For heavens sake, this was almost 10 years ago, and you still feel anger about some KDE developers (most of whom may no longer be active KDE hackers) who had the guts to just write software and worry about licenses only in the second place? This is gross, really. To think this only affected KDE1 - Qt2 already offered a GPL option - and you're now, almost 10 years since the project was founded, angry enough to _not_ use KDE.
... plus, in case you need to equip desktops, too, I suggest looking at KDE and Kolab (http://www.kolab.org/). Kolab is a nice, integrated groupware solution which includes a server and a smart client based on KDE's "Kontact".
If you need to deploy user desktops, the "Kiosk" framework in KDE makes it easy to lock down the workstations and guarantee an easy job for the administrators.
They might have the cash to fight, but there are other limitations. Money does not code software. Marketing does not either. They can "invent" lots and lots of licensing programs but in the end the software must work.
Even for Microsoft, programmers don't fall from trees and you cannot form teams of socially inept primadonna hackers. Even if you could, you need to discover the truly innovative minds that make technology leap forward. That's something you cannot outsource to India or China.
Seems that Microsoft is throwing everything it has into the battle against Google and maybe onto Longhorn. Everything else has to wait, since they're unable to recruit and train new staff fast enough.
I think the most accurate, though, is that KDE simply has a larger user base that have programming skills. I guess we can't be too far from reality if we establish a relationship between that (attracted people with programming skills) and the proposals present in this "contest".
I'm even tempted to speculate that GNOME (as a Desktop Environment, but certainly not as a development platform) is much more successful than KDE. Even if KDE's userbase is larger, it just means that people that use GNOME are much more oblivious to all this programming stuff, meaning it's prefered by Joe Sixpack.
Well, if this was true it's a bad thing for GNOME. A project that is unable to attract developers is a dying project. Being at mercy of corporate sponsorship alone to drive development is not freedom anymore. For the sake of GNOME lets hope this is not the case.
Well, I think your equation is only remotely correct.
GAIM: not exactly a GNOME application. It just happens to use GTK+ and glib
mono: from what I learned from guadec, the GNOME community seems to be quite divided regarding mono
ubuntu, fedoracore: lets first see if those bounties are connected to GNOME exclusively. Of course one can argue that FC and ubuntu are primarily GNOME, but you can have KDE with FC and there's kubuntu, too, so every improvement there can also be a win for KDE
But it doesn't really matter anyway. From the outside (news media that are not slashdot or osnews, or newsforge etc), nobody knows about those connections, they will list the topmost three at max, and GNOME is not among them.
Well, Gaim is not so much of a GNOME application, it's just using GTK+ as a widget toolkit and glib for convenience. Otherwise, no GNOME technologies are used. On the same grounds you could argue that "scribus" is a KDE application because it happens to use Qt.
The documentation tells that it "integrates well with GNOME 2 and KDE 3.1 system tray". So one could argue that it's a KDE application as well:-)
I'm a programmer, in fact, and I'm also a project manager. I need tools to support me, and I cannot waste time on fixing OSS tools that don't work or are plain inconvenient to use. And I'm also unlikely to pay $500 for some dork of a consultant to fix "planner", because if it was doable for that amount I could do it in no time. I'm more likely to spend the same amount on buying a project planning tool that actually works and that I can have now. Pity for me that those tools are only available on Windows.
Show me an OSS tool that does what Beyond Compare does. Or WinHex. There is a need for these things, and I don't want to limit myself to what OSS offers. It's really upsetting, but OSS tools seem to become developed only to the very spot where they are sufficient for their makers and there they stop.
The argument that companies should "buy" "software that works" instead of get free software and pay someone to implement and support it is 100% BS.
That's not what I said in the first place and it seems to be the result of a limited view. Not all software is web servers, not all applications are web shops, and I was not talking about "companies buying software", I'm talking about people buying products, about tools for things like comparing source trees, backporting changes from trunk to branch, code analysis, profiling, refactoring, and the list goes on.
