Thanks very much for the info it was kind and did clarify things somewhat.
Having said that I can't see why motif would be something that is normally distributed with the major components of the operating system and QT wouldn't. (By operating system I'm thinking Linux Distribution).
In fact this clause seems to grants permission to redistribute GPLed work linked against QT.
I'm interested in just whereabouts this "native system library" clause is in the GPL. I can't find anything of the sort.
The GPL does talk about derivative works. Personally I can't see any reason at all why a Motif applicaion isn't a derivative work of Motif but yet a QT application is a derivative work of QT.
Actually that's not a bad idea. The Trolls should consider actually publishing a paper version of their tutorial and reference guide. You get them for free when you download the toolkit but a nice printed version would be useful for developers, and I think the Trolls could make a large enough return for it to be worth their time doing.
Probably should be done once 2.1 is out the door though.
I think that message is a clear indication of predatory innovation by MS, and that it decimated sales of DRDOS. But don't take my words for it MS memos clearly show that they felt this would be the case when they thought it up.
Here's a quote from email sent by Microsoft Senior VP Brad Silverberg in 1992:
"What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable and, when he has bugs, suspect the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS, or decide not to take the risk for the other machines he has to buy for in the office."
If you think this message wouldn't cause users to avoid DRDOS like the plague then I sure as hell hope no one consults you for software usability advice!
BTW: The code that checked for the existence of DRDOS was the only encrypted/obsfucated code in the Windows 3.1 beta.
cheese63's statement 'and the letter "J" in front of every class.' lead me to believe he was only referring to code.
In the case of programs your comment is fair. I would agree it is mainly a branding thing (though a little name space conflict reduction still comes into play).
I'm actually an anti-enviromentalist and I would rather live in a safe dull world than a dangerous interesting one. But that in no way decreased the enjoyment I received from reading your (logically) beautiful post.
There is absolutely no other reason for MDI. There was no precedent in any user interface existing before it, or in previous versions of Windows (which tried to do CMU-style tiled windows to solve the problem).
I don't believe this is true. I know the KDevelop guys have drawn heavy fire from all sides for using MDI style. They have defended their position in several posts on the kde-dev lists, and cited several practical advantages of MDI.
One interesting statement made in the discussion is that emacs has a kind of MDI interface for splitting windows.
It indicates which compilation unit the name belongs. Eg KButton is probably a KDE class and its interface is probably found in $KDEDIR/include/kbutton.h.
It reduces name space collision. So if you prefixed all your classes with say MC then your names wouldn't collide with the names defined in KDE (or Java).
An open source license is a contract between you and the owner of a software program. It gives you rights to redistribute, modify and use software under certain conditions.
The GPL is one open source license it requires that the source be made available when binaries are distributed. (This is one of the conditions you must adhere to in order to redistribute the code). Your statement is a correct for the GPL license.
There are many other open source licenses which are less restrictive than the GPL and allow redistribution of binaries without making the source available.
I'm a C++ programmer who 12 months ago had very little experience with GUI programming on *nix. I read the QT tutorial http://www.troll.no/qt/tutorial.html and found it to be very informative. It's a 14 part tutorial which each step taking roughly an hour. It's neat because you can download QT and play with all the examples given.
I'm interested in hearing if there is something similar for GTK+, (I'm not interested in C for GUI stuff, just C++)
QT is kinda like Java in that it's almost insulates you from the OS. This is good in a way but bad when you find yourself with no other choice but to make direct system calls, (because you suddenly find yourself out of your depth).
To help out in these situations I have bought myself a copy of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens it's good and covers the differences betwwen BSD and SVR4, which is useful as I want my code to run on Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Solaris.
To be honest I've never seriously considered Beos. I liked NeXTStep a lot, and it had some great apps, but it didn't last. I can't see anything different enough about Beos to stop if suffering the same fate as NeXTStep.
However, a member of the intellectual elite would generally not spend their free time writing software. They would spend every last minute of it learning newer(sic) things.
And how would they learn these new things, by book reading?
Software devlopement is a discipline that takes much time to learn, it is a discipline best learnt by reading and writing code not books.
