Fortunately, the UI aspects should be small, so a port of Sphinx-4 to an OSS platform should be easy. But until that happens, it's free software that only runs on a proprietary platform (assuming it's even free software at all--what's the license and what's the patent situation?).
Of course, you can write KDE applications in Python; that's what PyKDE is for. And PyQt should work on Mac OS X and Windows as well (subject to the usual Qt licensing hassles).
wxPython works on all those platforms, too, and has GUI designers. So does PyGtk.
QtRuby looks like another reasonable binding, but functionally, it is just more of the same. Even the differences between Ruby and Python are negligible these days, since Python has blocks and all those other Ruby feature, too.
integration with collaboration and workgroup tools like sharepoint
I see nothing in the combination of Microsoft Office and Sharepoint that I don't get with OpenOffice and existing collaboration tools. In fact, if anything, Sharepoint seems way behind other open source and commercial tools in terms of its functionality.
section-level permissions based a centralized directory (active directory)
Given the structure of Microsoft Office documents, how can they possibly implement section-level permissions in a reasonably secure way?
The Qt/Ruby bindings are probably nice. But how do they bring something that wasn't there before? We have had Qt/Python bindings, Gtk/Python bindings, Gtk/Ruby bindings, wxWindows/Python bindings, and wxWindows/Ruby bindings. All of them are pretty nice and pretty easy to use. Several of them are supported by visual GUI builders. Qt/Rube seems like just another possible combination.
I guess you still believe that there is only a need for 5 computers in the world?
Actually, that is exactly the problem with what's happening with Solaris: putting in features like "dtrace" assumes that computers are expensive and have dedicated staff to "observe" and "tune" them. In a world with hundreds of millions or billions of computers, that attitude makes no sense anymore. That is why the Solaris approach is so outdated.
Sun feels compelled to do these things because their survival is at stake: Sun has to convince people to shell out money for Solaris or else they go out of business. And once Sun's marketing machinery kicks into high gear, bad-mouthing their open-source competition, it's natural for people to want to respond.
If Sun didn't make silly claims about Solaris, Linux developers wouldn't give Solaris a second thought anymore.
System managers want to observe what's going on inside their kernel about as much as they want to see what's going on inside their bowels. That stuff just has to work, and it has to work automatically and without being noticed. If people ever have to muck around with dtrace or tuning kernel parameters, there is something seriously wrong with Solaris.
As for reliability, even if (and that's a big if, given Sun's historically lousy record) the Solaris kernel actually manages to have a more reliable file system, so what? Those mechanisms still don't protect against many kinds of failures: you still need backups, hot standby servers, and other features if you want high reliability. Beyond a certain point, trying to push reliability of one part of a system is simply wasted effort or even harmful.
Overall, there is no "Solaris vs. Linux" issue. For a small number of applications, Solaris is still the best choice, and for the rest, Linux is the hands-down overall winner.
The main difference in modern, non political-sciences usage is that a republic has a directly elected head of state, while a parliamentary democracy have a head of state elected by the parliament.
Well, the distinction you are trying to make does not seem to be supported by dictionary definitions or common usage.
Even the CIA fact book lists Switzerland, Germany, and the US all as "federal republics".
Why? Businesses don't care about interoperability.
Sure they do, when they deal with other businesses.
but not until the people working on it and with applications around it are people who actually have made a living building advanced Fortune-50 caliber integrated information systems.
Even in Fortune 50 companies, Microsoft Office documents are mostly just mailed around. Sometimes they are stuck on a web site or into a document repository. Occasionally, people build simply workflows around them or do forms processing.
Technically, OpenOffice and other open source tools are already superior (not to mention less expensive and more secure). People stick with the Microsoft Office stuff because they know it.
OpenOffice has a long ways to go before it offers the sort of functionality that real businesses need, not mom-n-pop or real small businesses that don't actually manage their best practices.
Maybe you can be specific? What "functionality" are you thinking of?
There is a real chance that, if the OOo format becomes an ISO standard, organizations will put it onto their requirements checklist. In that case, Microsoft may not have much of a choice but to implement it.
