So this is how the QT people get to feel better about themselves after a horrible major restructuring that made Linus Torvalds of the Linux kernal fame team begrudgingly switch to Gnome even though he hates its approach to UI design.
I don't know what QuickTime has to do with it but if you mean Qt then I'm afraid all that was a storm in a teacup that was made a big thing of by some fanboys after Linus had made it known that he believed that Gnome had no real functionality. It simply meant that the KDE 4.0 as shipped by Fedora was not usable for him, which isn't surprising since distros were actually told this and they just replaced 3.5.x regardless and then whinged.
GTK has grown extremely long in the tooth because of the extreme dedication of the group to incrementalism, but that is not a sign of poor design.
Oh please, it is exceptionally poorly designed. GTK was chosen as a knee-jerk response to the whole KDE thing in the 90s to build Gnome on. To this day we still have brain damage like libegg and libsexy and where developers even copy and paste GTK code that they need liberally around their codebase if they want things like toolbars. The only reason there is a HIG is that things such as spacings cannot be inherited by applications. Leave a 12-pixel border between the edge of the window and the nearest controls?! The horizontal spacing between the buttons [on an alert] is 6 pixels?! Give me a fucking break. That's why we have component based programming and inheritance. If you give that to a Windows or OS X developer then he'll piss himself.
So Gnome's 2.0 structure was so bad that it is going to last longer than KDE3's?
KDE bit the bullet when they looked at the proprietary competition and what they were doing in Vista, Windows 7 and OS X. It's a rocky road but it was necessary if anyone was even going to fart in the general direction of an open source desktop.
I also doubt it's going to have the rockey ride that was 4.0/4.1 for KDE users either.
Why not? It happened for Gnome 2.x.
The reason for the outward protests at Gnome is that the developers are absolutely against the KDE4 kind of developement unless it is 100% necessary.
No. The protests against doing what KDE 4 has done have come about because it's like the elephant in the room - the developers know in the back of their minds that they need to do something if open source desktops and Gnome are to stay relevant when people look at Windows and OS X, but they don't want to do it because the infrastructure is so rotten that it will take them years to build it, years to build a desktop out of it and years to build any applications.
Is this the guy who gave us a whole bunch of reasons as to why they weren't going to use a working cross-platform toolkit in Qt for a cross-platform browser and why they were going to use the, now inferior, GTK for Linux? Somehow 'I told you so' just doesn't quite say it.
...this is not a French experiment, but an international one which happens to take place in France. There's a difference...
Clearly you haven't encountered the French. As long as something is based in France then it is French in their eyes, and that's all that matters to them. It's why there are two European parliaments - one in Brussels and one in Strasbourg that all the MEPs spend ridiculous amounts of money moving their stuff between, just to satisfy the French.
Trying to turn theoretical ideas into concrete practical projects is expensive. Damn expensive. However, if anything concrete at all comes out of it then the payoffs are going to be almost infinite.
The parent poster is not talking about corporate use, or geeks like us, he's talking about the folks at home. You know the other NINETY percent of the market.
Yes we know that and the parent is still wrong. People always talk about web applications in the open source world being the future because they know they cannot make their rich desktop good enough. Red Hat is adding some convoluted online thing because their Gnome desktop is just not up to scratch to deliver. People are not going to be using online AutoCAD. Probably ever.
Of course it can be done with proprietary gear. That's what the proxy or bridge patterns are for: commonize the interfaces so that Fred's Electric Controllers and Barney's Electric Controllers both have a common ElectricController interface....It doesn't matter if it's a Microsoft WindowsCE electric controller or an Open Source GNU electric controller.
This made me piss myself with laughter. Certainly the last part did. I don't think either you or those who have modded you up have quite grasped tha last thirty years of hardware and software activity. Interfaces and standards, although useful in theory, count for absolutely nothing. The implementation is everything, and the only way of being compatible with an implementation yourself is to either buy it or know what's in it. You've totally painted over the computer industry's failure on that front as well as patents, NDAs and a ton of other barriers that simply stop compatibility in any practical sense. Without knowing the ins and outs of an implementation then history has shown us that bugger all works.
The fact that you laughably talk about WindowsCE and 'Open Source GNU' even leads me to believe that you're a bit of a shill who's still trying to peddle that 'Open standards and not open source' crap that Microsoft in particular has been trying to get over. Sorry, but open source guarantees open standards because everyone is going to know how your stuff works anyway.
