If global warming is real (it might be), the so called solutions have been corrupted with agendas that deserve no place around the solutions. It isn't anything I can support. I would hope that it isn't anything A politician could support. At least not in it's current form.
IMO that's the very reason a politician would ever support such a thing. That's what makes me sick about Obama. While I want to believe that he really will try to attack corruption and corporate interests, and really will try to put the interests of this planet and all the life on it first, and smash through the shields of government secrecy and lies, I can't help but to be very worried that his plans will involve corporate interests and the new ideas will ultimately end up costing everyone in one way or another with no positive results, just digging the hole deeper, and as a whole the quality of life will continue to decrease with everyone affording less of everything that isn't a necessity for going to work every day. Transparency is definitely needed, so I'll be looking to see those improvements with his election and so should everyone.
The only thing that scares me about the possibility of anthropogenic warming is that by the time it effects us, it will be too late. We are least responsive to non-immediate threats.
In most all animals the here and now is the most important issue, so being too short-sited could be dangerous. But the fact remains, if the sun rises each day you come to depend on it, and if you keep certain things how they used to be, the entire world very well may have a better chance at staying that way, at least for a longer time. Wanting to put the Earth back to how it was before human life dramatically caused it's alteration is actually a very conservative idea since that's what the word means. Indeed it's the "wisest" course of action you could say. But just because it's the status quo, how things normally happen, doesn't mean it's the best way at all, but simply that it's the tested way. Any good proof that certain changes which will effect it positively are great, but regardless, my own feelings, I'd like to see it kept nice and untouched. The development of self-dependence of a species without having to obliterate anything they come in contact with is not only respectful and nice and allows for the preservation of things, but it's required for things like long space travel and is technologically going to be the future regardless, especially if the human species continues expansion, otherwise it'll be their undoing.
Actually I think that even if global warming were an issue, the advancement of the control of biology may be able to solve that problem by then. The ability will exist to genetically alter bacteria so that producing carbon-gobbling bacteria I think will be possible if they haven't already been created.
I can't trust my lenses to match what my brain has been wired over the years to perceive as straight.
You don't need glasses to perceive straightness - I can sometimes feel the flames several meters away without them, depending on how loud they're talking.:)
Supporting a popular idea, and doing something about it, though, does something. I car pool, take public transportation, walk, ride a bike, and generally refuse to buy a car. I also educate my immediate circle of peers, and make sure to read up on the research. You see, I'm agnostic on the issue, so I have to read both sides so I might someday hope to not be agnostic on the issue. Skepticism and action, who woulda thunk it.
You're right, it's rational action. No matter how popular or unpopular it is, you should do what you think is best if you think it really needs doing. You can never know anything for sure, but that doesn't mean you can't make your best educated guess and try it, especially if trying doesn't hurt anyone.
If everyone sat on a fence nothing would ever get done, and if everyone believed in what they were doing 100% there'd be no room for new ideas and searching for the truth and bettering their understanding. That's why it's pretty important that there is a mix of both, you just have to be careful what you do. Nature has tried to instill this balance in all animals, it's called "curiosity" vs. "willpower". The need to learn vs. the need to do. Ironic that if you rethink yourself too much you sometimes end up right back where you were, but not always. There are always ways to grow.
You're right to question other points, but if physics has seemed to nail down that CO2 retains heat from the greenhouse effect and would lead to a warmer planet if CO2 replaced the other gasses that are there, that's a fairly simple concept to swallow and I don't think you really have justification to attack that specifically. However, you're right that the reality and complexity of the actual setup could indeed make different outcomes possible, for example does the Earth actually have more CO2 gas now than before in total (sure, it may be higher in polluted cities, but how about the upper atmosphere and other areas, how are they doing?), and if it has the same amounts of the other gasses, or if less, how much less. Nature's ability to counter-balance is also important. Despite the fears of how delicate of a balance exists here and there in nature, if you increase CO2 perhaps you'd get an increase in plants and plankton life to counter it.
Quite simply, it is difficult scientifically to make the world your test tube, you're right, just like it's difficult with complex lifeforms. But, the alarmists could also be correct, and it may be important and delicate. There is evidence that suggests this other places in nature, too, so it's not a stretch to suggest that a few degrees difference could cause cataclysmic problems.
