Category: freesoftware (Page 7 of 8)
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).
I did promise Lance that I would blog more on Bongo, and I’m going to try to stick to a post a week at least – however, this first one will only tangentially be about Bongo.
Since the project was initially released, the autotools build system was what you needed to create Bongo. There are a variety of benefits to using autotools, and it’s an extremely well-tested and mature system. However, it’s also relatively difficult to understand and not particularly quick.
apComms is an all-party group interested in various technological issues, and they’ve just announced that they’re starting an enquiry effectively into ‘net neutrality. I would link to something useful if I could, but surprisingly(?) their website is well out of date. Paraphrasing the specific questions they’re asking, though:
When should ISPs be filtering/blocking traffic? Should Govt. intervene over Phorm-like services? Do we need new initiatives to protect privacy online? Is the global approach to kiddie porn working?
So, the news is out that Sun are being bought by Oracle. Personally, I didn’t see that coming – didn’t see Oracle wanting to get into the hardware business, but maybe they will literally just chop those bits out and sell them off. Or maybe they do want to get into hardware.
This has some interesting implications for free software projects, though:
Java. Clearly Oracle are huge fans of Java and will want to continue the development.
So, probably as I was posting my little blog piece yesterday on IBM taking over Sun, it seems that the IBM and Sun deal was falling apart – seemingly a quabble over the pricing, but I suspect a little more must have been to it than that.
Again, I’m reminded somewhat of Microsoft – when Yahoo! refused their take-over offer, which at $31 represented an extremely generous premium over their then ticker-price of about 62%, with a total deal worth $44.
If we’re to believe what we’re told in the press, sometime tomorrow – or perhaps later in the week – IBM and Sun will announce some kind of merger. I’m not sure anyone is under any illusion that this would effectively mean the end of Sun in time, being absorbed into IBM, although there is a lot of speculation over what would happen to various projects. Some, like NetBeans, seem pretty certainly done for, and the amount of life left in the SPARC architecture post-merger seems limited.
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.
This weekend saw the arrival of a new computer – woo! – a long-needed desktop upgrade which brought me the usual technological wtfs (“since when did CPUs come without pins?!” etc.). As part of this, I’ve been trying to upgrade my Fedora 11 Alpha to a more current rawhide.
Clearly I missed something, because even after a number of attempts in different ways I failed. rpm complaining about md5 mismatches or something, for example, which I kind of knew might be an issue from following devel but didn’t really anticipate.
When the new “MailCo” (as it was at the time) was announced, the first thing they did was poll people on what changes they should be looking to make to Thunderbird as kick-ass as possible – you can see from the initial launch blog post that integrated calendaring was item #1 on a list of new features.
Now, only one year on, the word is that calendaring won’t be integrated or bundled at all – in fact, it gets worse, because the calendar developers have also announced that a number of full-time developers have been lost.
Over the past couple of days I got added to the packagers group in FAS and uploaded my first approved RPM – it has been a very interesting process, particularly going through the various policy pages on the wiki (which, while informative, are pretty badly laid out in my opinion – but that’s something I can help fix). Trying cvs again for the first time in years has been an odd experience.
