There are going to be many sarcastic, witty and plain silly responses to this post. As there should be! I am sure to laugh at many of them. (The Slashdot community can be unimaginative and get-off-my-lawn obtuse at times, but it's always witty and enjoyable.)
But I'd like to be the one that says that this upcoming get-together of the Pythons, in honor of one of them, warms my heart to no end. They were and will be the ideal geeks: smart, non-conformist, funny, and thus happy.
Chapman holds a dear place for being so very gay, so very out, and having such an insightful perspective on British (and global) culture. I salute him with all my hands, and look forward to this salute from his fellow Pythons!
I was referring to ownership over media. The censorship apparatus is still strong, perhaps stronger than in Mao's time. Could Mao have imagined the Great Firewall?
I wasn't criticizing the summary, I was criticizing the Slashdot community and its gung-ho reaction to the summary.
The summary, too, was submitted by an individual and doesn't necessarily represent the People's Republic of Slashdot.:)
All newspapers and almost all "companies" in China are party- (=government in their Leninist system) owned. There's no "independent" anything in that strict sense. That said, freedom does exist in Chinese media to various degrees. Anyway, there's an interesting discussion possible here that most Slashdot comments missed by simply slamming "China" for being schizophrenic.
You would think that Slashdot could tell the difference between "China" and the person who reviewed the iPad for The People's Daily. Newspaper censorship in the PRC is much more intense than in much of the rest of the world, but that doesn't mean that individuals are mouthpieces for certain sectors of their government.
You are wrong. The core OS packages do come from Debian, but many major packages are maintained by Ubuntu for Ubuntu. Even the kernels are Ubuntu-specific. (Though the Debian project has done the initial work in packaging them for the Debian build system, which Ubuntu uses -- and "packaging" is not a trivial task.)
You can argue that these small changes that Ubuntu makes are small compared to the bulk of the work that the Debian project has done. In fact, that was a common critique of Ubuntu when it started.
I think it's a separate critique from what Shuttleworth is responding to here, but it is related in the sense that the critics in both cases are underestimating both the importance and the size of the task that the Ubuntu project is taking on. They imply that Ubuntu is just adding some pretty little bells and whistles to "market" and get credit for (see the Slashdot comments here!) the real hard programming and administrative work that others have done, and is selfishly keeping this "marketing" stuff for itself to further this selfish goal.
So, the response is twofold:
1) The critics do not understand just how much work is involved in the "bells and whistles". Implementing a color scheme, editing and translating documentation, fixing a usability issue, adding accessibility controls, responding to newb questions in forums -- ends up taking as many man hours as optimizing an algorithm or fixing a security bug. It might not earn you as much geek credit, but it's challenging, important, and rewarding work in its own right.
2) The critics do not understand how hard it is to follow the patching and quality assurance protocols of so many upstream packages. Doing so fully would easily double the man hours counted up in step #1. (The GNOME project has an especially difficult process.)
In my opinion, #1 is a dying issue. Shuttleworth has done a great job at getting respect for the "non-tech" aspects of open source and the people who work on it. But #2 remains a point of contention, and it's not one that Shuttleworth has addressed quite convincingly enough yet.
Most people don't seem to understand the criticism that Shuttleworth is responding to.
The open source community does not begrudge Ubuntu's success at all. The issue is that the Ubuntu project fixes a lot of bugs from "upstream" open source projects, but has so far done a poor job at submitting these patches back to the upstream projects.
I can understand why this happens: It's very, very hard to manage a project as big as a complete operating system, and very, very time consuming to have to adhere to every single protocol for contributing patches to every single upstream project. If the point is to get things done for the end user, then it happens that the upstream packages lose here. And that's where the bitterness comes in: because the upstream packages don't get these patches, it means that other operating systems that use these projects don't get these patches, either. It thus seems as if Ubuntu is only patching for itself.
