Yes, that was "cannot" in the colloquial sense of "well, maybe you _could_ make money off it, somehow, if you were incredibly lucky, but for all practical purposes, it's impossible".
Your interpretation, but it's a flawed interpretation which is based on your limited definition of selling software.
I use just "cannot" because it's a lot quicker and easier to type, and the meaning is blatantly obvious from context to anyone not trying to be a pedantic arsehole.
I'll avoid responding in kind, however you did say that it cannot be done. Clearly this is not true. If you meant unlikely, that would be a different word.
I'm pretty sure I've got a good handle on the spirit, definition, intent and harsh reality of the GPL.
I'm pretty sure you have a handle on what you think it means; that doesn't mean you understand the GPL. It's unlikely if you think the reality is harsh, the GPL is a reflection of the reality of copyright laws.
Literally, no. Practically, yes.
Yet it still happens.
Ignoring for a second the massive quantity of proprietry software used by businesses the refutes this assertion, "GPLed code" and "customer access to source" are not even remotely close to being synonymous.
You also ignore the tremendous amount of GPL software used by businesses, particularly technology companies and large corporations in their network infrastructure. Indeed, all that business code is supported and wouldn't be where it was unless it was.
Most "business code" isn't GPLed and, indeed, GPLing it would (rightly) be seen as sacrificing a competitive advantage.
That depends on which business code; As I had mentioned, there are some applications for which the GPL does not make sense. There is a tremendous amount where it does however, particularly in business infrastructure.
Indeed. The major difference is when *do* like it, and can (legally) get it for free, they're significantly less likely to pay for it out of generosity.
Smaller entities are indeed less likely, but a large number of them are unlikely to buy them even if they are not free - how much software do you suppose is pirated? These are not the customers that generate revenue. The world has plenty of people who will not pay for software regardless of the license.
Reality intrudes at this point and reminds us that the vast majority of people will not pay for a product or service they can also get for free (or significantly cheaper).
Again, these are not generally the sort that would pay for software in the first place. A business model for software includes presenting a value proposition for customers, including support and training. If you take this away from your software, you're not likely to get very far.
The problem with selling GPLed software is that your first customer can quite legally resell copies at a lower price than you, and/or make copies freely available. Exactly how do you propose to run a business selling software when that can happen ?
It can be redistributed, this is true, but your name stays on the software. If you do not provide a value proposition to your customers, they will indeed not pay you. If you can provide support and training, you'll make money. Cheapbytes sells CDs from several Linux distributions, yet the distributions continue to exist. This is because they provide a value proposition in their product that Cheapbytes does not.
Something I have never disputed, but is completely irrelevant to the topic of this discussion, which is SELLING SOFTWARE. Not selling software tied to support contracts, hardware, additional content or subscription services.
Your difficulty seems to be that you feel a need to separate them. If you've tried selling software without a support structure then I'm not surprised you failed. The customer who actually pays money for your product expects support of some sort to e
I've still got mine, along with a decent number of good games. I've had a lot of consoles, some of which were disappointing, but never regretted the purchase of the Sega CD. Aside from being my first CD player, it had AH-3 Thunderstrike, Robo Aleste, Lunar 1 and 2 along with several other good Working Designs translations, Snatcher, and Dark Wizard, all of which were standouts - especially for the time. SoulStar was good for a shooter on rails, Final Fight was a solid port, Sonic CD was expansive with an interesting time travel theme, and the gags in Switch (not double switch) were a riot. There are still a few games I'd like to pick up for the console, if I ever find them in good condition.
Granted, the Sega CD had more than its share of junk FMV games. They also should have integrated a larger color palette for the price they were selling it when they added the sprite/background scaling, which would have made the games more colorful and the FMV better. I sometimes still pop it out though, and it remains hooked to the television for nostalgia runs. I do enjoy a good game of Dark Wizard, which is an excellent and very long hex-based strategy game with four complete stories, and the occasional (non-escort) AH-3 mission can be great mindless fun.
You said that a company cannot make money from GPLed software unless they tie it to a non-GPLed product. This is false.
You need to re-read what I'm writing. Because it's clear - either deliberately or accidentally - you are misinterpreting what I'm saying.
I've read your writing, but it seems clear that you do not understand either the spirit or letter of the GPL. This is not surprising, the GPL is one of the most commonly misunderstood software licenses.
Yes. Terms which are created *because the terms of the GPL are not appropriate to the purpose of selling software*.
The terms are there explicitly to guarantee access to the source code, which is a different problem. It is not incompatible with selling the software. Let's be very clear here; the GPL is an open source license first, but its provisions do not prevent the software from being sold.
In most cases your "customers" - ie: people who pay for your software - couldn't care less whether or not it was GPLed.
Larger customers, with deeper pockets, do indeed care whether they have the source to a product which they wish to deploy. Business code in particular, which is amongst the most widely developed code out there, but other software which might be useful as well.
Basing a business on the idea people will voluntarily give you money just because you have a good product is financial suicide.
This is no different whether the software is open source or not. You still have to sell it to your customer, and if they believe your product to be worthless then they won't buy it. If your product is really that good, people will pay for it. Most everyone wants a say in their favorite software product's development, and in the case of open source software in particular features can definitely be purchased.
In which case we're back to having to tie GPLed software to some other product like paid support to make it financially viable. Ie: the whole freaking point of this discussion.
And your point is not valid. We'll go over why in the rest of this message.
The vast bulk of their revenue, however, comes from software sales. Moving down the tree to software companies which aren't lucky enough to have the size to invest in multiple markets, and the proportion of their revenue coming from software sales is even higher.
I don't think you have any idea of what you're talking about. Most software companies will gladly offer high priced service agreements to corporations that use their services, and these companies have a better chance of seeing their software used in these very lucrative environments. Many large and small software companies are more than happy to take money in exchange for support if an entity is willing to spend it. If yours is not... Well, your competition probably is.
Where do game companies without subscription services like WoW derive revenue from if not software sales ?
Game publishers gain some quick revenue from software sales while the product is still hot, but a lot of games do not in fact make money. (*cough* Daikatana *cough*) Plenty of game companies go out of business regardless of the license of their software, because the gaming industry's customers are fickle. Licensing and merchandising of gaming franchises (toys, TV shows, breakfast cereals and the like) make up a lot more of their profit than they might be comfortable with. For that matter, the majority of what compromises a game these days is the content and not just the code. In that light, games really should fit the GPL model if your assertions are correct. Open sourcing the code (as has happened for a number of games after release, particularly those from id software) does not prevent a company from making money when done properly. People still buy id games that have been open sourced, even if only for nostalgia.
The point here is that you can't make money selling GPLed software, without tying it to some other product.