Software engineering is a social phenomena and requires interaction with others in order to gain even the most basic understanding.
Work expended on these activities requires mental not muscular exercise, this require constant learning and as a result build they mind.
Open source development often goes hand in hand with open source advocacy, a political endeavour. These three activities software development (artistic), software engineering (social) and open source advocacy (political) make open source programmers the very definition of intelligentsia.
"intellectuals who form an artistic, social, or political vanguard or elite "
A lot of people talk about the desktop but not that many people are out there developing. Just look at the dev lists to see what a tiny pool of people are involved, (there are a lot of transients but very few people stay around for more than a few months).
This is even more true in application land. I estimate Linux has 1% of the number of active application develops as Win32.
If you look at the number of application development teams than Linux has 1% of 1% of the raw manpower compared to Win32.
(I suspect the quality of Linux developers is substantially higher though).
So to answer your question it's not that everyone has abandoned the enterprise to go developing linux apps it's just that there aren't many people doing either, and even less people doing either in coordinated teams.
Here is the oldest article from March 23 1999 (pre Chips and Dip stuff): http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000001.shtm l
And it was actually articles http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000005.shtm l and http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000004.shtm l that were funny.
First non Malda comment: http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000017.shtm l
First post by Hemos, Chips and Dips lives!: http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000018.shtm l
Mandrake says Xfree 4.0 out soon (this in Oct-1997!) http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000028.shtm l
Who new KDE and Gnome were so old (Oct-97 again) http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000048.shtm l
First flame war, things were pretty civilized then http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000054.shtm l
First fan? http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000072.shtm l
Not just XFree can fall behind schedule, NT5 Ship Date Delayed, probably won't ship until 1999. http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000114.shtm l
Wow it's a good thing these things tags aren't allowed in comments anymore:-) http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000137.shtm l
Slashdot has been renamed to Slashdot, "5000 hits per day, and that isn't slowing down yet" it's unstoppable: http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000150.shtm l
Last of the old posts, then the format changes to yy/mm/dd/millsec and becomes untrackable:-( http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00001079.shtm l
The search engine is screwed. Go to the search page and select the author senegan to see that. (He was at one time a prolific author but none of his old articles appear).
Much old stuff is still accessible eg "Linus on KDE vs. GNOME flame wars" at http://slashdot.org/articles/older/980711108243. shtml which is from mid '98.
At one point in time slash dot articles didn't have the date embedded in them at all, the articles were just numbered according to an incremented counter. For fun I went back as far as I could articles 000000000003 and 000000000005 were quite a laugh, with Rob fooling around saying stuff that he never expected people to see. I can't find those really old articles anymore.
Yeah Santa back in my home time got pelted with water balloons, and had to be taken to hospital for an eye operation. (I never realised they could be so dangerous).
I don't think this kind of thing is terribly uncommon.
Why be crammed in a city anymore? It's a good way get experience. Once I've done that I would like to move to somewhere like Nevada (while retaining roughly the same salary).
I also have to pay off my student loan so raw $ is important for that.
kernel: http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-020/_2936 .htm A module of a program that forms a logical entity or performs a unit function. Note: The most vulnerable portion of code in a secure operating system is a special case of a kernel.
operating system: http://usvms.gpo.gov/findfact.html A software program that controls the allocation and use of computer resources (such as central processing unit time, main memory space, disk space, and input/output channels). The operating system also supports the functions of software programs, called "applications," that perform specific user-oriented tasks. The operating system supports the functions of applications by exposing interfaces, called "application programming interfaces," or "APIs." These are synapses at which the developer of an application can connect to invoke pre-fabricated blocks of code in the operating system.
shell: (Ambigous) http://www.idiom.com/about-shell.shtml The word "shell" is a generic term for the command interpreters used on unix.
Window Manager: http://www.rahul.net/kenton/txa/nov95.html The window manager is responsible for controlling important attributes of top level application windows, including size, position, stacking order, colormap focus, and keyboard focus. Your X client may request certain values for these attributes using the protocols defined in the ICCCM.