When the OpenOffice file format becomes an ISO standard, Microsoft may be forced to support it, since organizations will likely put "ISO office document standard compliance" into their requirements.
Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support.
The problem is: Microsoft Office formats are not a "standard"; they aren't even a "de-facto standard" or a "proprietary standard". They are simply whatever Microsoft's codebase happens to write into files this release. It's impossible to be fully compatible with that. Not even Microsoft manages to.
That's why an ISO standard office document format would be so important.
Why would it lure people from Microsoft? People don't just use Office because they are forced into it. They use it because the alternatives suck.
There are many different kinds of people. I'm sure there are a few MS Office users that, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have come to the conclusion that MS Office is the best office suite for them, but I suspect that group is pretty small. There is also a group of people who, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have concluded that MS Office sucks; when those people use MS Office, they do so because Microsoft controls the standard.
And then there is the last, and probably by far largest, group of users: people who use MS Office not because they prefer it but because it is the only office suite they know and because switching to something else would be a big hassle. Part of that hassle is having to learn a new UI, and another part of that hassle is to try to convert documents in Microsoft's proprietary format.
and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality.
The needs of most users are more than adequately covered by versions of Microsoft Office that are several years old, as well as by Open Office. Offering more features is not going to make an open source office suite win against Microsoft Office.
Quite to the contrary: an open source office suite probably can win away users by being more usable and offering fewer features than Microsoft Office.
Here's what concerns me. Open Source has never really shown that it's terribly interested in ensuring API and binary compatibility across releases.
That's a myth created by Sun, not a real concern. Both closed source and open source projects have backwards compatibility issues. With open source projects, at least you know that they aren't driven by some vendor's business considerations.
Your claim is particularly ironic because the SunOS/Solaris transition Sun forced on their users was enormously painful and primarily driven by Sun suits, not by user demand.
Much of this could be solved if Sun put the Java API and other technologies through an official standardization process
Yes, but Sun has made crystal clear that they are not interested in doing that.
tell me, how open are posix, ANSI C, or the internet standards?
POSIX, ANSI C, and the Internet standards are completely open: you can implement them in whatever way you like. There are no mandatory compatibility test suites for your implementation. Only if you want to have your implementation certified do you have to pass official tests.
fine, but at least we can pretty much rely on the java we have installed on our systems run whatever claims to be java
Fine, but at least we can pretty much rely on the Windows we have installed on our systems run whatever claims to be Windows software. What's the difference? Both Sun and Microsoft give you the same answer to compatibility: "just use our proprietary standard and you'll be fine". That is not what "open standards" are supposed to be about.
Linux conforms pretty closely to POSIX and SUS, which are closed standards. GCC conforms to ISO C99 (at least, when you tell it to).
Yes, but Linux conforms to those standards that its users want it to conform to, not to the standards that some other entity says it has to conform to.
That makes a huge difference in practice because it allows junk that users just don't want to be removed from the system.
Furthermore, allowing Sun to set compatibility standards and tests means that, for all practical purposes, they could make Java proprietary again at any time, simply by imposing compatibility requirements that open source implementations can't meet. That's not the kind of control open source developers are willing to give some company, in particular, a company that's in as bad shape as Sun is.
Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that all Sun owns right now about the Java platform is their own implementation and the trademark. But that's not true: Sun has much strong intellectual property rights, and they have demonstrated time and again that they are not willing to give up those rights.
For example, you cannot write an open source implementation from Sun's specifications (see here for RMS's take on it). Furthermore, Sun has numerous patents on technologies related to Java; it looks like some of those patents are essential for writing a standards-compliant Java implementation.
The fact that some people have started independent (but so far woefully incomplete) efforts to create open source implementations of Java and have so far gotten away with it, unfortunately, doesn't show anything; Sun doesn't have to enforce their trade secret, patent, or copyright claims until it is convenient for them to do so. People didn't see LZW and GIF coming either. Sun may well eventually make SCO-like claims over open source Java implementations, and unlike SCO, Sun may have a pretty solid legal case.
While their styles will vary greatly, old timers will almost uniformly prefer an easy-for-others-to-read style.
