proprietary? anti-free? hmmm... [LWN.net]

proprietary? anti-free? hmmm...

Posted May 31, 2006 2:13 UTC (Wed) by jclinton (guest, #38092)
In reply to: proprietary? anti-free? hmmm... by jabby
Parent article: SafeDesk Puts Bounties on STS Open-Source Development

Um, did you read the comment to which you replied?

This announcement has absolutely nothing to do with LTSP, at all. We used to sell an LTSP product based on SuSE 9.3 but it is now retired. (It had an open source and an enterprise edition -- the later with a GUI management tool that I wrote through hours of tearing my hair out in the horrid YCP YaST scripting language.)

The announcement you are replying to is related to our Safedesk Terminal Server which is an entirely new "distribution" which runs on Debian Live; we extended Debian Live to support network booting and the patches were submitted back to the project freely. And, if you had read the announcement, you would have seen that we are PAYING the open source community to develop new features to be released BACK to the open source community: the so-called "bounty".

And yes, there are indeed two versions. As I say on the web site and in the included readme.txt file, the only differences between the open source and the enterprise versions is a GUI installer, management tool, and bundled VMWare Player (which is proprietary). Both the installer and management tool were written by me without links to ANY GPL software of any kind. They are available for purchase for the guys whom want to pay someone to do the hard work for them. If you know what you're doing, you're more than welcome to use the open source version. All the software included is EXACTLY THE SAME. The features are EXACTLY THE SAME. The only difference is that you can pay us to do the heavy lifting for you.

Also, commercial(ism) support is available for both version. But if you don't believe in commercial(ism) support, then I guess you can't take advantage of that ...

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sorry! unclear PR?

Posted May 31, 2006 15:02 UTC (Wed) by jabby (guest, #2648) [Link]

I did read the comment to which I replied, and the press release above it, but apparently not closely enough. I did not follow the link in the press release to read about the product. That would have changed everything.

I had heard about SafeDesk recently somewhere else (can't recall where... probably LXer). I searched for relevant articles and found some. I made the wild leap that "SafeDesk Server", "SafeDesk Terminal Server", and "STS" were all the same thing. I didn't immediately see anything indicating that the new product was *not* based on LTSP. Being based on Debian Live does not preclude using LTSP. LTSP can do PXE booting, SMB, local USB, sound, and local apps, so none of that suggested that this was anything different from the earlier product. The "streaming video" claim made me suspicious of hype. If I had read the comment a little closer I might have realized that the whole unionfs thing implies something very different.

I concluded that these bounties were an attempt to get people to voluntarily hack on the hobbled open source version of a closed source product. I apparently made some hasty assumptions and I apologize for that.

Perhaps my misunderstanding is a better clue as to why people aren't singing and clapping over these bounties. The press release doesn't effectively distinguish this from the earlier product. (It also contains two grammatical and one spelling error which made me want to stop reading.) Including a couple of paragraphs from the website would have gone a long way to explaining what the "STS Open-Source Project" is. This might be a good way to make people more aware of your goals.

It would also be nice to employ consistent terminology. I see "STS Open-Source Project", "STS Project", "STS project", "Open Source Thin-Client Project", and "STS Open-Source Development" all in this short press release. The press release and the website also use the terms "Debian Live", "Debian Live Net", and "Debian Net Live" interchangeably. This kind of inconsistency makes it harder to follow and understand.

Now that I've reread the press release and the informative comment and skimmed your website, I think I'm starting to understand what exactly your project is. It is definitively *not* LTSP and it *does* sound like something novel and something that people would want. Since it is like booting a liveCD and runs everything locally to the client, it could indeed do fully accelerated and streaming video! Impressive...

Sorry for the unwarranted flame.