Quite simply, no one really knows for sure, but reducing the dependence on oil, creating a healthier atmosphere by reducing air pollution in cities, and striving for cheaper power that isn't so disruptive to the environment are all pretty good goals. The only question really is if you think the government should step in and use your tax money to help/force it to happen sooner rather than later when all the oil is gone.
Believing strongly can be OK, just so long as there are good reasons behind it and you're not completely shut off to debate or the feelings of others. Fence-sitting can sometimes be just as dangerous, like if it leads to an acceptance of things which shouldn't be accepted. Any argument can cause that to happen, too, both from science and from religion, belief, and emotion. Just depends on how you structure your priorities.
If everyone had a fence-sat attitude, nothing would ever really get accomplished. One strategy for keeping masses under control is the use of arguments to create such confusion, i.e. a smokescreen, and again those arguments can be from anywhere, science or religion. Sound familiar? Support our troops? Fight the terrists?
Agreed that there should be a simple label for it, but that's for the general populace, those who aren't looking for a technical definition. Technically, you should note the distinction, because there is a difference between the kernel, Bash, X, etc, because those are separate parts and should be modular enough to stay separated. That way, you can use a different kernel if you want, or a different graphical environment, or a different window manager, or whatever.
So yes, agreed, they should lighten up, but that's for the general public. Don't forget who normally prowls the Slashdot grounds.:)
Agreed that more organization/streamlining is needed, but it is something that has been happening, and it should be very much encouraged to happen so that Linux won't fall behind in any way, and the ways in which it has do need to be addressed, fully agreed, and I think most developers would agree with that. Who doesn't want to see Linux become a better contender? Not unless you work for MS or Apple I guess...even though Apple "uses it" to a degree so it helps with their success too (yeah yeah it's BSD, but the OS part of the system shares a lot with Linux systems). Some old rusty parts of Linux/Gnu have been cut out and replaced with newer, more functional, more adaptive and intelligent systems. It'll only continue to happen. Like the previous poster noted, if you make it and everyone likes it, it'll become popular. As for choosing something that's one of the best and making it the installed default which is fine, Ubuntu has a "Movie Player", and that's it. Totem. It's a great movie player, and leaves me with no additional needs really so I use it and only it unless I have the very rare codec problem for which I install and use VLC for. If you don't like the default selection of apps, use a different distro or one that has everything on 50 DVDs, and lets you choose exactly what you want to install. It's up to you. Users have the freedom to choose, that is key. They are, and it has been making things simpler, you're right. If you have program X and program Y, and Y has a huge user base and X does not, you'll install Y by default in your distro, and that's what is being done. Selection via popularity and user demand.
I'm not going to claim that standardization will be a *totally* natural process of users selecting the app that matters most to them though. I think a more important evolution lies deeper down. Standardizing ways of installing and running any program on any Linux install. Standardizing a program's interface so that it mimics the current GUI's user's configuration options and breaking free from the desktop environment specific restraints. Those are the things that doing them in the right way will ultimately give users more flexability and more choice, and will allow more competition between software by helping to level the playing field.
Avoid proprietization, battle for interoperability and freedom.
Ideas would still be come up with if there weren't laws giving one of the many individuals who happened to get to the patent or copyright office first a patent/copyright. With an increase in sharing of ideas, progress happens faster, and improved technology should give everyone more free time, and more free time should yield more ideas. What the world needs is some real competition occuring, not a few rich bastards trying to take as big a piece of everyone's pie as they can. Everyone's life will be improved if monopolies were non-existant. The government shouldn't be working to make companies as much money as possible, it should be working to get citizens the cheapest quality goods it can.
Copyright and patent law is like stepping in a trap. Once it starts, it clamps down on you bleeding you dry of money, until you can't afford to invest and invent because you have no spare time since you're always working because monopolies are suddenly everywhere, and businesses and employees have no spare energy, time, or money to spend on research. Instead, everyone is employed and laboring to line the pockets of the rich when it could be going to the good of the whole.
Also, patents have a chilling effect on inventors, when it should be the opposite, there should be incentives to cooperatively invent and openly share those ideas. It's a world that will probably never been seen because of the rich who are in charge of everything.