Yes, a well connected city like they're describing is possible but it means open standards people can actually implement and the complete ditching of proprietary stuff, certainly in all core infrastructure. Without that, bugger all will work and it will fail completely. I can't see it happening any time soon.
I seriously don't understand this. Presumably when users are connected to the VPN then there must be some way of resolving internal names, and this can only be done via your own internal DNS. You can't have the DNS of users' ISPs resolving internal names because that would be silly and would obviously fail. Therefore.......use your own DNS while users are connected to the VPN. A lot of VPN software will do this automatically, but I've done this with OpenVPN by pushing down DNS through DHCP and changing the bind order of the interfaces with the VPN at the top. At least on Windows that is.
I have no clue whatsoever why you're trying to talk to ISPs. This is not their problem at all.
It's symptomatic of the growing pains in an economy like India. Everyone flocks there and Indian companies do well from their cheap labour, but in order to maintain that labour the standard of living, and the cost, needs to rise.
I normally don't reply to anonymous comments, but it seems some people are really rather upset over this.
Bzzzt. Wrong.
Bzzzzt. I look at what is, not at what people want it to be perceived as.
the CDDL was not specifically created to be GPL incompatible; it was created to meet the needs of developers and Sun's customers. In fact, the CDDL is just a revised version of the MPL.
Nevertheless, it is still GPL incompatible where other similar licenses and software projects have not had a problem. The MPL is a rather silly and historic license and is why Mozilla itself does tri licensing.
The only reason binary bits are required from "Nevada" is because Sun was unable to secure the rights to open source those bits, either because copyright holders were unwilling or because it was impossible to do so.
This is still the case after several years. It's rather disingenuous to call it open source really isn't it?
It was the same way with Java; or are people's memories so short?
Sun has dragged its feet over that in the same way after proclaiming Java as being 'open sourced'. I don't know what you think that proves other than Sun likes the appearance of being open source but they're not all that keen on it with much of the software they control.
I can assure you it wasn't about appearance; there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of people that worked for Sun that pushed hard for this to happen
I listen to Sun's sales consultants. "Oh, Solaris is now OpenSolaris and is open source just like Linux!" That's how it was used.
It was because of patents and that it needed to be based per file that the CDDL was made. There was no anti Linux conspiracy. It is not incompatible with the GPL, the GPL is incompatible with the CDDL because of demands that the GPL makes in its text.
It's an interesting sleight of hand way of looking at it. I fail to see how anyone can retrospectively make the GPL CDDL compatible. The CDDL was needlessly GPL incompatible and the patent argument still doesn't wash.
There was another person at Sun that made some comments that were frankly lies when no longer an employee and all the FUD about that stems from that.
So we just ignore anyone who doesn't tow the Sun line?
This is why I like OSS. The cool kids with more time and energy than I have can invent and play with this stuff in KDE, and have a fighting chance of achieving something. In the meantime, I can stick with the relatively clean and business-like GNOME on my main machine...
Can you hazard a guess as to how many businesses are using Gnome because it looks business-like? A lot of people really do drink that anti-freeze it seems. I believe I covered that with this:
"Until people wise up to that all we'll have in the open source desktop world is a bunch of sad people arguing about what the 'default' desktop is in a Linux distribution that well over 90% of the world have never heard of and have no reason whatsoever to use."
That means that unless Gnome, and KDE for that matter, and the distributions they are a part of can do for them what Windows and Mac OS can, and they can do stuff that Windows and Mac OS can't, then they just won't buy it and they won't give a shit about you. Really. They just don't give a shit how clean and business-like it is because real businesses care about applications and functionality.
Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting.
No, they focused on the wrong things and some of the right stuff they focused on was half-baked to the point of being unusable so it never turned into anything an end user might feel the benefit of.
KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.
Which is exactly what the CDE guys did about fifteen years ago when they declared CDE as a 'standard', looked at Windows and Mac OS and said "We don't need anything developer friendly. We don't need any of this new fangled 3D programming API stuff. Who wants to play something called Half Life anyway?" Microsoft also said "Who needs the internet?" and quickly realised they were wrong. I'm sure no user asked for any of those things until they came along. The world moved on and left CDE in its own sad little world.
We all now that no one uses any of that stuff and Microsoft was right about the internet, right? Your statement is so stupid on so many levels it isn't even funny. Why bother with any new functionality at all? We all know that each new version of software can be sold on the basis that it has 'less' functionality so it 'doesn't get in your way' right? I'm afraid no one is moving off Windows and Mac OS with that strap-line. The sad part is that you probably believe it even when the contrary has been pointed out and that is why I see KDE being the only thing that is helping the open source desktop on. Either people don't see it or they just don't want to see it.
