thelinuxlink.net

Okay, it looks as if the Fedora guys are getting closer to the FSF's goal of a Free Java platform, quoting some release notes from the Fedora Wiki:

This release of Fedora Core represents another big step down the free Java path.
Through the introduction of the completely free software stack java-gcj-compat that runs native and bytecode Java, Fedora can now compile and run software written in Java without relying upon proprietary and closed Java machine implementations.
The excellent Fedora Java development team of Red Hat and community hackers have built many popular Java-based or Java-using packages utilizing java-gcj-compat for this release. These packages, which include OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, Apache Tomcat, and Jakarta, are now compiled and run on a 100% free and open software stack.
We included a complete set of packages and development goodies in Fedora Core 5 for Java technologies. Fedora Extras also has many Java applications: the popular BitTorrent utility Azureus, RSSowl, and others, all powered by gcj-java-compat.

Looks like I can finally continue my Azureus addition without being forced to use Sun's non-Free Java platform. Oh man, I really hope the BSDs will adopt this soon, so that the Java nightmare can end, because that is just a big pain the the butt.

Tsuroerusu wrote:Okay, it looks as if the Fedora guys are getting closer to the FSF's goal of a Free Java platform, quoting some release notes from the Fedora Wiki:.

Actually, Fedora Core 4 had a free Java stack. A lot of work has been done by Red Hat to get GCJ up to snuff. I think it's just closer to compatibility with Sun at this point.

FC4 was released with a version of Open Office that works with GCJ and not Sun's Java, and a huge amount of work went into that. Of course it makes sense that Red Hat would want to support Java to differentiate themselves from Novell (and Mono).

With Fedora you get both Java AND Mono.

Gomer_X wrote:Actually, Fedora Core 4 had a free Java stack. A lot of work has been done by Red Hat to get GCJ up to snuff. I think it's just closer to compatibility with Sun at this point.

Yeah, Red Hat has for the longest time wanted a Free Java platform, and the work that they have done to achive that is absolutely commendable.
I really hope that the GNU project gets GCJ to the point where Sun is with their 1.5 version of Java right now.

Gomer_X wrote:FC4 was released with a version of Open Office that works with GCJ and not Sun's Java, and a huge amount of work went into that.

Yeah I seem to remember that, the FSF made a big stink about OpenOffice not working with a Free Java platform right?

Gomer_X wrote:Of course it makes sense that Red Hat would want to support Java to differentiate themselves from Novell (and Mono).

With Fedora you get both Java AND Mono.

Well, in terms of the product both companies deliver, I highly prefer the stuff Novell does, and something I like about their good old "SUSE Linux" is that there is still a boxed retail version of it, that "feature" alone almost gurantees a good quality product, because I doubt anyone woudl buy it if it wasn't very stable and well tested. Also, SUSE provides both a good GNOME and KDE experience, the KDE experience you get with Fedora is just sad and miserable, if you want KDE, go get SUSE or Mandriva, that's what I'm saying.

[soapbox]
I used to use Red Hat in the 7.3 and 8 days and always really enjoyed it and tried Fedora for a bit as well. I know that some people don't like RH because they are all corporate and all, but I think that you have to give RH big props because they have always been great kernel contributors (Alan Cox), great GNOME contributors (Havoc Pennington), and they really believe in and advocate the Free Software model. They are a true Linux company, and a great community member. Some people gripe that they have not included mp3 support or whatever for awhile, but the fact that they have stuck to their guns is admirable. Maybe I am biased because I live in the city where RH is headquartered and I know some people that work over there, but they really do "get it."

I remember when testing RH 9, I had a problem with X11 LCD probing on my nvidia card. I filed a bugzilla report and got into a discussion with some of the RH X11 guys. They *all* used ATI cards because of the Free drivers that were available. They believed that strongly in not tainting the kernel.

I don't really have a point here other than to say that I think RH is a great company and so this move with regards to java is not surprising.
[/soapbox]

Chess wrote:I used to use Red Hat in the 7.3 and 8 days and always really enjoyed it and tried Fedora for a bit as well.

Fedora is actually quite a good GNOME distro if that's the desktop you prefer, but I really think they do a terrible job with KDE, that old-ass super outdated BlueCurve theme looks like a pile of crap compared to the shiny new Clearlooks theme on GNOME. With GNOME it's very good no doubt about that.

Chess wrote:I know that some people don't like RH because they are all corporate and all, but I think that you have to give RH big props because they have always been great kernel contributors (Alan Cox), great GNOME contributors (Havoc Pennington), and they really believe in and advocate the Free Software model. They are a true Linux company, and a great community member.

Absolutely, Red Hat is a very good company, no doubt. I actually played around with Red Hat Enterprise 4 AS and CentOS for a server, and that was a really good experience, great commandline tools to enable and disable serivces, and good use of yum. Red Hat is great for servers, no doubt about that, I love it for that, because it's so simple to configure and maintain, they've just done a wonderful job of making that a breeze to do.

Chess wrote:Some people gripe that they have not included mp3 support or whatever for awhile, but the fact that they have stuck to their guns is admirable.

