If that were true, Linux itself would be failing spectacularly in favour of the BSDs.
Whether a license works for a piece of software depends on how the software is used. A GPL license on the Linux kernel and Linux command line utilities means something very different from a GPL license on a GUI toolkit.
The crucial difference here is that companies can ship commercial software on top of a Linux kernel without their software falling under the GPL and without paying anybody, while companies cannot ship commercial software on top of Qt without their software falling under the GPL or paying a lot of money to TT. And you can argue that that doesn't matter, but it obviously does.
Gnome introduced the whole desktop wars, if they wanted standardisation they would either not have started, or certainly would have disbanded when their original aim became irrelevant.
Gnome is as relevant as it has always been, and Novell's decision underlines that again: KDE can never become the standard desktop for Linux. It's just not going to happen. And the sooner the KDE project members realize that, the better off we all are.
I have several Macs and several Linux machines (plus, grudginly, a Windows machine). I wish, however, Apple and Apple proponents would stop marketing Macintosh by putting down Linux. Macintosh is a good alternative alternative to Windows: it runs desktop applications well and is fairly easy to use and administer compared to Windows. But Macintosh is not a replacement for a Linux machine, and I'm also concerned about Apple's long-term direction in terms of their underlying technology.
With the dot-coms, when they went belly up, all the investments were lost. With open source, the results of every man-hour invested in an open source project are availabe forever and for everyone.
So, venture capitalists, do your worst and bubble away; we love you.
Not to mention that nuclear fission is the cleanest, safest, most abundant practical source of energy on the planet at the moment.
No, the safest and most abundant practical source of energy is--conservation. Nuclear fission remains highly risky because there is no large scale long-term waste disposal available.
All that the environmental nuts caused was for us to burn MORE fossil fuels at diesel plants. So much for saving the planet.
No, the people that caused more fuel to be burned are the people who used the energy. The environmental nuts (crunchy and healthy at that) want you to use less energy so that we can burn less fossil fuel and can avoid building any more nuclear power plants.
I agree that a diversity of desktops is good. I would love to see a desktop by the KDE developers that had a chance to succeed commercially. But as long as KDE is based on Qt (GPL and for-pay license), I think it's going to hurt rather than help Linux.
I think technically, KDE is a good desktop, and it is popular in Europe. But no matter how good it is, KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL and a commercial license. Gnome may be worse, but it isn't so much worse that it makes a difference to real-world users.
I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now.
The KDE developers should seriously think about developing the next generation Linux desktop, based on a an entirely new toolkit and new approach to doing things.
And you think forcing him to sit in classes that bore him for hours a day, and for him to show his intellect on every test and question and class, is not going to produce problems and conflicts with his peers?
This kid is different; he simply doesn't have the option of growing up like other kids. He will have to find his own place in society. I venture to say that he'll still have a more comfortable and interesting life than most other people on this planet.
Google isn't even the leader in web-based price comparisons. This is going to happen, Google or not.
I expect the main channel of delivery in the future will be via cell phones anyway: SMS, MMS (photo of product bar code), and cell phone browser.
I guess what he doesn't like is that, for a while, there was an information imbalance between sellers and buyers, with sellers being able to use sophisticated computer systems for pricing, but buyers being left clipping coupons. Well, that imbalance is going away. That's a good thing for a market economy and capitalism. You like market economies and capitalism, right?
In any case, somebody who refuses to respect the primary free software license is not to be trusted.
Yes, I think that's the real point. The KDE developers were well-intentioned, but with the original KDE debacle, they have demonstrated very bad judgement when it comes to licensing issues, and we simply cannot trust them anymore to make sound judgements in this area. They are also wrong on the dual-licensing issue, and the defections of the various Linux distributions clearly demonstrates that.
They were in denial back then, and they are in denial now. I wonder how long it will take them to come around this time, and what kind of rabbit they are going to try to pull out of a hat now.
I'm not sure I understand that. Why would you want to use MySQL without linking to it? I'm quoting this from MySQL's site....
Because MySQL runs as a separate process/service; you talk to it over the network. Under those circumstances, the GPL doesn't apply to the client software. If you use GPL client libraries to talk to MySQL, then your software does need to fall under the GPL, but there are also LGPL client libraries. Note that it doesn't matter what the explanation of the license says, it only matters what the license itself says.
The other differences are that MySQL will sell you a commercial license for deployment even if you developed under the free license (TT won't), and, most importantly, that MySQL, unlike Qt, implements a standard that is also implemented by many other databases. Qt's license wouldn't be a problem if there were another usable implementation of the Qt APIs under the LGPL or BSD license (even if the TT implementation were "better" in some way).
