Cogs can think.

There’s a geek soap opera going on over at Planet GNOME, with the center of attention being Jeff Waugh and his (non?) work for GNOME. Since I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the people behind the software I use (really, I don’t. I care about the product or art, not the programmer or artist), and I only had one run-in with Waugh, I really cannot comment on this stuff. That run-in was perfectly resolved, and he didn’t come across me in a way that resembles whatever Cumming is claiming.

In the end, this is all useless political blabber. GNOME is falling apart. As I have said many times before on this blog as well as on OSNews, GNOME is dead. Dead, dead, dead. If you, as a major software project in a fast-changing world, do not have a well thought-out plan for the future, then you are dead. Cold, harsh, but reality. People have flamed Eugenia and I for saying it, but if a strong leader does not step up soon, a leader that dares to make the hard decisions needed to set a viable plan for the future, than GNOME is doomed to insignificance. It won’t be able to adapt. And we all know what happens to things that do not adapt.

KDE had the guts to make the tough decisions, and despite delays and setbacks, they are slowly but surely seeing the fruit of their labour. I may not like everything coming out of KDE 4, but at least they are trying. And I commend them for it.

I do want KDE 4.0 to be released after December 31st, 2007, though. I want to win my bet with Aaron.

I doubled the RAM in my laptop, from 768MB to 1.5GB. And you know what?

You don’t notice a damn thing in either Vista or Ubuntu.

• My dad and I have decided to buy a digital SLR camera together - I want to take good pictures damn it. We both want one, but in order to make it affordable for me, we decided to buy one together. After consulting the interweb and Eugenia and her husband, we decided on getting the Nikon D40 (we’ll buy it somewhere in the coming weeks). It has gotten raving reviews, is easy to use, and is relatively affordable at ~500 EUR. As for a lens, we’ll be settling on the kit lens (18-55mm) for the time being, seeing that has also been getting very good reviews (despite it being a kit lens). We can always buy a better, more professional lens later on. They don’t come cheap at all, you see. Great stuff.
• For the first time ever, Debian has let me down. A dist-upgrade on my laptop went tits up, and manual fixage got me quite far, but not far enough. I’m quite pissed off right now about this one. Ten pounds of suck, that’s what it is.

My dream operating system would have BeOS’ kernel, responsiveness, and soul. Mac OS X’ attention to detail and polishedness. Windows’ industry support. Linux’ price tag. VMS’ stability. OpenBSD’s security. My nightmare operating system would have the Linux kernel. Windows’ attention to detail and polishedness. SkyOS’ industry support. Vista’s pricetag. Windows 98’s stability. BeOS’ security.

Just saying.

This has to be the best response so far on the whole Linux scheduler and general kernel development attitude.

Everybody here wants Linux to be better. Everybody, me included. Make no mistake. But collectively we should not be in a state of “reaction” to external forces as the only known method of development.

And:

But [Con]’s on *our* side and he got beat down by the Linux kernel community. That’s the tragedy here. He was beaten down by the very people he was trying to help out and support. It should have been handled better.

I respect Linus for his awesome work, and I think in general he’s a bright and pragmatic guy (and I love his stance towards the GPL and the FSF), but on this very issue, he has clearly dropped the ball, as evidenced by the many, many, many complaints by knowledgeable people on the lkml. It’s becoming more and more evident that, as I have said before, Linux kernel development is by no means an open process anymore.

So, DistroWatch replied to my moral rant about their policies towards Elive.

Thanatermesis has never asked DistroWatch not to post direct download links to the stable Elive CD images. I am in regular contact with the Elive developer and I’ve just checked all his recent emails (just to be sure), but I couldn’t find a single one (let alone “numerous requests”) where he would ask me not to post these links. So either he is lying to Mr Holwerda, or Mr Holwerda is lying in his blog.

Those are Thanatermesis’ words - “many times”, he wrote.

In six years of its existence, DistroWatch has never hosted any ISO images of any distribution, including Elive. Again, somebody is making things up.

Again, Thanatermesis’ words. I am assuming that “he uploaded it himself” does not necessarily have to mean to distrowatch.com/pub/incoming/, but any server.

Is it disrespectful of DistroWatch to provide direct download links to the Elive CD images? Yes, absolutely - and I agree with Mr Holwerda on this point. However, I don’t believe it is any more disrespectful than twisting the meaning of the word “donation” or providing non-existent links to a slow download server which, oops, is down and has been down for weeks. I have no problem with the Elive developer wanting to make money out of his hard work, but then he should be straightforward about it and go commercial, instead of playing these ridiculous “you must donate” and “feel guilty if I starve to death” games. Or he should come up with a better way of distributing his work than “hiding” it in randomly named “dot” directories on public FTP servers.

Look, I don’t agree with such a compulsory donation scheme either, and I would much rather see a voluntary donation scheme, but that is not a sound reason to be disrespectful and discourteous to another developer’s choice. It’s his god-given right to supply his users with his software in a way he deems necessary. You may not like that, but that is no reason to disrespect a developer who works really hard on his project in his free time, and post links to his work on fast servers - despite the fact that you are not legally prohibited to do so.

since Mr Holwerda portrays DistroWatch as a backstabbing organisation with little respect for other people’s work…

That’s a bit drama queenish of you. I am just saying that what you are doing with Elive is an ungentlemanlike thing to do, and I just pointed it out to you. You could have just added a “my take” or whatever to the newsitem, stating that you find it unacceptable of Thanatermesis to uphold such a donation scheme.