I heard some companies are paying $5,000/license for multiple BK licenses. This strikes me as being a tremendous waste of resources. Hire ONE consultant to work 5 hours a week to support everyone who needs to use the source management tools and go with a free solution like subversion, darcs, monotone, or, now, git.
The fact that this model worked for you does not make it work for everyone else. If BK is expensive yet people are actually paying for it, there should be a reason for it. There are free alternatives like the ones you mentioned, and I'm using CVS myself, so if these tools were sufficient for everyones need nobody payed a dime for a BK license. There are more capable managers around than the clueless COO you refer to.
That's the IBM model, and why they're so eager to support OSS. Don't pay money for licenses, just our army of Global Services.
... and it's a shitty model. Nobody likes consultants. I want software that works, not software I have to hire consultants for to make it work. Or why would you want to get the software for free and then spend money at a rate of $150/h until it finally does what you want? I'm much more likely to buy software and thereby give the maker an incentive to develop it further. Hell, I'd even give money for Open Source software if the maker took it, and if he promised to keep improving it.
don't make me laugh. How do you read the RSS feed on a "1 inch square screen"? Did you ever tried to read your email on a phone display? RSS is just as awful.
... as soon as the first proof of concept evolves into a worm, they will experience what it means to be deployed on millions of internet-connected pc's of clueless users.
Rule #1: doesn't matter how fast you output a security update, if it's not being installed.
Unfortunately it's not enough for an update to _exist_.
Debian would be a platform, or Novell/SUSE, or RedHat - if they finally committed themselves to being one.
A platform is a platform only if its stable, and I don't mean "stable" as in "does not crash". I mean "stable" as in "does not change significantly every 6 months". So Debian would be an ideal choice.
However, Debian itself has zero commercial drive. I wonder what drives Debian at all, and other people wonder, too, given the admirable rise of Ubuntu.
But people want pretty software, and Debian stable features GNOME and a stone-aged KDE. And while GNOME on Debian seems to be more advanced than KDE, forgive me, I would not chose it for fancy software. It looks so painfully dull:-(
KDE on the other hand looks nice and lively, but is it a platform? I wonder.
Obviously there has to be a balance between the drive forward, the wish to leave behind all that old cruft (fsck compatibility!) and the conservative approach to not chance anything to not break compatibility.
Still, what drives the PC market is cool software, not cool licensing.
Just to give you an example: mplayer is technically cool. But its complexity scares people away. It's only cool because it's free. You won't be able to sell it to anybody, because as a software _product_ it sucks. badly. Even with gmplayer.
Or take GIMP. It's cool 'cause it's free. But it's just an aggregation of image manipulation tools. It's not a _product_.
There is this small gap between a program and a product that Open Source software seems to be unable to bridge, this final, annoying, painful step of really _finishing_ it so that it _could_ be sold.
My conclusion: Linux needs commercial(-grade) software. Firefox is not enough. Instead of scaring commercial software vendors away with stupid fundamentalism we should be fair with them.
Novell could code up a closed player too, and license the codec for SUSE. They probably will if VLC and Mplayer go down.
Actually, SUSE can still package Mplayer or xine. All they have to do is enter an agreement with MPEGLA and Thomson and ViaLicensing and,... and pay royalties for every copy of SuSE Linux they sell. Maybe the downloadable SuSE would then come without multimedia support
Well, maybe they would have to limit the formats played back, otherwise that game's gonna get real expensive soon.
Actually, I don't think that open source media players are really in danger. They will probably have to stop shipping packages and do source-only. look at the DREAM project as an example, http://drm.sf.net/ . Patent royalties usually become applicable when you ship executables.
Actually, "D" state means that a process sleeps on a wait queue or semaphore and will not be woken up by a signal (signal as in 'kill'). It's not really related to DMA or other interrupt activity. You could also wait 'interruptible' on a queue, meaning that it sleeps (in state "S"), but will be woken up if you 'kill' it (or via alarm(2)), it just means that you need to take care of the cause of your wakeup - it might not be what you actually expected.