I'm sure this isn't the intent, though. Some of the critics have gone a bit overboard in accusing the Ubuntu project of doing this on purpose. I think that's shortsighted and unhelpful, and that's what Shuttleworth is responding to here. Though, as eloquent as he is, he's not doing a good job in this post of addressing the critique.
My own opinion is that the fault is not with Ubuntu, but with the staggering diversity and fragmentation of the open source world. It's hard enough to create a distribution that consumes all these projects, to produce back to them is monumentally hard.
What should be done is create a more uniform way for projects to receive patches. Perhaps a central repository where these patches could be places, and project maintainers can pull these from and merge in, if they think it's appropriate.
Fat change this will happen? Maybe, maybe not. I'm very impressed by Ubuntu's leadership in getting the open source world to think more about diverse end users. I think there's an opportunity to use this leadership to try to create a more streamlines path for "upstream" contribution. Projects would benefit from bug fixes and patches, other operating systems will benefit, and everybody will just be so happy forever.
Actually, the world of free software has Jokosher, which is inspired by GarageBand, and to me seems as easy to use. Still at an early stage, but I recommend taking note of it! Note that it's actually not JACK-based, which would make it so much easier for new users (the crowd usually drawn to GarageBand) to get into. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, Jokosher could be bundled into free operating system distributions, making them a nice alternative to Apple computers.
I also recommend Qtractor, which is more full-featured, but still not as intimidating as a full-blown DAW.
But, I must say, being a heavy user, that I feel that Ardour has come a long way in usability in that last two years, and these days it's almost as easy to use as all the above. It's not hard to get productive with it fairly quickly. If you gotta learn a piece of software in order to produce music, I would recommend Ardour right now. It can start you small, and take you very high up in features. Ardour's huge problem right now (if you ask me) is it's outdated and paltry documentation.
That said -- I fully agree with your statement that audio production on free software is not ready for self-congratulation. It's immensely powerful (there's nothing quite like JACK in the proprietary world, and there are some truly astounding LADSPA effects) but it's hardly rock solid, and definitely a mess.
While you didn't have much to say about Vala, you make the right "point."
Vala, I believe, is what Mono should have been from the beginning: a C#-like language without the virtual machine.
If you remember, De Icaza started the Mono project because he wanted an easier way to write applications for GNOME. He was definitely not thinking of server applications, and definitely not trying to emulate.NET 100%. Remember, too, that this was at the time when Apple was encouraging developers to write Mac OS X applications in Java...
That whole approach is dead, because users don't see why the should pay the price of extra resource overhead just because the developer chose a certain language.
However, Vala lets you keep the language without the user paying any price. It's brilliant, and will squash Mono, at least for writing GNOME applications.
Obviously, Mono has found other uses, as a cross-platform development tool. I think, though, that Vala will prove a better choice for the many develoeprs.
I'm usually in agreement with RMS, but in this case I'm having a hard time following him.
Fact is, cloud computing is enabled by free software. If it weren't for free software, I doubt it would exist! All those virtual machines running in the cloud are free operating systems. Proprietary operating systems have no licensing model that can handle it -- they are only now starting to provide something compatible (and yet still cumbersome) due to the financial success of cloud computing. But that's putting the horse before the cart: were it not for free operating systems, cloud computing would never had taken off.
Also, there are plenty of cloud computing initiatives out there based entirely on free software. Hadoop, for example, is running some amazing stuff.
The issue of freedom here, as I understand it, is not the software, but the hardware running it. Because you're renting machine time and storage from, say, Amazon, you might be concerned about how well Amazon takes care of your data. But, I see no problem in having a solution involving backing up your data on your own machines. In fact, there are quite a few startups based around this idea -- of using cloud computing just to scale up "locally" running grids.
Otherwise, it seems like RMS is ranting about online services, from a user's perspective. But... I really don't see how this has anything to do with cloud computing, per se. I agree with him that there are severe issues here with ownership of information, but... they would still hold if Gmail were running a grid, a single server, or whatever. Cloud computing is about the technical management of serving the application, not the application itself.
