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My ConcernMy ConcernPosted Aug 31, 2006 17:29 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563)In reply to: My Concern by emkey Parent article: Fedora Core to drop openmotif
My concern with this trend to remove software that isn't "pure" is how it affects the ability of Linux to compete with Windows. I tend to view this more as cruft removal, with the convenient excuse being a bad license. Motif is a dinosaur, and it's long past time to put it out to pasture. It was a great widget set in the early 90's, and pioneered a lot of the concepts (dynamic geometry management) that we now take for granted. But it was also big, slow, weird (tell me again why menus are a subclass of the row-column widget?) and buggy. And it hasn't gotten any better over the last decade. Frankly, the idea that it "competes" with Microsoft's various GUI libraries (or Gtk+ or Qt, for that matter) in any meaningful way is kinda humorous.
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My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 17:41 UTC (Thu) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] Removing it because it is obsolete is fine. Just don't mention the licensce because to me that has zero validity.
This may have been a bad example but my general point stands. I've seen far to much focus recently on removing software from Linux distros because it isn't "pure". I care about Linux being a viable alternative to Microsoft. I do not care about it being 100% compliant with some particular idiological stance. In particular I take a negative view of moves towards an idiological stance that is counter productive to Linux being a viable alternative to Microsoft.
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 18:32 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] I'm not sure where you're getting this "ideological stance", but licensesare about legal issues. I'm assuming that RedHat's paying customers have certain expections (in the legal sense) about what they can do with the software delivered to them. If the software doesn't meet with the customers expectations, you'd better fix the situation or they find a supplier who meets them better (in this case, in the legal sense). > Linux being a viable alternative to Microsoft Hm. Hasn't it been better than what MicroSoft offers for at least 10 years? At least to me it has; it's freely available, freely modifiable, freely distributable, of great quality, even of large educational value etc. All this is enabled by the license under which it is distributed and the effect that this license has on the community working on it. Yes, it could be /easier/ to use, but that will come with time (along with the "migrating morons" :-)).
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 18:45 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] I think you should ask the 95% of user base who use MS products. The main reason they stick to it is that they have everything available without having to look for a driver, look for a software on the net, because it's simply installed when you buy the machine. And if there is something to install from the internet, like an update, you don't need to find out where you can get it, it's all centrally located and the CD knows where to go if not.
With a inux distro that removes components one after the other, you leave people with more hunting to do to be able to get mp3 working, GUI for older programs, PDF reader within web browser...
But if FC wants to make it easier to switch to Ubuntu, Suse, or any other distro out there, they seem to be on the right track.
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 19:19 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] > With a Linux distro that removes components one after the other, you> leave people with more hunting to do to be able to get mp3 working, > GUI for older programs, PDF reader within web browser... Maybe those kind of people[1] are not the main customers for RedHat? I would image them to be more comfortable with something like Linspire which according to Wikipedia: "includes proprietary software on its installation CD, such as Adobe Reader, proprietary drivers and support for MP3, DVD, QuickTime, Sun Java, Adobe Flash, Real Media, Windows Media." [1] RHEL customers probably build their own distro on top of RedHat SW and normal Fedora users hopefully are competant enough to write a script to automate installing whatever extra stuff they want. I've myself haven't used RedHat since 1996 because it never had enough (free) software for me and SUSE has been removing stuff I use in each release, so I'm moving away from that too...
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 1:52 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
And software? Does your windows system come with anything more than (sometimes) Office and (eventually) some basic CD/DVD recording software? Sure, you have Windows Update, but isn't any "modern" distro packager even better (updates/installs all programs, not only Microsoft ones). As a Linux user, but not a Linux fanatic, I know it has lot's of shortcomings in relation to Windows or OS/X, but this points seem completelly wrong on all accounts. I can agree with you on the hardware part if you only talk about Laptops and brand PCs, but at least where I'm from they are the minority (and not forgetting you would get the same on the few pre-installed Linux boxes available).
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 13:09 UTC (Fri) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] I used to think the same as I focused on Windows 98. But I recently installed a Windows XP system for my spouse. Everything came preinstalled, it updated itself (at my request) with the latest patches (from the internet), without me having to find the right web site to get the stuff. That PC came preinstalled with Word Perfect, media player, internet browser, graphics suite, vector drawing stuff. All for CAD300.
Before doing this (I want to stay as much as possible away from Windows), I wanted to install a Linux system with Windows emulation for the software she needs on Windows. Cross stitching software DOES NOT exist on Linux. A good 3D CAD software does not exist on Linux. I quickly stopped this path as I had to setup either Xen or VMware and spend days/weeks (since I'm no expert with all that stuff).