I know your comment was a joke, but I just have to say I left Windows years ago and the only looking back I did was to consider if I wanted to run it just for playing a Windows game, then I quickly shook my head and fired up Wine. Even when Wine failed, I just couldn't bring myself back to the pain of installing Windows drivers again. Not that it was all that painful, but still, "just works" (usually) is so much nicer.
Now if Linux would just adopt "third-party" program and driver installation standards, so that you *could* do it like in Windows, when it was needed, without recompilation, that would be a nice feature.
Aside from the other responder's comment, many, especially the WINE developers, will celebrate the 1.0 mark. That's quite a mark after 15 years of work, even if it is more of an artificial point in time than of real importance in substance.
Why should anyone celebrate your birthday? You're only a day older than the day before your birthday, after all.
They can be to a degree yes, but I'm not sure that's as true as you think it is though, as different programs may be so different that a lot of the code isn't very compatible. Rip out Kopete's webcam interface and put it into Gaim? The developers laughed at me for even suggesting that one. If you make things more modular, though, and have some standardized points of communication, then switching out programs, using different programs, sharing code, etc, is easier. If an entire Linux distro, from the kernel to the desktop, was a big wad of code with no standards, you couldn't easily do things like program a new desktop environment, or a new window manager, because switching to those would be very difficult. If you have standards though and can all be on the same page about interprogram communication, this becomes a million times easier. Thanks to freedesktop.org it's much simpler to make different window managers for example to allow users to easily run and switch between them. So, where and when this can be done in a great way, kudos go to those programmers, for giving everyone else in the world more freedom by being more easily able to add on, change, remove, and use a program. The easier it is to make choices/changes and to adopt and use different programs, the more freedom you and everyone else has.
If Gaim and Kopete had both used a standardized plugin system, porting a webcam or other plugins between the programs would be cake.
Yet another Slashdot argument in which both sides are right on certain points, but continue to pretend they are directly opposed. Working on one thing will get it done faster, that is a good thing, but if you can't have that then at least you can hopefully use the ideas or even better, the actual software that is developed after the fork/splitoff/new project, in other projects which are more mainstream. Yes, competition is good, but so is working together when possible and beneficial. There, settled.
As a side note, separate projects are much more beneficial to one another when the system they are working on is modular and standardized enough to allow for easy adoption of code between the projects. A new package format, for example, would be just fine if there was a way to easily adopt existing package managers to understand the new package format. APIs/standards please, Linux community. Together, when possible, we are strong.
Hehe, you make good points though, I didn't know it wasn't GTK. I wish the entire visual interface for Linux was standardized in such a way that any app would take on the look of the current theme. I mean, why does GTK have to have it's own theme? I'd love to see Linux "modular" enough, and use a standard API, for themes, to the same depth as the GTK "look". Forgive me for being harsh, but programmers were kind of stupid and selfish to think that they should use their own buttons and whatnot instead of using a standard which allowed their program to take on whatever look and feel of whatever DE their program happened to be run inside of.
Big companies like Microsoft wouldn't like this at all, of course. Anything to make things less proprietary is good for consumers and end users, but of course those who benefit from "exclusives" hate choice like that. I say it's about freaking time someone made some real standards instead of WXWidgets, which just seems to me like a work-around, but maybe WXWidgets, or part of it, is what is needed.
As for Webkit, what makes it so special, when there are dozens of other open source browsers? Yes, competition is good, but working together can also be very good too, and a web browser is a pretty complicated program not to be working together on.
True, but Firefox being open source gets a lot of backing for the Linux front, anything that gets used a lot gets a lot of backing in open source. Sure, IE didn't get much improvement, but IE was also closed source and controlled by a single corporation that didn't care. That's not the case with Firefox, thus it's Linux support is large.
Shuttleworth wasn't saying he wanted to copy Red Hat and Suse. Synchronizing communities that use some of the same software so that they can work on the same bugs will only make the community stronger and better at taking care of bugs. It may very well serve to reduce duplicate effort. When all the communities are all on the same page with running and testing a particular release of a particular program, things can get done that much faster on it. While competition is a good thing, the open source and Linux communities working together on certain things is also helpful and IMO Linux needs more collaboration than not right now.