Oh, well. He himself admits that he doesn't even know what cloud computing is.
I'm really amazed that in this entire discussion, Vala isn't mentioned. I find Vala to be an ingenious project with the potential to please the whole GNOME community at once, especially users.
De Icaza originally created Mono because he wanted a nice high-level language to create GNOME applications quickly. Well, Mono did not quite deliver the goods. The applications are somewhat easier to develop (though I wonder if C# is really that much better than Python, which is also widely used in GNOME), but the applications require the large Mono runtime, which displeases users who want to get as much out of their computer as possible, and there's of course the problem that the whole project is precarious because of its relationship to Microsoft.
Vala does exactly what De Icaza originally wanted, without any of the costs. Developers get a high-level language, about equal to and in some cases more powerful than C#. Users get super-fast natively built applications, without any need for a virtual machine. And nobody has to worry about Microsoft, ever.
I realize that much of the excitement over Mono has nothing to do with GNOME in particular -- things like Silverlight support in non-Windows platforms, etc. I wish, though, that the discussion can go back to the problem Mono was trying to solve, and also make a fair comparison to what Vala is trying to achieve now.
While Vala won't help us get Silverlight running on OS X, it definitely is a project which could appeal to developers on various platforms. Vala compiles into standard C using the portable glib and GObject libraries, and makes it very easy to wrap and call standard C libraries, the most ubiquitous ABI, making it fully interoperable with practically anything you need. Some projects written in Java, for example, might be better of rewritten in Vala.
I encourage all of you to follow the progress of Vala, and help increase its visibility.
I think what's going on with some of the "discussions" in the comments is that some people are confusing JavaScript as an interpreted language with JavaScript manipulating the HTML DOM of a web page. These are very different things! Resig is not trying to suggest that DOM effects could replace Flash rendering! He is using JavaScript around Canvas, a component that renders just as well as Flash. The difference is that Resig's solution does not require the addition of an extra scripting language interpreter (Flash's) over the one already existent in all major browsers.
Vala. This new project, from the Gtk folk, is ingenious. It's a C#-like language that is translated internally into C source code. Object orientation is handled automagically through GObject, which is really the main mover of Vala and its inspiration. GObject is a complete OO solution in pure C, essentially an OO ABI. Bindings exist between GObject and practically any language you have heard of. Thus, a GObject-based C library is immediately usable, for example, by Python, in binary form. Read that again: you can expose an object from your code, and use it, just like that, in Python, without having to write any "wrapper." No other platform in existence allows that. The closest you get to anything like that is exporting COM objects from.NET, but COM is far, far more complex than GObject. GObject is a self-contained, standard C library. You can run it anywhere. Thing is, using GObject is a pain in C, which is not itself an OO language. Enter Vala: it changes all that by adding a higher compilation level. The end result is that you get all the advantages of all the high-level languages, with the added advantage of instant interoperability with a host of powerful platforms. I really think this is the killer solution. Vala code could run anywhere there is a C compiler, and be more interoperable than any of the above solutions. I'm definitely going to be following this development very closely!
Another reason to follow the progress of the Vala project is that it would seriously jeopardize the future of Mono, by making its main drive irrelevant.
If you remember the history, Mono was introduced quickly and with some controversy. Miguel de Icaza and Ximian originally envisioned Mono as allowing an easy way to develop applications for the GNOME desktop, De Icaza's more famous project. The problem with Java at the time was that its license was not easily compatible with the GPL. While there were a few open source Java VMs out there, the projects themselves were problematic and mired in all kinds of problems, including legal uncertainty. Meanwhile, experimenting with C#, De Icaza managed to develop a quick-and-dirty C# compiler. The open source community didn't really care if it was C# or Java, as long as they had a virtual machine of their own. De Icaza had already proved himself capable, so he got the support he needed, and things moved very quickly.
In essence, though, the reason Mono exists is legal: Java's license. Mono definitely was not adopted as a way to make Windows.NET applications run on Linux. That was a "side" benefit.