The dual license isn't another product. It's another set of terms through which another entity can distribute copies of your product, presumably with a different set of restrictions.
What you have to lose from the GPL is the likelihood of ever selling your software. What you have to gain is the relatively remote possibility that other people will be nice enough to improve your product for free.
You have the good will of your customers to gain. If your product is worth its salt, which not all are, you'll sell licenses in any case. Larger entities will definitely buy, and a large number of them will not use anything that does not have some sort of paid support structure.
Microsoft. Most game companies. There's no shortage of companies (or corporate departments) who derive most of their money from selling software (or software licenses).
Microsoft makes their share from publishing MCSE training materials as well. Most game publishers make their money from selling some (but definitely not all or even most) software, the whole thing being a gamble of who will buy which typically shelf life limited product first. Those that last for a longer time without languishing on the shelf tend to be those with an additional cost, such as WoW and EQ.
I didn't say companies who had _no_ other sources of revenue, I said companies who derive most of their money from software sales. The GPL makes that essentially impossible and, hence, removes those companies' business models. *THAT* is why TrollTech dual-licence QT - because they know if they didn't they would have a great deal of trouble making enough money to stay in business.
You said major sources of revenue, and both training and support can be major sources. TrollTech added the GPL to their product because their customers demanded it; the QPL was there before, and no doubt some customers were already using those terms who may not wish to use the GPL.
What I find ironic is that even the people who steadfastly insist the GPL is "business friendly" usually do so in the same breath they say "because you can just dual license" - seemingly unaware they're shooting down their own argument.
No, what's convenient about the GPL is that you protect your product from proprietary exploitation by your competitors in a modified form that you cannot use yourself. No one-upsmanship where you cannot follow, unless they pay you for the privilege. An additional license is simply an agreement between yourself and those who want different terms, with a different pricing tier.
Poor example. QT is dual licensed (the GPLed version is only usable if you are developing GPLed software).
Actually, this is an excellent example. It clearly shows that the GPL is by no means business unfriendly for the developers/copyright holders, only for others who wish to profit off their work without contributing back. Those who do not want to GPL their software can purchase a non-GPL license, whereas those who do wish to GPL their software can use it freely. If you think about it, it's something like a patent on source code that only expires when the copyrights do. People can benefit from your work through openness, but not hide it in a proprietary product without making a separate agreement with you.
Let's put it another way. The GPL is something like giving to the public domain with the associated good will from your customers, but without giving up your copyrights. That doesn't mean others won't do anything with your work mind you, there is only so much control and forks can happen, but they will also be GPL'ing their versions. You can take whatever code you like to integrate back into your original GPLed version, although not into a proprietary licensed version without agreement from the code's developer. You have little to lose from the GPL unless you want absolute control, but potentially much to gain if there are enough interested contributors.
Who derives a primary revenue stream only from selling GPLed software ?
Who derives a primary revenue stream only from selling software? Most software companies also sell support, either per incident or through a contract. Training tends to be quite lucrative as well. I find it humorous how much is spent on training and support for e.g. IBM/Rational and Oracle products somewhere that I won't mention, but I can't argue that it's a good business model for the vendors.
I fully advocate giving up "intellectual property" as it is currently defined, which is distinct from physical personal property. Intellectual property has been twisted into a tool with which to bludgeon one's competitors via minor details, which I frankly find offensive and morally corrupt. You're advocating removing the controls put in place for corporations which abuse monopoly-type situations, the removal of which would be just as anti-consumer as intellectual property. I'm saying if you're willing to go that far, you might as well throw it all out and start over. The two arguments are more or less complete opposites, and each is as valid as the other.
So you feel anti-trust laws are somehow bad? Let's get rid of IP laws as well, I think they're morally corrupt. The two sort of balance each other out to a degree, although the former is typically only used when companies grossly overstep their bounds and the latter at the drop of a hat. If we're going to get rid of anti-trust laws that protect us from this sort of behavior, let's get rid of a few more bad apples while we're at it.
MS has a rather active recent history of attacking the GPL and software under its license through bad PR. What is being discussed is Novell creating a new legal vector with which Microsoft can attack GPL software developers by poisoning Novell contributions. It makes perfect business sense to them when their server business is at stake. You run MS operating systems exclusively, you've said so yourself. You should know how much it costs to purchase a suite of MS software for your environment. Consider what would happen to Microsoft if a large number of people like yourself and in larger corporate markets stopped paying Microsoft for every new version of Windows/Office/BO/etc and instead went to Linux or another alternative. That's what they are fighting.
Go download a set of Mandriva 2007 media. Play around with the KDE desktop. See what happens when you connect hardware, use the GUI package installer and update system, go over the icons in the lower left hand corner. It's a lot better than you remember it.
Although I typically admin Linux systems, I'm occasionally called on to clean up Windows systems where it's not possible to reformat for whatever reason. Here's the basic strategy I follow, which while not complete is a good start if at some point you really need to clean one out.
1) Like most people, I typically run an Antivirus application, Ad-Aware and Spybot SD to see what sort of spyware I can remove. I disable network access as well, so the software cannot re-download itself or other malware. Most of what I actually do ends up being done in safe mode, and System Restore gets disabled since a lot of malware will infect the restore points as well.
2) If Ad-Aware or Spybot is disabled by a running application (some spyware does this) I look first in the task manager. Note that this doesn't show all possible applications, as a program can hide itself from the task manager, but if you're familiar enough with it you can usually pick out a few things that shouldn't be there. Google them and see what they are, you'll often find more details of the issue. Even if the software goes to completion and removes everything it finds, I go through the task manager and ensure nothing odd is there. If I verify that there's a problem, I try to kill the programs. This is not always possible, as some will run with Systems privileges which Admin can't touch. I make a note of these and do further research.
3) Once this is done, I do a listing sorted by date of the system directories under Windows. The windows top level (C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT) and the SYSTEM32 directories are the most common places for these applications to install themselves. Sometimes you'll find something in RECYCLER. Windows files have timestamps which are consistent across most systems if you do updates identically across all your Windows systems. Examining the files for interesting strings can help to determine whether they are spyware or possibly data files which the software would use to either infect other systems (IP lists and the like) or sometimes information (e.g. passwords) that the application would send to someone you don't want to have it. Once I've verified files that belong to these categories, I delete them or (if this is not possible) move them to another directory.
4) Next, I dig into regedit and look in the various "Run" entries. You can find these by using Regedit's search function and searching for the word "Run". You'll get a few extra locations, but this will show you some of the places where Spyware often launches. Additionally, although this isn't as common, you can try searching the "Startup" folder under the Start Menu entry of each user's profile (as well as the All Users profile.) Occasionally, I've even seen the legacy Windows ini files corrupted. It can't hurt to look.