It is, in fact, if it weren't because I would loose sound quality I would have converved my entire music library to OGG a long time ago. One thing that annoy me about the whole IPTV/vidcast/video podcast thing, is that people are litterally granting Apple a monopoly by all using their freaking H.264 codec, sure it gets you good quality, BUT NOT EVERYONE CAN DECODE IT LEGALLY, FREAKING APPLE WHORES!!!!!!!!!!!

You know what we need? We need to get H.264 features into XviD ASAP and make it super duper easy to encode and find good and optimal settings to encode with!

Just to quote the Fedora website:

Why can't Fedora play mp3 files?

Why is mp3 the standard? Because it's better than everything else out there?

No. mp3 is the standard because its creators licensed it broadly to spur its adoption. Then, once it was the de facto format, they started to enforce their patents aggressively and restrictively.

The Free and open source multimedia codecs such as the Ogg family of codecs are superior, and they are not patent-encumbered. Never have been, never will be. That's why we support Ogg Vorbis (lossy) and FLAC (lossless) for general audio, Speex for speech, and Ogg Theora for video.

For those people who insist upon using mp3, it's not difficult to figure out how to get these players. Still, we'd much rather change the world instead of going along with it.

Chess wrote:Maybe I am biased because I live in the city where RH is headquartered and I know some people that work over there, but they really do "get it."

I remember when testing RH 9, I had a problem with X11 LCD probing on my nvidia card. I filed a bugzilla report and got into a discussion with some of the RH X11 guys. They *all* used ATI cards because of the Free drivers that were available. They believed that strongly in not tainting the kernel.

I don't really have a point here other than to say that I think RH is a great company and so this move with regards to java is not surprising.

Yeah, I'm curious of what software it is that Red Hat includes which makes Richard Stallman not like it, aren't it all free- and open source software?

Actually one of the only things that I strongly disagree with Red Hat on is the position of the Linux desktop, when they jumped to primarily focus on servers with Red Hat Enterprise and created Fedora as a community project, they said it was because they didn't see the Linux desktop going anywhere soon, and even back then I think that was a very false position to take, that's the only thing I think they should have done differently.

I started with RH 5 and used it until around around 6.2. The whole customized version of GCC debacle in 7.0 was the final nail in the coffin for my personal use plus I wanted to try out other distros. It's a fine company who have been trailblazers and shown how a company can be profitable and still adhere to the F/OSS tennants of conduct. They are solid contributers in many areas. I've tried talking to them on numerous occasions and with no success. I guess they didn't like Dan's hoagie guy story! Oh well life goes on. I'll try to grab someone from the Fedora project in Boston. They might be a little more receptive.

Tsuroerusu wrote:that old-ass super outdated BlueCurve theme looks like a pile of crap compared to the shiny new Clearlooks theme on GNOME.

haha, I agree with you there.

It is, in fact, if it weren't because I would loose sound quality I would have converved my entire music library to OGG a long time ago. One thing that annoy me about the whole IPTV/vidcast/video podcast thing, is that people are litterally granting Apple a monopoly by all using their freaking H.264 codec, sure it gets you good quality, BUT NOT EVERYONE CAN DECODE IT LEGALLY, FREAKING APPLE WHORES!!!!!!!!!!!

You know what we need? We need to get H.264 features into XviD ASAP and make it super duper easy to encode and find good and optimal settings to encode with!

Amen to that!

Actually one of the only things that I strongly disagree with Red Hat on is the position of the Linux desktop, when they jumped to primarily focus on servers with Red Hat Enterprise and created Fedora as a community project, they said it was because they didn't see the Linux desktop going anywhere soon, and even back then I think that was a very false position to take, that's the only thing I think they should have done differently.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think they were trying to take the most conservative route and playing the odds of what would enable them to survive as a viable company. Frankly, I think it is tough to make as a company that offers alternative operating systems. I think RH figured that if they can establish themselves as viable enterprise player first, then they can always dip their toes into the home market later. I think it's harder to go the other way around (home first, then enterprise), as Mandrake found out, IMHO. Still, they could have probably handled it better.

Patrick wrote:I guess they didn't like Dan's hoagie guy story! Oh well life goes on. I'll try to grab someone from the Fedora project in Boston. They might be a little more receptive.

Haha! Yeah, you're probably right about that. That's ok -- the hoagie guy story is priceless.

Patrick wrote:I've tried talking to them on numerous occasions and with no success. I guess they didn't like Dan's hoagie guy story! Oh well life goes on.

What are you talking about that was funny as all hell man!!

Patrick wrote:I'll try to grab someone from the Fedora project in Boston. They might be a little more receptive.

Yeah, hackers at trade shows are almost always willing to talk for a few minutes, 'ey maybe you'll run into Alan Cox

Chess wrote:Yeah, I know what you mean. I think they were trying to take the most conservative route and playing the odds of what would enable them to survive as a viable company.

Yeah, the server market is still bigger than the desktop market, so maybe it may have been a wise decision, I don't know.

Chess wrote:Frankly, I think it is tough to make as a company that offers alternative operating systems.

