Gentoo could work for that. What we need is a proper repository for gentoo packages. With strict packaging rules, like debian. Ideally there would be some way for people to provide packages with all the different possible USE combinations, so you wouldn't lose flexibility by using binary packages. It would take up a helluva lot of space, but I think it's doable. Are there any efforts to make one?
But why don't they freeze it? If it looked like they were actually moving towards release, I wouldn't mind them taking the time to iron out all the bugs. But I was being told Sarge will be out real soon now TWO YEARS AGO. There have been betas of the new installer, which is something, but other than that we seem no closer to a release than we were then.
I know many here will be cheering, after all it's an evil spammer, but does this strike anyone else as being scary? Yes he's broken laws and done bad things, we suppose, but does he really deserve to owe $49 million? And how much of that is from legal costs rather than straight fines? If he did wrong and has been convicted he deserves to be punished, but the legal system as it stands can bankrupt an innocent all too easily.
At the end of the 80s and early 90s it was, there were estimates that 99.9% of ftp traffic was pirate. All the warez groups used it, and there were more of them and bigger than they are now because there was less pressure from police and *AA. Everyone got their warez and songs etc from ftp sites, well some from usenet but that's too leechable, ftp sites could force you to upload a certain amount of your own before you could download. (There were no file sharing networks back then). Yes lots of legitimate files were distributed over ftp too, but they were a drop in the bucket by comparison - the open source movement wasn't big yet, so there weren't that many things that could be legitimately redistributed.
I don't think so. Fact is p2p is mostly pirate, just like ftp was back in "the day". It shouldn't matter - Betamax case said you don't need majority non-infringing use, only substantial non-infringing use, and there is a substantial amount of public domain and other redistributable stuff on grokster if you know where to look.
Yep, but P2P doesn't in itself infringe the rights any more than other ways of publishing. Would you ban photocopiers because people use them to photocopy copyrighted material? How about printing presses? Why should you allow these but not p2p?
A key difference is you don't have to load plugins. I need (for example) xinerama, but don't need accessibility support. So if something supports both, then it's bloated, but if it supports neither it's missing features. If you include xinerama but not accessibility, then for someone else who is the other way around it will be both bloated and missing important features. If you have both as plugins, then both of us have the features we want without the bloat.
Well, the other forks have been releasing a lot more quickly. If blackbox wants to stay relevant compared to fluxbox and openbox then they need to keep releasing.
Less features - no taskbar, no wheelmouse desktop switching, a few other things are missing. But with that comes a smaller size and possibly greater stability.
It's pretty close to perfect, because it's very minimalist. When's the last time you upgraded ls? They seem to be very responsive to bugreports, but features won't be added unless you can show they're very useful.
Then don't use it. But there are people who are using that kind of hardware, still, and running linux on it, and for them a lightweight windowmanager is worth having.
I wouldn't say lots, there are some but I don't think they're in the majority yet. Yes you can reflash it if you have the equipment, but soldered bioses are a nightmare to take off and even harder to put back on. Real hackers use socketed ones so you can modify it without risk, just reflash if you mess it up, but I think soldered is more common because it's cheaper to make.
I don't mind it missing bloopers so much as it underlining perfectly good sentences. I know what the passive voice is and I'll use it when I want to, dammit!
I don't think your example does hold true. Once you're doing something non-obvious, it doesn't matter how many obvious things you are doing with it. Are you prevented from patenting things simply because they use standard plugs? Storing an entire document as a single XML file is a novel thing to do because XML normally doesn't work like that. Yes other formats were single file, but XML bundling everything together seems an ass-backwards thing to do because the whole point of most XML-based stuff is to separate format and content. So I think it was a novel step.
They're patenting using a single XML file to store all the stuff about the document. Given that OOo doesn't do this, instead going through the clumsy step of using an uncompressed zipfile if you want to save an uncompressed document. (because an OOo document is a lot of XML files) it does seem a non-obvious step and so patentable.
Yeah, but good luck trying to persuade a corp to use a format that other people have to use a plugin to read. Many places will refuse things in rtf format even though word is the primary program to support it.
You forget one thing: it's not their document that people wants to read, it's the customers', just stored in their format. It's like the guy who built my house refusing to tell me what size bricks he used, so that I have to hire him to do all the repairs.
Sorry, if that wasn't clear what I meant was "make it completely impossible that there could ever be a propriety fork of linux". And yes, there's a problem if the license has a bug, but presumably linux weighed that against the risk of the FSF doing something stupid and decided that was more of a problem.
Given that KDE started first the onus is on Gnome to be compatible. And they don't even seem to try, wheras KDE will change to fd.o and gnome standards when it can. (see icons, dbus, menu setup...)
No, but if program foo says "version 2 or later at your option", then Steve Ballmer licenses a copy under v10 to Bill Gates who then can make a derivative of foo called foobar and sell it without giving users the sources.
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Gentoo could work for that. What we need is a proper repository for gentoo packages. With strict packaging rules, like debian. Ideally there would be some way for people to provide packages with all the different possible USE combinations, so you wouldn't lose flexibility by using binary packages. It would take up a helluva lot of space, but I think it's doable. Are there any efforts to make one?