Because Firefox is the main web browser shipped with many of the major Linux distros. IE is the browser shipped with Windows. Mozilla would be stupid to drop the ball on their Linux dominance, it needs to continue to keep playing well with both Linux and Windows.
Being able to easily install drivers from vendors and drivers you may have stored on some medium for later use is a luxury, and a feature of an OS. A good, stable, but expandable ABI could be come up with if someone wanted to, yet you're saying they are denying adding this feature because of a fear of binaries? Maybe it's time they stopped making life hell for users who don't care to know or want to know the CLI and how to compile and the hell you can go through to do so most times, and added this feature, leaving the binary/source preferences up to the users downstream and the distro packagers. Withholding a great feature of an OS is just weak and causes everyone else pain, and that pain should not be forced on someone because of a fear of them installing something restrictive. Let them have that choice, because along with that freedom to choose comes many benefits.
Just because starving Africans could poke their eyes out with loaves of bread doesn't mean you should let them go hungry. I'd much rather see Linux become a great OS, and that means heeding needs like having standards so that the installation of software and drivers is possible on any distro, old or new, which includes those standards.
Anything to help freedesktop.org, the respective DE teams, and others, to make standards to allow DEs to play together nicely deserves lots and lots of kudos. Users need to keep as much freedom as they can, and the freedom to easily use the DE they want and to switch between them is a critical part in preserving these freedoms.
All that matters is a common API, not so much a common desktop layout (but that can be somewhat useful too if there is some standardization on that which will come from users voting their preference by preferring certain desktops). Having a common API at least means that the DEs will play nicely with one another, which is extremely important if users want to keep a maximum freedom of choice to move between them.
Slashdot Mirror
If global warming is real (it might be), the so called solutions have been corrupted with agendas that deserve no place around the solutions. It isn't anything I can support. I would hope that it isn't anything A politician could support. At least not in it's current form.
:P
IMO that's the very reason a politician would ever support such a thing. That's what makes me sick about Obama. While I want to believe that he really will try to attack corruption and corporate interests, and really will try to put the interests of this planet and all the life on it first, and smash through the shields of government secrecy and lies, I can't help but to be very worried that his plans will involve corporate interests and the new ideas will ultimately end up costing everyone in one way or another with no positive results, just digging the hole deeper, and as a whole the quality of life will continue to decrease with everyone affording less of everything that isn't a necessity for going to work every day. Transparency is definitely needed, so I'll be looking to see those improvements with his election and so should everyone.
And no, McCain will not be president.
The only thing that scares me about the possibility of anthropogenic warming is that by the time it effects us, it will be too late. We are least responsive to non-immediate threats.
In most all animals the here and now is the most important issue, so being too short-sited could be dangerous. But the fact remains, if the sun rises each day you come to depend on it, and if you keep certain things how they used to be, the entire world very well may have a better chance at staying that way, at least for a longer time. Wanting to put the Earth back to how it was before human life dramatically caused it's alteration is actually a very conservative idea since that's what the word means. Indeed it's the "wisest" course of action you could say. But just because it's the status quo, how things normally happen, doesn't mean it's the best way at all, but simply that it's the tested way. Any good proof that certain changes which will effect it positively are great, but regardless, my own feelings, I'd like to see it kept nice and untouched. The development of self-dependence of a species without having to obliterate anything they come in contact with is not only respectful and nice and allows for the preservation of things, but it's required for things like long space travel and is technologically going to be the future regardless, especially if the human species continues expansion, otherwise it'll be their undoing.
Actually I think that even if global warming were an issue, the advancement of the control of biology may be able to solve that problem by then. The ability will exist to genetically alter bacteria so that producing carbon-gobbling bacteria I think will be possible if they haven't already been created.
I can't trust my lenses to match what my brain has been wired over the years to perceive as straight.
:)
You don't need glasses to perceive straightness - I can sometimes feel the flames several meters away without them, depending on how loud they're talking.
To prevent confusion, I was referring to the aerodynamic qualities of race cars that should also be emulated along with lighter weight. :P
Gee, and I always thought driving a massive box around was the most aerodynamic, fuel-efficient design on the planet.