Yeah, you can say that again, Mandriva is once again in serious financial trouble!

Chess wrote:I think RH figured that if they can establish themselves as viable enterprise player first, then they can always dip their toes into the home market later. I think it's harder to go the other way around (home first, then enterprise), as Mandrake found out, IMHO. Still, they could have probably handled it better.

Dude, the new management at Mandriva are a bunch of dickheads, they're just your typical office dickhead who doesn't understand free software or open source at all.

Mandriva should just stick to their roots and provide a great solution for end users, and maybe use their new preload deal with HP to get some cash in the bank, and stuff like that.

You heard about them firing Gael Duval, the founder of Mandriva? He was like gold to Mandriva in my opinion, that guy really understands the ways of a free software desktop.

It's too bad, Mandrake/Mandriva was a good company with some good products, and has wonderful community support, oh well, I guess the suits always have to ruin everything that benefits end users.

At least Novell is doing some good stuff in the area of the community, they open sourced the stuff Ximian and SUSE kept proprietary for years, and opened up the development of SUSE to the public, and when they acquired Immunix they open sourced AppArmor and opened it's development too as a sub project under openSUSE.

By the way to the Slackware fans in here, if you need some added protection on your servers, go check out Novell's AppArmor, I belive there is a port to Slackware available.

Tsuroerusu wrote:Yeah, I'm curious of what software it is that Red Hat includes which makes Richard Stallman not like it, aren't it all free- and open source software?

For RMS, totally free is not enough. On a fresh Fedora install, you can open a terminal, su to root and do 'yum install gstreamer*' and have MP3 support. Stallman believes an OS is only free if you're not free to install non-free software.

Tsuroerusu wrote:Actually one of the only things that I strongly disagree with Red Hat on is the position of the Linux desktop, when they jumped to primarily focus on servers with Red Hat Enterprise and created Fedora as a community project, they said it was because they didn't see the Linux desktop going anywhere soon, and even back then I think that was a very false position to take, that's the only thing I think they should have done differently.

I don't recall Red Hat ever saying the desktop wasn't going anywhere. They decided to focus on the enterprise because they need to make money in order to survive. Had they done differently, they would be facing the same financial problem Novell and Mandriva are.

The result has been that they're financially healthy, and they still are innovating on the desktop. I believe Fedora is a more modern distro than they would have had if they hadn't turned it over to the community. Call that a bad decision if you want.

Gomer_X wrote:For RMS, totally free is not enough. On a fresh Fedora install, you can open a terminal, su to root and do 'yum install gstreamer*' and have MP3 support. Stallman believes an OS is only free if you're not free to install non-free software.

Hmmmm, well the mad library is licensed under the GPL, so it's Free software, and GStreamer and a lot of it's plugins are GPLed as well, hmm weird.

Gomer_X wrote:I don't recall Red Hat ever saying the desktop wasn't going anywhere. They decided to focus on the enterprise because they need to make money in order to survive.

I think they said something like "We don't see the Linux desktop as an opportunity, if you wanna use it, go ahead, but our focus is servers", I'm not quoting them here, but just trying to explain what I recall they said.
I didn't say they souldn't focus on the corporate market or enterprise class stuff, but they "could" just do what SUSE does, have a boxed version of their community project's product aimed at consumers including a manual and stuff like that, not necessarily support as SUSE does.

Gomer_X wrote:Had they done differently, they would be facing the same financial problem Novell and Mandriva are.

Well, Novell it's issues is caused by poor marketing I think, because their products are really solid, SUSE and Ximian are a good combination in my mind, and since Novell has been active in this industry with Netware for over 15 years, they have a quite sophiticated support infrastructure in place. Mandriva is having issues because the new management are trying to transition the company to being kinda like Red Hat, where you just focus on the corporate side of things, which was one of things Gael Duval disagreed with them on, he believes Mandriva should stick to it's roots and provide a good desktop OS for consumers, with their support and club services which saved their butt once before.

Gomer_X wrote:The result has been that they're financially healthy, and they still are innovating on the desktop. I believe Fedora is a more modern distro than they would have had if they hadn't turned it over to the community. Call that a bad decision if you want.

Well I think it's a good thing that they turned their community distro over to the community, don't get me wrong, and I certainly agree that desktop innovation is still coming from Red Hat in the form of AIGLX, NetworkManager, and a few other things. As I stated in an earlier post, the only thing I disagree with Red Hat on is that there are an opportunity on the consumer level side of the desktop, because they do have an enterprise desktop with support and all that stuff, but what I'm talking about is something that SUSE's consumer product which used to be called SUSE Linux Professional and SUSE Linux Personal, but today it's just called "SUSE Linux".

One thing I noticed is that it seems that SUSE and Novell never really merged into one company, to me it seems as if Ximian actually was merged with Novell, but SUSE seems to kind of still be more of an entity of it's own, though owned by Novell. For example, at FOSDEM, you could clearly see the difference in the talks the SUSE guys gave, they did refer to Novell a few times, but the way they talk was very different than the way the Novell guys actually talk about stuff.