* Unlock the secrets of the planet by intuitively grasping the complex interplay of oceans, sunlight and atmospheric effects
* Diagnose life-threatening medical conditions in unprecedented detail
* Achieve six-sigma quality by enabling domain experts to work collaboratively, not sequentially
* Extract currently unrecoverable petroleum assets through better understanding and management of existing fields
This has nothing to do with the original question. This is a software distribution system, not a file manager. What the hell is the matter with you, and more importantly, those with mod points!?
I wonder how much the paramedics would laugh if some random stranger came up, pointed laughing saying "Haha look at that guy he's all messed up, oh man that's hilarious."
That's exactly what these immature/.ers are doing.
If you haven't been affected by this tragedy you're not allowed to make jokes. Yes, that's how it works.
That's kinda the point actually. You're a typical consumer, you're not supposed to pay for it.
There's a number of ways to make money off of OSS though. Obviously support is one of the huge ones. I personally make a living off of OSS. I have a couple of OSS projects myself (neither of which make me much money, but I like the reciprocal nature of the community. I take, I give.)
There's tons of other avenues though. Commercial licensing is another big one, and is where most of the money lies anyway. Home users are cheap bastards, but corporations are often willing to spend big bucks for the rights to source, etc).
Mostly because these types of things usually end up saving them time and money. Why waste money when it's already been done.
Sometimes web advertising can be a source of revenue for bigger projects.
Many people want customizations made to OSS software, companies may require these changes quickly. This of course can be quite profitable.
There are quite a few examples of companies paying for OSS to be developed. Netfilter is a prime one.
Linus may not be as rich as Bill, but he certainly does alright. He's a millionaire, and he's not hated by everyone on the planet:).
This is exactly my point:). People tend to get a little crazy when talking about the greatness of bittorrent, forgetting that like all tools it has its time, place, and purpose.
Bittorrent is not the be-all end-all of file transfers.
Super fast delivery is very much not the purpose of BT. If you knew anything about the protocol you would know this. The primary purpose is peer to peer delivery, with a secondary goal being speed.
If you read some technical info on the protocol you'll know that an over-saturated torrent severely degrades its performance. Also connecting to more than 50 or 60 clients and seeds on a normal household connection will also degrade performance severely.
As well your comment about 1 seeder at 100k making the total bandwidth available 100k is also false. This is only true until one person receives one packet of the file. Theoretically over time the network should produce a total flow equal to the upload speeds of all clients and seeds combined, however this is very rarely the case.
Like I said before Bittorrent is a great protocol for sharing distributed content, and taking load off of servers, but in no way is it a replacement for direct downloads. It's architecturally impossible for a protocol design like torrent's to compete with a direct tcp protocol assuming the sender of the direct file has enough bandwidth.
Maybe one day peer to peer transfers will replace direct downloads, but bittorrent is not the protocol that will do it.
Nothing is wrong with money, but you have to consider the business market and model of the product in question.
In this case, all other browsers are free. There's plenty of opportunity to make money off of a free browser, and this opportunity increases exponentially as the market saturation grows.
In my opinion the Opera guy(s) made a terrible mistake in desiring short term income over a competitive long term strategy. I won't go as far as to say they'd be the dominant browser right now if they had, but they'd sure be a lot more competitive. I for one would probably be using Opera, and would have been doing so for quite some time. I know a lot of people feel this way.
The thing that people mistakenly do is equate open source software authors with broke hippies who don't care about money. Yes many of us have ideological reasons for releasing our software under an open license, but this doesn't mean that no money can be earned by doing so.
What if... it's a nice thought, but that's not the way it works now or will work in the future.
I find it very easy to find direct downloads that saturate my meagre 5 megabit connection, but never once have I had a bittorrent download that broke the sustained 200 kB/s barrier. Note that that's a complete average of the total download time. I've had torrent downloads that hit 350+ kB/s, but only for bursts in the middle of the file. The rest of the time (beginning and end) can see speeds as low as 8-10 kB/s.
Bittorrent suits its purpose well, but it's simply not designed for super fast delivery.
Speaking from a corporate perspective, if I ever had to wait for a bittorrent download to complete for a driver or software update from a major company I would be seriously annoyed, and would probably consider going with a different company next time.
Why anyone would chose RedHat over Solaris for a server system is beyond me
- iptables - proper package management (not that red hat provides that, but compared pkgadd anything seems good) - real command line utils (GNU), ie: - color ls - tar with gzip, bzip support (no need for piping)
Now I don't want to give the impression I think Solaris is crap. Far from it. Obviously you wouldn't want to run Linux on a massive 64 processor server or anything. But for a small system, and for ease of use and maintenance, Linux is a lot nicer to work with.