Supporting a popular idea, and doing something about it, though, does something. I car pool, take public transportation, walk, ride a bike, and generally refuse to buy a car. I also educate my immediate circle of peers, and make sure to read up on the research. You see, I'm agnostic on the issue, so I have to read both sides so I might someday hope to not be agnostic on the issue. Skepticism and action, who woulda thunk it.
You're right, it's rational action. No matter how popular or unpopular it is, you should do what you think is best if you think it really needs doing. You can never know anything for sure, but that doesn't mean you can't make your best educated guess and try it, especially if trying doesn't hurt anyone.
If everyone sat on a fence nothing would ever get done, and if everyone believed in what they were doing 100% there'd be no room for new ideas and searching for the truth and bettering their understanding. That's why it's pretty important that there is a mix of both, you just have to be careful what you do. Nature has tried to instill this balance in all animals, it's called "curiosity" vs. "willpower". The need to learn vs. the need to do. Ironic that if you rethink yourself too much you sometimes end up right back where you were, but not always. There are always ways to grow.
You're right to question other points, but if physics has seemed to nail down that CO2 retains heat from the greenhouse effect and would lead to a warmer planet if CO2 replaced the other gasses that are there, that's a fairly simple concept to swallow and I don't think you really have justification to attack that specifically. However, you're right that the reality and complexity of the actual setup could indeed make different outcomes possible, for example does the Earth actually have more CO2 gas now than before in total (sure, it may be higher in polluted cities, but how about the upper atmosphere and other areas, how are they doing?), and if it has the same amounts of the other gasses, or if less, how much less. Nature's ability to counter-balance is also important. Despite the fears of how delicate of a balance exists here and there in nature, if you increase CO2 perhaps you'd get an increase in plants and plankton life to counter it.
Quite simply, it is difficult scientifically to make the world your test tube, you're right, just like it's difficult with complex lifeforms. But, the alarmists could also be correct, and it may be important and delicate. There is evidence that suggests this other places in nature, too, so it's not a stretch to suggest that a few degrees difference could cause cataclysmic problems.
Quite simply, no one really knows for sure, but reducing the dependence on oil, creating a healthier atmosphere by reducing air pollution in cities, and striving for cheaper power that isn't so disruptive to the environment are all pretty good goals. The only question really is if you think the government should step in and use your tax money to help/force it to happen sooner rather than later when all the oil is gone.
Believing strongly can be OK, just so long as there are good reasons behind it and you're not completely shut off to debate or the feelings of others. Fence-sitting can sometimes be just as dangerous, like if it leads to an acceptance of things which shouldn't be accepted. Any argument can cause that to happen, too, both from science and from religion, belief, and emotion. Just depends on how you structure your priorities.
If everyone had a fence-sat attitude, nothing would ever really get accomplished. One strategy for keeping masses under control is the use of arguments to create such confusion, i.e. a smokescreen, and again those arguments can be from anywhere, science or religion. Sound familiar? Support our troops? Fight the terrists?
Agreed that there should be a simple label for it, but that's for the general populace, those who aren't looking for a technical definition. Technically, you should note the distinction, because there is a difference between the kernel, Bash, X, etc, because those are separate parts and should be modular enough to stay separated. That way, you can use a different kernel if you want, or a different graphical environment, or a different window manager, or whatever.
:)
So yes, agreed, they should lighten up, but that's for the general public. Don't forget who normally prowls the Slashdot grounds.
Agreed that more organization/streamlining is needed, but it is something that has been happening, and it should be very much encouraged to happen so that Linux won't fall behind in any way, and the ways in which it has do need to be addressed, fully agreed, and I think most developers would agree with that. Who doesn't want to see Linux become a better contender? Not unless you work for MS or Apple I guess...even though Apple "uses it" to a degree so it helps with their success too (yeah yeah it's BSD, but the OS part of the system shares a lot with Linux systems). Some old rusty parts of Linux/Gnu have been cut out and replaced with newer, more functional, more adaptive and intelligent systems. It'll only continue to happen. Like the previous poster noted, if you make it and everyone likes it, it'll become popular. As for choosing something that's one of the best and making it the installed default which is fine, Ubuntu has a "Movie Player", and that's it. Totem. It's a great movie player, and leaves me with no additional needs really so I use it and only it unless I have the very rare codec problem for which I install and use VLC for. If you don't like the default selection of apps, use a different distro or one that has everything on 50 DVDs, and lets you choose exactly what you want to install. It's up to you. Users have the freedom to choose, that is key. They are, and it has been making things simpler, you're right. If you have program X and program Y, and Y has a huge user base and X does not, you'll install Y by default in your distro, and that's what is being done. Selection via popularity and user demand.