Things have changed a lot since then. Sun's Java implementation is now moving quickly to GPL, making it a much more mature alternative to Mono for open source. This same opening up, at the same time, has made it possible to include Sun's original Java classes into GCJ, making GCJ much stronger than it was before. There are already trunk versions of GCJ using those classes. (Much of GCJ's weakness was the slow-moving progress of the CLASSPATH project, and open-source equivalent to Sun's Java classes.)
Meanwhile, at GNOME, there's been much controversy over using a virtual machine on the desktop in the first place. A few GNOME projects have been written in Mono, as feasibility studies, and while they worked, users found them sluggish and overblown. Users simply don't like virtual machines on their desktop, and there's no reason why they should.
The Vala project goes back cleanly and directly to the original impetus for developing Mono: allowing the productivity of Java and C# for the open source GNOME desktop. It does this, in fact, far, far better than Mono. GObject, the core of Vala, is also the core of GNOME. All those GNOME projects written in Mono could easily be ported to Vala, immediately making them first-class binary applications, fully interoperable with everything else in GNOME. Just like C# is
Stallman is "great" not because of how he acts, but because of what he did. In the battle against (what some see as) the abuse of copyright law, he gave us a powerful legal weapon, which will be with us for many years to come.
I'm sure he'd be grateful for your brilliant psychoanalysis of him, though.
People here seem to be arguing who is more important, the license maker or the kernel maker. I think it will be the former.
Stalin and Hitler were also important, and many people (still) consider them heroes. RMS isn't quite as controversial as they are, but not everybody is happy with his politics. Nevertheless, we all recognize his impact, and I want to point out that in the long run it would probably be much greater than Torvalds. For good or for (not quite as bad as Hitler's) ill.
30 years from now, we probably won't even remember much about Linux. Hardware will shift, paradigms will shift and new models of software will render old operating systems and their pieces obsolete.
We'll be running something else, and that something will probably be protected from abuse by a GNU license. Torvalds is an important, and not only, contributer to the license's esteem (something that he has always recognized very matter of factly). In the long run the real benefit for us will be from GNU.
Making too big a deal out of a particular piece of software that happens to be very useful these days (due to various historically-specific technical and market-related reasons) will seem petty. The real battle front for our rights to use humanity's inventions is GNU. You may not agree that we should have these rights, but you must agree that this is what the battle is about.
Well, I'm willing to soften my "immediately" qualifier. But think of this: does everyone know that Amarok is a mythological wolf? I had to look it up, but once I did, I was, like, cool name, good logo, all is well. My point was that it's nice to name software with words that have relevant meanings, rather than make up something obscure. So, "GIMP" is bad. "Xfce" is bad. But "Beryl" is good (and better than "Compiz"... I'm sure most users don't even understand what compositing has to with the wobbly windows they get).
I guess people will be torn as to whether it sounds nice or not, but I personally like how Pidgin sounds.
You two are being silly! It's obviously both a real word and one that's not too known, which is fine as a name. Thing, for example, of Amarok. I didn't know that it was a reference for a mythological wolf until I looked it up. Having to look it up didn't make it less appropriate.
The disgusting legal issues notwithstanding, I have to say I'm very pleased with the change! I really hate all the cryptic acronyms so popular in the free software world. "Gaim," especially, was awkward and ugly. Pronounced like "game", is it?
"Pidgin" is a terrific name. It immediately implies what the software does, and rolls nicely off the tongue.
I'm also *really* happy with 2beta6 -- it was exactly what I needed to let me leave Windows, where I was dependent on Trillian for far too long. Pidgin supported Unicode correctly, which I needed, and there's a handy plugin that lets me read all my eight years worth of Trillian logs. I'm a very happy Ubuntu user now.