Plus, you must be prepared to immediately return to userspace so that the signal can be handled. But, there are situations where you just cannot do that safely. You might be just in the middle of something and cannot roll back the changes you have already done. That's where god invented the 'D' state:)
sleeping in 'D' state is however fatal if the event you're waiting for will never come because of a system failure somewhere else. Imagine you scheduled some I/O and wait for its completion, but the hardware went into some strange state and the I/O cannot be completed. Or the driver is plain buggy, or else...
"why not add a timeout" you might ask, but if you chose to D-sleep there are reasons for it. One of them being that you cannot just cannot return to the calling userspace application unless you completed *something*. A timeout would not be feasible...
so what gives? the existence of a fix will not automatically deploy it onto all affected machines. Most bugs in Windows are long known, long "fixed", still you find hundreds of thousands of vulnerable machines out there.
proud words, but you cannot find many security bugs by testing. how many corner cases are you likely to try out until the deadline for the next release arrives? while the software is constantly under development under your feet;)
and if you fix a bug in libc or libjpeg, you're quite likely to break the office suite, mail client, file browser...
this is all nice and stuff, but who's going to look at it? patents are granted _despite_ evidence of prior art being available somewhere. its just unlikely to be discovered and actually used to refute a claim.
Once a patent is granted, it will need more than just a message in a blog to void it. you have to challenge it in court, which costs a fortune.
The one thing we can do is blowing up the story as much as we can, creating a mindshare to make people aware of it. talk to your congressmen, members of parliament, whoever needs you to vote for him. Phone them, write _real_ letters (on that stuff called "paper", you remember?), make them aware, your issue is their issue. It worked in Europe once already.
It is necessary, however, to be more articulate than just "Software patents are crap". Show them how it actually affects you, your company, your employer (if you're allowed to talk about it), your way of making a living.
figure you'd see a regular HTTP response packet that fits your TCP sequence numbers quite nicely, and a RST afterwards because the numbers got messed up as the faked response didn't have the same length as the real server response. Perhaps they hold down the server by injecting RST packets, too, like juggernauts TCP stream capturing mode did...
Slashdot Mirror
Schneiers' Law applies.
For heavens sake, this was almost 10 years ago, and you still feel anger about some KDE developers (most of whom may no longer be active KDE hackers) who had the guts to just write software and worry about licenses only in the second place? This is gross, really. To think this only affected KDE1 - Qt2 already offered a GPL option - and you're now, almost 10 years since the project was founded, angry enough to _not_ use KDE.
sigh.
... plus, in case you need to equip desktops, too, I suggest looking at KDE and Kolab (http://www.kolab.org/). Kolab is a nice, integrated groupware solution which includes a server and a smart client based on KDE's "Kontact".
If you need to deploy user desktops, the "Kiosk" framework in KDE makes it easy to lock down the workstations and guarantee an easy job for the administrators.
They might have the cash to fight, but there are other limitations. Money does not code software. Marketing does not either. They can "invent" lots and lots of licensing programs but in the end the software must work.
Even for Microsoft, programmers don't fall from trees and you cannot form teams of socially inept primadonna hackers. Even if you could, you need to discover the truly innovative minds that make technology leap forward. That's something you cannot outsource to India or China.
Seems that Microsoft is throwing everything it has into the battle against Google and maybe onto Longhorn. Everything else has to wait, since they're unable to recruit and train new staff fast enough.
It's psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity ...
Well, if this was true it's a bad thing for GNOME. A project that is unable to attract developers is a dying project. Being at mercy of corporate sponsorship alone to drive development is not freedom anymore. For the sake of GNOME lets hope this is not the case.
So let's just say that GNOME has adopted GAIM as an IM client.
Well, I think your equation is only remotely correct.
