Category: fedora (Page 5 of 6)
A horrible, horrible headline for an extremely interesting story: RMS is amongst one of those who has signed his name to a letter to the Commissioner for Competition and Director General Competition of the EU that the Oracle-Sun merger should not take place due to the harm that it would do to MySQL. I saw this via Joe Brockmeier’s posting on the subject, in which he reads the letter as essentially saying that the GPL is not good enough to protect MySQL – which I think is inferring the wrong idea from what’s written.
Matt Asay has written another entertaining blog piece on his particular theories of open source economics, and Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann and he have engaged in what is superficially a bit of “Is not!” “Is too!“. Looking a bit deeper, though, it’s not really the pragmatics vs. the Stallmanites, even though that’s how Asay frames it.
Fundamentally, Tiemann is right on the money: a simplistic “supply and demand” view of how prices are set in a market place completely ignores the value that Red Hat offers to its customers.
Let me start this by saying that I really, really want OpenMoko Inc. to be a raging success. With Android, Palm Pre and other “Linux phones” showing pretty how not to do things (jury’s out on N900 for me still), the properly free smartphone is an idea whose time is very definitely here. Sadly, with the freeping creaturism of the phone market and the need to develop both a hardware and software stack simultaneously, that didn’t seem to work out so well, so OM are now going to their backup plan: “WikiReader“.
It’s difficult to tell apart the different factions of the people of Judea these days. On one hand, you have the Boycott Novellers, who post large amounts of “news” heavily rewritten to support their point of view, often with personal attacks on individuals and accompanied by Perez Hilton-style silly drawings. Sad, then, to see the new entrant – Boycott Boycott Novell – apparently chase after their namesakes with a personal attack on a free software developer and, of course, accompanying silly Hiltonesque.
For various reasons, I’ve been playing with Clutter over the past week. Rather than the 1.0 release that was announced a little while ago, I’m still on 0.8 – for a number of reasons, but mainly because 1.0 isn’t really available in any distro yet, and because the various language bindings are not yet up to date. LWN has a pretty decent write-up of the 1.0 release (subscriber only for the next week).
As I drove to a business planning session (a.k.a. entrepreneur funday) this morning, I heard on the radio that Google had announced their intention to release a consumer operating system. This was interesting news, albeit too brief, and being at this event I wasn’t able to check the news until I got back this evening.
Pretty much the first thing I read was Andrew Savory‘s take on this. Wow, how disappointing.
It has been interesting watching the debate around Mono over the past few months. As essentially an independent observer – albeit one who has used Mono and can almost code C# – I couldn’t help the sneaking feeling that somehow, some of this was being orchestrated behind the scenes.
Particularly on the “anti-Mono” side, it has been pretty clear that an agenda of agitation has been in effect, with various distributions being prodded into making statements either way and various “users” kicking up stink on mailing lists – not least a certain infamous blog writer being caught red-handed whilst goading people on to write angry letters.
Mike McGrath asks a pertinent question: why didn’t you vote? Although I did actually take the time to vote, I can totally understand why someone wouldn’t.
For one thing, as others have said, a lot of the candidates were quite similar: they said many similar things, and I don’t doubt any of them could do the job competently.
Personally, I tried to vote on issues where possible. I voted for people who had a clear view of what “Fedora” means to them, and sided with those who had a specific vision (that is to say, not those who take a pluralistic all-things-to-all-men approach).
It’s been great to see Fedora 11 released, even with a couple of small delays it didn’t seem to me like a terribly problematic release.
As Rawhide, I’ve been using it on and off for a while now, and to be honest aside from the few things I ended up filing, there hasn’t been an awful lot wrong with it. One thing I’d particularly like to call out are the small improvements arriving in virt-manager, which is slowly improving release by release into a really tasty piece of software.
When Fedora 10 was released, one of the first things I did was enable nouveau as my graphics driver – nv was horribly slow on my Dell, and I didn’t want the pain of the proprietary drivers. Needless to say, it didn’t immediately work: it didn’t want to play with my 1920×1050 panel and I got big black bars on either side of the screen. It took someone on #nouveau all of about five minutes to give me a patch to fix the problem, and a hop-skip-jump later I’d recompiled the driver and the display was great.