It's amazing how much the small conveniences add up. Seriously, try going without color ls for a while. It's ridiculous, but it can be really frustrating.
Leave it to a bunch of red-necks to come up with a poster that says "Kill Rats at Sight!"
btw try the "rat quizes." My favorite question and answer is:
9. Why do we control rats?
a) because they are ugly
b) because they spread disease
c) because they taste bad
Heh.
btw you can mod me off-topic. But if new-zealanders were a bunch of oil happy gun toting beer drinking rat haters they'd never have lost their precious precious pornography.
Also of note is the fact that the Alberta government estimates saving over 1 billion dollars since the institution of the rat control policy. 1 Billion!
I'm pretty much a non-violent pacifist and all that, but seriously... kill the rats!!
Did I miss something? The OOo website clearly states that it will have native theme integration. All of the screenshots of the betas already show what appears to be full integration.
Apparently the KDE team already has OOo 2.0 native widget support ready.
Unless you can find a reference for that, I don't believe you.
Also cross platform GUI's definitely aren't easy, but they're not a complete nightmare. And just so you know I'm not talking out of my ass I've personally created a GUI abstraction layer that supported GTK, win32, and a custom OpenGL widget library. You just have to think about it before hand.
Yeah it's tough, and yeah you learn a lot along the way, but just ask the Mozilla folks, it's not an impossibility by any stretch of the imagination.
Also, especially now with toolkits like wxWidgets that suddenly becomes a whole lot easier!
And yeah a GTK port to Mac would definitely be cool.
Seeing as you're not a developer maybe you should leave the development talk to people who know better.
You know, it's not all that hard to do a cross platform gui in c/c++ that has native widget support across all platforms.
I mean there's already free toolkits out there, and even so, doing your own isn't immensely hard. It just takes knowing more than one system really well, and writing a properly abstracted widget interface.
Having said that, that's exactly what they've done for OO 2.0.
Good points, and a good post. Except for one part:
Torvald's response came quickly and succinctly. "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more;)" he said.
Just a clarification... when I said having no driver is the only other alternative, I meant because the alternative would be the current open source driver... which is basically unusable beyond the most basic tasks. (ie no OpenGL, or advanced accelerated 2d operations).
Nice way of skirting around the real issue. Please tell me how having a closed source driver destroys the core value of linux. But, in doing so, you must explain how not having this driver at all (which is the only other alternative in todays society) would be a better option.
It's not as if I don't see how having an open source driver would be a really good thing. Of course I do!
In your case, idealism is a dirty word. Your idealistic views keep you from seeing the reality of the situation, which makes you say such nonsense as "destroying the core value."
It's zealots like you that keep a lot of people from adopting Linux, and give the whole community a bad name.
Nvidia is doing everyone a favor by releasing quality drivers.
People like you do a lot of complaining, but do nothing to make things better. And in the process you piss people off enough to turn them away.
When you talk like that, it is you who destroys the future of Linux. If you're too short-sighted to understand then perhaps being alive is not for you.
I didn't mean you have to change the driver itself. This would be impossible as it's a closed source binary only driver!
I just meant minor modifications to the system. And I was talking about a fringe case: the case where a whole new version of the kernel is released (not just a point release). If you think about this it speaks very well on nvidia's behalf.
Also, in their favor, they released a 2.6 version soon after the release of 2.6. (No modifications necessary).
My point, which you completely missed, was that you do NOT need to upgrade your driver every time a kernel point release is made, and I was talking about a very extreme case where nvidia really shone.
Open source isn't the be-all end all. Nvidia puts out a great product and a good driver to match. I fail to see how doing this "destroys the core value of Linux."
Without a proper nvidia driver, Linux would be basically useless for any real modern desktop use, as all we'd have is driver support comparable to say that of any of the other open sourced ones, SiS, via, intel, matrox, the open source nvidia, or ATI drivers. Which by the way all tremendously suck. Sure basic 2d operations are supported, but that's it.
nvidia is under no obligation to release the internals of their product, and why would they in such a competetive market!
Punishing nvidia for running a good, smart business, and support free and alternative operating systems with quality products is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say.
Before you spout your mouth off like that, I'd like to see you create and maintain the number one graphics card company in the world, then release the source code to your driver which would give your competitors a HUGE leg up on understanding the internals of your product.
Don't be such an idealistic ass. It's people like YOU that destroy the core value of Linux.