Chagning the subject line of the thread won't make it true either.
I suppose it gives them something to do and something important in their own delusional little world. However, when the shit hits the fan over the next few years over the state of our public finances, tax revenues decline, our astronomical national debt interest payments kick in, as well as repayments to dodgy Public Finance Initiative schemes, then these sorts of little projects will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. The notions of democracy and liberty all started with the English Civil War and we're not exactly the nicest bunch of people on the planet when we feel we need to start defending them.
I should also add that the graph that you have used to 'back up' what you're saying only confirms that as a software project gets more complex and popular the number of bugs increases - over a period of years. Well stone me. I never would have thought that. It doesn't give any picture on the current state of the project at all.
So you haven't even bothered to find out have you? Amazing. What I linked to were confirmed bugs.
Says who? I don't think you know what goes on in Bugzilla in any project, how it works or whether most of what is in there there is actually representative. Regardless of what has or hasn't been marked as confirmed in Bugzilla that snapshot still needs triaging to see whether it is indicative of the current quality of the project. You just linked to it because thought it proved something. Sorry, but it doesn't. Bugzilla never does.
Come on...bugs however small or "insignificant", should not be there. Period. Get it?
Uh, huh. I'm sure every software project would love to have zero bugs but the bizarre thing is, no one has ever achieved that. It's funny that. Haven't you noticed? You're trying to hold KDE to a level that no software project has ever achieved anywhere, and to try and do so for your own ends is obviously just plain daft.
How about get 4.x as stable as 3.5x before we start moving forward?
Hmmmm. Maybe because software doesn't stand still and those that do become irrelevant curiosities promoted by irrelevant people?
Since KDE 4 is a different desktop to KDE 3 with different libraries, tools, applications and functionality I don't know how you can compare both with a statement such as 'as stable as' because it just assumes the two can be compared. KDE 3 took a number of point releases itself before it became 'stable' in the eyes of many people (I notice you wrote KDE 3.5x) and I would imagine that would be the case for KDE 4 as well. So, they should focus on making KDE 4 as 'stable' (however you choose to define that) as KDE 3.5x...........but they had to get to a point release of 3.5.x to actually achieve that 'stability' and they should ditch all new functionality in the meantime to get there?! Logically, that's just stupid. I know of no software project that has managed to defy logic like that.
I know KDE is a mostly voluntary effort but in the current situation of over 50,000 bugs
Take a memo: Since when has the number of opened bugs, certainly in an open bug tracking system, ever reflected the general quality of any software? How many of those bugs are actually relevant? How many of them are just arguments over functionality? Have they been triaged? Your argument is meaningless if what you've linked to hasn't been filtered. All it tells me is that people obviously care about what is going on in KDE 4.
I tried the latest KDE on a 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM system with an on board graphics card and I must say I was underwhelmed. The system (Kubuntu) was so slow.
Well, for an awful lot of people it hasn't been. If you want people to take notice of what you say then you'll have to qualify those claims further with specifics because I'm afraid just saying it doesn't make it true.
I had to say this otherwise I know I will be castigated for saying what is true and is on my mind.
Like it or lump it, I see KDE as the only open source desktop trying, or even able to, to keep open source desktops relevant and on the radar with people with respect to what the proprietary competition is doing and will be able to do in the future - graphics, resolution independence, development tools and libraries, searching with semantic meaning....... With the foundation of all of that in KDE 4 they have the ability to create actual tools, applications and widgets that can make the social desktop a reasonable reality rather than just creating the appearance of it with hastily put together front-ends to Facebook because that foundation isn't there. I'll mention no names there.
Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows. Until people wise up to that all we'll have in the open source desktop world is a bunch of sad people arguing about what the 'default' desktop is in a Linux distribution that well over 90% of the world have never heard of and have no reason whatsoever to use. If Psystar wins its case that will probably get several times more difficult and Apple will make a crapload of cash bizarrely, but I digress.
Open Source would have saved Sun, if they had thought of it 18 years ago. But they spent so long fighting it, when they finally flipped no one cared.
They still haven't flipped though. They created a license in the CDDL that is was needlessly GPL incompatible and years later if you want to bootsrap an 'OpenSolaris' system you will need some binary bits and have to do it from Nevada - Sun's blessed OpenSolaris distribution. They wanted the appearance of being open source so they could go to people and say "Hey, we're just like Linux!"
