thelinuxlink.net

After listening to NOA about Giver, I figure I would give it a look. I pulled down the sources and set to compiling. Well, lo-and-behold there were some dependencies that I could just not fulfill from the ubuntu repositories. For instance, notify-sharp. Now I could have gone old school and just grabbed all those sources and compiled the dependencies myself but I figured against it with the hopes that some day these might show up in Ubuntu repositories somewhere.

That got me thinking about Novell and my past experiences with them. While they make good on releasing their sources, a lot of the work they seem to be doing requires a good deal of their own dependencies. I'm on the fence whether this is always a good thing. What happens when they release a binary only dependency that makes it next to impossible to get said code that depends on this binary to work under different distrobutions. I guess that is the case against closed software there.

Why does Novell, like Linc, hate freedom?

dann wrote:That got me thinking about Novell and my past experiences with them. While they make good on releasing their sources, a lot of the work they seem to be doing requires a good deal of their own dependencies. I'm on the fence whether this is always a good thing. What happens when they release a binary only dependency that makes it next to impossible to get said code that depends on this binary to work under different distrobutions. I guess that is the case against closed software there.

Novell's desktop distros, be it SLED or openSUSE, in this case with GNOME, is not just a stock GNOME, it has a bunch of tweaks and stuff that makes some things a little nicer for some people. Giver is some small file-sharing thingy for GNOME, and that notify-sharp thing sounds like some sort of notification through Mono. If you don't want to compile these dependencies, I'd suggest just stop bitching, because then it's pretty much your own decision. Novell is not hating freedom for actually utilizing software freedom by adding features to a program (In this case GNOME)! You have the source! So you can just take it, and modify it to use something else. It sounds to me like you semi-view Novell, who's distro is an RPM-based distro, as being sort of obligated to make sure some new stuff that they're working on FOR THEIR distro, works on the distro you use, Ubuntu. That's your decision to use that stuff.
Also, Linspire has had proprietary stuff of their own (CNR) in their distro for years, and I've not heard anyone complain about that (I don't mean the proprietary drivers and other GPL violating stuff), is it just because you're a poor Ubuntu user that Novell doesn't support? *

dann wrote:Why does Novell, like Linc, hate freedom?

Well, that depends, Linc seems to occasionally get software freedom (Clearly defined here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) confused with freedom of speech and/or freedom of thought.




*) Sorry about that little dig Dann, but I like to make these sorts of jokes, because I see so many Ubuntu bitching about frickin' everything.

NOW NOW Troels, dann has made some valid points , no need to brandish him with a Katana Novell do tend to develop on there own accord, having the corporate product to sell, they are sure to put enormous amount of work on getting that right.
To counteract my sentence Novell are not alone, try getting one of ubuntu gui configuration tools to work easily in slackware...
I think you take RPM to close to your heart, Dann never mentioned them once, i don't know why you connected novell and RPM with Danns constructive criticism.

Bringing Linspire into the picture is just derailing, that distro may even vanish soon,..

allix wrote:NOW NOW Troels, dann has made some valid points , no need to brandish him with a Katana

Don't worry, it's never been drawn.

allix wrote:Novell do tend to develop on there own accord, having the corporate product to sell, they are sure to put enormous amount of work on getting that right.
To counteract my sentence Novell are not alone, try getting one of ubuntu gui configuration tools to work easily in slackware...

Yeah, like the "restricted drivers managed" for example, although I wouldn't recommend that you use that on any distro!

allix wrote:I think you take RPM to close to your heart, Dann never mentioned them once, i don't know why you connected novell and RPM with Danns constructive criticism.

I mentioned RPM, not because I take it dear to my heart (Although I do prefer it over Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeebian ), but to demonstrate how ridiculous it would be to expect Novell to make sure that THEIR stuff ran on other distros that their own. This is not what Novell is about, if you want to use their stuff on another distro, they're happy with that, and they'll likely accept a patch if you find a problem, however to expect them to make sure that some new developmental experiment that they're doing would work for people wanting to test it on another distro is just plain out ridiculous in my opinion.

allix wrote:Bringing Linspire into the picture is just derailing, that distro may even vanish soon,..

Ummm no? I contrasted the fact that Dann is bitching about Novell doing an experiment as part of their own community distro project, and releasing it under a free software license that allows Dann to take the code and make it run on whatever he desires, to Linspire writing something proprietary, that you couldn't even move to other distros legally and nobody bitching about it.