Following rumors of an OpenOffice fork initiated by Novell, this interesting article will be interesting to read :
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2133220131.html
Of course, full Microsoft compatibility in Ooo is a very good thing, particularly for Excel macros.
I can see the interest of the Ooo users, but I'm surprised that MS would let die what prevents their milkcow Office Suite to fall from 400$ to 20$. They can maintain high prices only because they own the document standard of Office.
So, where is the bug ? Is Novell going to deliver the compatibility layers to the public under the GPL (or the LGPL) ? It is not clear. "Open Source" does not mean free software. I don't believe in miracles.
Friday 8 December 2006
Stall-Man comments on the Novell-MS deal
Stall-Man says : I'll get my revenge with my secret weapon : the GPL-v3.
My comment : don't mess with super-heros.
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2006/11/stallman_finall.html
My comment : don't mess with super-heros.
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2006/11/stallman_finall.html
Flash special
Our friends in Mandriva are offering a new product on their website : the Mandriva Flash, which is a USB-bootable flash memory. Provided your PC can boot from USB (recent models can do that), you have access to the Mandriva 3D desktop without installation, and with 1GB of free space available for your documents. This means you can carry on one single key the OS and 1GB of user data.
http://www.mandriva.com/en/individuals/products/flash
For what usage ?
- Separate the OS from the PC and transform any available (recent) PC into your familiar environment. Nice for the mail passwords etc.
- Try the Mandriva 3D environment without installation, and with a quicker response than on CD, with USB2.
This product belongs to the same family as "the Globetrotter", a USB hard drive sold by Mandriva. But now we have more features in a smaller form factor.
http://www.mandriva.com/en/individuals/products/flash
For what usage ?
- Separate the OS from the PC and transform any available (recent) PC into your familiar environment. Nice for the mail passwords etc.
- Try the Mandriva 3D environment without installation, and with a quicker response than on CD, with USB2.
This product belongs to the same family as "the Globetrotter", a USB hard drive sold by Mandriva. But now we have more features in a smaller form factor.
Tuesday 5 December 2006
My experience with Kubuntu
Managing two desktop PC's with Gentoo is a nightmare. Last summer, after a gcc upgrade, I've had to recompile all the packages, with all the problems coming together. Fox never compiled. So, I've got a powerful PC with a dual core amd64, 4Gb of RAM and a nvidia 7900GT graphics card for Gentoo, and my Sony laptop is now running Kubuntu. I used to have Windows XP + Mandriva, but finally I found I have no need for Microsoft at all, even for ripping DVD's. So I formatted the hard drive, reinstalled, and gave Kubuntu a try.
Kubuntu is N°1 on Distrowatch. Maybe because they seem to call home everytime somebody installs Ubuntu. But it is certainly worth trying to understand the popularity of Ubuntu.
And I am fed up with Ubuntu.
Here are several remarks :
- I hate this sudo thing. What do you do when you plug a ext3 external hard-drive and you want to browse it ? The only reasonable thing is to run kdesu konqueror in a normal distro. I know, the ultras will say it is not safe. But you have to strike a deal between security and usability on the desktop. With Mandriva, just type alt-F2 and kdesu konqueror. Or start from a konsole.
- The Adept updater is not finished and buggy. I got several frezzes that could only be fixed by digging in the system and suppressing by hand a .lock file. Fantastic for a distro which is supposed to facilitate the desktop ! From my tray icon, I can launch several sessions of Adept. This is not practical.
- The software offer is poor. There is no Kuickshow. I could not find "Transcode".
- There is no such thing as the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front). "Attention, novembre 2006 : The PLF Ubuntu project is shutting down, due to lack of time of its maintainers." (http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/depots/plf/plf-fr). Availibility of PLF packages is important for my freedom ! Resistance to software patents is a part of foss story !
- The distribution is not up-to-date. Why should I wait more for the 3D office ?
My conclusion is : I am going to ditch this distro and come back to my good old Mandriva. I have the same feeling when I give a regular try to Gnome. I rapidly come back to KDE, which is way more advanced. Mandriva is not perfect, but much better. Except the PR, I cannot see the point with Unbuntu.