I'm not going to claim that standardization will be a *totally* natural process of users selecting the app that matters most to them though. I think a more important evolution lies deeper down. Standardizing ways of installing and running any program on any Linux install. Standardizing a program's interface so that it mimics the current GUI's user's configuration options and breaking free from the desktop environment specific restraints. Those are the things that doing them in the right way will ultimately give users more flexability and more choice, and will allow more competition between software by helping to level the playing field.
Avoid proprietization, battle for interoperability and freedom.
Ideas would still be come up with if there weren't laws giving one of the many individuals who happened to get to the patent or copyright office first a patent/copyright. With an increase in sharing of ideas, progress happens faster, and improved technology should give everyone more free time, and more free time should yield more ideas. What the world needs is some real competition occuring, not a few rich bastards trying to take as big a piece of everyone's pie as they can. Everyone's life will be improved if monopolies were non-existant. The government shouldn't be working to make companies as much money as possible, it should be working to get citizens the cheapest quality goods it can.
Copyright and patent law is like stepping in a trap. Once it starts, it clamps down on you bleeding you dry of money, until you can't afford to invest and invent because you have no spare time since you're always working because monopolies are suddenly everywhere, and businesses and employees have no spare energy, time, or money to spend on research. Instead, everyone is employed and laboring to line the pockets of the rich when it could be going to the good of the whole.
Also, patents have a chilling effect on inventors, when it should be the opposite, there should be incentives to cooperatively invent and openly share those ideas. It's a world that will probably never been seen because of the rich who are in charge of everything.
I know your comment was a joke, but I just have to say I left Windows years ago and the only looking back I did was to consider if I wanted to run it just for playing a Windows game, then I quickly shook my head and fired up Wine. Even when Wine failed, I just couldn't bring myself back to the pain of installing Windows drivers again. Not that it was all that painful, but still, "just works" (usually) is so much nicer.
Now if Linux would just adopt "third-party" program and driver installation standards, so that you *could* do it like in Windows, when it was needed, without recompilation, that would be a nice feature.
Aside from the other responder's comment, many, especially the WINE developers, will celebrate the 1.0 mark. That's quite a mark after 15 years of work, even if it is more of an artificial point in time than of real importance in substance.
Why should anyone celebrate your birthday? You're only a day older than the day before your birthday, after all.
I know, sorry, it was a really horrible joke, I don't play WoW either. ;)
I'm sure the recently covered lawsuit against Comcast had nothing to do with this decision? :P
I now have WOW and am paying a little less for pretty much the same thing.
You're forgetting to add on the cost of your time spent playing WoW though and the subsequent wounds from your lover.
They can be to a degree yes, but I'm not sure that's as true as you think it is though, as different programs may be so different that a lot of the code isn't very compatible. Rip out Kopete's webcam interface and put it into Gaim? The developers laughed at me for even suggesting that one. If you make things more modular, though, and have some standardized points of communication, then switching out programs, using different programs, sharing code, etc, is easier. If an entire Linux distro, from the kernel to the desktop, was a big wad of code with no standards, you couldn't easily do things like program a new desktop environment, or a new window manager, because switching to those would be very difficult. If you have standards though and can all be on the same page about interprogram communication, this becomes a million times easier. Thanks to freedesktop.org it's much simpler to make different window managers for example to allow users to easily run and switch between them. So, where and when this can be done in a great way, kudos go to those programmers, for giving everyone else in the world more freedom by being more easily able to add on, change, remove, and use a program. The easier it is to make choices/changes and to adopt and use different programs, the more freedom you and everyone else has.