This is nothing new and it's how companies like Google get around not releasing their code under the GPL, but at least with software as a service I have a choice whether I want to use it or not. If I'm truly locked into it even when I want to leave then it will usually be as a result of the usual proprietary formats held in place with proprietary software.
If you go out into the world and use things then there is a certain amount of lock-in involved as you come to rely on those things, and yes, you have to ask yourself whether it is better if you do certain things yourself. Indeed, in the long run it can work out cheaper. However, you can go too far with this approach. Do I go with Google Apps or do I set up a Zimbra server? If I set up a Zimbra server then do I go to a hosting company, in which case I might give up some control, or do I sit in front of a terminal for a few days installing Zimbra and then wondering why clamd has stopped working because there is another bloody binary update? Should we all run our own data centres? I'm afraid those are real-world concerns that people dwell over every day and they're not going to listen to ideology from somone in an organisation that has produced a decent straightforward license I grant you, but has produced nothing as an alternative for anyone to date to back up that ideology. All the GNU software in use today has gained traction off the back of one thing - Linux.
I just hope that folks at Mythbuntu can integrate the script that removes commercials. Right now, you must be a semi geek to set this up.
Really? I have Mythbuntu installed and this stuff is built in. You can set up the auto detection methods and there is a commercial flagging job. Sometimes it doesn't always detect commercial breaks, but it's been impressive on the ones it has detected.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's give Dan Kegel even more spam by posting his e-mail address.
I don't know what QuickTime has to do with it but if you mean Qt then I'm afraid all that was a storm in a teacup that was made a big thing of by some fanboys after Linus had made it known that he believed that Gnome had no real functionality. It simply meant that the KDE 4.0 as shipped by Fedora was not usable for him, which isn't surprising since distros were actually told this and they just replaced 3.5.x regardless and then whinged.
Oh please, it is exceptionally poorly designed. GTK was chosen as a knee-jerk response to the whole KDE thing in the 90s to build Gnome on. To this day we still have brain damage like libegg and libsexy and where developers even copy and paste GTK code that they need liberally around their codebase if they want things like toolbars. The only reason there is a HIG is that things such as spacings cannot be inherited by applications. Leave a 12-pixel border between the edge of the window and the nearest controls?! The horizontal spacing between the buttons [on an alert] is 6 pixels?! Give me a fucking break. That's why we have component based programming and inheritance. If you give that to a Windows or OS X developer then he'll piss himself.
KDE bit the bullet when they looked at the proprietary competition and what they were doing in Vista, Windows 7 and OS X. It's a rocky road but it was necessary if anyone was even going to fart in the general direction of an open source desktop.
Why not? It happened for Gnome 2.x.
No. The protests against doing what KDE 4 has done have come about because it's like the elephant in the room - the developers know in the back of their minds that they need to do something if open source desktops and Gnome are to stay relevant when people look at Windows and OS X, but they don't want to do it because the infrastructure is so rotten that it will take them years to build it, years to build a desktop out of it and years to build any applications.
Is this the guy who gave us a whole bunch of reasons as to why they weren't going to use a working cross-platform toolkit in Qt for a cross-platform browser and why they were going to use the, now inferior, GTK for Linux? Somehow 'I told you so' just doesn't quite say it.
They are full of them, and they're full of tossers who believe that Ubuntu's 'market share' amounts to a hill of beans.
Clearly you haven't encountered the French. As long as something is based in France then it is French in their eyes, and that's all that matters to them. It's why there are two European parliaments - one in Brussels and one in Strasbourg that all the MEPs spend ridiculous amounts of money moving their stuff between, just to satisfy the French.
Trying to turn theoretical ideas into concrete practical projects is expensive. Damn expensive. However, if anything concrete at all comes out of it then the payoffs are going to be almost infinite.
Yes we know that and the parent is still wrong. People always talk about web applications in the open source world being the future because they know they cannot make their rich desktop good enough. Red Hat is adding some convoluted online thing because their Gnome desktop is just not up to scratch to deliver. People are not going to be using online AutoCAD. Probably ever.
This made me piss myself with laughter. Certainly the last part did. I don't think either you or those who have modded you up have quite grasped tha last thirty years of hardware and software activity. Interfaces and standards, although useful in theory, count for absolutely nothing. The implementation is everything, and the only way of being compatible with an implementation yourself is to either buy it or know what's in it. You've totally painted over the computer industry's failure on that front as well as patents, NDAs and a ton of other barriers that simply stop compatibility in any practical sense. Without knowing the ins and outs of an implementation then history has shown us that bugger all works.