Could this be part of the reason hardware manufacturers don't put a high priority for Linux drivers?
No.
You don't need to release a new driver with every kernel release. ATI just has no idea what they're doing that's all.
A good example: When 2.6 first came out, the nvidia 2.4 kernel module could be made to compile with only minor modifications! I upgrade kernels with every release, and I've never had to go out and find a new driver release.
But to answer your question, the reason why most manufacturers don't put a high priority on Linux support is because the amount of effort it takes is simply not worth the trouble. Linux just doesn't have the install base.
On the other hand, if you're a cool company, and a lot of your engineers, devs, etc already use Linux, or *BSD then the effort it takes is much smaller, because they already know the system.
Ever compared the install between ATI and Nvidia. ATI's is a freakin' joke. It's horrible.
You know they basically took some of their people, forced them to slap something resemembling driver support together and released it on the public.
I agree with the grandparent post. Reward nvidia with your money. Quit your bitching, stop all the silly petitions to try to get ATI to release decent drivers. All that does is let them know they can do it and people will still buy them!
All they have to do is support a limited subset of PC hardware... whatever they deem acceptable (stable).
They can still sell PPC, and x86 Apple branded hardware. And likely it'll run on commodity PC hardware that conforms exactly to Apple specs. It might require some hack, but people will likely make it happen.
Either way, it's going to be a good thing. Apple branded x86 hardware will be a little more expensive than regular PCs (of course). But they will sell more because they'll be cheaper (and faster) than PPC versions.
As their volume goes up, prices will go down, and their volume will go up some more.
No no no... you missed the point that it's only going to run on the hardware that Apple decides on.
You may think that PC problems are due to shit hardware, which some are, but no most. Most are due to Windows being crap. Macs are already basically commodity machines. The only thing in them that's different is the motherboard and the processor.
All Apple has to do is be selective on the hardware they support.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but does your low end PC allow you to:
* Unlock the secrets of the planet by intuitively grasping the complex interplay of oceans, sunlight and atmospheric effects
* Diagnose life-threatening medical conditions in unprecedented detail
* Achieve six-sigma quality by enabling domain experts to work collaboratively, not sequentially
* Extract currently unrecoverable petroleum assets through better understanding and management of existing fields
I don't think so!
(source)
That's a fine statement to make... at least under normal circumstances. But before you make such a statement you should really do your research first.
Seriously take a look at what this guy has done. He's not just some spoon fed fresh of the academic train PhD.
This is a seriously smart guy with the experience to back it up.
This has nothing to do with the original question. This is a software distribution system, not a file manager. What the hell is the matter with you, and more importantly, those with mod points!?
I wonder how much the paramedics would laugh if some random stranger came up, pointed laughing saying "Haha look at that guy he's all messed up, oh man that's hilarious."
/.ers are doing.
That's exactly what these immature
If you haven't been affected by this tragedy you're not allowed to make jokes. Yes, that's how it works.
That's kinda the point actually. You're a typical consumer, you're not supposed to pay for it.
:).
There's a number of ways to make money off of OSS though. Obviously support is one of the huge ones. I personally make a living off of OSS. I have a couple of OSS projects myself (neither of which make me much money, but I like the reciprocal nature of the community. I take, I give.)
There's tons of other avenues though. Commercial licensing is another big one, and is where most of the money lies anyway. Home users are cheap bastards, but corporations are often willing to spend big bucks for the rights to source, etc).
Mostly because these types of things usually end up saving them time and money. Why waste money when it's already been done.
Sometimes web advertising can be a source of revenue for bigger projects.
Many people want customizations made to OSS software, companies may require these changes quickly. This of course can be quite profitable.
There are quite a few examples of companies paying for OSS to be developed. Netfilter is a prime one.
Linus may not be as rich as Bill, but he certainly does alright. He's a millionaire, and he's not hated by everyone on the planet
This is exactly my point :). People tend to get a little crazy when talking about the greatness of bittorrent, forgetting that like all tools it has its time, place, and purpose.
Bittorrent is not the be-all end-all of file transfers.
But for the purpose it fills, it works well.
Super fast delivery is very much not the purpose of BT. If you knew anything about the protocol you would know this. The primary purpose is peer to peer delivery, with a secondary goal being speed.
If you read some technical info on the protocol you'll know that an over-saturated torrent severely degrades its performance. Also connecting to more than 50 or 60 clients and seeds on a normal household connection will also degrade performance severely.
As well your comment about 1 seeder at 100k making the total bandwidth available 100k is also false. This is only true until one person receives one packet of the file. Theoretically over time the network should produce a total flow equal to the upload speeds of all clients and seeds combined, however this is very rarely the case.