5) After doing all these things and a few reboots, I typically go back and look at the system directories again. Some applications will keep re-installing themselves, many will use different filenames and occasionally locations. If it's not possible to kill it in Windows and the system has a FAT32 filesystem, I'll sometimes pop up Knoppix and remove the files that keep coming back. A BartPE disk can be useful for the NTFS systems, but be careful that the BartPE instance doesn't get infected.
Our environment has a corporate Symantec AV subscription and we automate AV updates. Generally our problems come frome malware which Symantec AV doesn't want to touch, typically spyware. Although we strongly encourage backing up data and reformatting, for those cases where it's just not possible (unreplaceable and unique software installations from a vendor for control systems etc) these are a few techniques that can point you in the right direction.
I think you've missed the point; noone said anything about removing their existing OS. If I were to give someone a computer (again, if I felt someone truly needed a system) I would probably give them a Linux installation. Probably not ubuntu, but this is an aside. If I were to give my friends a Linux CD to test, it would probably be in the form of a VMware player image ready to run in their current OS. My point is that it's not as terrible as you're pointing out to give Linux.
If I were to give my parents an iMac or Mac mini, they'd never use it. I know from experience that they're not interested in a Mac. However, giving a VMware image to play around with would give the more adventurous something to poke at non-destructively.
I'd rather give them a PC with Ubuntu on it. Really, despite your apparent bias it's still a computer. If I thought someone needed a computer that badly, I'd give them one that came with everything they needed and nothing left to buy.
It seems a bit of a small gift, although it's not quite as bad as you make it sound - especially if this is from a student, who probably doesn't have much in the line of money. Frankly, a lot of people are interested in learning what this "Linux Thing" is. It's not much different than buying someone an iMac, except they can use the CD in most generic PCs. They're also free to dual boot and keep that Windows partition, so they're not really losing anything but excess disk space which is so common these days. For my part, the only tech support I provide these days is for Linux/UNIX derivatives. I actually have a life now.:)
FWIW, I've been using Linux for well over a decade and it's come quite a long way. I worked my way through the entire Slackware distribution from the ground up while I was a college student. When I started, it was a bit of a difficult task to get anything working. You needed to build your CD-ROM interface's driver (typically your sound card) into your kernel in order to use it. If you had a Sound Blaster 16 you might even get it the sound card itself to work. Recompiling/upgrading the system libraries and binaries from a.out to ELF format and migrating from the BSD to SysV init all by hand taught me a lot about the system, but it wasn't for the squeamish. Tweaking X11 was an interesting game of generating mode timings that hopefully wouldn't destroy your monitor based on minimal documentation. Browsers tended to be statically linked memory hogs due to Motif 1.2 not being open source, at a time when 8MB might have been your total RAM. Swap was often required just to get X to start. Setting up printing typically involved editing a lot of config files to set up print filters, queues, and getting your file rendered through Ghostscript. Boy has all that ever changed.
How easy it is now depends on which distro and software you use of course. Mandriva 2007 for example popped up a dialog box and configured my printer for me when I plugged it in for the first time. Ubuntu/kubuntu also tend to be good about adding and removing hardware. X11 isn't nearly the guessing game it used to be, and the hardware I own just works in a fresh OS install given one of the aforementioned distributions.
About your keyboard, have you tried Rosegarden? It's a bit of a large package, but it comes with a wonderful score editor and will happily play to and record from multiple MIDI devices. If you keep your keyboard near your computer, you might never need to use the keyboard's memory again.
As for the GIMP, it does have the ability to scan through SANE. File->Acquire->XSane:Device Dialog works in the version I'm using. You'll need SANE installed, but I've never had a problem with bringing images in through this menu item.
Xpdf is a bit of a simple application, and doesn't have much extra functionality. There are however other applications like kghostview which can do everything you're looking to do and more. Konqueror as a browser embeds it as a PDF viewer, amongst other datatypes. While the Adobe PDF plugin for Firefox doesn't seem to have been functioning properly for a while, there are alternatives.
I've listed mostly KDE apps as examples, as those are what I've tended to use, but there are typically GNOME equivalents with good functionality as well. If you want full functionality, it's best to use more modern applications. While I'll agree that Linux is not yet ready to replace Windows on everyone's systems, it's continuously improving in user friendliness and hardware support. Linux is certainly headed in the right direction. When will it be 'ready'? Who knows. What I do know is that the definition of ready varies per person. It was ready for me 12 years ago, and it's ready for a lot more people now.
Redhat packages the results of open source projects into a distribution. They also create a few tools of their own, but these tools are also open source. Oracle can continue along the same path, maybe they'll even provide a bit more stability in the distribution schedule and/or backports of new packages rather than just bugfixes if they take longer to release new versions. This isn't the first time Redhat has been forked, as an example I've been running Mandrake/Mandriva for years. We do use RH where I work, but given our experience with RH's support and ongoing yearly maintenence costs for workstations it's likely that we'll be giving Oracle's offering a serious look.
FWIW, to my knowledge there's nothing on the disc that prevents it from being copied. As I always do with my CDs, I ripped the disc to my computer and put the CD on the shelf. After looking at the videos on the other side that is. I suppose I might have watched the DVD half more if it had the "White and Nerdy" video on it, but the animations aren't terrible and the album itself doesn't disappoint this long-time Al fan. For those who care, which excludes myself, there are enhanced stereo and surround versions on the DVD side as well. Anyway, White & Nerdy, Canadian Idiot and Trapped in the Drive-Thru (a great sendup of Trapped in the Closet) were the album's high points for me. Even "Don't download this song" has enough sarcasm to make it funny, in a "We are the world" parody sort of way.
That's where you're wrong: C++ is an absolute disaster and has held back desktop and application enormously.
That's an opinion. You're welcome to it, but C++ has more developer mindshare and code written than Objective C. This is a fact.
If it "limits" people away from writing code in C and C++, I'm all for it.
And I'm all against it. Flexibility should be a requirement for X11, since it works across so many platforms. We're talking about completely different issues in any case; I'm advocating further development of the underlying architecture of X11, whereas you're talking about a particular API for a single toolkit sitting on top of X11 which will NOT interoperate with other toolkits. All toolkits could benefit from improvements in the basic X11 architecture.
In any case, it's not a question of what "I" do, it's already happening: Microsoft and Gnome have made C# a full-fledged application development language, and Apple has moved to Objective-C. In the Microsoft/Gnome case, you can still write C/C++-based applications, but increasingly, you're going to see more and more fancy widgets written in C# only (and even then, you can call them from C/C++ compiled to a CLR backend). It's a good migration strategy. The Apple strategy is similar. Only KDE still clings to the notion that people should write everything in C++.