The fact that you laughably talk about WindowsCE and 'Open Source GNU' even leads me to believe that you're a bit of a shill who's still trying to peddle that 'Open standards and not open source' crap that Microsoft in particular has been trying to get over. Sorry, but open source guarantees open standards because everyone is going to know how your stuff works anyway.
Yes, a well connected city like they're describing is possible but it means open standards people can actually implement and the complete ditching of proprietary stuff, certainly in all core infrastructure. Without that, bugger all will work and it will fail completely. I can't see it happening any time soon.
I seriously don't understand this. Presumably when users are connected to the VPN then there must be some way of resolving internal names, and this can only be done via your own internal DNS. You can't have the DNS of users' ISPs resolving internal names because that would be silly and would obviously fail. Therefore.......use your own DNS while users are connected to the VPN. A lot of VPN software will do this automatically, but I've done this with OpenVPN by pushing down DNS through DHCP and changing the bind order of the interfaces with the VPN at the top. At least on Windows that is.
I have no clue whatsoever why you're trying to talk to ISPs. This is not their problem at all.
It's symptomatic of the growing pains in an economy like India. Everyone flocks there and Indian companies do well from their cheap labour, but in order to maintain that labour the standard of living, and the cost, needs to rise.
Bzzzzt. I look at what is, not at what people want it to be perceived as.
Nevertheless, it is still GPL incompatible where other similar licenses and software projects have not had a problem. The MPL is a rather silly and historic license and is why Mozilla itself does tri licensing.
This is still the case after several years. It's rather disingenuous to call it open source really isn't it?
Sun has dragged its feet over that in the same way after proclaiming Java as being 'open sourced'. I don't know what you think that proves other than Sun likes the appearance of being open source but they're not all that keen on it with much of the software they control.
I listen to Sun's sales consultants. "Oh, Solaris is now OpenSolaris and is open source just like Linux!" That's how it was used.
It's an interesting sleight of hand way of looking at it. I fail to see how anyone can retrospectively make the GPL CDDL compatible. The CDDL was needlessly GPL incompatible and the patent argument still doesn't wash.
So we just ignore anyone who doesn't tow the Sun line?
Bloody hell. I wonder why they would ever want to ship a software product that did that.
Can you hazard a guess as to how many businesses are using Gnome because it looks business-like? A lot of people really do drink that anti-freeze it seems. I believe I covered that with this:
That means that unless Gnome, and KDE for that matter, and the distributions they are a part of can do for them what Windows and Mac OS can, and they can do stuff that Windows and Mac OS can't, then they just won't buy it and they won't give a shit about you. Really. They just don't give a shit how clean and business-like it is because real businesses care about applications and functionality.
No, they focused on the wrong things and some of the right stuff they focused on was half-baked to the point of being unusable so it never turned into anything an end user might feel the benefit of.
Which is exactly what the CDE guys did about fifteen years ago when they declared CDE as a 'standard', looked at Windows and Mac OS and said "We don't need anything developer friendly. We don't need any of this new fangled 3D programming API stuff. Who wants to play something called Half Life anyway?" Microsoft also said "Who needs the internet?" and quickly realised they were wrong. I'm sure no user asked for any of those things until they came along. The world moved on and left CDE in its own sad little world.
We all now that no one uses any of that stuff and Microsoft was right about the internet, right? Your statement is so stupid on so many levels it isn't even funny. Why bother with any new functionality at all? We all know that each new version of software can be sold on the basis that it has 'less' functionality so it 'doesn't get in your way' right? I'm afraid no one is moving off Windows and Mac OS with that strap-line. The sad part is that you probably believe it even when the contrary has been pointed out and that is why I see KDE being the only thing that is helping the open source desktop on. Either people don't see it or they just don't want to see it.
Chagning the subject line of the thread won't make it true either.
I suppose it gives them something to do and something important in their own delusional little world. However, when the shit hits the fan over the next few years over the state of our public finances, tax revenues decline, our astronomical national debt interest payments kick in, as well as repayments to dodgy Public Finance Initiative schemes, then these sorts of little projects will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. The notions of democracy and liberty all started with the English Civil War and we're not exactly the nicest bunch of people on the planet when we feel we need to start defending them.