I'm sorry to say that Linux is not ready for the regular people and removing software that is won't help Linux adoption. All my boxes use Linux, as I can deal with it. When it comes to setting up a box for a standard user, I'm not able to do so and I can understand that people with less computer knowledge than I won't want to go through this pain.
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 13:55 UTC (Fri) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105) [Link] "Cross stitching software DOES NOT exist on Linux."
You've got to be joking. A quick Google reveals
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 20:05 UTC (Fri) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] Did you try it ? I did.
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 18:25 UTC (Fri) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] Well, the only problem is that you cannot get Linux pre-installedand pre-configured (with an upto-date distro you yourself prefer) for your broadband connection (email accounts etc). Hm. Actually I think some providers are giving Nokia 770 (Internet tablet using Maemo Linux) to their broadband customers... Anyway, If you need to install Windows (XP) yourself, that's a world of pain compared to installing Linux. Just installing the virus scanning software feels to be about on same scale as installing one of the smaller Linux distros. Virus checking software taking nearly 1/2GB of disk, running all the time half a dozen processes and doubling your machine's bootup time seems quite extravagant. Well, that might be slightly exaggerated, but I'm actually looking forward to MicroSoft taking care of that... They've created all the security holes, so who's better at patching them? ;-) Admittedly there are still some special apps for which there's not as good (or cheap?) alternative on Linux as on Windows and for gaming Windows beats Linux hands down, at least when it comes to bleeding edge 3D and quantity. But for normal Office and Internet usage I think Linux is pretty good. E.g. Xandros home edition is 31 euros, or were you comparing Windows of which you pay quite a bit against Linux which you get free? If the Linux distro doesn't offer that many packages, then getting the SW often requires installing them from the sources and although this is doable for a knowledgable computer person, there's no way computer novice going to do it. Hopefully Linux systems at some point stabilize enough at the system, GUI toolkit and package naming level, that using packages from other distros unmodified becomes feasible. (Debian offers alien, but I'm not sure how it handles package deps)
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 20:40 UTC (Fri) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] I know that it is very difficult to find a Linux pre-installed. From what I've seen, it exists, but those businesses fold up pretty quickly because even once "properly" installed there are lots of quirks to fix and you end up having quite a bit of support to do when you can't offer such a service.
Try to install a printer, if you're lucky to have a driver available, you will need to know where to get it. Most geeks know that linuxprinting.org will get that fine, but the unfortunate who types linux-printing.org instead gets some parked domain name.
Linux is about how good you are at googling, most of the time. I did not google a single time to get the XP box working. Instead I was able to browse local help to understand why I needed to setup the network 3 times through their wizard every single time I wanted to change one parameter.
It sure is easier to cry about the big PC vendor not offering Linux than setting up a business that will sell PCs with Linux pre-installed and ready to work in 30 minutes.
Windows emulation on linux Posted Sep 3, 2006 23:30 UTC (Sun) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link] I wanted to install a Linux system with Windows emulation for the software she needs on Windows. I quickly stopped this path as I had to setup either Xen or VMware and spend days/weeks (since I'm no expert with all that stuff). I had a very easy time setting up Windows emulation with qemu in fedora. Do it like this:
rpm -Uvh http://fedoranews.org/tchung/qemu/0.8.1/fc5/2.6.17-1.2174_FC5/qemu-0.8.1-2.fc5.i386.rpm
That will boot the emulated system from the windows installation CD. After you install windows, the system will reboot. Finish the installation, shut down the emulated windows the way you normally shut down windows, and close qemu. After that, you can boot the emulated system from the hard drive instead of the CD, as follows: qemu windows.img -localtime -k en-us -monitor stdio -usb -usbdevice tablet -soundhw es1370 -cdrom /dev/cdrom -kernel-kqemu -m 512 The -kernel-kqemu switch makes windows run a lot faster (but you can't use it while installing windows -- windows will hang). Once everything is set up correctly, you should be able to run qemu full screen (Ctrl-Alt-f) and not even notice the emulation overhead. Hope this helps.
Windows emulation on linux Posted Sep 5, 2006 15:41 UTC (Tue) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] Thanks for the info. I guess it was to difficult to put it in the qemu documentation. Once again, lack of easy user support. Even if you know where the software is, info is very hard to find.