Again, I'm not passing judgement, I'm just saying that a GPL/commercially-licensed Qt doesn't have a prayer as the basis for the desktop of a commercial Linux distributions in the long term. The circumstances for MySQL are different, so I expect MySQL will continue to be widely used.
You know, you'd have a point if "standardizing" was a US invention, but it isn't; it's a traditional British spelling that's still correct even in Britain. And it probably has fallen into disuse simply because easily irritated people like you are trying desparately to find an identity for Britain separate from the US.
I'm not sure that's quite comparable. AFAIK, you can use MySQL commercially without linking to it. Unlike Qt, you can certainly commercial develop code that works with MySQL without buying a license for development. Also, it's pretty easy to move from MySQL to other databases for most code, while it's really hard to move from Qt to some other toolkit.
While I'm still a bit surprised to see Novell give such a slight to KDE this soon, there were signs that they were becoming a GNOME operation.
It's business, and I don't think they had a choice. Supporting both was costly and wasn't working well (Gnome on SuSE was no fun) and so they had to pick one. Gnome was the obvious choice: it's clearly good enough, it's what they use with Mono, it's what IBM picked for SWT, and it's what most other distributions use. And, most importantly, their commercial customers are not dependent on licenses from another company (TT).
Why is that so many people prefer kde over gnome, yet redhat, debian-based distros like ubuntu and now SuSE use gnome as their primary? What main distros will be left that uses kde in preference? I can only think of mandriva now.
Think about it. You're a commercial Linux distributor and you're trying to sell your $80 distribution. If you pick KDE, you have to tell your commercial customers that they also have to buy a $2000 commercial development license from Troll Tech, before they start doing any kind of GUI development that integrates with the desktop. KDE proponents can argue as much as they like that the $2000 are worth it, but even if they are right, that's going to be a really hard sell. And it's not just the Linux distributions, it's also Sun with their desktop (Gnome-based), wxWidgets, and IBM SWT.
Slight differences in quality between KDE and Gnome aren't going to matter relative to the difficulties of that sales argument.
Maybe to you. I think this is a big improvement because Novell's Gnome support in the past was much worse than their KDE support. Time will tell whether it was the right business decision.
It doesn't matter how good KDE is (and it's pretty good), its dependence on a dual-licensed GUI library kills it in commercial applications. Qt proponents can swear up and down that it doesn't matter to commercial customers, but the fact is that it does.
It's not necessarily driven by cutomers, it's driven by vendors: no vendor like IBM, Sun, or Novell can depend for their commercial business on Troll Tech. If Novell stuck with Qt, basically, Troll Tech could set the terms under which Novell's commercial customers can develop. That simply doesn't make sense, in particular if there is a less restrictive and widely used alternative.
This move also makes sense because Novell is heavily invested in Mono, and Mono GUIs are generally written in Gtk#.
I see that Unisys is now at the "we are going to be using Linux and open source in a big way" stage of failing companies. Just remember that Unisys was in trouble before they adopted Linux; you can't blame Linux for their almost inevitable failure.
You're simply full of shit when it comes to operating systems, idlake. Stick to whatever it is that you know, which seems to be very little, and let the grownups do the real work
And there you tell us in a nutshell why operating systems aren't going anywhere: the last half century of computer science and software engineering has passed you buy: you insult potential users of your software, you program in C, you don't do requirements gathering, you hand-craft your own object systems, and you think garbage collection is going to make your software slow. You're a dinosaur (and an ill-mannered one at that).
I don't think this law quite hits the spot, but at least they are paying attention: businesses should be subject to stiff penalties, fines, and restitutions if poor security discloses any kind of private or sensitive information about their customers.
Not quite; it can generate the low frequency audio by non-linear interaction of ultrasound with air; don't laugh--it's hot technology that lets you localize sound in a nice way, and it may well become the standard speaker system in the future. You could still re-record with a microphone, but there would be no simple analog electrical signal to capture.
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If that were true, Linux itself would be failing spectacularly in favour of the BSDs.
Whether a license works for a piece of software depends on how the software is used. A GPL license on the Linux kernel and Linux command line utilities means something very different from a GPL license on a GUI toolkit.
The crucial difference here is that companies can ship commercial software on top of a Linux kernel without their software falling under the GPL and without paying anybody, while companies cannot ship commercial software on top of Qt without their software falling under the GPL or paying a lot of money to TT. And you can argue that that doesn't matter, but it obviously does.