As long as I have the stage: I'm sorry that the Pidgin team had to endure AOL's despicable treatment. Big kudos to them for sticking through and listening to their lawyers. I feel like they "took the bullet" for a lot of us who use free software and believe that engineering achievements should be accessible to anyone, period. Y'all deserve a nice big hug for your service and commitment to the free software world.
Nice idea.
I suggest you put a special icon next to open source software.
I'm not saying you should be an open source evangelical, but I do think that *some* people who browse your site might prefer open source (and especially GNU) to propietary software, if they are given a clear choice.
[For the record, I often choose propietery "clean" software myself. And sometimes I even (gasp!) pay for it. I'm very, very happy with Trillian 3 Pro, and am unsatisfied with the open source offerings.]
Nitpicking, I know, but the Sony CLIE can play MP3s, and I do use mine as a secondary MP3 player (I also have an old-skool Archos Jukebox 6000). So, Sony, as a megacorporation, does support playing MP3s at one remote corner of it. I'm just sayin'.
Slashdot Mirror
There are going to be many sarcastic, witty and plain silly responses to this post. As there should be! I am sure to laugh at many of them. (The Slashdot community can be unimaginative and get-off-my-lawn obtuse at times, but it's always witty and enjoyable.)
But I'd like to be the one that says that this upcoming get-together of the Pythons, in honor of one of them, warms my heart to no end. They were and will be the ideal geeks: smart, non-conformist, funny, and thus happy.
Chapman holds a dear place for being so very gay, so very out, and having such an insightful perspective on British (and global) culture. I salute him with all my hands, and look forward to this salute from his fellow Pythons!
I was referring to ownership over media. The censorship apparatus is still strong, perhaps stronger than in Mao's time. Could Mao have imagined the Great Firewall?
I wasn't criticizing the summary, I was criticizing the Slashdot community and its gung-ho reaction to the summary.
The summary, too, was submitted by an individual and doesn't necessarily represent the People's Republic of Slashdot. :)
All newspapers and almost all "companies" in China are party- (=government in their Leninist system) owned. There's no "independent" anything in that strict sense. That said, freedom does exist in Chinese media to various degrees. Anyway, there's an interesting discussion possible here that most Slashdot comments missed by simply slamming "China" for being schizophrenic.
You would think that Slashdot could tell the difference between "China" and the person who reviewed the iPad for The People's Daily. Newspaper censorship in the PRC is much more intense than in much of the rest of the world, but that doesn't mean that individuals are mouthpieces for certain sectors of their government.
You are wrong. The core OS packages do come from Debian, but many major packages are maintained by Ubuntu for Ubuntu. Even the kernels are Ubuntu-specific. (Though the Debian project has done the initial work in packaging them for the Debian build system, which Ubuntu uses -- and "packaging" is not a trivial task.)
You can argue that these small changes that Ubuntu makes are small compared to the bulk of the work that the Debian project has done. In fact, that was a common critique of Ubuntu when it started.
I think it's a separate critique from what Shuttleworth is responding to here, but it is related in the sense that the critics in both cases are underestimating both the importance and the size of the task that the Ubuntu project is taking on. They imply that Ubuntu is just adding some pretty little bells and whistles to "market" and get credit for (see the Slashdot comments here!) the real hard programming and administrative work that others have done, and is selfishly keeping this "marketing" stuff for itself to further this selfish goal.
So, the response is twofold:
1) The critics do not understand just how much work is involved in the "bells and whistles". Implementing a color scheme, editing and translating documentation, fixing a usability issue, adding accessibility controls, responding to newb questions in forums -- ends up taking as many man hours as optimizing an algorithm or fixing a security bug. It might not earn you as much geek credit, but it's challenging, important, and rewarding work in its own right.
2) The critics do not understand how hard it is to follow the patching and quality assurance protocols of so many upstream packages. Doing so fully would easily double the man hours counted up in step #1. (The GNOME project has an especially difficult process.)
In my opinion, #1 is a dying issue. Shuttleworth has done a great job at getting respect for the "non-tech" aspects of open source and the people who work on it. But #2 remains a point of contention, and it's not one that Shuttleworth has addressed quite convincingly enough yet.