…while picturing OSNews as a moral-high-ground holding bastion of purity and innocence, here is a question to the author of the blog post: DistroWatch has donated close to US$14,000 to open source software projects over the last three years. How about OSNews, Mr Holwerda?

As a proper journalistic outlet [1], OSNews does not take sides by donating money to anything. We are an independent news outlet, and as such, we do not take donations, nor give them to anyone. We want to maintain our unbiasedness, and donations (either to or from OSNews) do not fit into that. So, even if we did give/receive donations, we would not talk about it.

Personally, I am not the type to scream my personal donations off the rooftops. I contribute to my free software project of choice in the best way I can, and on top of that, do the community a service by working hours and hours a day, unpaid (I don’t get a penny for my work on OSNews), on a website that provides that community with publicity. My donation habits are strictly personal, and not anyone’s business.

Apart from that, even if you donated tenhundredmillionbillion Dollars to the free software world, that does not give you the right to disrespect individual developers. No matter how many lives a doctor has saved, it does not give him the moral right to kill someone.

Morality is not for sale, Distrowatch.

[1] OSNews is a voluntary effort, and our editors and webmaster do not get paid in any way for the work we do. In other words, the word “proper” in this context is relative. I’m honest in that.

Sometimes, I really wonder whatever the hell happened to courtesy and gentlemanship.

The (bascially a) one man project Elive, a Debian-based installable live CD which uses Enlightenment 0.16 and 0.17 as its desktop environment, has just released version 1.0 of their project. Since nobody pays Samuel ‘Thanatermesis’ F. Baggen to work on Elive, he gives his users two options when they want to download stable Elive releases: a slow, free server, or a fast server for which you have to donate any amount of money (USD 1, 2, or whatever you want) to get access to. This way, the one-man project gets a few bucks to fund Elive.

Of course, this world is filled with idiots without any form of respect, so you soon get people who post the stable .iso’s somewhere else, so others can enjoy a free fast download. This in itself is of course extremely lame, but hey, I don’t think there’s anything legally you could do to stop this - the license permits redistribution.

On OSNews, I wrote an item about the Elive 1.0 release. In the comments, a user posted direct download links to a fast server hosting the Elive 1.0 releases, which, of course, while not illegal, is still not very gentleman-like. So I emailed Thanatermesis, asking him if he wanted the links removed - you know, out of courtesy and respect. He said he would like that, so Eugenia and I removed the direct download links.

However, Distrowatch posts a direct download link on its frontpage announcement of Elive 1.0. Thanatermesis explained to me that despite numerous emails and request to, like, not do that, Distrowatch continues to do so. In fact, when Thanatermesis moved the stable .iso somewhere else, Distrowatch just hosted the .iso themselves, in spite of the fact that they know about the mild donation request.

Shame on you, Distrowatch, this is a very lame thing to do. I will be sure to not link to any Distrowatch story until this situation is resolved. For whatever that’s worth.

I switched my Ubuntu installation over to Kubuntu. I see more future in KDE4 than I see in GNOME (as I have said many times before). If I don’t see someone from the GNOME community stand up to bring GNOME to the next level, I don’t see why I should invest time in using it and reporting bugs on it. As a user, I expect my platform of choice to have (what I consider) a viable future, and at this point, I just don’t see a viable future in GNOME (and no, some bug fixes and minor changes to the 2.x tree do not count as a viable future).

Sure, KDE3 lacks polish here and there, but at least KDE has set out a path for the future. And it has Kopete and Konqueror, which kick GAIM Pidgin and Firefox’ asses any day.

About 5200 words.

A new essay?

No, just the GPLv3 final draft. If you need 5200 words to define how users and developers use your free and open source software, then there’s something seriously wrong with your definition and idea of ‘free and open source software’.

By the way, Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger license is only about 1200 words more. Interesting.

Warning: rant ahead.

I don’t give a rat’s ass what all the anti-MS idiots say. Surface is a truly innovative product, and I applaud Microsoft for it. They had the guts, back in 2001, to devote money and manpower to this idea, and now, 6 years later, it is paying off. Surface looks great, opens up a whole slew of possibilities, and, as far as I can see it, is truly a Pandora’s box of opportunities. I’ve seen use cases flash before my eyes like every other minute of the past two days.

Surface is just one of those things the OSS community will never come up with. Let’s face it; Linux, BSD, most of the other OSS projects, they are all followers. They are in it to regurgitate what companies like Apple and Microsoft serve them. The OSS community is supposed to be so great, right? Then why is it that they never seem to be able to come with something truly new, something groundbreaking, something that will make people all around the world go: “wow…!” I showed Surface to some of my computer-illetrate friends, and they were baffled. They all saw new use cases in front of them… Just like I did.

Fact remains, as much as I like the OSS world (I try to use the OSS equiv. when it is at least as good as or better than the closed-source counterparts), they are followers, not trendsetters. So, sure, there is enough to bash Microsoft and Apple about, but at least they have the guts to come up with truly new ideas.

In 2010, we’ll see a marginally different, poor rip-off of Surface. The joy of waiting.