But it doesn't really matter anyway. From the outside (news media that are not slashdot or osnews, or newsforge etc), nobody knows about those connections, they will list the topmost three at max, and GNOME is not among them.
Well, Gaim is not so much of a GNOME application, it's just using GTK+ as a widget toolkit and glib for convenience. Otherwise, no GNOME technologies are used. On the same grounds you could argue that "scribus" is a KDE application because it happens to use Qt.
The documentation tells that it "integrates well with GNOME 2 and KDE 3.1 system tray". So one could argue that it's a KDE application as well :-)
Yes, adding complexity by glueing components together is really innovative. You have my commiseration.
Wow. This is truely the most elaborate way of ignoring a slashdot comment I've ever seen.
:-)
I'm a programmer, in fact, and I'm also a project manager. I need tools to support me, and I cannot waste time on fixing OSS tools that don't work or are plain inconvenient to use. And I'm also unlikely to pay $500 for some dork of a consultant to fix "planner", because if it was doable for that amount I could do it in no time. I'm more likely to spend the same amount on buying a project planning tool that actually works and that I can have now. Pity for me that those tools are only available on Windows.
Show me an OSS tool that does what Beyond Compare does. Or WinHex. There is a need for these things, and I don't want to limit myself to what OSS offers. It's really upsetting, but OSS tools seem to become developed only to the very spot where they are sufficient for their makers and there they stop.
The argument that companies should "buy" "software that works" instead of get free software and pay someone to implement and support it is 100% BS.That's not what I said in the first place and it seems to be the result of a limited view. Not all software is web servers, not all applications are web shops, and I was not talking about "companies buying software", I'm talking about people buying products, about tools for things like comparing source trees, backporting changes from trunk to branch, code analysis, profiling, refactoring, and the list goes on.
I heard some companies are paying $5,000/license for multiple BK licenses. This strikes me as being a tremendous waste of resources. Hire ONE consultant to work 5 hours a week to support everyone who needs to use the source management tools and go with a free solution like subversion, darcs, monotone, or, now, git.The fact that this model worked for you does not make it work for everyone else. If BK is expensive yet people are actually paying for it, there should be a reason for it. There are free alternatives like the ones you mentioned, and I'm using CVS myself, so if these tools were sufficient for everyones need nobody payed a dime for a BK license. There are more capable managers around than the clueless COO you refer to.
... and it's a shitty model. Nobody likes consultants. I want software that works, not software I have to hire consultants for to make it work. Or why would you want to get the software for free and then spend money at a rate of $150/h until it finally does what you want? I'm much more likely to buy software and thereby give the maker an incentive to develop it further. Hell, I'd even give money for Open Source software if the maker took it, and if he promised to keep improving it.
don't make me laugh. How do you read the RSS feed on a "1 inch square screen"? Did you ever tried to read your email on a phone display? RSS is just as awful.
safe software is the exception. not the rule. this applies also to open source software
... as soon as the first proof of concept evolves into a worm, they will experience what it means to be deployed on millions of internet-connected pc's of clueless users.
Rule #1: doesn't matter how fast you output a security update, if it's not being installed.
Unfortunately it's not enough for an update to _exist_.
Yeah, 'cause there's so many of them :-)
:-(
Debian would be a platform, or Novell/SUSE, or RedHat - if they finally committed themselves to being one.
A platform is a platform only if its stable, and I don't mean "stable" as in "does not crash". I mean "stable" as in "does not change significantly every 6 months". So Debian would be an ideal choice.
However, Debian itself has zero commercial drive. I wonder what drives Debian at all, and other people wonder, too, given the admirable rise of Ubuntu.
But people want pretty software, and Debian stable features GNOME and a stone-aged KDE. And while GNOME on Debian seems to be more advanced than KDE, forgive me, I would not chose it for fancy software. It looks so painfully dull
KDE on the other hand looks nice and lively, but is it a platform? I wonder.
Obviously there has to be a balance between the drive forward, the wish to leave behind all that old cruft (fsck compatibility!) and the conservative approach to not chance anything to not break compatibility.