It's a migration strategy, but to do it in just GTK would mean doing it at too high of a level to do any good. X11 has been and should continue to be platform agnostic. That doesn't mean it shouldn't have any features, but rather that these features should not be tied to a particular type of system and definitely not something vendor specific. Developers should be able to write their code in any language and have the application look alike, which should be the job of a separate UI drawing layer as it's done in OS X (Quartz) and Windows (GDI/GDI+/etc). The API and language choice should be left to the programmer.
They are "lacking" because KDE, Qt, Gnome, and Gtk+ have largely chosen to ignore what was there before they started, instead of participating in improving it. The end result? We have two Linux desktops that look really nice but whose underlying technologies are less capable than what Motif could do nearly 20 years ago. I mean, neither Qt nor Gtk+ applications even work correctly remotely.
Bollocks. The "Open" Software Foundation/Open Group can only blame themselves for what happened with Motif. They kept it closed for so long that it became irrelevent. This is why GTK and Qt are now eating Motif's lunch, note that GIMP was originally a Motif app before they developed GTK (Gimp Toolkit) to replace it. Motif apps have been and are still just as limited in how they can interact with non-Motif applications as Qt and GTK+ applications are. Qt apps tend to like other Qt apps, and the same can be said about GTK+ apps. There is some integration, XDND and the very limited X clipboard, but this functionality should be augmented at the X11 layer to allow for e.g. copying and pasting data objects of any type using whatever method an application can accept it in.
BTW, do you have an generalized example I can apply to any Qt or GTK+ application which shows that they do not work correctly remotely unless they're using XSHM, XV (YUV overlay extension) or another extension which requires local hardware access? I use X11 extensively without these supposed local vs. remote issues, and have for over 10 years including Openlook on Solaris and Linux, Motif and the Motif-based CDE on several platforms, the current crop of desktop environments from KDE to XFCE, and dozens of WMs. That's not to say that there are no issues, but rather that these are issues with X11 R6 itself.
You're barking up the wrong tree. I'm not arguing C vs. C++. I think both C and C++ are lousy languages to write GUIs and desktop apps in. The only C-based language that is even close to being object oriented is Objective-C, and it has a lot of other problems. (I leave Java and C# out of the discussion because, despite their syntax, they are not really C-based.)
You're misunderstanding my point. Objective-C is not widespread enough for serious discussion in the real world, OS X/NeXTStep/OpenStep notwithstanding. C++ is widely available, almost certainly installed on a Linux distro with development tools, and not as bad as you make it out to be. There are problems with every language, but C++ has the virtues of being widespread and familiar to a large number of programmers who are skilled in its use - especially those coming from Windows. It presents an object oriented API to the programmer if they choose to use it, whatever your opinion of its virtues. The standard Java and C# implementations both use different virtual machines as their native targets, and I'd rather not even get into that mess just yet.
You're still assuming that Qt and Gtk+ APIs are APIs people will want to write against in the future
IMO there's nothing wrong with the Qt API, although I will admit that most of the GTK+ code I've seen/had to work with looks like spaghetti. Probably due to Glade's code generation more than the API itself, but even that makes me not want to use it.
I think the real migration strategy is from something like Gtk+ to Gtk#, followed by a pure C# implementation of Gtk# based on Cairo. Gnome has taken big steps in that direction. Microsoft has done something similar. Apple has ditched C++ and has moved everything to Objective-C (now with garbage collection). Only KDE still clings to C++.
You're only going to end up with further fragmentation in this direction, and limit the languages in which people are able to write their applications. I'm not talking about a specific language, I'm talking about a more powerful low level X11 layer on which the various toolkits can build upon. This would give application developers the flexibility to choose their own language/toolkit and still have better consistency in the resulting applications. It would also help when someone had to port existing code into the environment.
The "graphics layer" and the "clipboard layer" you speak of is what X11 was supposed to be. It has all the provisions and facilities for providing that functionality in a toolkit-independent way. Unfortunately, both Qt and Gtk+ ignore most of that stuff and instead do their own thing.
The "clipboard layer" in X11 is a piece of garbage, and needs to be replaced. There it is, stated clearly and for the record. I'd like to see an object oriented replacement for X11 which is toolkit independent. The graphics layer and native GUI toolkit (if Xt and the Athena widgets are what you'd consider native) also need serious reworking for modern GUI application development, which is why most people tend to use a separate toolkit like Qt or GTK+. There are reasons why people have done their own thing for such a long time. The network transparent layer and ubiquity are nice, but services which a generic application can depend on are severely lacking.
The idea behind KDE is to engineer a solid application environment. They felt the best way was to use an object oriented language. Based on the development environments I've seen, I happen to think they're on to something. C does have a more stable ABI under GCC at this point, which is nice, and gcc's C++ optimization still isn't what it could be. Once these issues are resolved though, C++ is simply a richer, more functional environment on which to build a graphical application.
I'd still like to see some work done on KDE/Qt though. I personally think Qt and GDK/GTK should be stripped down such that one can write against either API and connect to a more universal GUI layer, one which is themable and efficient. It should handle all the drawing regardless of the backend, which would reduce the number of portability issues. While we're at it, how about a consistent object-oriented clipboard which handles non-textual data types using a generic interface that can pass them back and forth between all apps (not just GNOME or KDE) which register to receive them? Now THAT'S something I'd be willing to contribute to.
How about (and I don't intend to sound flip here) WebBrowser? Just a thought, since IceWeasel lends a rather unprofessional sound to the distribution. Many apps could use a name more descriptive of what they do, and if you get the chance to rename them with the author's blessing it wouldn't hurt to make them less ambiguous. I don't use Debian myself, but if I did I'd be more likely to install WebBrowser than IceWeasel.
I would say that the end result of a successful product is community minded, even if the development process is not by necessity. Many defunct software companies have found this out the hard way. Unless you're writing a custom app, you need more than one customer if your product is intended to make money. While capitalism tends to stress power for the individual, community it is still important lest one spend their life ostracized. Japan's society is an excellent example of this. On the other hand, communist ideals might not involve hoarding power as such, but community is still (obviously) central to the concept.
Just out of curiosity and aside from hermits/loners, what generalized groups would you consider not community-minded? Beowulf clusters are certainly a long running joke here, but this is hardly the only forum where jokes tend to live ad infinitum. To further the stereotype though, I personally think the Wii would make a pretty sweet webserver - low heat and power consumption, more than enough CPU to do the job.
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Yes, that was "cannot" in the colloquial sense of "well, maybe you _could_ make money off it, somehow, if you were incredibly lucky, but for all practical purposes, it's impossible".
