freedomness investigation if even Debian is not doing it all, so it's good there are some people who are really checking it all. It's hard to be perfect, and that's why it's good that there are different folks (Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, gNewsense) each looking into the freedomness of various pieces of software. That's how we make sure that we can continue to be sure to have the freedoms to use the software also in the future.
Thanks for pointing that out, seems there are rather informed people there, though still too many who even consider the non-commercial clause. But most probably you'll be choosing between cc-by-sa and gfdl, and that's great. The former is going to be a bit more work.
They still haven't decided on the license of their original articles:"All new articles will be available under an open content license yet to be determined.".
If they will go the oh-so-common route of choosing a license with "non-commercial" clause (hey, we're soo anti-commercial and soo "free"), they really won't be a competitor to Wikipedia since the reusage possibilities of Citizendium's material drops dramatically.
I would guess they will choose some free license, and choosing any other than GFDL (without invariant sections / covers) is going to be a big pain for them since they would need to handle the fact of license changing from article to article. But since they _still_ haven't chosen anything, I'd take that as a sign they really don't a) understand, b) care or c) want their material to be freely usable.
Thanks to the wonderful English language (lacking "libre"), we already have eg. Scholarpedia, "the free peer reviewed encyclopedia", "like Wikipedia" (just don't put any material on anything you're selling, oh and btw don't take more than 100 copies). I would hope for real competition from Citizendium, rather than fooling people with "free" sites and luring eg. professionals to write to them like Scholarpedia does.
Actually Xorg 7.2 is currently on its way to feisty, thanks to efforts by a community member, working together with Debian and helped by some Ubuntu core developers: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/200 7-February/023252.html
The xserver-xorg-core is already version at 7.2 (or "1.2") now, with the rest of the modules going in gradually. With the modularity of X.org nowadays, it's not certain that all the newest driver work will be in, though. For example the ati driver has seen only some important patches backported to feisty, while there has been a lot of development and reworking without a proper release of xserver-xorg-video-ati lately.
Actually, "radeon" and "ati" are the exactly same driver. The confusion has arised from the fact that "ati" driver has, recently fixed in GIT though, had problems auto-detecting some recent Radeons and thus failing to give the control to the real driver (radeon). This has people led to think that they would somehow be different drivers, or that the "ati" does not support their card at all but "radeon" does.
I'd understand the "give us our whatever-blobs"-attitude better if the "half" of the proprietary drivers people want wouldn't suck so bad. On my 64-bit Ubuntu, the proprietary ATI fglrx drivers:
...while the reverse-engineered drivers give my Radeon X800 card 3D acceleration, DVI output, DVI+VGA output, accelerated Beryl 3D desktop via AIGLX etc. just finely. So I just don't belive in the FUD (from eg. NVIDIA) that they are so complex and extremely difficult to write, that the worldwide OSS community couldn't do that - those handful of reverse-engineering people are already doing better drivers than ATI with all the in-house knowledge!
. odp (yes, server's mime-type is probably wrong, you have to save it first)
- Hang the whole machine every time I logout (apparently because I'm using DVI output... gosh!), so I exit that installation of Ubuntu (which is not my primary, just testing the fglrx drivers etc. there) with alt-sysrq-e/i/s/u/b because it's safer.
- Give only green stripes and a complete hang if using _both_ DVI and VGA outputs at the same time (oh my god, we never though that could happen!).
- Do not give any 3D support if I happen not to disable Composite/AIGLX in Xorg.conf.
I do symphatize with the people who just want "stuff to work", and know that NVIDIA proprietary drivers happen to be better quality at this time, but all my experiences with binary blobs has been so bad that I will take reverse-engineered drivers anytime, even for NVIDIA.
For those who haven't read it yet, David Airlied's LCA 2007 talk is a really good and entertaining piece: http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied/talks/lca07/nouveau
The only thing that bothers me is that they add to the confusion by not dismissing the general "proprietary drivers == 3D desktop" point of view. In summary, Intel integrated graphics have 3D desktop with the free drivers, ATI Radeon up to quite new X850-series have 3D desktop with the free drivers, and by the time of feisty+1 we just might have 3D desktop working on the free Nouveau drivers for NVIDIA cards. Not the top speed of course in case of reverse-engineered ATI/NVIDIA drivers, but enough.
The situation is even more interesting considering that the proprietary ATI drivers (that are required for the X1000-series to have even 2D support) don't support Composite with AIGLX, the default in Ubuntu and X.org, while the reverse-engineered open source driver does. I think it is one aspect that has been affecting this decision - why include proprietary drivers if they don't even work.
It is to be admitted though that NVIDIA has such a large market share (probably 20-30% of all desktop and laptop PCs, compared to ca. 50% with Intel integrated graphics), that it partly makes the issue "3D needs proprietary drivers"-like, until Nouveau gets usable.
There's an improved version of Chart coming to OOo finally in the version 2.3, which should be released in September of this year. It should be good enough for most purposes it's currently not. It's been development for a long time, since the Chart module basically hasn't changed much since OOo 1.0.
Hopefully they'll revamp the equation editor at some point too. It has good potential, but clearly it's another module that hasn't been touched for a long, long time.
I remembered Chaos instantly, and it really was great! I algo got it via Your Sinclair cassette, and it was incredible that something as good as that came free with the magazine. It was on top of my gaming list for years, and I have it on my computer (to run via some of the Spectrum emulators for *nix) at this very moment, too.
The original 8500 is a faster card than the newest 9250. And 9200 was a bit faster than 9250.
One example is bleep.com, which offers FLAC versions of some releases. I've bought a couple of them, but unfortunately the selection is quite small (all of Autechre and then some). Maybe the transferring of FLAC music to portable device (eg. convert to Ogg Vorbis) is too much of a hassle for ordinary people. Me, of course, have an iAudio player that plays FLAC out of the box.
Other than that, emusic.com provides over a million MP3s with no DRM used, but I won't buy music in a patent-restricted format. And with the superioty of FLAC (after all, I'm _paying_ for the music, I'd expect perfect quality), I'm not sure if I'd pay for Ogg Vorbis songs, either.