Gnome introduced the whole desktop wars, if they wanted standardisation they would either not have started, or certainly would have disbanded when their original aim became irrelevant.
Gnome is as relevant as it has always been, and Novell's decision underlines that again: KDE can never become the standard desktop for Linux. It's just not going to happen. And the sooner the KDE project members realize that, the better off we all are.
I have several Macs and several Linux machines (plus, grudginly, a Windows machine). I wish, however, Apple and Apple proponents would stop marketing Macintosh by putting down Linux. Macintosh is a good alternative alternative to Windows: it runs desktop applications well and is fairly easy to use and administer compared to Windows. But Macintosh is not a replacement for a Linux machine, and I'm also concerned about Apple's long-term direction in terms of their underlying technology.
I( thought that I already gave you a good whip from the clue-by-four?
Indeed, you have already given us your thinly disguised marketing spiel for Troll Tech.
With the dot-coms, when they went belly up, all the investments were lost. With open source, the results of every man-hour invested in an open source project are availabe forever and for everyone.
So, venture capitalists, do your worst and bubble away; we love you.
Not to mention that nuclear fission is the cleanest, safest, most abundant practical source of energy on the planet at the moment.
No, the safest and most abundant practical source of energy is--conservation. Nuclear fission remains highly risky because there is no large scale long-term waste disposal available.
All that the environmental nuts caused was for us to burn MORE fossil fuels at diesel plants. So much for saving the planet.
No, the people that caused more fuel to be burned are the people who used the energy. The environmental nuts (crunchy and healthy at that) want you to use less energy so that we can burn less fossil fuel and can avoid building any more nuclear power plants.
I agree that a diversity of desktops is good. I would love to see a desktop by the KDE developers that had a chance to succeed commercially. But as long as KDE is based on Qt (GPL and for-pay license), I think it's going to hurt rather than help Linux.
I think technically, KDE is a good desktop, and it is popular in Europe. But no matter how good it is, KDE is simply is not going to happen as a mainstream commercial desktop as long as Qt is available only under the GPL and a commercial license. Gnome may be worse, but it isn't so much worse that it makes a difference to real-world users.
I think it's a bad mistake for Ubuntu to support KDE on equal footing with Gnome; for the Linux desktop, the best thing is if people standardize on Gnome for now.
The KDE developers should seriously think about developing the next generation Linux desktop, based on a an entirely new toolkit and new approach to doing things.
And you think forcing him to sit in classes that bore him for hours a day, and for him to show his intellect on every test and question and class, is not going to produce problems and conflicts with his peers?
This kid is different; he simply doesn't have the option of growing up like other kids. He will have to find his own place in society. I venture to say that he'll still have a more comfortable and interesting life than most other people on this planet.
Google isn't even the leader in web-based price comparisons. This is going to happen, Google or not.
I expect the main channel of delivery in the future will be via cell phones anyway: SMS, MMS (photo of product bar code), and cell phone browser.
I guess what he doesn't like is that, for a while, there was an information imbalance between sellers and buyers, with sellers being able to use sophisticated computer systems for pricing, but buyers being left clipping coupons. Well, that imbalance is going away. That's a good thing for a market economy and capitalism. You like market economies and capitalism, right?
In any case, somebody who refuses to respect the primary free software license is not to be trusted.
Yes, I think that's the real point. The KDE developers were well-intentioned, but with the original KDE debacle, they have demonstrated very bad judgement when it comes to licensing issues, and we simply cannot trust them anymore to make sound judgements in this area. They are also wrong on the dual-licensing issue, and the defections of the various Linux distributions clearly demonstrates that.
They were in denial back then, and they are in denial now. I wonder how long it will take them to come around this time, and what kind of rabbit they are going to try to pull out of a hat now.
I'm not sure I understand that. Why would you want to use MySQL without linking to it? I'm quoting this from MySQL's site....
Because MySQL runs as a separate process/service; you talk to it over the network. Under those circumstances, the GPL doesn't apply to the client software. If you use GPL client libraries to talk to MySQL, then your software does need to fall under the GPL, but there are also LGPL client libraries. Note that it doesn't matter what the explanation of the license says, it only matters what the license itself says.
The other differences are that MySQL will sell you a commercial license for deployment even if you developed under the free license (TT won't), and, most importantly, that MySQL, unlike Qt, implements a standard that is also implemented by many other databases. Qt's license wouldn't be a problem if there were another usable implementation of the Qt APIs under the LGPL or BSD license (even if the TT implementation were "better" in some way).