Kubuntu is N°1 on Distrowatch. Maybe because they seem to call home everytime somebody installs Ubuntu. But it is certainly worth trying to understand the popularity of Ubuntu.
And I am fed up with Ubuntu.
Here are several remarks :
- I hate this sudo thing. What do you do when you plug a ext3 external hard-drive and you want to browse it ? The only reasonable thing is to run kdesu konqueror in a normal distro. I know, the ultras will say it is not safe. But you have to strike a deal between security and usability on the desktop. With Mandriva, just type alt-F2 and kdesu konqueror. Or start from a konsole.
- The Adept updater is not finished and buggy. I got several frezzes that could only be fixed by digging in the system and suppressing by hand a .lock file. Fantastic for a distro which is supposed to facilitate the desktop ! From my tray icon, I can launch several sessions of Adept. This is not practical.
- The software offer is poor. There is no Kuickshow. I could not find "Transcode".
- There is no such thing as the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front). "Attention, novembre 2006 : The PLF Ubuntu project is shutting down, due to lack of time of its maintainers." (http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/depots/plf/plf-fr). Availibility of PLF packages is important for my freedom ! Resistance to software patents is a part of foss story !
- The distribution is not up-to-date. Why should I wait more for the 3D office ?
My conclusion is : I am going to ditch this distro and come back to my good old Mandriva. I have the same feeling when I give a regular try to Gnome. I rapidly come back to KDE, which is way more advanced. Mandriva is not perfect, but much better. Except the PR, I cannot see the point with Unbuntu.
Monday 4 December 2006
Mark - The Space Cuckoo
"Female parasitic-cuckoos seem to specialize and lay eggs that closely resemble the eggs of their chosen host. Parasitic cuckoos are grouped into gentes, with each gente specializing in a particular host. There is some evidence that the gentes are genetically different from one another. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo
First, I parasite the Debian distribution and I try to attract some of its developpers. Then I inject my cheap dollars into Ubuntu and distribute CDROMS almost for free. This creates havoc on the ecosystem. People like Mandriva, who have to earn each dollar with their sweat suffer from that. The Suse distribution, which has all my respect because they contributed so much to my preferred desktop, KDE, suffers from Novell attitude. What do I do ? This is another opportunity for me to parasite the ecosystem.
For me, this is not the spirit of FOSS. FOSS main objective is to free the people from closed standards and closed systems. With FOSS, building blocks can be added to create bigger achievements. There are still plenty of areas where GNU/Linux can be improved. Mark, why didn't you inject your space trip ticket + all your Ubuntu uneeded expenses for that purpose ? Why a new distribution when there are already too many ?
This is a short list of subjects where you could have been more useful in the area of Desktop Linux :
- Work on hal / ivman / dbus to improve the peripherals management
- Work on KDE, not Gnome, to improve the user experience. I can't believe you support this Gnome thing so much.
- Work on the startup time
- Lobby ATI and Nvidia to have open source drivers
- Lobby the printer manufacturers to improve printing support
- Lobby to push Linux PC availability
FOSS needs Linus, Richard, Alan and others. A FOSS-friendly businessman voice would have been interesting to listen.
Here is a nice summary to read :
http://blog.madduck.net/debian/2006.05.24-ubuntu-and-debian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo
First, I parasite the Debian distribution and I try to attract some of its developpers. Then I inject my cheap dollars into Ubuntu and distribute CDROMS almost for free. This creates havoc on the ecosystem. People like Mandriva, who have to earn each dollar with their sweat suffer from that. The Suse distribution, which has all my respect because they contributed so much to my preferred desktop, KDE, suffers from Novell attitude. What do I do ? This is another opportunity for me to parasite the ecosystem.
For me, this is not the spirit of FOSS. FOSS main objective is to free the people from closed standards and closed systems. With FOSS, building blocks can be added to create bigger achievements. There are still plenty of areas where GNU/Linux can be improved. Mark, why didn't you inject your space trip ticket + all your Ubuntu uneeded expenses for that purpose ? Why a new distribution when there are already too many ?