Like I said before Bittorrent is a great protocol for sharing distributed content, and taking load off of servers, but in no way is it a replacement for direct downloads. It's architecturally impossible for a protocol design like torrent's to compete with a direct tcp protocol assuming the sender of the direct file has enough bandwidth.
Maybe one day peer to peer transfers will replace direct downloads, but bittorrent is not the protocol that will do it.
Nothing is wrong with money, but you have to consider the business market and model of the product in question.
In this case, all other browsers are free. There's plenty of opportunity to make money off of a free browser, and this opportunity increases exponentially as the market saturation grows.
In my opinion the Opera guy(s) made a terrible mistake in desiring short term income over a competitive long term strategy. I won't go as far as to say they'd be the dominant browser right now if they had, but they'd sure be a lot more competitive. I for one would probably be using Opera, and would have been doing so for quite some time. I know a lot of people feel this way.
The thing that people mistakenly do is equate open source software authors with broke hippies who don't care about money. Yes many of us have ideological reasons for releasing our software under an open license, but this doesn't mean that no money can be earned by doing so.
What if... it's a nice thought, but that's not the way it works now or will work in the future.
I find it very easy to find direct downloads that saturate my meagre 5 megabit connection, but never once have I had a bittorrent download that broke the sustained 200 kB/s barrier. Note that that's a complete average of the total download time. I've had torrent downloads that hit 350+ kB/s, but only for bursts in the middle of the file. The rest of the time (beginning and end) can see speeds as low as 8-10 kB/s.
Bittorrent suits its purpose well, but it's simply not designed for super fast delivery.
Speaking from a corporate perspective, if I ever had to wait for a bittorrent download to complete for a driver or software update from a major company I would be seriously annoyed, and would probably consider going with a different company next time.
I have used Solaris yes, but not very much. I was just going on my initial reaction to it.
Your post was by far the best out of all the replies. Very informative, thank you.
Why anyone would chose RedHat over Solaris for a server system is beyond me
- iptables
- proper package management (not that red hat provides that, but compared pkgadd anything seems good)
- real command line utils (GNU), ie:
- color ls
- tar with gzip, bzip support (no need for piping)
Now I don't want to give the impression I think Solaris is crap. Far from it. Obviously you wouldn't want to run Linux on a massive 64 processor server or anything. But for a small system, and for ease of use and maintenance, Linux is a lot nicer to work with.
It's amazing how much the small conveniences add up. Seriously, try going without color ls for a while. It's ridiculous, but it can be really frustrating.
Either that or a rat free government policty.
Leave it to a bunch of red-necks to come up with a poster that says "Kill Rats at Sight!"
btw try the "rat quizes." My favorite question and answer is:
9. Why do we control rats?
a) because they are ugly
b) because they spread disease
c) because they taste bad
Heh.
btw you can mod me off-topic. But if new-zealanders were a bunch of oil happy gun toting beer drinking rat haters they'd never have lost their precious precious pornography.
Also of note is the fact that the Alberta government estimates saving over 1 billion dollars since the institution of the rat control policy. 1 Billion!
I'm pretty much a non-violent pacifist and all that, but seriously... kill the rats!!
Yeah true enough. Sorry man I was a bit of an ass there.
Asking questions is never a bad thing.
Did I miss something? The OOo website clearly states that it will have native theme integration. All of the screenshots of the betas already show what appears to be full integration.
Apparently the KDE team already has OOo 2.0 native widget support ready.
Unless you can find a reference for that, I don't believe you.
Also cross platform GUI's definitely aren't easy, but they're not a complete nightmare. And just so you know I'm not talking out of my ass I've personally created a GUI abstraction layer that supported GTK, win32, and a custom OpenGL widget library. You just have to think about it before hand.
Yeah it's tough, and yeah you learn a lot along the way, but just ask the Mozilla folks, it's not an impossibility by any stretch of the imagination.
Also, especially now with toolkits like wxWidgets that suddenly becomes a whole lot easier!
And yeah a GTK port to Mac would definitely be cool.
Seeing as you're not a developer maybe you should leave the development talk to people who know better.
You know, it's not all that hard to do a cross platform gui in c/c++ that has native widget support across all platforms.
I mean there's already free toolkits out there, and even so, doing your own isn't immensely hard. It just takes knowing more than one system really well, and writing a properly abstracted widget interface.
Having said that, that's exactly what they've done for OO 2.0.
And no, they didn't use Java for the GUI.