Your interpretation, but it's a flawed interpretation which is based on your limited definition of selling software.
I use just "cannot" because it's a lot quicker and easier to type, and the meaning is blatantly obvious from context to anyone not trying to be a pedantic arsehole.
I'll avoid responding in kind, however you did say that it cannot be done. Clearly this is not true. If you meant unlikely, that would be a different word.
I'm pretty sure I've got a good handle on the spirit, definition, intent and harsh reality of the GPL.
I'm pretty sure you have a handle on what you think it means; that doesn't mean you understand the GPL. It's unlikely if you think the reality is harsh, the GPL is a reflection of the reality of copyright laws.
Literally, no. Practically, yes.
Yet it still happens.
Ignoring for a second the massive quantity of proprietry software used by businesses the refutes this assertion, "GPLed code" and "customer access to source" are not even remotely close to being synonymous.
You also ignore the tremendous amount of GPL software used by businesses, particularly technology companies and large corporations in their network infrastructure. Indeed, all that business code is supported and wouldn't be where it was unless it was.
Most "business code" isn't GPLed and, indeed, GPLing it would (rightly) be seen as sacrificing a competitive advantage.
That depends on which business code; As I had mentioned, there are some applications for which the GPL does not make sense. There is a tremendous amount where it does however, particularly in business infrastructure.
Indeed. The major difference is when *do* like it, and can (legally) get it for free, they're significantly less likely to pay for it out of generosity.
Smaller entities are indeed less likely, but a large number of them are unlikely to buy them even if they are not free - how much software do you suppose is pirated? These are not the customers that generate revenue. The world has plenty of people who will not pay for software regardless of the license.
Reality intrudes at this point and reminds us that the vast majority of people will not pay for a product or service they can also get for free (or significantly cheaper).
Again, these are not generally the sort that would pay for software in the first place. A business model for software includes presenting a value proposition for customers, including support and training. If you take this away from your software, you're not likely to get very far.
The problem with selling GPLed software is that your first customer can quite legally resell copies at a lower price than you, and/or make copies freely available. Exactly how do you propose to run a business selling software when that can happen ?
It can be redistributed, this is true, but your name stays on the software. If you do not provide a value proposition to your customers, they will indeed not pay you. If you can provide support and training, you'll make money. Cheapbytes sells CDs from several Linux distributions, yet the distributions continue to exist. This is because they provide a value proposition in their product that Cheapbytes does not.
Something I have never disputed, but is completely irrelevant to the topic of this discussion, which is SELLING SOFTWARE. Not selling software tied to support contracts, hardware, additional content or subscription services.
Your difficulty seems to be that you feel a need to separate them. If you've tried selling software without a support structure then I'm not surprised you failed. The customer who actually pays money for your product expects support of some sort to e
I've still got mine, along with a decent number of good games. I've had a lot of consoles, some of which were disappointing, but never regretted the purchase of the Sega CD. Aside from being my first CD player, it had AH-3 Thunderstrike, Robo Aleste, Lunar 1 and 2 along with several other good Working Designs translations, Snatcher, and Dark Wizard, all of which were standouts - especially for the time. SoulStar was good for a shooter on rails, Final Fight was a solid port, Sonic CD was expansive with an interesting time travel theme, and the gags in Switch (not double switch) were a riot. There are still a few games I'd like to pick up for the console, if I ever find them in good condition.
Granted, the Sega CD had more than its share of junk FMV games. They also should have integrated a larger color palette for the price they were selling it when they added the sprite/background scaling, which would have made the games more colorful and the FMV better. I sometimes still pop it out though, and it remains hooked to the television for nostalgia runs. I do enjoy a good game of Dark Wizard, which is an excellent and very long hex-based strategy game with four complete stories, and the occasional (non-escort) AH-3 mission can be great mindless fun.
I never said it was.
You said that a company cannot make money from GPLed software unless they tie it to a non-GPLed product. This is false.
You need to re-read what I'm writing. Because it's clear - either deliberately or accidentally - you are misinterpreting what I'm saying.
I've read your writing, but it seems clear that you do not understand either the spirit or letter of the GPL. This is not surprising, the GPL is one of the most commonly misunderstood software licenses.
Yes. Terms which are created *because the terms of the GPL are not appropriate to the purpose of selling software*.
The terms are there explicitly to guarantee access to the source code, which is a different problem. It is not incompatible with selling the software. Let's be very clear here; the GPL is an open source license first, but its provisions do not prevent the software from being sold.
In most cases your "customers" - ie: people who pay for your software - couldn't care less whether or not it was GPLed.
Larger customers, with deeper pockets, do indeed care whether they have the source to a product which they wish to deploy. Business code in particular, which is amongst the most widely developed code out there, but other software which might be useful as well.
Basing a business on the idea people will voluntarily give you money just because you have a good product is financial suicide.
This is no different whether the software is open source or not. You still have to sell it to your customer, and if they believe your product to be worthless then they won't buy it. If your product is really that good, people will pay for it. Most everyone wants a say in their favorite software product's development, and in the case of open source software in particular features can definitely be purchased.
In which case we're back to having to tie GPLed software to some other product like paid support to make it financially viable. Ie: the whole freaking point of this discussion.
And your point is not valid. We'll go over why in the rest of this message.
The vast bulk of their revenue, however, comes from software sales. Moving down the tree to software companies which aren't lucky enough to have the size to invest in multiple markets, and the proportion of their revenue coming from software sales is even higher.
I don't think you have any idea of what you're talking about. Most software companies will gladly offer high priced service agreements to corporations that use their services, and these companies have a better chance of seeing their software used in these very lucrative environments. Many large and small software companies are more than happy to take money in exchange for support if an entity is willing to spend it. If yours is not... Well, your competition probably is.
Where do game companies without subscription services like WoW derive revenue from if not software sales ?
Game publishers gain some quick revenue from software sales while the product is still hot, but a lot of games do not in fact make money. (*cough* Daikatana *cough*) Plenty of game companies go out of business regardless of the license of their software, because the gaming industry's customers are fickle. Licensing and merchandising of gaming franchises (toys, TV shows, breakfast cereals and the like) make up a lot more of their profit than they might be comfortable with. For that matter, the majority of what compromises a game these days is the content and not just the code. In that light, games really should fit the GPL model if your assertions are correct. Open sourcing the code (as has happened for a number of games after release, particularly those from id software) does not prevent a company from making money when done properly. People still buy id games that have been open sourced, even if only for nostalgia.
We are talking abo
The point here is that you can't make money selling GPLed software, without tying it to some other product.
The dual license isn't another product. It's another set of terms through which another entity can distribute copies of your product, presumably with a different set of restrictions.