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 18:42 UTC (Thu) by EmbeddedLinuxGuy (guest, #35019) [Link] I care about Linux being a viable alternative to Microsoft.We need an alternative to MS, but unless the alternative is Open/Free then all you'll achieve is replacing one proprietary monopolistic system with another. What would be the point of that exercise? Just don't mention the licensce because to me that has zero validity. History shows that people who don't care about the license and "just want something that works" are wrong. Bitkeeper, anyone?
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 18:54 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] Linux is already open/free. I don't see why all the software components have to be. The good thing about open is that you allow competition and choice for the user.
For example, if you want PDF reader, you have the choice between the proprietary one, or the open source ones. I personnally prefer the closed-source one for it's integration to Firefox, but I don't mind using Kpdf for the odd document that doesn't read properly with acroread (which is kind of funny since they're supposed to have created the format).
I'm sorry but Linux is far from being monopolistic, and preventing closed-source software from spreading on Linux is creating another kind of dictatorship that already exists on MS Windows. I frankly don't want to have the choice between two dictatorships.
Being open means accepting the other. If it's bad, it will fail anyway.
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 19:55 UTC (Thu) by EmbeddedLinuxGuy (guest, #35019) [Link] Linux is already open/free.It's great, isn't it? So why sell out your freedom now for a proprietary application. I don't see why all the software components have to be. They don't of course. Fortunately in this case there is a nice free component available, thus no need for OpenMotif. Using non-free software is a bit like eating human flesh; yes, you should do it if you haven't got any other options, but it's better for society if people avoid it as the default. The good thing about open is that you allow competition and choice for the user. There are a lot of good things about being open, and not all choices are good. There is a lot of competition and choice within the context of free software; including proprietary vendors does not necessarily lead to more long-term competition and choice. preventing closed-source software from spreading on Linux is creating another kind of dictatorship I did look up "dictatorship" but could not find a use that applies to Fedora or other distros preferring free software.
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 21:18 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] "why sell out your freedom now for a proprietary application."
I didn't sell my freedom. I can still uninstall the software at any time if I feel it doesn't meet my needs. Since I didn't pay for it, I won't feel I've been screwed by the company, unlike when I buy a software to find out it's not what I want but I can't return it for refund since I opened it. Freedom is about choice. Freedom is unrestricted access.
"Using non-free software is a bit like eating human flesh; yes, you should do it if you haven't got any other options, but it's better for society if people avoid it as the default."
What kind of comparison is this ??
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 22:28 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I didn't sell my freedom.Sadly, using a proprietary application is indeed selling out your freedom. You often lose your freedom to study the software, to use it as you see fit or to lend it to others. At the very least you lose the freedom to modify it and distribute modified (custom, patched, extended...) copies; otherwise, it is not proprietary. I can still uninstall the software at any time if I feel it doesn't meet my needs.I wish it were so easy. Many proprietary programs hold your data ransom (like these not-so-amusing examples we saw here last month). Others hold on to your hard disk like a virus. Yet others become so "standard" that you are forced to use them, often at work. Freedom is about choice. Freedom is unrestricted access.Sorry, but no: freedom is freedom and unrestricted access is unrestricted access. Unrestricted access to, say, tactical nuclear devices is not freedom; while Red Hat provides freedom but not unrestricted access. Freedom is not either about choice, most of the time. Even if you can choose between XP Professional and XP Home Edition, that is a very poor freedom indeed. Freedom to do things and freedom from unpleasantness I can understand; freedom to choose the lesser of two evils I do not want.
My Concern Posted Sep 5, 2006 15:49 UTC (Tue) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] Sorry, but no: freedom is freedom and unrestricted access is unrestricted access.
I suggest you open a dictionnary since unrestricted access is part of the definition of freedom n my Collins. If you want to argue this, I'm not the one to do it with. Contact them and good luck arguing.
Webster chooses the words "Unrestricted use" instead.
My Concern Posted Sep 5, 2006 19:29 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The American Heritage Dictionary also says "freedom" is "Ease or facility of movement" and "lack of modesty or reserve", and I don't think you mean that. Dictionaries are general in use, and "freedom" is a generic term which can be many things in different contexts.That is why Stallman chose to define the four freedoms which pertain to software. "Unrestricted use" is one of them; "unrestricted access" is not there. That is because unlimited access is not a precondition for free software; not even for open source. If you want those definitions changed, I suggest you contact the authors. Good luck arguing with Stallman and Raymond :)
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 20:08 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] I'm sorry but Linux is far from being monopolistic, and preventing closed-source software from spreading on Linux is creating another kind of dictatorship that already exists on MS Windows. I frankly don't want to have the choice between two dictatorships.You're starting to sound like Hugo Chavez. ;-)
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 21:22 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] Based on his accomplishments, I'll take that as a compliment. For someone criticizing the US foreing policy, being named by a US magazine must mean something...