If you think so, then what's your explanation as to why Ubuntu isn't doing a good job contributing up?
Most people don't seem to understand the criticism that Shuttleworth is responding to.
The open source community does not begrudge Ubuntu's success at all. The issue is that the Ubuntu project fixes a lot of bugs from "upstream" open source projects, but has so far done a poor job at submitting these patches back to the upstream projects.
I can understand why this happens: It's very, very hard to manage a project as big as a complete operating system, and very, very time consuming to have to adhere to every single protocol for contributing patches to every single upstream project. If the point is to get things done for the end user, then it happens that the upstream packages lose here. And that's where the bitterness comes in: because the upstream packages don't get these patches, it means that other operating systems that use these projects don't get these patches, either. It thus seems as if Ubuntu is only patching for itself.
I'm sure this isn't the intent, though. Some of the critics have gone a bit overboard in accusing the Ubuntu project of doing this on purpose. I think that's shortsighted and unhelpful, and that's what Shuttleworth is responding to here. Though, as eloquent as he is, he's not doing a good job in this post of addressing the critique.
My own opinion is that the fault is not with Ubuntu, but with the staggering diversity and fragmentation of the open source world. It's hard enough to create a distribution that consumes all these projects, to produce back to them is monumentally hard.
What should be done is create a more uniform way for projects to receive patches. Perhaps a central repository where these patches could be places, and project maintainers can pull these from and merge in, if they think it's appropriate.
Fat change this will happen? Maybe, maybe not. I'm very impressed by Ubuntu's leadership in getting the open source world to think more about diverse end users. I think there's an opportunity to use this leadership to try to create a more streamlines path for "upstream" contribution. Projects would benefit from bug fixes and patches, other operating systems will benefit, and everybody will just be so happy forever.
The point is not that mistakes can improve performance, but that allowing for mistakes improves performance.
Actually, the world of free software has Jokosher, which is inspired by GarageBand, and to me seems as easy to use. Still at an early stage, but I recommend taking note of it! Note that it's actually not JACK-based, which would make it so much easier for new users (the crowd usually drawn to GarageBand) to get into. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, Jokosher could be bundled into free operating system distributions, making them a nice alternative to Apple computers.
I also recommend Qtractor, which is more full-featured, but still not as intimidating as a full-blown DAW.
But, I must say, being a heavy user, that I feel that Ardour has come a long way in usability in that last two years, and these days it's almost as easy to use as all the above. It's not hard to get productive with it fairly quickly. If you gotta learn a piece of software in order to produce music, I would recommend Ardour right now. It can start you small, and take you very high up in features. Ardour's huge problem right now (if you ask me) is it's outdated and paltry documentation.
That said -- I fully agree with your statement that audio production on free software is not ready for self-congratulation. It's immensely powerful (there's nothing quite like JACK in the proprietary world, and there are some truly astounding LADSPA effects) but it's hardly rock solid, and definitely a mess.
Groovy adds all the glory you would find in Ruby and Python directly to the Java platform. It's tremendously fun to use.
Vala, I believe, is what Mono should have been from the beginning: a C#-like language without the virtual machine.
If you remember, De Icaza started the Mono project because he wanted an easier way to write applications for GNOME. He was definitely not thinking of server applications, and definitely not trying to emulate .NET 100%. Remember, too, that this was at the time when Apple was encouraging developers to write Mac OS X applications in Java...
That whole approach is dead, because users don't see why the should pay the price of extra resource overhead just because the developer chose a certain language.
However, Vala lets you keep the language without the user paying any price. It's brilliant, and will squash Mono, at least for writing GNOME applications.
Obviously, Mono has found other uses, as a cross-platform development tool. I think, though, that Vala will prove a better choice for the many develoeprs.