What you have to lose from the GPL is the likelihood of ever selling your software. What you have to gain is the relatively remote possibility that other people will be nice enough to improve your product for free.
You have the good will of your customers to gain. If your product is worth its salt, which not all are, you'll sell licenses in any case. Larger entities will definitely buy, and a large number of them will not use anything that does not have some sort of paid support structure.
Microsoft. Most game companies. There's no shortage of companies (or corporate departments) who derive most of their money from selling software (or software licenses).
Microsoft makes their share from publishing MCSE training materials as well. Most game publishers make their money from selling some (but definitely not all or even most) software, the whole thing being a gamble of who will buy which typically shelf life limited product first. Those that last for a longer time without languishing on the shelf tend to be those with an additional cost, such as WoW and EQ.
I didn't say companies who had _no_ other sources of revenue, I said companies who derive most of their money from software sales. The GPL makes that essentially impossible and, hence, removes those companies' business models. *THAT* is why TrollTech dual-licence QT - because they know if they didn't they would have a great deal of trouble making enough money to stay in business.
You said major sources of revenue, and both training and support can be major sources. TrollTech added the GPL to their product because their customers demanded it; the QPL was there before, and no doubt some customers were already using those terms who may not wish to use the GPL.
What I find ironic is that even the people who steadfastly insist the GPL is "business friendly" usually do so in the same breath they say "because you can just dual license" - seemingly unaware they're shooting down their own argument.
No, what's convenient about the GPL is that you protect your product from proprietary exploitation by your competitors in a modified form that you cannot use yourself. No one-upsmanship where you cannot follow, unless they pay you for the privilege. An additional license is simply an agreement between yourself and those who want different terms, with a different pricing tier.
Poor example. QT is dual licensed (the GPLed version is only usable if you are developing GPLed software).
Actually, this is an excellent example. It clearly shows that the GPL is by no means business unfriendly for the developers/copyright holders, only for others who wish to profit off their work without contributing back. Those who do not want to GPL their software can purchase a non-GPL license, whereas those who do wish to GPL their software can use it freely. If you think about it, it's something like a patent on source code that only expires when the copyrights do. People can benefit from your work through openness, but not hide it in a proprietary product without making a separate agreement with you.
Let's put it another way. The GPL is something like giving to the public domain with the associated good will from your customers, but without giving up your copyrights. That doesn't mean others won't do anything with your work mind you, there is only so much control and forks can happen, but they will also be GPL'ing their versions. You can take whatever code you like to integrate back into your original GPLed version, although not into a proprietary licensed version without agreement from the code's developer. You have little to lose from the GPL unless you want absolute control, but potentially much to gain if there are enough interested contributors.
Who derives a primary revenue stream only from selling GPLed software ?
Who derives a primary revenue stream only from selling software? Most software companies also sell support, either per incident or through a contract. Training tends to be quite lucrative as well. I find it humorous how much is spent on training and support for e.g. IBM/Rational and Oracle products somewhere that I won't mention, but I can't argue that it's a good business model for the vendors.
I fully advocate giving up "intellectual property" as it is currently defined, which is distinct from physical personal property. Intellectual property has been twisted into a tool with which to bludgeon one's competitors via minor details, which I frankly find offensive and morally corrupt. You're advocating removing the controls put in place for corporations which abuse monopoly-type situations, the removal of which would be just as anti-consumer as intellectual property. I'm saying if you're willing to go that far, you might as well throw it all out and start over. The two arguments are more or less complete opposites, and each is as valid as the other.
So you feel anti-trust laws are somehow bad? Let's get rid of IP laws as well, I think they're morally corrupt. The two sort of balance each other out to a degree, although the former is typically only used when companies grossly overstep their bounds and the latter at the drop of a hat. If we're going to get rid of anti-trust laws that protect us from this sort of behavior, let's get rid of a few more bad apples while we're at it.
MS has a rather active recent history of attacking the GPL and software under its license through bad PR. What is being discussed is Novell creating a new legal vector with which Microsoft can attack GPL software developers by poisoning Novell contributions. It makes perfect business sense to them when their server business is at stake. You run MS operating systems exclusively, you've said so yourself. You should know how much it costs to purchase a suite of MS software for your environment. Consider what would happen to Microsoft if a large number of people like yourself and in larger corporate markets stopped paying Microsoft for every new version of Windows/Office/BO/etc and instead went to Linux or another alternative. That's what they are fighting.
Go download a set of Mandriva 2007 media. Play around with the KDE desktop. See what happens when you connect hardware, use the GUI package installer and update system, go over the icons in the lower left hand corner. It's a lot better than you remember it.
Although I typically admin Linux systems, I'm occasionally called on to clean up Windows systems where it's not possible to reformat for whatever reason. Here's the basic strategy I follow, which while not complete is a good start if at some point you really need to clean one out.
1) Like most people, I typically run an Antivirus application, Ad-Aware and Spybot SD to see what sort of spyware I can remove. I disable network access as well, so the software cannot re-download itself or other malware. Most of what I actually do ends up being done in safe mode, and System Restore gets disabled since a lot of malware will infect the restore points as well.
2) If Ad-Aware or Spybot is disabled by a running application (some spyware does this) I look first in the task manager. Note that this doesn't show all possible applications, as a program can hide itself from the task manager, but if you're familiar enough with it you can usually pick out a few things that shouldn't be there. Google them and see what they are, you'll often find more details of the issue. Even if the software goes to completion and removes everything it finds, I go through the task manager and ensure nothing odd is there. If I verify that there's a problem, I try to kill the programs. This is not always possible, as some will run with Systems privileges which Admin can't touch. I make a note of these and do further research.
3) Once this is done, I do a listing sorted by date of the system directories under Windows. The windows top level (C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT) and the SYSTEM32 directories are the most common places for these applications to install themselves. Sometimes you'll find something in RECYCLER. Windows files have timestamps which are consistent across most systems if you do updates identically across all your Windows systems. Examining the files for interesting strings can help to determine whether they are spyware or possibly data files which the software would use to either infect other systems (IP lists and the like) or sometimes information (e.g. passwords) that the application would send to someone you don't want to have it. Once I've verified files that belong to these categories, I delete them or (if this is not possible) move them to another directory.
4) Next, I dig into regedit and look in the various "Run" entries. You can find these by using Regedit's search function and searching for the word "Run". You'll get a few extra locations, but this will show you some of the places where Spyware often launches. Additionally, although this isn't as common, you can try searching the "Startup" folder under the Start Menu entry of each user's profile (as well as the All Users profile.) Occasionally, I've even seen the legacy Windows ini files corrupted. It can't hurt to look.