Easy-to-read for whom? Easy to read for an absolute beginner? Easy to read for an expert programmer?
There is no style that works for every reader--a style that makes code easy to read for beginners can obscure patterns and shorthands that make code easy to read for expert programmers.
The facts are simple, The US has the longest continuous democratic government in the world. So the comment stable government is accurate in that sense.
No, it doesn't. Iceland and Switzerland have the US beat.
And whether the US should even be considered "democratic" until the mid-20th century is also debatable.
there will still be a peaceful transition of power if Kerry wins, and a peaceful continuation if Bush wins. That is what it is all about.
China has peaceful transitions between its "elected" leaders, too. That doesn't make it a democracy.
However, these problems are a result of people making poor decisions in one state.
How do you know that without actual independent confirmation?
Again, this is a slap in the face of America
If it is, then US is slapping itself, because those monitors are there are the request of the US.
But, yes, it is an indication that people, both here and abroad, have lost some degree of confidence in US democracy, and there is no use pretending otherwise. The way to recover from that loss of confidence is not through arrogance, secrecy, or propaganda, it is through openness to independent, external scrutiny.
The primary purpose of open source licenses is to give users control over the software platform that they use--to allow them to adapt it to their own needs, instead of the business needs of some mega-software-corporation. This includes removing or replacing poorly conceived portions of a platform and adding incompatible extensions. An "open source" implementation for a closed standard under the control of Sun doesn't allow this, hence it doesn't achieve the goals of open source.
Furthermore, requiring formal test suite compatibility means that such a project simply cannot meet the definitions of an open source project.
Slashdot Mirror
Python also has list comprehensions, which are less general but more convenient:
How did they "fall flat on their faces"? Python has full lexical closures and bound methods.
They aren't used as much in Python because it also has some other constructs that are often preferred by users (eg list comprehensions).
Fortunately, the UI aspects should be small, so a port of Sphinx-4 to an OSS platform should be easy. But until that happens, it's free software that only runs on a proprietary platform (assuming it's even free software at all--what's the license and what's the patent situation?).
Of course, you can write KDE applications in Python; that's what PyKDE is for. And PyQt should work on Mac OS X and Windows as well (subject to the usual Qt licensing hassles).
wxPython works on all those platforms, too, and has GUI designers. So does PyGtk.
QtRuby looks like another reasonable binding, but functionally, it is just more of the same. Even the differences between Ruby and Python are negligible these days, since Python has blocks and all those other Ruby feature, too.
integration with collaboration and workgroup tools like sharepoint
I see nothing in the combination of Microsoft Office and Sharepoint that I don't get with OpenOffice and existing collaboration tools. In fact, if anything, Sharepoint seems way behind other open source and commercial tools in terms of its functionality.
section-level permissions based a centralized directory (active directory)
Given the structure of Microsoft Office documents, how can they possibly implement section-level permissions in a reasonably secure way?
The Qt/Ruby bindings are probably nice. But how do they bring something that wasn't there before? We have had Qt/Python bindings, Gtk/Python bindings, Gtk/Ruby bindings, wxWindows/Python bindings, and wxWindows/Ruby bindings. All of them are pretty nice and pretty easy to use. Several of them are supported by visual GUI builders. Qt/Rube seems like just another possible combination.
Repeat after me: "You have no right to privacy in public." (especially when you are outdoors)
Why exactly shouldn't I have a right to privacy in my own backyard?
I guess you still believe that there is only a need for 5 computers in the world?
Actually, that is exactly the problem with what's happening with Solaris: putting in features like "dtrace" assumes that computers are expensive and have dedicated staff to "observe" and "tune" them. In a world with hundreds of millions or billions of computers, that attitude makes no sense anymore. That is why the Solaris approach is so outdated.
Why do people feel compelled to do these things?
Sun feels compelled to do these things because their survival is at stake: Sun has to convince people to shell out money for Solaris or else they go out of business. And once Sun's marketing machinery kicks into high gear, bad-mouthing their open-source competition, it's natural for people to want to respond.