Desktop Manager Probably meant.
Desktop shell: http://www.rasterman.com/e.html Enlightenment will become a desktop shell - that DOES NOT mean it's a full desktop - that does NOT mean it's a window manager - it's inbetween. It handles things outside of applicatons (filemanagement, application launching and management etc.). I'm excited about trying to create a good desktop shell.
Which brings up: Desktop Environment http://www.kde.org/documentation/faq/kdefaq-2.ht ml#ss2.1 KDE provides a complete desktop environment, including a file manager, a window manager, a help system, a configuration system, uncountable tools and utilities, and an ever increasing number of applications, including but not limited to mail and news clients, drawing programs, a PostScript and a DVI viewer and so forth.
GUI: http://www.pcwebopedia.com/Software/User_Interfa ces/GUIs/Graphical_User_Interface_GUI.html A program interface that takes advantage of the computer's graphics capabilities to make the program easier to use. Well-designed graphical user interfaces can free the user from learning complex command languages.
I suspect this question will never be seen but I feel a need to ask it anyway.
I don't understand how RMS can advocate both not using security and using strong encryption, how can he reconcile those two beliefs?
(RMS advocated not using security in this artice and has done so elsewhere but a couple months ago he advocated using strong encryption in the UK in response to some new laws passed to help counter IRA resistance).
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks very much for the info it was kind and did clarify things somewhat.
Having said that I can't see why motif would be something that is normally distributed with the major components of the operating system and QT wouldn't. (By operating system I'm thinking Linux Distribution).
In fact this clause seems to grants permission to redistribute GPLed work linked against QT.
I'm interested in just whereabouts this "native system library" clause is in the GPL. I can't find anything of the sort.
The GPL does talk about derivative works. Personally I can't see any reason at all why a Motif applicaion isn't a derivative work of Motif but yet a QT application is a derivative work of QT.
It sounds very much like a double-standard to me.
Actually that's not a bad idea. The Trolls should consider actually publishing a paper version of their tutorial and reference guide. You get them for free when you download the toolkit but a nice printed version would be useful for developers, and I think the Trolls could make a large enough return for it to be worth their time doing.
Probably should be done once 2.1 is out the door though.
LNUX VA Linux Systems Inc
Last: 165 1/4
52 Week Range: 161 1/2 - 320
I think VA is a good company but it's not necessarily a good idea to buy into Linux companies just after they go public.
I think that message is a clear indication of predatory innovation by MS, and that it decimated sales of DRDOS. But don't take my words for it MS memos clearly show that they felt this would be the case when they thought it up.
Here's a quote from email sent by Microsoft Senior VP Brad Silverberg in 1992:
"What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable and, when he has bugs, suspect the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS, or decide not to take the risk for the other machines he has to buy for in the office."
If you think this message wouldn't cause users to avoid DRDOS like the plague then I sure as hell hope no one consults you for software usability advice!
BTW: The code that checked for the existence of DRDOS was the only encrypted/obsfucated code in the Windows 3.1 beta.
cheese63's statement 'and the letter "J" in front of every class.' lead me to believe he was only referring to code.
In the case of programs your comment is fair. I would agree it is mainly a branding thing (though a little name space conflict reduction still comes into play).
That was great.
I'm actually an anti-enviromentalist and I would rather live in a safe dull world than a dangerous interesting one. But that in no way decreased the enjoyment I received from reading your (logically) beautiful post.
Bravo!
There is absolutely no other reason for MDI. There was no precedent in any user interface existing before it, or in previous versions of Windows (which tried to do CMU-style tiled windows to solve the problem).
I don't believe this is true. I know the KDevelop guys have drawn heavy fire from all sides for using MDI style. They have defended their position in several posts on the kde-dev lists, and cited several practical advantages of MDI.
One interesting statement made in the discussion is that emacs has a kind of MDI interface for splitting windows.
Prefixing names serves a few purposes:
It indicates which compilation unit the name belongs. Eg KButton is probably a KDE class and its interface is probably found in $KDEDIR/include/kbutton.h.