5) After doing all these things and a few reboots, I typically go back and look at the system directories again. Some applications will keep re-installing themselves, many will use different filenames and occasionally locations. If it's not possible to kill it in Windows and the system has a FAT32 filesystem, I'll sometimes pop up Knoppix and remove the files that keep coming back. A BartPE disk can be useful for the NTFS systems, but be careful that the BartPE instance doesn't get infected.
Our environment has a corporate Symantec AV subscription and we automate AV updates. Generally our problems come frome malware which Symantec AV doesn't want to touch, typically spyware. Although we strongly encourage backing up data and reformatting, for those cases where it's just not possible (unreplaceable and unique software installations from a vendor for control systems etc) these are a few techniques that can point you in the right direction.
I think you've missed the point; noone said anything about removing their existing OS. If I were to give someone a computer (again, if I felt someone truly needed a system) I would probably give them a Linux installation. Probably not ubuntu, but this is an aside. If I were to give my friends a Linux CD to test, it would probably be in the form of a VMware player image ready to run in their current OS. My point is that it's not as terrible as you're pointing out to give Linux.
If I were to give my parents an iMac or Mac mini, they'd never use it. I know from experience that they're not interested in a Mac. However, giving a VMware image to play around with would give the more adventurous something to poke at non-destructively.
Wow, I'd be afraid to load that last site at work...
I'd rather give them a PC with Ubuntu on it. Really, despite your apparent bias it's still a computer. If I thought someone needed a computer that badly, I'd give them one that came with everything they needed and nothing left to buy.
It seems a bit of a small gift, although it's not quite as bad as you make it sound - especially if this is from a student, who probably doesn't have much in the line of money. Frankly, a lot of people are interested in learning what this "Linux Thing" is. It's not much different than buying someone an iMac, except they can use the CD in most generic PCs. They're also free to dual boot and keep that Windows partition, so they're not really losing anything but excess disk space which is so common these days. For my part, the only tech support I provide these days is for Linux/UNIX derivatives. I actually have a life now. :)
FWIW, I've been using Linux for well over a decade and it's come quite a long way. I worked my way through the entire Slackware distribution from the ground up while I was a college student. When I started, it was a bit of a difficult task to get anything working. You needed to build your CD-ROM interface's driver (typically your sound card) into your kernel in order to use it. If you had a Sound Blaster 16 you might even get it the sound card itself to work. Recompiling/upgrading the system libraries and binaries from a.out to ELF format and migrating from the BSD to SysV init all by hand taught me a lot about the system, but it wasn't for the squeamish. Tweaking X11 was an interesting game of generating mode timings that hopefully wouldn't destroy your monitor based on minimal documentation. Browsers tended to be statically linked memory hogs due to Motif 1.2 not being open source, at a time when 8MB might have been your total RAM. Swap was often required just to get X to start. Setting up printing typically involved editing a lot of config files to set up print filters, queues, and getting your file rendered through Ghostscript. Boy has all that ever changed.
How easy it is now depends on which distro and software you use of course. Mandriva 2007 for example popped up a dialog box and configured my printer for me when I plugged it in for the first time. Ubuntu/kubuntu also tend to be good about adding and removing hardware. X11 isn't nearly the guessing game it used to be, and the hardware I own just works in a fresh OS install given one of the aforementioned distributions.
About your keyboard, have you tried Rosegarden? It's a bit of a large package, but it comes with a wonderful score editor and will happily play to and record from multiple MIDI devices. If you keep your keyboard near your computer, you might never need to use the keyboard's memory again.
As for the GIMP, it does have the ability to scan through SANE. File->Acquire->XSane:Device Dialog works in the version I'm using. You'll need SANE installed, but I've never had a problem with bringing images in through this menu item.
Xpdf is a bit of a simple application, and doesn't have much extra functionality. There are however other applications like kghostview which can do everything you're looking to do and more. Konqueror as a browser embeds it as a PDF viewer, amongst other datatypes. While the Adobe PDF plugin for Firefox doesn't seem to have been functioning properly for a while, there are alternatives.
I've listed mostly KDE apps as examples, as those are what I've tended to use, but there are typically GNOME equivalents with good functionality as well. If you want full functionality, it's best to use more modern applications. While I'll agree that Linux is not yet ready to replace Windows on everyone's systems, it's continuously improving in user friendliness and hardware support. Linux is certainly headed in the right direction. When will it be 'ready'? Who knows. What I do know is that the definition of ready varies per person. It was ready for me 12 years ago, and it's ready for a lot more people now.
Redhat packages the results of open source projects into a distribution. They also create a few tools of their own, but these tools are also open source. Oracle can continue along the same path, maybe they'll even provide a bit more stability in the distribution schedule and/or backports of new packages rather than just bugfixes if they take longer to release new versions. This isn't the first time Redhat has been forked, as an example I've been running Mandrake/Mandriva for years. We do use RH where I work, but given our experience with RH's support and ongoing yearly maintenence costs for workstations it's likely that we'll be giving Oracle's offering a serious look.
I'd rather give it to Matt Groening, all he ever really wanted to do was draw rabbits.
FWIW, to my knowledge there's nothing on the disc that prevents it from being copied. As I always do with my CDs, I ripped the disc to my computer and put the CD on the shelf. After looking at the videos on the other side that is. I suppose I might have watched the DVD half more if it had the "White and Nerdy" video on it, but the animations aren't terrible and the album itself doesn't disappoint this long-time Al fan. For those who care, which excludes myself, there are enhanced stereo and surround versions on the DVD side as well. Anyway, White & Nerdy, Canadian Idiot and Trapped in the Drive-Thru (a great sendup of Trapped in the Closet) were the album's high points for me. Even "Don't download this song" has enough sarcasm to make it funny, in a "We are the world" parody sort of way.
That's where you're wrong: C++ is an absolute disaster and has held back desktop and application enormously.
That's an opinion. You're welcome to it, but C++ has more developer mindshare and code written than Objective C. This is a fact.
If it "limits" people away from writing code in C and C++, I'm all for it.
And I'm all against it. Flexibility should be a requirement for X11, since it works across so many platforms. We're talking about completely different issues in any case; I'm advocating further development of the underlying architecture of X11, whereas you're talking about a particular API for a single toolkit sitting on top of X11 which will NOT interoperate with other toolkits. All toolkits could benefit from improvements in the basic X11 architecture.
In any case, it's not a question of what "I" do, it's already happening: Microsoft and Gnome have made C# a full-fledged application development language, and Apple has moved to Objective-C. In the Microsoft/Gnome case, you can still write C/C++-based applications, but increasingly, you're going to see more and more fancy widgets written in C# only (and even then, you can call them from C/C++ compiled to a CLR backend). It's a good migration strategy. The Apple strategy is similar. Only KDE still clings to the notion that people should write everything in C++.