Still, what drives the PC market is cool software, not cool licensing.
Just to give you an example: mplayer is technically cool. But its complexity scares people away. It's only cool because it's free. You won't be able to sell it to anybody, because as a software _product_ it sucks. badly. Even with gmplayer.
Or take GIMP. It's cool 'cause it's free. But it's just an aggregation of image manipulation tools. It's not a _product_.
There is this small gap between a program and a product that Open Source software seems to be unable to bridge, this final, annoying, painful step of really _finishing_ it so that it _could_ be sold.
My conclusion: Linux needs commercial(-grade) software. Firefox is not enough. Instead of scaring commercial software vendors away with stupid fundamentalism we should be fair with them.
Actually, SUSE can still package Mplayer or xine. All they have to do is enter an agreement with MPEGLA and Thomson and ViaLicensing and, ... and pay royalties for every copy of SuSE Linux they sell. Maybe the downloadable SuSE would then come without multimedia support
Well, maybe they would have to limit the formats played back, otherwise that game's gonna get real expensive soon.
Actually, I don't think that open source media players are really in danger. They will probably have to stop shipping packages and do source-only. look at the DREAM project as an example, http://drm.sf.net/ . Patent royalties usually become applicable when you ship executables.
... and I know that Trolltech has announced Qtopia Phone edition just recently.
However, the article claims that it runs on Symbian, not Linux.
Actually, "D" state means that a process sleeps on a wait queue or semaphore and will not be woken up by a signal (signal as in 'kill'). It's not really related to DMA or other interrupt activity. You could also wait 'interruptible' on a queue, meaning that it sleeps (in state "S"), but will be woken up if you 'kill' it (or via alarm(2)), it just means that you need to take care of the cause of your wakeup - it might not be what you actually expected.
:)
Plus, you must be prepared to immediately return to userspace so that the signal can be handled. But, there are situations where you just cannot do that safely. You might be just in the middle of something and cannot roll back the changes you have already done. That's where god invented the 'D' state
sleeping in 'D' state is however fatal if the event you're waiting for will never come because of a system failure somewhere else. Imagine you scheduled some I/O and wait for its completion, but the hardware went into some strange state and the I/O cannot be completed. Or the driver is plain buggy, or else...
"why not add a timeout" you might ask, but if you chose to D-sleep there are reasons for it. One of them being that you cannot just cannot return to the calling userspace application unless you completed *something*. A timeout would not be feasible...
so what gives? the existence of a fix will not automatically deploy it onto all affected machines. Most bugs in Windows are long known, long "fixed", still you find hundreds of thousands of vulnerable machines out there.
proud words, but you cannot find many security bugs by testing. how many corner cases are you likely to try out until the deadline for the next release arrives? while the software is constantly under development under your feet ;)
...
and if you fix a bug in libc or libjpeg, you're quite likely to break the office suite, mail client, file browser
this is all nice and stuff, but who's going to look at it? patents are granted _despite_ evidence of prior art being available somewhere. its just unlikely to be discovered and actually used to refute a claim.
Once a patent is granted, it will need more than just a message in a blog to void it. you have to challenge it in court, which costs a fortune.
The one thing we can do is blowing up the story as much as we can, creating a mindshare to make people aware of it. talk to your congressmen, members of parliament, whoever needs you to vote for him. Phone them, write _real_ letters (on that stuff called "paper", you remember?), make them aware, your issue is their issue. It worked in Europe once already.
It is necessary, however, to be more articulate than just "Software patents are crap". Show them how it actually affects you, your company, your employer (if you're allowed to talk about it), your way of making a living.
figure you'd see a regular HTTP response packet that fits your TCP sequence numbers quite nicely, and a RST afterwards because the numbers got messed up as the faked response didn't have the same length as the real server response. Perhaps they hold down the server by injecting RST packets, too, like juggernauts TCP stream capturing mode did...