If Sun didn't make silly claims about Solaris, Linux developers wouldn't give Solaris a second thought anymore.
System managers want to observe what's going on inside their kernel about as much as they want to see what's going on inside their bowels. That stuff just has to work, and it has to work automatically and without being noticed. If people ever have to muck around with dtrace or tuning kernel parameters, there is something seriously wrong with Solaris.
As for reliability, even if (and that's a big if, given Sun's historically lousy record) the Solaris kernel actually manages to have a more reliable file system, so what? Those mechanisms still don't protect against many kinds of failures: you still need backups, hot standby servers, and other features if you want high reliability. Beyond a certain point, trying to push reliability of one part of a system is simply wasted effort or even harmful.
Overall, there is no "Solaris vs. Linux" issue. For a small number of applications, Solaris is still the best choice, and for the rest, Linux is the hands-down overall winner.
Well, the distinction you are trying to make does not seem to be supported by dictionary definitions or common usage.
Even the CIA fact book lists Switzerland, Germany, and the US all as "federal republics".
The CIA Factbook defines "republic" as So, a republic is a kind of democracy, and the kind of democracy it is is related to how it makes its laws (not how it elects its president).
Why? Businesses don't care about interoperability.
Sure they do, when they deal with other businesses.
but not until the people working on it and with applications around it are people who actually have made a living building advanced Fortune-50 caliber integrated information systems.
Even in Fortune 50 companies, Microsoft Office documents are mostly just mailed around. Sometimes they are stuck on a web site or into a document repository. Occasionally, people build simply workflows around them or do forms processing.
Technically, OpenOffice and other open source tools are already superior (not to mention less expensive and more secure). People stick with the Microsoft Office stuff because they know it.
OpenOffice has a long ways to go before it offers the sort of functionality that real businesses need, not mom-n-pop or real small businesses that don't actually manage their best practices.
Maybe you can be specific? What "functionality" are you thinking of?
There is a real chance that, if the OOo format becomes an ISO standard, organizations will put it onto their requirements checklist. In that case, Microsoft may not have much of a choice but to implement it.
When the OpenOffice file format becomes an ISO standard, Microsoft may be forced to support it, since organizations will likely put "ISO office document standard compliance" into their requirements.
Staroffice/OpenOffice really needs to have a better office document standard support.
The problem is: Microsoft Office formats are not a "standard"; they aren't even a "de-facto standard" or a "proprietary standard". They are simply whatever Microsoft's codebase happens to write into files this release. It's impossible to be fully compatible with that. Not even Microsoft manages to.
That's why an ISO standard office document format would be so important.
Why would it lure people from Microsoft? People don't just use Office because they are forced into it. They use it because the alternatives suck.
There are many different kinds of people. I'm sure there are a few MS Office users that, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have come to the conclusion that MS Office is the best office suite for them, but I suspect that group is pretty small. There is also a group of people who, after careful evaluation of the alternatives, have concluded that MS Office sucks; when those people use MS Office, they do so because Microsoft controls the standard.
And then there is the last, and probably by far largest, group of users: people who use MS Office not because they prefer it but because it is the only office suite they know and because switching to something else would be a big hassle. Part of that hassle is having to learn a new UI, and another part of that hassle is to try to convert documents in Microsoft's proprietary format.
and it will be seven levels above Office in functionality.
The needs of most users are more than adequately covered by versions of Microsoft Office that are several years old, as well as by Open Office. Offering more features is not going to make an open source office suite win against Microsoft Office.
Quite to the contrary: an open source office suite probably can win away users by being more usable and offering fewer features than Microsoft Office.
Here's what concerns me. Open Source has never really shown that it's terribly interested in ensuring API and binary compatibility across releases.
That's a myth created by Sun, not a real concern. Both closed source and open source projects have backwards compatibility issues. With open source projects, at least you know that they aren't driven by some vendor's business considerations.
Your claim is particularly ironic because the SunOS/Solaris transition Sun forced on their users was enormously painful and primarily driven by Sun suits, not by user demand.
Much of this could be solved if Sun put the Java API and other technologies through an official standardization process
Yes, but Sun has made crystal clear that they are not interested in doing that.
tell me, how open are posix, ANSI C, or the internet standards?