This is a short list of subjects where you could have been more useful in the area of Desktop Linux :
- Work on hal / ivman / dbus to improve the peripherals management
- Work on KDE, not Gnome, to improve the user experience. I can't believe you support this Gnome thing so much.
- Work on the startup time
- Lobby ATI and Nvidia to have open source drivers
- Lobby the printer manufacturers to improve printing support
- Lobby to push Linux PC availability
FOSS needs Linus, Richard, Alan and others. A FOSS-friendly businessman voice would have been interesting to listen.
Here is a nice summary to read :
http://blog.madduck.net/debian/2006.05.24-ubuntu-and-debian
Friday 1 December 2006
Interoperability - A vast subject
Inter-operability is not a new subject. Crimosoft seems to discover this word because they were until now in such a dominant position that their products were based on a "de-facto" standard - their own standard. As long as IE was the only one browser, no need to follow the W3C recommendations. Same for the Oasis standard for XML documents. This time is over, Billy boy.
Wikipedia on "de-facto" standards : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-facto_standard
Your GSM phone and my GSM phone will work say - in India or in Hong Kong. Why ? Because the French and the German telecom authorities started the GSM standard, which became a worldwide ETSI standard. Was there a need for patent coverage ?
Mmmm ... It happens that a US mobile phone company which name starts by a "M" was bribing a northern Europe operator to fax them all the internal discussions and was patenting everything underground. The funny story is that the guy faxing documents during the night had no sleep and fell on the ground during a meeting. I will never buy a GSM phone from "M".
It looks like a US tradition to try to f*** everybody with silly patents. The ETSI had to create a truce between the big players, but the Japanese players had to pay ...
But, anyway, my point is that companies can sit around the table and more or less agree on standards to garantee inter-operability, and this through standardisation bodies. Royalties agreements can exist, but the rules should be the same for eveybody. This is the normal way.
Doing bi-lateral agreements such as the MS-Novell deal is hijacking and unfair. MS playing unfair games ? No ? I cannot believe that ;-).
Here is an interesting comment on Red Hat reaction to the MS-Novel deal.
And here is a very nice article on Crimosoft dragging their feet to comply with the European requests on interoperability.
Wikipedia on "de-facto" standards : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-facto_standard
Your GSM phone and my GSM phone will work say - in India or in Hong Kong. Why ? Because the French and the German telecom authorities started the GSM standard, which became a worldwide ETSI standard. Was there a need for patent coverage ?
Mmmm ... It happens that a US mobile phone company which name starts by a "M" was bribing a northern Europe operator to fax them all the internal discussions and was patenting everything underground. The funny story is that the guy faxing documents during the night had no sleep and fell on the ground during a meeting. I will never buy a GSM phone from "M".
It looks like a US tradition to try to f*** everybody with silly patents. The ETSI had to create a truce between the big players, but the Japanese players had to pay ...
But, anyway, my point is that companies can sit around the table and more or less agree on standards to garantee inter-operability, and this through standardisation bodies. Royalties agreements can exist, but the rules should be the same for eveybody. This is the normal way.
Doing bi-lateral agreements such as the MS-Novell deal is hijacking and unfair. MS playing unfair games ? No ? I cannot believe that ;-).
Here is an interesting comment on Red Hat reaction to the MS-Novel deal.
And here is a very nice article on Crimosoft dragging their feet to comply with the European requests on interoperability.
Thursday 30 November 2006
Linus Torvalds is a Hero - according to Time Magazine
Mother Teresa and Linus heros together ...
http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero2006/torvalds.html
And what about Richard Stallman ? A super-hero ? We have Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Stallman ...
http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero2006/torvalds.html
And what about Richard Stallman ? A super-hero ? We have Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Stallman ...
Reflections around the Novell - Microsoft Linux deal
Novell (Suse Linux) and Microsoft have recently announced a cooperation agreement, probably coming from the need to work on interoperability in virtual environments.
This in itself was a scoop, since Crimosoft was finally admitting Linux was really here in the business landscape and not simply a subversive communist movement like Ballmer earlier barked.
But on top of that, several layers of interesting stuff piled up.