It's a migration strategy, but to do it in just GTK would mean doing it at too high of a level to do any good. X11 has been and should continue to be platform agnostic. That doesn't mean it shouldn't have any features, but rather that these features should not be tied to a particular type of system and definitely not something vendor specific. Developers should be able to write their code in any language and have the application look alike, which should be the job of a separate UI drawing layer as it's done in OS X (Quartz) and Windows (GDI/GDI+/etc). The API and language choice should be left to the programmer.
They are "lacking" because KDE, Qt, Gnome, and Gtk+ have largely chosen to ignore what was there before they started, instead of participating in improving it. The end result? We have two Linux desktops that look really nice but whose underlying technologies are less capable than what Motif could do nearly 20 years ago. I mean, neither Qt nor Gtk+ applications even work correctly remotely.
Bollocks. The "Open" Software Foundation/Open Group can only blame themselves for what happened with Motif. They kept it closed for so long that it became irrelevent. This is why GTK and Qt are now eating Motif's lunch, note that GIMP was originally a Motif app before they developed GTK (Gimp Toolkit) to replace it. Motif apps have been and are still just as limited in how they can interact with non-Motif applications as Qt and GTK+ applications are. Qt apps tend to like other Qt apps, and the same can be said about GTK+ apps. There is some integration, XDND and the very limited X clipboard, but this functionality should be augmented at the X11 layer to allow for e.g. copying and pasting data objects of any type using whatever method an application can accept it in.
BTW, do you have an generalized example I can apply to any Qt or GTK+ application which shows that they do not work correctly remotely unless they're using XSHM, XV (YUV overlay extension) or another extension which requires local hardware access? I use X11 extensively without these supposed local vs. remote issues, and have for over 10 years including Openlook on Solaris and Linux, Motif and the Motif-based CDE on several platforms, the current crop of desktop environments from KDE to XFCE, and dozens of WMs. That's not to say that there are no issues, but rather that these are issues with X11 R6 itself.
You're barking up the wrong tree. I'm not arguing C vs. C++. I think both C and C++ are lousy languages to write GUIs and desktop apps in. The only C-based language that is even close to being object oriented is Objective-C, and it has a lot of other problems. (I leave Java and C# out of the discussion because, despite their syntax, they are not really C-based.)
You're misunderstanding my point. Objective-C is not widespread enough for serious discussion in the real world, OS X/NeXTStep/OpenStep notwithstanding. C++ is widely available, almost certainly installed on a Linux distro with development tools, and not as bad as you make it out to be. There are problems with every language, but C++ has the virtues of being widespread and familiar to a large number of programmers who are skilled in its use - especially those coming from Windows. It presents an object oriented API to the programmer if they choose to use it, whatever your opinion of its virtues. The standard Java and C# implementations both use different virtual machines as their native targets, and I'd rather not even get into that mess just yet.
You're still assuming that Qt and Gtk+ APIs are APIs people will want to write against in the future
IMO there's nothing wrong with the Qt API, although I will admit that most of the GTK+ code I've seen/had to work with looks like spaghetti. Probably due to Glade's code generation more than the API itself, but even that makes me not want to use it.
I think the real migration strategy is from something like Gtk+ to Gtk#, followed by a pure C# implementation of Gtk# based on Cairo. Gnome has taken big steps in that direction. Microsoft has done something similar. Apple has ditched C++ and has moved everything to Objective-C (now with garbage collection). Only KDE still clings to C++.
You're only going to end up with further fragmentation in this direction, and limit the languages in which people are able to write their applications. I'm not talking about a specific language, I'm talking about a more powerful low level X11 layer on which the various toolkits can build upon. This would give application developers the flexibility to choose their own language/toolkit and still have better consistency in the resulting applications. It would also help when someone had to port existing code into the environment.
The "graphics layer" and the "clipboard layer" you speak of is what X11 was supposed to be. It has all the provisions and facilities for providing that functionality in a toolkit-independent way. Unfortunately, both Qt and Gtk+ ignore most of that stuff and instead do their own thing.
The "clipboard layer" in X11 is a piece of garbage, and needs to be replaced. There it is, stated clearly and for the record. I'd like to see an object oriented replacement for X11 which is toolkit independent. The graphics layer and native GUI toolkit (if Xt and the Athena widgets are what you'd consider native) also need serious reworking for modern GUI application development, which is why most people tend to use a separate toolkit like Qt or GTK+. There are reasons why people have done their own thing for such a long time. The network transparent layer and ubiquity are nice, but services which a generic application can depend on are severely lacking.
Nice application, but at the wrong level IMO. Ideally, this functionality would be implemented at a lower level than the GUI.
The idea behind KDE is to engineer a solid application environment. They felt the best way was to use an object oriented language. Based on the development environments I've seen, I happen to think they're on to something. C does have a more stable ABI under GCC at this point, which is nice, and gcc's C++ optimization still isn't what it could be. Once these issues are resolved though, C++ is simply a richer, more functional environment on which to build a graphical application.
I'd still like to see some work done on KDE/Qt though. I personally think Qt and GDK/GTK should be stripped down such that one can write against either API and connect to a more universal GUI layer, one which is themable and efficient. It should handle all the drawing regardless of the backend, which would reduce the number of portability issues. While we're at it, how about a consistent object-oriented clipboard which handles non-textual data types using a generic interface that can pass them back and forth between all apps (not just GNOME or KDE) which register to receive them? Now THAT'S something I'd be willing to contribute to.
How about (and I don't intend to sound flip here) WebBrowser? Just a thought, since IceWeasel lends a rather unprofessional sound to the distribution. Many apps could use a name more descriptive of what they do, and if you get the chance to rename them with the author's blessing it wouldn't hurt to make them less ambiguous. I don't use Debian myself, but if I did I'd be more likely to install WebBrowser than IceWeasel.
I would say that the end result of a successful product is community minded, even if the development process is not by necessity. Many defunct software companies have found this out the hard way. Unless you're writing a custom app, you need more than one customer if your product is intended to make money. While capitalism tends to stress power for the individual, community it is still important lest one spend their life ostracized. Japan's society is an excellent example of this. On the other hand, communist ideals might not involve hoarding power as such, but community is still (obviously) central to the concept.
Just out of curiosity and aside from hermits/loners, what generalized groups would you consider not community-minded? Beowulf clusters are certainly a long running joke here, but this is hardly the only forum where jokes tend to live ad infinitum. To further the stereotype though, I personally think the Wii would make a pretty sweet webserver - low heat and power consumption, more than enough CPU to do the job.