Again, I'm not passing judgement, I'm just saying that a GPL/commercially-licensed Qt doesn't have a prayer as the basis for the desktop of a commercial Linux distributions in the long term. The circumstances for MySQL are different, so I expect MySQL will continue to be widely used.
Because in the real world, editors, not authors, get to pick their preferred form.
You know, you'd have a point if "standardizing" was a US invention, but it isn't; it's a traditional British spelling that's still correct even in Britain. And it probably has fallen into disuse simply because easily irritated people like you are trying desparately to find an identity for Britain separate from the US.
It means "to cause to become liquid". What do you think it means?
I'm not sure that's quite comparable. AFAIK, you can use MySQL commercially without linking to it. Unlike Qt, you can certainly commercial develop code that works with MySQL without buying a license for development. Also, it's pretty easy to move from MySQL to other databases for most code, while it's really hard to move from Qt to some other toolkit.
Those days are long over, of course, but the animosity towards KDE seems to have remained.
It's not a question of animosity; the dual-license, while conforming to FOSS guidelines, is still a problem.
While I'm still a bit surprised to see Novell give such a slight to KDE this soon, there were signs that they were becoming a GNOME operation.
It's business, and I don't think they had a choice. Supporting both was costly and wasn't working well (Gnome on SuSE was no fun) and so they had to pick one. Gnome was the obvious choice: it's clearly good enough, it's what they use with Mono, it's what IBM picked for SWT, and it's what most other distributions use. And, most importantly, their commercial customers are not dependent on licenses from another company (TT).
Why is that so many people prefer kde over gnome, yet redhat, debian-based distros like ubuntu and now SuSE use gnome as their primary? What main distros will be left that uses kde in preference? I can only think of mandriva now.
Think about it. You're a commercial Linux distributor and you're trying to sell your $80 distribution. If you pick KDE, you have to tell your commercial customers that they also have to buy a $2000 commercial development license from Troll Tech, before they start doing any kind of GUI development that integrates with the desktop. KDE proponents can argue as much as they like that the $2000 are worth it, but even if they are right, that's going to be a really hard sell. And it's not just the Linux distributions, it's also Sun with their desktop (Gnome-based), wxWidgets, and IBM SWT.
Slight differences in quality between KDE and Gnome aren't going to matter relative to the difficulties of that sales argument.
Unbelievable. They ruin a distribution.
Maybe to you. I think this is a big improvement because Novell's Gnome support in the past was much worse than their KDE support. Time will tell whether it was the right business decision.
Maybe you should give Gnome a try.
It doesn't matter how good KDE is (and it's pretty good), its dependence on a dual-licensed GUI library kills it in commercial applications. Qt proponents can swear up and down that it doesn't matter to commercial customers, but the fact is that it does.
It's not necessarily driven by cutomers, it's driven by vendors: no vendor like IBM, Sun, or Novell can depend for their commercial business on Troll Tech. If Novell stuck with Qt, basically, Troll Tech could set the terms under which Novell's commercial customers can develop. That simply doesn't make sense, in particular if there is a less restrictive and widely used alternative.
This move also makes sense because Novell is heavily invested in Mono, and Mono GUIs are generally written in Gtk#.
I see that Unisys is now at the "we are going to be using Linux and open source in a big way" stage of failing companies. Just remember that Unisys was in trouble before they adopted Linux; you can't blame Linux for their almost inevitable failure.
You're simply full of shit when it comes to operating systems, idlake. Stick to whatever it is that you know, which seems to be very little, and let the grownups do the real work
And there you tell us in a nutshell why operating systems aren't going anywhere: the last half century of computer science and software engineering has passed you buy: you insult potential users of your software, you program in C, you don't do requirements gathering, you hand-craft your own object systems, and you think garbage collection is going to make your software slow. You're a dinosaur (and an ill-mannered one at that).
I don't think this law quite hits the spot, but at least they are paying attention: businesses should be subject to stiff penalties, fines, and restitutions if poor security discloses any kind of private or sensitive information about their customers.
more bogus Bezos patents, based on results developed with ourlabor. Just say no.
Not quite; it can generate the low frequency audio by non-linear interaction of ultrasound with air; don't laugh--it's hot technology that lets you localize sound in a nice way, and it may well become the standard speaker system in the future. You could still re-record with a microphone, but there would be no simple analog electrical signal to capture.