It reduces name space collision. So if you prefixed all your classes with say MC then your names wouldn't collide with the names defined in KDE (or Java).
An open source license is a contract between you and the owner of a software program. It gives you rights to redistribute, modify and use software under certain conditions.
The GPL is one open source license it requires that the source be made available when binaries are distributed. (This is one of the conditions you must adhere to in order to redistribute the code). Your statement is a correct for the GPL license.
There are many other open source licenses which are less restrictive than the GPL and allow redistribution of binaries without making the source available.
8. Grits boy
9. Beowulf cluster
10. Last Post
(I don't find any of these people funny BTW).
I'm a C++ programmer who 12 months ago had very little experience with GUI programming on *nix. I read the QT tutorial http://www.troll.no/qt/tutorial.html and found it to be very informative. It's a 14 part tutorial which each step taking roughly an hour. It's neat because you can download QT and play with all the examples given.
I'm interested in hearing if there is something similar for GTK+, (I'm not interested in C for GUI stuff, just C++)
QT is kinda like Java in that it's almost insulates you from the OS. This is good in a way but bad when you find yourself with no other choice but to make direct system calls, (because you suddenly find yourself out of your depth).
To help out in these situations I have bought myself a copy of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens it's good and covers the differences betwwen BSD and SVR4, which is useful as I want my code to run on Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Solaris.
To be honest I've never seriously considered Beos. I liked NeXTStep a lot, and it had some great apps, but it didn't last. I can't see anything different enough about Beos to stop if suffering the same fate as NeXTStep.
However, a member of the intellectual elite would generally not spend their free time writing software. They would spend every last minute of it learning newer(sic) things.
And how would they learn these new things, by book reading?
Software devlopement is a discipline that takes much time to learn, it is a discipline best learnt by reading and writing code not books.
Software engineering is a social phenomena and requires interaction with others in order to gain even the most basic understanding.
Work expended on these activities requires mental not muscular exercise, this require constant learning and as a result build they mind.
Open source development often goes hand in hand with open source advocacy, a political endeavour. These three activities software development (artistic), software engineering (social) and open source advocacy (political) make open source programmers the very definition of intelligentsia.
"intellectuals who form an artistic, social, or political vanguard or elite "
Right on brother. Oops, I mean fellow individual.
Now if there was just a way to get Exceed to pass on alt-tab and ctrl-esc to KDE.
Then again maybe this is an unsurmountable limitation of Windows.
At least I could rebind ctrl-esc to shift-esc but had no such luck with alt-tab. (Actually if no one beats me to it I will fix this myself).
Actually because this article was posted under the GNU topic I assumed (possibly mistakenly) that the source was to be released under the GPL.
/. doesn't have an icon for generic open software. It does have an omninous if it's open software then it owes a debt to the FSF feel about it.
I guess
Here is the oldest article from March 23 1999 (pre Chips and Dip stuff):
I meant March 23 1997 of course.
I'm assumming you're a different AC. I was replying to comments by an AC about Linux and the enterprise:
Linux is missing the opportunity in areas where it COULD excel -- enterprise and application servers
Perhaps you are in the wrong discussion?
A lot of people talk about the desktop but not that many people are out there developing. Just look at the dev lists to see what a tiny pool of people are involved, (there are a lot of transients but very few people stay around for more than a few months).
This is even more true in application land. I estimate Linux has 1% of the number of active application develops as Win32.
If you look at the number of application development teams than Linux has 1% of 1% of the raw manpower compared to Win32.
(I suspect the quality of Linux developers is substantially higher though).
So to answer your question it's not that everyone has abandoned the enterprise to go developing linux apps it's just that there aren't many people doing either, and even less people doing either in coordinated teams.
Here is the oldest article from March 23 1999 (pre Chips and Dip stuff):m l
m l m l
m l
m l
m l
m l
m l
m l
m l
:-) m l
m l
:-( m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000001.sht
And it was actually articles
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000005.sht
and
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000004.sht
that were funny.
First non Malda comment:
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000017.sht
First post by Hemos, Chips and Dips lives!:
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000018.sht
Mandrake says Xfree 4.0 out soon (this in Oct-1997!)