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 23:55 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] Yeah, and I'll bet there's a CIA plot behind this whole openmotif thing too.
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 2:08 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Hugo Chavez is a complete nutter.
It's one thing to critize U.S. foreign policies, but it's quite another to use U.S. as a scape goat as you and your friends consolidate political power and seize control of economic assist to the complete detriment of your own country and your own citizens.
My Concern Posted Sep 1, 2006 13:58 UTC (Fri) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link] "It's one thing to critize Iraq foreign policies, but it's quite another to use Iraq as a scapegoat as you and your friends consolidate political power and seize control of economic assist to the complete detriment of your own country and your own citizens."
Certainly works both ways, doesn't it? Chavez *may* be a nutter (I don't know enough about him really to form an opinion on that), but if he is, he's in good (so to speak) company.
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 19:11 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Just don't mention the licensce because to me that has zero validity.I guess that is because you are not a distributor. Or a redistributor -- imagine you had to make a living out of delivering Linux to your customers, you had to modify the default qmail binary and the license forbid it. Imagine you cannot repackage a custom Ubuntu for your family and friends. I do not care about it being 100% compliant with some particular idiological stance.Licensing is not ideological, it is a fairly practical issue. It is what allows you to modify and customize free software to your liking. Having a solid base to stand upon is important if your business is going to depend on software. In this case, the Open Group requires that you distribute Open Motif solely "on, with, or for operating systems which are themselves Open Source programs". The license requires you to worry about licensing of all other pieces; if you want to distribute this thing you have to be holier than Stallman. I think it is a delightful irony. In particular I take a negative view of moves towards an idiological stance that is counter productive to Linux being a viable alternative to Microsoft.No offense, but I think you have some conceptual confusion there. Linux is no alternative to Microsoft -- Microsoft is a company and Linux is a kernel (or, in the broad sense, a family of operating systems sharing a kernel). To deliver a comparable system (or, as current parlance has it, a "stack") as Microsoft provides, you have to mix software from very diverse sources: Linux from kernel.org, GNU utilities, X libraries, OpenOffice.org suite (from Sun), MySQL (from MySQL AB)... If all of these pieces carried incompatible licenses nobody would be able to put together a distribution. If any of these programs had licenses which prohibited distribution of modified versions, distributors would be unable to patch the software if, say, a security flaw was discovered. Of course if any software came without source code or with an NDA, you would not be able to learn what your computer is doing without the author's permission. Finally, if lawyers have to disentangle a web of n*n interactions, where 'n' is the number of non-free licenses in a distribution, you have better keep a large legal department; this leaves community distributions out in the cold. Again, no ideological stance. Frankly, if you think these things are not important, practical issues and you dislike Microsoft so much, then you might be better off with other alternatives like Mac OS X.
My Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 22:14 UTC (Thu) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] Linux isn't just a kernel. For better or worse the word has come to encompase the whole enchalada. You and I may know and care that it is in fact made up of many different components, some of which pre date the Linux kernel by a decade or more but to the average consumer/business that is all useless detail.
I understand your point about incompatible or overly restrictive licenses and don't disagree. In those cases distributotors will have to make a choice, as will consumers. If the outcry against non free software in Linux were just over such situations I wouldn't really care.
What I do care about is people calling for the removal of all non free software. Even in instances where the risk is minimal or non existent and the cost is high. Device drivers for instance.
Cripple Linux and you strengthen Microsoft. Cripple Linux and you make Bill Gates and associates very happy people.
My Own Concern Posted Aug 31, 2006 23:46 UTC (Thu) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link] "Cripple Linux and you strengthen Microsoft. Cripple Linux and you make Bill Gates and associates very happy people."
The increasing prevalence of this argument from people like you and ESR is what concerns ME. You know, not everyone is obsessed with using Linux only because it harms Microsoft or makes Bill Gates angry. For many of us, they are totally irrelevant. The "Free" part of Free Software is not about cost or convenience, it is about being able to do what I want when I want with my computer. If this is too "ideological" for you, so be it, but IMHO Linux would not be where it is today if people had decided earlier on that compromising on the freedom was just fine so long as it hurt Microsoft enough. So what if this means Linux won't take over the world tomorrow, I don't see how closed-source-Linux-dominated industry is any better that a Windows-dominated industry.
My Own Concern Posted Sep 2, 2006 6:42 UTC (Sat) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] You clearly don't understand where Bill Gates and Microsoft are heading. You won't be able to run Linux on anything if they win the day. Think about DRM and the implications of some of the hardware initiatives associated with it.