Fact is, cloud computing is enabled by free software. If it weren't for free software, I doubt it would exist! All those virtual machines running in the cloud are free operating systems. Proprietary operating systems have no licensing model that can handle it -- they are only now starting to provide something compatible (and yet still cumbersome) due to the financial success of cloud computing. But that's putting the horse before the cart: were it not for free operating systems, cloud computing would never had taken off.
Also, there are plenty of cloud computing initiatives out there based entirely on free software. Hadoop, for example, is running some amazing stuff.
The issue of freedom here, as I understand it, is not the software, but the hardware running it. Because you're renting machine time and storage from, say, Amazon, you might be concerned about how well Amazon takes care of your data. But, I see no problem in having a solution involving backing up your data on your own machines. In fact, there are quite a few startups based around this idea -- of using cloud computing just to scale up "locally" running grids.
Otherwise, it seems like RMS is ranting about online services, from a user's perspective. But... I really don't see how this has anything to do with cloud computing, per se. I agree with him that there are severe issues here with ownership of information, but... they would still hold if Gmail were running a grid, a single server, or whatever. Cloud computing is about the technical management of serving the application, not the application itself.
Oh, well. He himself admits that he doesn't even know what cloud computing is.
I'm really amazed that in this entire discussion, Vala isn't mentioned. I find Vala to be an ingenious project with the potential to please the whole GNOME community at once, especially users.
De Icaza originally created Mono because he wanted a nice high-level language to create GNOME applications quickly. Well, Mono did not quite deliver the goods. The applications are somewhat easier to develop (though I wonder if C# is really that much better than Python, which is also widely used in GNOME), but the applications require the large Mono runtime, which displeases users who want to get as much out of their computer as possible, and there's of course the problem that the whole project is precarious because of its relationship to Microsoft.
Vala does exactly what De Icaza originally wanted, without any of the costs. Developers get a high-level language, about equal to and in some cases more powerful than C#. Users get super-fast natively built applications, without any need for a virtual machine. And nobody has to worry about Microsoft, ever.
I realize that much of the excitement over Mono has nothing to do with GNOME in particular -- things like Silverlight support in non-Windows platforms, etc. I wish, though, that the discussion can go back to the problem Mono was trying to solve, and also make a fair comparison to what Vala is trying to achieve now.
While Vala won't help us get Silverlight running on OS X, it definitely is a project which could appeal to developers on various platforms. Vala compiles into standard C using the portable glib and GObject libraries, and makes it very easy to wrap and call standard C libraries, the most ubiquitous ABI, making it fully interoperable with practically anything you need. Some projects written in Java, for example, might be better of rewritten in Vala.
I encourage all of you to follow the progress of Vala, and help increase its visibility.
I think what's going on with some of the "discussions" in the comments is that some people are confusing JavaScript as an interpreted language with JavaScript manipulating the HTML DOM of a web page. These are very different things! Resig is not trying to suggest that DOM effects could replace Flash rendering! He is using JavaScript around Canvas, a component that renders just as well as Flash. The difference is that Resig's solution does not require the addition of an extra scripting language interpreter (Flash's) over the one already existent in all major browsers.
Another reason to follow the progress of the Vala project is that it would seriously jeopardize the future of Mono, by making its main drive irrelevant.
If you remember the history, Mono was introduced quickly and with some controversy. Miguel de Icaza and Ximian originally envisioned Mono as allowing an easy way to develop applications for the GNOME desktop, De Icaza's more famous project. The problem with Java at the time was that its license was not easily compatible with the GPL. While there were a few open source Java VMs out there, the projects themselves were problematic and mired in all kinds of problems, including legal uncertainty. Meanwhile, experimenting with C#, De Icaza managed to develop a quick-and-dirty C# compiler. The open source community didn't really care if it was C# or Java, as long as they had a virtual machine of their own. De Icaza had already proved himself capable, so he got the support he needed, and things moved very quickly.
In essence, though, the reason Mono exists is legal: Java's license. Mono definitely was not adopted as a way to make Windows .NET applications run on Linux. That was a "side" benefit.