- Crimosoft could not resist mentioning patent coverage for their partner's customers, which is a nonsense regarding the GPL license covering most FOSS work (read). This created a lot of fuss in the community. Of course, everybody believes Crimosoft was behind the SCO FUD and thought this new story was the last invention of Crimosoft. Novell was then forced to comment and say that there was no patent issue, according to them.
- Then Mark Shuttleworth, who is behind Ubuntu with Canonical, could not resist posting to the Suse mailing list (read) to invite the OpenSuse developpers to quit and join Ubuntu. By doing that, he won the nickname of "Shark Muddleworth" in a satirical reply on Ubuntu forums (read). Not a very good move for Mark, who has certainly underestimated the reaction of the OpenSuse community. Come on, Mark, these guys are not children and they don't need anybody to make their own decisions. There is a nice comment about this story in Linux.com (read).
I think that all this buzz is quite interesting.
First, Crimosoft looks like the MPAA/RIAA, fighting on the intellectual rights field and using FUD rather than competing face to face on the basis of the quality and features of their products. They have locked their customers in, they have no respect for them, and they don't care openly pressurising them. This is not a scoop but the latest episode.
Second, it is clear for me that many people will leave the OpenSuse community in reaction to a deal they don't like. See the comments of the Samba guys (read). They will move to the other popular distros, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Mepis, Mandriva, Debian or Gentoo.
This leads me to the subject of how to select the right distribution. Here and there, we can see flame wars about the best distributions. For me, as a GNU/Linux techie desktop user, I need the following things :
- A up-to-date distribution with recent versions of my favorite packages, such as Open Office, Firefox, KDE, The Gimp, Blender.
- A wide software offer for less regular needs.
- An active community to find solutions in case of trouble.
- A good citizenship in the community, no hassle.
- The other points such as eye-candy are nonsense since you can easily customize the look&feel of your desktop, and anyway the next version of KDE will integrate a lot more eye-candy.
Among the distributions I've quoted above, I don't like Fedora and Ubuntu. Mepis uses the Ubuntu packages and is in the same bag.
I don't like Ubuntu because I don't like Shuttleworth. This individual has burned 20 million dollars to spend a few days in space. This is a shame. This shocks my ethics. Money should be respected and not spent such a crazy way. I think this guy will deliver bad surprises to the community. Ubuntu is an independant entity ? My foot. You don't bite the hand which feeds you and I cannot see how these guys are going to live without the Canonical money. And he boarded a sputnik because he was not worth a shuttle ;-)
I don't like Fedora because I prefer distributions coming from small companies like Mandriva or from not-for-profit entities like Debian, or Gentoo.
In fact, I don't want to use a distribution coming from an entity which would one day push me against my will in a direction I don't like. I like freedom. I have left Crimosoft one day because they were asking me a code to authorize the 3rd installation of their bugged software and treated me like a thief.
I'm using Gentoo and Mandriva. Gentoo for the fun, but believe me, it is time consuming. The good point is that I know my machine in all details and I can tweak this /etc config file or that one to do what I want. Thanks to Gentoo, I think I know what a Linux distribution is. I'm generally using Mandriva on my notebook because it works well and Mandriva is too small a company to ever annoy me. Mmmm. At the moment, I use Ubuntu. Just because I cannot understand all the noise around it. And up to now, I've not understood. Yesterday, the software management tool crashed and I had to suppress a .lock file by hand to restart it. Surprising. With Mandriva I've never seen such a stupid bug. And I'm really, really upset by this sudo thing. Sometimes, you really need to be root to work.
Mandriva is fighting to survive through their sales. Nobody is pouring millions without counting into it. This is respectable.
For-profit Linux players are useful for the community. We should not forget that a lot of interesting FOSS come from companies such as Sun or IBM. The Mozilla Foundation makes a lot of money through their Google deal.
The key point is not here.
The key point is : is this or that company dangerous for my freedom ? Are they going to lock me in one day one way or another ?
Mandriva will not - any time soon.
This in itself was a scoop, since Crimosoft was finally admitting Linux was really here in the business landscape and not simply a subversive communist movement like Ballmer earlier barked.