POSIX, ANSI C, and the Internet standards are completely open: you can implement them in whatever way you like. There are no mandatory compatibility test suites for your implementation. Only if you want to have your implementation certified do you have to pass official tests.
fine, but at least we can pretty much rely on the java we have installed on our systems run whatever claims to be java
Fine, but at least we can pretty much rely on the Windows we have installed on our systems run whatever claims to be Windows software. What's the difference? Both Sun and Microsoft give you the same answer to compatibility: "just use our proprietary standard and you'll be fine". That is not what "open standards" are supposed to be about.
Linux conforms pretty closely to POSIX and SUS, which are closed standards. GCC conforms to ISO C99 (at least, when you tell it to).
Yes, but Linux conforms to those standards that its users want it to conform to, not to the standards that some other entity says it has to conform to.
That makes a huge difference in practice because it allows junk that users just don't want to be removed from the system.
Furthermore, allowing Sun to set compatibility standards and tests means that, for all practical purposes, they could make Java proprietary again at any time, simply by imposing compatibility requirements that open source implementations can't meet. That's not the kind of control open source developers are willing to give some company, in particular, a company that's in as bad shape as Sun is.
Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that all Sun owns right now about the Java platform is their own implementation and the trademark. But that's not true: Sun has much strong intellectual property rights, and they have demonstrated time and again that they are not willing to give up those rights.
For example, you cannot write an open source implementation from Sun's specifications (see here for RMS's take on it). Furthermore, Sun has numerous patents on technologies related to Java; it looks like some of those patents are essential for writing a standards-compliant Java implementation.
The fact that some people have started independent (but so far woefully incomplete) efforts to create open source implementations of Java and have so far gotten away with it, unfortunately, doesn't show anything; Sun doesn't have to enforce their trade secret, patent, or copyright claims until it is convenient for them to do so. People didn't see LZW and GIF coming either. Sun may well eventually make SCO-like claims over open source Java implementations, and unlike SCO, Sun may have a pretty solid legal case.
While their styles will vary greatly, old timers will almost uniformly prefer an easy-for-others-to-read style.
Easy-to-read for whom? Easy to read for an absolute beginner? Easy to read for an expert programmer?
There is no style that works for every reader--a style that makes code easy to read for beginners can obscure patterns and shorthands that make code easy to read for expert programmers.
The dictionary definitions of "democracy" and "republic" both apply to the US. In fact, they apply to just about any Western democracy.
The facts are simple, The US has the longest continuous democratic government in the world. So the comment stable government is accurate in that sense.
No, it doesn't. Iceland and Switzerland have the US beat.
And whether the US should even be considered "democratic" until the mid-20th century is also debatable.
there will still be a peaceful transition of power if Kerry wins, and a peaceful continuation if Bush wins. That is what it is all about.
China has peaceful transitions between its "elected" leaders, too. That doesn't make it a democracy.
Sorry, but I'm supposed to trust some toothless european agency with ulterior motives any more?
No, you aren't. You can trust whoever you like.
But the OSCE members might like to know whether they can trust US democracy, and that's why it makes sense for them to look for themselves.
However, these problems are a result of people making poor decisions in one state.
How do you know that without actual independent confirmation?
Again, this is a slap in the face of America
If it is, then US is slapping itself, because those monitors are there are the request of the US.
But, yes, it is an indication that people, both here and abroad, have lost some degree of confidence in US democracy, and there is no use pretending otherwise. The way to recover from that loss of confidence is not through arrogance, secrecy, or propaganda, it is through openness to independent, external scrutiny.
The primary purpose of open source licenses is to give users control over the software platform that they use--to allow them to adapt it to their own needs, instead of the business needs of some mega-software-corporation. This includes removing or replacing poorly conceived portions of a platform and adding incompatible extensions. An "open source" implementation for a closed standard under the control of Sun doesn't allow this, hence it doesn't achieve the goals of open source.
Furthermore, requiring formal test suite compatibility means that such a project simply cannot meet the definitions of an open source project.