Things have changed a lot since then. Sun's Java implementation is now moving quickly to GPL, making it a much more mature alternative to Mono for open source. This same opening up, at the same time, has made it possible to include Sun's original Java classes into GCJ, making GCJ much stronger than it was before. There are already trunk versions of GCJ using those classes. (Much of GCJ's weakness was the slow-moving progress of the CLASSPATH project, and open-source equivalent to Sun's Java classes.)
Meanwhile, at GNOME, there's been much controversy over using a virtual machine on the desktop in the first place. A few GNOME projects have been written in Mono, as feasibility studies, and while they worked, users found them sluggish and overblown. Users simply don't like virtual machines on their desktop, and there's no reason why they should.
The Vala project goes back cleanly and directly to the original impetus for developing Mono: allowing the productivity of Java and C# for the open source GNOME desktop. It does this, in fact, far, far better than Mono. GObject, the core of Vala, is also the core of GNOME. All those GNOME projects written in Mono could easily be ported to Vala, immediately making them first-class binary applications, fully interoperable with everything else in GNOME. Just like C# is
I'm sure he'd be grateful for your brilliant psychoanalysis of him, though.
Stalin and Hitler were also important, and many people (still) consider them heroes. RMS isn't quite as controversial as they are, but not everybody is happy with his politics. Nevertheless, we all recognize his impact, and I want to point out that in the long run it would probably be much greater than Torvalds. For good or for (not quite as bad as Hitler's) ill.
We'll be running something else, and that something will probably be protected from abuse by a GNU license. Torvalds is an important, and not only, contributer to the license's esteem (something that he has always recognized very matter of factly). In the long run the real benefit for us will be from GNU.
Making too big a deal out of a particular piece of software that happens to be very useful these days (due to various historically-specific technical and market-related reasons) will seem petty. The real battle front for our rights to use humanity's inventions is GNU. You may not agree that we should have these rights, but you must agree that this is what the battle is about.
I guess people will be torn as to whether it sounds nice or not, but I personally like how Pidgin sounds.
You two are being silly! It's obviously both a real word and one that's not too known, which is fine as a name. Thing, for example, of Amarok. I didn't know that it was a reference for a mythological wolf until I looked it up. Having to look it up didn't make it less appropriate.
(yes, there is such a thing)
What if they invest some money in trademarking it this time?
The disgusting legal issues notwithstanding, I have to say I'm very pleased with the change! I really hate all the cryptic acronyms so popular in the free software world. "Gaim," especially, was awkward and ugly. Pronounced like "game", is it? "Pidgin" is a terrific name. It immediately implies what the software does, and rolls nicely off the tongue. I'm also *really* happy with 2beta6 -- it was exactly what I needed to let me leave Windows, where I was dependent on Trillian for far too long. Pidgin supported Unicode correctly, which I needed, and there's a handy plugin that lets me read all my eight years worth of Trillian logs. I'm a very happy Ubuntu user now. As long as I have the stage: I'm sorry that the Pidgin team had to endure AOL's despicable treatment. Big kudos to them for sticking through and listening to their lawyers. I feel like they "took the bullet" for a lot of us who use free software and believe that engineering achievements should be accessible to anyone, period. Y'all deserve a nice big hug for your service and commitment to the free software world.
Nice idea. I suggest you put a special icon next to open source software. I'm not saying you should be an open source evangelical, but I do think that *some* people who browse your site might prefer open source (and especially GNU) to propietary software, if they are given a clear choice. [For the record, I often choose propietery "clean" software myself. And sometimes I even (gasp!) pay for it. I'm very, very happy with Trillian 3 Pro, and am unsatisfied with the open source offerings.]
Nitpicking, I know, but the Sony CLIE can play MP3s, and I do use mine as a secondary MP3 player (I also have an old-skool Archos Jukebox 6000). So, Sony, as a megacorporation, does support playing MP3s at one remote corner of it. I'm just sayin'.