I should also add that the graph that you have used to 'back up' what you're saying only confirms that as a software project gets more complex and popular the number of bugs increases - over a period of years. Well stone me. I never would have thought that. It doesn't give any picture on the current state of the project at all.
Says who? I don't think you know what goes on in Bugzilla in any project, how it works or whether most of what is in there there is actually representative. Regardless of what has or hasn't been marked as confirmed in Bugzilla that snapshot still needs triaging to see whether it is indicative of the current quality of the project. You just linked to it because thought it proved something. Sorry, but it doesn't. Bugzilla never does.
Uh, huh. I'm sure every software project would love to have zero bugs but the bizarre thing is, no one has ever achieved that. It's funny that. Haven't you noticed? You're trying to hold KDE to a level that no software project has ever achieved anywhere, and to try and do so for your own ends is obviously just plain daft.
Hmmmm. Maybe because software doesn't stand still and those that do become irrelevant curiosities promoted by irrelevant people?
Since KDE 4 is a different desktop to KDE 3 with different libraries, tools, applications and functionality I don't know how you can compare both with a statement such as 'as stable as' because it just assumes the two can be compared. KDE 3 took a number of point releases itself before it became 'stable' in the eyes of many people (I notice you wrote KDE 3.5x) and I would imagine that would be the case for KDE 4 as well. So, they should focus on making KDE 4 as 'stable' (however you choose to define that) as KDE 3.5x...........but they had to get to a point release of 3.5.x to actually achieve that 'stability' and they should ditch all new functionality in the meantime to get there?! Logically, that's just stupid. I know of no software project that has managed to defy logic like that.
Take a memo: Since when has the number of opened bugs, certainly in an open bug tracking system, ever reflected the general quality of any software? How many of those bugs are actually relevant? How many of them are just arguments over functionality? Have they been triaged? Your argument is meaningless if what you've linked to hasn't been filtered. All it tells me is that people obviously care about what is going on in KDE 4.
Well, for an awful lot of people it hasn't been. If you want people to take notice of what you say then you'll have to qualify those claims further with specifics because I'm afraid just saying it doesn't make it true.
Wow. It's true is it? I didn't know ;-).
Like it or lump it, I see KDE as the only open source desktop trying, or even able to, to keep open source desktops relevant and on the radar with people with respect to what the proprietary competition is doing and will be able to do in the future - graphics, resolution independence, development tools and libraries, searching with semantic meaning....... With the foundation of all of that in KDE 4 they have the ability to create actual tools, applications and widgets that can make the social desktop a reasonable reality rather than just creating the appearance of it with hastily put together front-ends to Facebook because that foundation isn't there. I'll mention no names there.
Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows. Until people wise up to that all we'll have in the open source desktop world is a bunch of sad people arguing about what the 'default' desktop is in a Linux distribution that well over 90% of the world have never heard of and have no reason whatsoever to use. If Psystar wins its case that will probably get several times more difficult and Apple will make a crapload of cash bizarrely, but I digress.
They still haven't flipped though. They created a license in the CDDL that is was needlessly GPL incompatible and years later if you want to bootsrap an 'OpenSolaris' system you will need some binary bits and have to do it from Nevada - Sun's blessed OpenSolaris distribution. They wanted the appearance of being open source so they could go to people and say "Hey, we're just like Linux!"
This is nothing new and it's how companies like Google get around not releasing their code under the GPL, but at least with software as a service I have a choice whether I want to use it or not. If I'm truly locked into it even when I want to leave then it will usually be as a result of the usual proprietary formats held in place with proprietary software.
If you go out into the world and use things then there is a certain amount of lock-in involved as you come to rely on those things, and yes, you have to ask yourself whether it is better if you do certain things yourself. Indeed, in the long run it can work out cheaper. However, you can go too far with this approach. Do I go with Google Apps or do I set up a Zimbra server? If I set up a Zimbra server then do I go to a hosting company, in which case I might give up some control, or do I sit in front of a terminal for a few days installing Zimbra and then wondering why clamd has stopped working because there is another bloody binary update? Should we all run our own data centres? I'm afraid those are real-world concerns that people dwell over every day and they're not going to listen to ideology from somone in an organisation that has produced a decent straightforward license I grant you, but has produced nothing as an alternative for anyone to date to back up that ideology. All the GNU software in use today has gained traction off the back of one thing - Linux.
Really? I have Mythbuntu installed and this stuff is built in. You can set up the auto detection methods and there is a commercial flagging job. Sometimes it doesn't always detect commercial breaks, but it's been impressive on the ones it has detected.