Also, as I've said before... Your freedom is fine so long as it doesn't impinge on my ability to make choices and get work done.
Free alternatives Posted Sep 1, 2006 22:53 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] What I do care about is people calling for the removal of all non free software. Even in instances where the risk is minimal or non existent and the cost is high. Device drivers for instance.You will appreciate that the goal of such removals is not to bother people, but to encourage the development and adoption of free alternatives. These alternatives are important especially for device drivers: imagine what would happen if Microsoft were to buy ATI and nVidia tomorrow with their huge cash reserves, and withdraw their proprietary drivers; they could even remove permission to distribute the last available versions. A lot of users would get burned instantly and leave the platform in droves. While a gradual removal of proprietary drivers can be handled more or less gracefully. If you are talking about firmware binary blobs, then I'm not sure about their legal status. From what little I've read about it, it is hard to know what would happen if publishing companies turned evil. It is however easy to see that free versions would have no problems, so nurturing free replacements would still seem to be a worthy goal. In both cases you are right that suddenly removing all proprietary bits would be instant disaster, but a gradual replacement and removal policy doesn't seem so far out to me.
Free alternatives Posted Sep 2, 2006 6:45 UTC (Sat) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] Free drivers will always lag. And if past experience is any indicator they will lag significantly. Reverse engineering takes time and is seldom perfect. Throw in the fact that there are provisions in the digital millenium copyright act that make reverse engineering illegal and the picture gets even more grim if the scenario you outline were to happen.
Free alternatives Posted Sep 2, 2006 10:53 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Free drivers will always lag. And if past experience is any indicator they will lag significantly.The majority of drivers on my Linux system are at least as good as their proprietary counterparts. I don't see them lagging in any significant way. Only graphics drivers, and only for 3D, and only for modern cards without specs, and only from ATI and nVidia, lag. This is a transient status: past experience seems to indicate that free drivers will eventually get there (as they have for Wi-Fi cards) and then surpass proprietary equivalents. We are already there for Intel, and with the recent acquisition of ATI it might change faster than we think. [...] there are provisions in the digital millenium copyright act [...]Those provisions are only for copyright protection measures, do not fear.
My Concern Posted Oct 5, 2006 20:57 UTC (Thu) by Rotwang (guest, #40943) [Link] Big? Slow? Weird? Buggy? IMO all those adjective apply to GTK+ much more than to Motif.
Motif appeared "big" and "slow" on 1992 vintage computers with inefficient operating systems (no shared libraries... 16 MB RAM... etc). Today, Motif's HD and memory footprints are tiny compared to GTK+. And it's much faster. Of course, the reason for this is that it lacks many of the features of GTK+. Many of these are very useful (e.g. lots of great widgets), some are quite useless. I have worked with Motif for 10+ years, with Qt for a few years, and on and off with GTK+. If you find Motif more weird than GTK+, I suspect that you haven't given it a fair chance. Also, in my experience, Motif had by far the lowest defect/bug count of ANY widget set I've ever worked with. I say "had" because early versions of OpenMotif 2.2 added some really nasty bugs. And of course, many programmers will blame Motif if their badly written application doesn't work as they expect.
Enough of that rant. Most of you aren't interested in such conflicting opinions anyway. My real issues with this decision are:
1. While LessTif compiles and runs most Motif apps seemingly okay, it is several orders of magnitude more buggy, so it causes apps to crash or otherwise misbehave much more often. Which will easily turn off users of excellent applications like DDD or NEdit. The thought that a maintainer thinks that just because an app compiles and starts up with LessTif means that switching is no problem gives me the creeps. QA is obviously not a concern in Fedora.
2. LessTif is ugly as sin -- it doesn't implement the CDE/Motif 2 look (thin frames, etched-in menus, etc) which makes any Motif app look much better once you set 4 resources in your .Xdefaults file.
3. Many corporations, including mine, write vertical/application-specific software in Motif. The OS of choice is very often Linux. Switching from Motif to a buggy, incomplete, hardly-worked-on clone just because the license is "more open" is not an option. Yes, they can get OpenMotif elsewhere and link statically or include libXm.so with their software. But this move makes it harder, breaks old distributions, and generally adds work. Why do they still use Motif? (a) Because it does what they need it to do, (b) because the few bugs in it are well known and so are the workarounds, (c) because rewriting millions of lines of code isn't something you do on a whim and certainly not to a widget set that changes its API in incompatible ways every three months, (d) because the users are satisfied with it.
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