Debian won't do a different installer for x86 only, so you need to get that working on all the architectures before it can be included.
But why don't they freeze it? If it looked like they were actually moving towards release, I wouldn't mind them taking the time to iron out all the bugs. But I was being told Sarge will be out real soon now TWO YEARS AGO. There have been betas of the new installer, which is something, but other than that we seem no closer to a release than we were then.
Replace "Religion" with "Video games" in that post and it makes even more sense.
I know many here will be cheering, after all it's an evil spammer, but does this strike anyone else as being scary? Yes he's broken laws and done bad things, we suppose, but does he really deserve to owe $49 million? And how much of that is from legal costs rather than straight fines? If he did wrong and has been convicted he deserves to be punished, but the legal system as it stands can bankrupt an innocent all too easily.
At the end of the 80s and early 90s it was, there were estimates that 99.9% of ftp traffic was pirate. All the warez groups used it, and there were more of them and bigger than they are now because there was less pressure from police and *AA. Everyone got their warez and songs etc from ftp sites, well some from usenet but that's too leechable, ftp sites could force you to upload a certain amount of your own before you could download. (There were no file sharing networks back then). Yes lots of legitimate files were distributed over ftp too, but they were a drop in the bucket by comparison - the open source movement wasn't big yet, so there weren't that many things that could be legitimately redistributed.
I don't think so. Fact is p2p is mostly pirate, just like ftp was back in "the day". It shouldn't matter - Betamax case said you don't need majority non-infringing use, only substantial non-infringing use, and there is a substantial amount of public domain and other redistributable stuff on grokster if you know where to look.
You're presuming the court will look at things like facts and precedents rather than just ruling in favour of whoever has the most money.
Yep, but P2P doesn't in itself infringe the rights any more than other ways of publishing. Would you ban photocopiers because people use them to photocopy copyrighted material? How about printing presses? Why should you allow these but not p2p?
No, but it's a visual distraction. I wish I could change a mode or something so it will only highlight actual errors.
A key difference is you don't have to load plugins. I need (for example) xinerama, but don't need accessibility support. So if something supports both, then it's bloated, but if it supports neither it's missing features. If you include xinerama but not accessibility, then for someone else who is the other way around it will be both bloated and missing important features. If you have both as plugins, then both of us have the features we want without the bloat.
Well, the other forks have been releasing a lot more quickly. If blackbox wants to stay relevant compared to fluxbox and openbox then they need to keep releasing.
Less features - no taskbar, no wheelmouse desktop switching, a few other things are missing. But with that comes a smaller size and possibly greater stability.
It's pretty close to perfect, because it's very minimalist. When's the last time you upgraded ls? They seem to be very responsive to bugreports, but features won't be added unless you can show they're very useful.
Then don't use it. But there are people who are using that kind of hardware, still, and running linux on it, and for them a lightweight windowmanager is worth having.
I wouldn't say lots, there are some but I don't think they're in the majority yet. Yes you can reflash it if you have the equipment, but soldered bioses are a nightmare to take off and even harder to put back on. Real hackers use socketed ones so you can modify it without risk, just reflash if you mess it up, but I think soldered is more common because it's cheaper to make.
I don't mind it missing bloopers so much as it underlining perfectly good sentences. I know what the passive voice is and I'll use it when I want to, dammit!
I don't think your example does hold true. Once you're doing something non-obvious, it doesn't matter how many obvious things you are doing with it. Are you prevented from patenting things simply because they use standard plugs? Storing an entire document as a single XML file is a novel thing to do because XML normally doesn't work like that. Yes other formats were single file, but XML bundling everything together seems an ass-backwards thing to do because the whole point of most XML-based stuff is to separate format and content. So I think it was a novel step.
They're patenting using a single XML file to store all the stuff about the document. Given that OOo doesn't do this, instead going through the clumsy step of using an uncompressed zipfile if you want to save an uncompressed document. (because an OOo document is a lot of XML files) it does seem a non-obvious step and so patentable.
Yeah, but good luck trying to persuade a corp to use a format that other people have to use a plugin to read. Many places will refuse things in rtf format even though word is the primary program to support it.
You forget one thing: it's not their document that people wants to read, it's the customers', just stored in their format. It's like the guy who built my house refusing to tell me what size bricks he used, so that I have to hire him to do all the repairs.
Sorry, if that wasn't clear what I meant was "make it completely impossible that there could ever be a propriety fork of linux". And yes, there's a problem if the license has a bug, but presumably linux weighed that against the risk of the FSF doing something stupid and decided that was more of a problem.
It says "MPi" on it. (I got it second hand)
Given that KDE started first the onus is on Gnome to be compatible. And they don't even seem to try, wheras KDE will change to fd.o and gnome standards when it can. (see icons, dbus, menu setup...)
No, but if program foo says "version 2 or later at your option", then Steve Ballmer licenses a copy under v10 to Bill Gates who then can make a derivative of foo called foobar and sell it without giving users the sources.