Linux Desktop needs less commercialism [LWN.net]

Linux Desktop needs less commercialism

Posted May 24, 2005 12:12 UTC (Tue) by ranger (guest, #6415)
In reply to: Linux Desktop needs less commercialism by purslow
Parent article: What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

Yes sir, please look really closely: 15/16 packages for Linux are expressly for 3 commercial distros -- RH/Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva -- & only 1 is for a non-commercial distro, Debian.

Seems you're confusing commercial with Free ...

Another leading non-com, Gentoo, has a package available in Portage, which has been created by Gentoo's highly competent volunteer devs.

Well, at the time those distributions were released, NX was not GPL.

At present, NX is in Mandriva 2005LE, the commercial distribution that also has a few highly competent volunteer devs (one of whom packaged NX).

But, your argument is irrelevant for proprietary software ... especially the kind Gentoo may not distribute in distfiles ...

Unless of course you were recommending that everyone should statically link binaries (as Gentoo users would have had to do before NX was GPL'd), or implyng that the "highly competent volunteer devs" from Gentoo wrote the GPL version of NX from scratch?

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Linux Desktop needs less commercialism

Posted Jun 3, 2005 15:08 UTC (Fri) by zakaelri (guest, #17928) [Link]

What the Gentoo devs do for proprietary packages is write an encapsulating ebuild, not rewrite the application itself.

Portage determines dependencies, & installs them. After that, they use the original installer to place the files in a "sandbox". At this point, they can swap in their own platform specific config files and do whatever else they need to prep the install. Then they merge the sandbox with the current filesystem.

They provide ebuilds for several proprietary apps (particularly games), and they all work this way. To name a few: sun-java, blackdown, ut2k4, point2play, & neverwinter nights (along with wine-nwn).