Good points, and a good post. Except for one part:
;)" he said.
Torvald's response came quickly and succinctly. "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more
Reference.
Just a clarification... when I said having no driver is the only other alternative, I meant because the alternative would be the current open source driver... which is basically unusable beyond the most basic tasks. (ie no OpenGL, or advanced accelerated 2d operations).
Nice way of skirting around the real issue. Please tell me how having a closed source driver destroys the core value of linux. But, in doing so, you must explain how not having this driver at all (which is the only other alternative in todays society) would be a better option.
It's not as if I don't see how having an open source driver would be a really good thing. Of course I do!
In your case, idealism is a dirty word. Your idealistic views keep you from seeing the reality of the situation, which makes you say such nonsense as "destroying the core value."
It's zealots like you that keep a lot of people from adopting Linux, and give the whole community a bad name.
Nvidia is doing everyone a favor by releasing quality drivers.
People like you do a lot of complaining, but do nothing to make things better. And in the process you piss people off enough to turn them away.
When you talk like that, it is you who destroys the future of Linux. If you're too short-sighted to understand then perhaps being alive is not for you.
No No, you misunderstood what I said.
I didn't mean you have to change the driver itself. This would be impossible as it's a closed source binary only driver!
I just meant minor modifications to the system. And I was talking about a fringe case: the case where a whole new version of the kernel is released (not just a point release). If you think about this it speaks very well on nvidia's behalf.
Also, in their favor, they released a 2.6 version soon after the release of 2.6. (No modifications necessary).
My point, which you completely missed, was that you do NOT need to upgrade your driver every time a kernel point release is made, and I was talking about a very extreme case where nvidia really shone.
Open source isn't the be-all end all. Nvidia puts out a great product and a good driver to match. I fail to see how doing this "destroys the core value of Linux."
Without a proper nvidia driver, Linux would be basically useless for any real modern desktop use, as all we'd have is driver support comparable to say that of any of the other open sourced ones, SiS, via, intel, matrox, the open source nvidia, or ATI drivers. Which by the way all tremendously suck. Sure basic 2d operations are supported, but that's it.
nvidia is under no obligation to release the internals of their product, and why would they in such a competetive market!
Punishing nvidia for running a good, smart business, and support free and alternative operating systems with quality products is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say.
Before you spout your mouth off like that, I'd like to see you create and maintain the number one graphics card company in the world, then release the source code to your driver which would give your competitors a HUGE leg up on understanding the internals of your product.
Don't be such an idealistic ass. It's people like YOU that destroy the core value of Linux.
Could this be part of the reason hardware manufacturers don't put a high priority for Linux drivers?
No.
You don't need to release a new driver with every kernel release. ATI just has no idea what they're doing that's all.
A good example: When 2.6 first came out, the nvidia 2.4 kernel module could be made to compile with only minor modifications! I upgrade kernels with every release, and I've never had to go out and find a new driver release.
But to answer your question, the reason why most manufacturers don't put a high priority on Linux support is because the amount of effort it takes is simply not worth the trouble. Linux just doesn't have the install base.
On the other hand, if you're a cool company, and a lot of your engineers, devs, etc already use Linux, or *BSD then the effort it takes is much smaller, because they already know the system.
Ever compared the install between ATI and Nvidia. ATI's is a freakin' joke. It's horrible.
You know they basically took some of their people, forced them to slap something resemembling driver support together and released it on the public.
I agree with the grandparent post. Reward nvidia with your money. Quit your bitching, stop all the silly petitions to try to get ATI to release decent drivers. All that does is let them know they can do it and people will still buy them!
All they have to do is support a limited subset of PC hardware... whatever they deem acceptable (stable).
They can still sell PPC, and x86 Apple branded hardware. And likely it'll run on commodity PC hardware that conforms exactly to Apple specs. It might require some hack, but people will likely make it happen.
Either way, it's going to be a good thing. Apple branded x86 hardware will be a little more expensive than regular PCs (of course). But they will sell more because they'll be cheaper (and faster) than PPC versions.
As their volume goes up, prices will go down, and their volume will go up some more.
No no no... you missed the point that it's only going to run on the hardware that Apple decides on.
You may think that PC problems are due to shit hardware, which some are, but no most. Most are due to Windows being crap. Macs are already basically commodity machines. The only thing in them that's different is the motherboard and the processor.
All Apple has to do is be selective on the hardware they support.
I never said that either.
Dethroning aside, I think they'll do it. Steve knows his business model a lot better than you do, and if he thinks it can work, I'm with him.