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000028.sht
Who new KDE and Gnome were so old (Oct-97 again)
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000048.sht
First flame war, things were pretty civilized then
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000054.sht
First fan?
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000072.sht
Not just XFree can fall behind schedule, NT5 Ship Date Delayed, probably won't ship until 1999.
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000114.sht
Wow it's a good thing these things tags aren't allowed in comments anymore
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000137.sht
Slashdot has been renamed to Slashdot, "5000 hits per day, and that isn't slowing down yet" it's unstoppable:
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00000150.sht
Last of the old posts, then the format changes to yy/mm/dd/millsec and becomes untrackable
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/00001079.sht
The search engine is screwed. Go to the search page and select the author senegan to see that. (He was at one time a prolific author but none of his old articles appear).
. shtml
Much old stuff is still accessible
eg "Linus on KDE vs. GNOME flame wars" at
http://slashdot.org/articles/older/980711108243
which is from mid '98.
At one point in time slash dot articles didn't have the date embedded in them at all, the articles were just numbered according to an incremented counter. For fun I went back as far as I could articles 000000000003 and 000000000005 were quite a laugh, with Rob fooling around saying stuff that he never expected people to see. I can't find those really old articles anymore.
Yeah Santa back in my home time got pelted with water balloons, and had to be taken to hospital for an eye operation. (I never realised they could be so dangerous).
I don't think this kind of thing is terribly uncommon.
Why be crammed in a city anymore?
It's a good way get experience. Once I've done that I would like to move to somewhere like Nevada (while retaining roughly the same salary).
I also have to pay off my student loan so raw $ is important for that.
BTW I hear 2/3 neighbor's toilets flushing.
kernel:6 .htm
t ml#ss2.1
a ces/GUIs/Graphical_User_Interface_GUI.html
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-020/_293
A module of a program that forms a logical entity or performs a unit function. Note: The most vulnerable portion of code in a secure operating system is a special case of a kernel.
operating system:
http://usvms.gpo.gov/findfact.html
A software program that controls the allocation and use of computer resources (such as central processing unit time, main memory space, disk space, and input/output channels). The operating system also supports the functions of software programs, called "applications," that perform specific user-oriented tasks. The operating system supports the functions of applications by exposing interfaces, called "application programming interfaces," or "APIs." These are synapses at which the developer of an application can connect to invoke pre-fabricated blocks of code in the operating system.
shell: (Ambigous)
http://www.idiom.com/about-shell.shtml
The word "shell" is a generic term for the command interpreters used on unix.
Window Manager:
http://www.rahul.net/kenton/txa/nov95.html
The window manager is responsible for controlling important attributes of top level application windows, including size, position, stacking order, colormap focus, and keyboard focus. Your X client may request certain values for these attributes using the protocols defined in the ICCCM.
Desktop Manager Probably meant.
Desktop shell:
http://www.rasterman.com/e.html
Enlightenment will become a desktop shell - that DOES NOT mean it's a full desktop - that does NOT mean it's a window manager - it's inbetween. It handles things outside of applicatons (filemanagement, application launching and management etc.). I'm excited about trying to create a good desktop shell.
Which brings up:
Desktop Environment
http://www.kde.org/documentation/faq/kdefaq-2.h
KDE provides a complete desktop environment, including a file manager, a window manager, a help system, a configuration system, uncountable tools and utilities, and an ever increasing number of applications, including but not limited to mail and news clients, drawing programs, a PostScript and a DVI viewer and so forth.
GUI:
http://www.pcwebopedia.com/Software/User_Interf
A program interface that takes advantage of the computer's graphics capabilities to make the program easier to use. Well-designed graphical user interfaces can free the user from learning complex command languages.
I suspect this question will never be seen but I feel a need to ask it anyway.
I don't understand how RMS can advocate both not using security and using strong encryption, how can he reconcile those two beliefs?
(RMS advocated not using security in this artice and has done so elsewhere but a couple months ago he advocated using strong encryption in the UK in response to some new laws passed to help counter IRA resistance).