But on top of that, several layers of interesting stuff piled up.
- Crimosoft could not resist mentioning patent coverage for their partner's customers, which is a nonsense regarding the GPL license covering most FOSS work (read). This created a lot of fuss in the community. Of course, everybody believes Crimosoft was behind the SCO FUD and thought this new story was the last invention of Crimosoft. Novell was then forced to comment and say that there was no patent issue, according to them.
- Then Mark Shuttleworth, who is behind Ubuntu with Canonical, could not resist posting to the Suse mailing list (read) to invite the OpenSuse developpers to quit and join Ubuntu. By doing that, he won the nickname of "Shark Muddleworth" in a satirical reply on Ubuntu forums (read). Not a very good move for Mark, who has certainly underestimated the reaction of the OpenSuse community. Come on, Mark, these guys are not children and they don't need anybody to make their own decisions. There is a nice comment about this story in Linux.com (read).
I think that all this buzz is quite interesting.
First, Crimosoft looks like the MPAA/RIAA, fighting on the intellectual rights field and using FUD rather than competing face to face on the basis of the quality and features of their products. They have locked their customers in, they have no respect for them, and they don't care openly pressurising them. This is not a scoop but the latest episode.
Second, it is clear for me that many people will leave the OpenSuse community in reaction to a deal they don't like. See the comments of the Samba guys (read). They will move to the other popular distros, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Mepis, Mandriva, Debian or Gentoo.
This leads me to the subject of how to select the right distribution. Here and there, we can see flame wars about the best distributions. For me, as a GNU/Linux techie desktop user, I need the following things :
- A up-to-date distribution with recent versions of my favorite packages, such as Open Office, Firefox, KDE, The Gimp, Blender.
- A wide software offer for less regular needs.
- An active community to find solutions in case of trouble.
- A good citizenship in the community, no hassle.
- The other points such as eye-candy are nonsense since you can easily customize the look&feel of your desktop, and anyway the next version of KDE will integrate a lot more eye-candy.
Among the distributions I've quoted above, I don't like Fedora and Ubuntu. Mepis uses the Ubuntu packages and is in the same bag.
I don't like Ubuntu because I don't like Shuttleworth. This individual has burned 20 million dollars to spend a few days in space. This is a shame. This shocks my ethics. Money should be respected and not spent such a crazy way. I think this guy will deliver bad surprises to the community. Ubuntu is an independant entity ? My foot. You don't bite the hand which feeds you and I cannot see how these guys are going to live without the Canonical money. And he boarded a sputnik because he was not worth a shuttle ;-)
I don't like Fedora because I prefer distributions coming from small companies like Mandriva or from not-for-profit entities like Debian, or Gentoo.
In fact, I don't want to use a distribution coming from an entity which would one day push me against my will in a direction I don't like. I like freedom. I have left Crimosoft one day because they were asking me a code to authorize the 3rd installation of their bugged software and treated me like a thief.
I'm using Gentoo and Mandriva. Gentoo for the fun, but believe me, it is time consuming. The good point is that I know my machine in all details and I can tweak this /etc config file or that one to do what I want. Thanks to Gentoo, I think I know what a Linux distribution is. I'm generally using Mandriva on my notebook because it works well and Mandriva is too small a company to ever annoy me. Mmmm. At the moment, I use Ubuntu. Just because I cannot understand all the noise around it. And up to now, I've not understood. Yesterday, the software management tool crashed and I had to suppress a .lock file by hand to restart it. Surprising. With Mandriva I've never seen such a stupid bug. And I'm really, really upset by this sudo thing. Sometimes, you really need to be root to work.
Mandriva is fighting to survive through their sales. Nobody is pouring millions without counting into it. This is respectable.
For-profit Linux players are useful for the community. We should not forget that a lot of interesting FOSS come from companies such as Sun or IBM. The Mozilla Foundation makes a lot of money through their Google deal.
The key point is not here.
The key point is : is this or that company dangerous for my freedom ? Are they going to lock me in one day one way or another ?
Mandriva will not - any time soon.
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