If Gaim and Kopete had both used a standardized plugin system, porting a webcam or other plugins between the programs would be cake.
Yet another Slashdot argument in which both sides are right on certain points, but continue to pretend they are directly opposed. Working on one thing will get it done faster, that is a good thing, but if you can't have that then at least you can hopefully use the ideas or even better, the actual software that is developed after the fork/splitoff/new project, in other projects which are more mainstream. Yes, competition is good, but so is working together when possible and beneficial. There, settled.
As a side note, separate projects are much more beneficial to one another when the system they are working on is modular and standardized enough to allow for easy adoption of code between the projects. A new package format, for example, would be just fine if there was a way to easily adopt existing package managers to understand the new package format. APIs/standards please, Linux community. Together, when possible, we are strong.
Hmm, well, I like it. ;)
Hehe, you make good points though, I didn't know it wasn't GTK. I wish the entire visual interface for Linux was standardized in such a way that any app would take on the look of the current theme. I mean, why does GTK have to have it's own theme? I'd love to see Linux "modular" enough, and use a standard API, for themes, to the same depth as the GTK "look". Forgive me for being harsh, but programmers were kind of stupid and selfish to think that they should use their own buttons and whatnot instead of using a standard which allowed their program to take on whatever look and feel of whatever DE their program happened to be run inside of.
Big companies like Microsoft wouldn't like this at all, of course. Anything to make things less proprietary is good for consumers and end users, but of course those who benefit from "exclusives" hate choice like that. I say it's about freaking time someone made some real standards instead of WXWidgets, which just seems to me like a work-around, but maybe WXWidgets, or part of it, is what is needed.
As for Webkit, what makes it so special, when there are dozens of other open source browsers? Yes, competition is good, but working together can also be very good too, and a web browser is a pretty complicated program not to be working together on.
True, but Firefox being open source gets a lot of backing for the Linux front, anything that gets used a lot gets a lot of backing in open source. Sure, IE didn't get much improvement, but IE was also closed source and controlled by a single corporation that didn't care. That's not the case with Firefox, thus it's Linux support is large.
Shuttleworth wasn't saying he wanted to copy Red Hat and Suse. Synchronizing communities that use some of the same software so that they can work on the same bugs will only make the community stronger and better at taking care of bugs. It may very well serve to reduce duplicate effort. When all the communities are all on the same page with running and testing a particular release of a particular program, things can get done that much faster on it. While competition is a good thing, the open source and Linux communities working together on certain things is also helpful and IMO Linux needs more collaboration than not right now.
Because Firefox is the main web browser shipped with many of the major Linux distros. IE is the browser shipped with Windows. Mozilla would be stupid to drop the ball on their Linux dominance, it needs to continue to keep playing well with both Linux and Windows.
Being able to easily install drivers from vendors and drivers you may have stored on some medium for later use is a luxury, and a feature of an OS. A good, stable, but expandable ABI could be come up with if someone wanted to, yet you're saying they are denying adding this feature because of a fear of binaries? Maybe it's time they stopped making life hell for users who don't care to know or want to know the CLI and how to compile and the hell you can go through to do so most times, and added this feature, leaving the binary/source preferences up to the users downstream and the distro packagers. Withholding a great feature of an OS is just weak and causes everyone else pain, and that pain should not be forced on someone because of a fear of them installing something restrictive. Let them have that choice, because along with that freedom to choose comes many benefits.
Just because starving Africans could poke their eyes out with loaves of bread doesn't mean you should let them go hungry. I'd much rather see Linux become a great OS, and that means heeding needs like having standards so that the installation of software and drivers is possible on any distro, old or new, which includes those standards.
Anything to help freedesktop.org, the respective DE teams, and others, to make standards to allow DEs to play together nicely deserves lots and lots of kudos. Users need to keep as much freedom as they can, and the freedom to easily use the DE they want and to switch between them is a critical part in preserving these freedoms.
All that matters is a common API, not so much a common desktop layout (but that can be somewhat useful too if there is some standardization on that which will come from users voting their preference by preferring certain desktops). Having a common API at least means that the DEs will play nicely with one another, which is extremely important if users want to keep a maximum freedom of choice to move between them.