<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Andy Green escreveu: <blockquote cite="mid44291494.2070003@warmcat.com" type="cite">Eric S. Raymond wrote: (...) <blockquote type="cite">But the art problem pales compared to the issue that everyone has been ducking, which is Fedora's support for DVDs and proprietary audio and video and web-streaming formats and Java applets. That is to say, its </blockquote> ... <blockquote type="cite">It's 2006, people. The Web is fifteen years old. Even non-techies have had a decade to form expectations about what constitutes a base </blockquote> Supporting Flash seems to soak up most of the problem that can be solved, eg, youtube, Google Video, and if you have 32-bit firefox you can have it. Seems the only answer for Quicktime and such is the corporate mantrap that is Mplayer, it makes no sense for Redhat to invite attack on their cash by playing that game. There is no limit to the number of dangerous proprietary formats that one could address by that logic. </blockquote> <div align="justify">This kind of argument only shows 2 things: <ol> <li>RedHat/Fedora people are absolutelly unable to deal with major manufacturers (Adobe for Instance) and have good versions of Flash/Shockwave and (Apple) Quicktime. Curious thing is that my Apple Mini (a real wonder) runs OS X Tiger (that is a *NIX system) and has no problems with flash, shockwave or PDF files... as well as don't have problems with device drivers. </li> <li>RedHat wants, in the mid-range/long term to have a "commercial product" where those "facilities" and other "utilities" are sold at a price...</li> </ol> </div> <blockquote cite="mid44291494.2070003@warmcat.com" type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite">Let's start with the basics. For a consumer OS to be unable to play MP3s and handle podcasts is just plain not acceptable, not in the world after iTunes. Red Hat/Fedora's duck-and-cover on this would be understandable if the Fraunhofer patents blocked decoders, but Fraunhofer itself has only dunned for royalties on *encoders* -- thus Red Hat/Fedora has ceded to Fraunhofer rights it has never claimed. </blockquote> I don't know about it, it would be lovely if Fedora had MP3 out of the box. However again the caution is commendable, because having mp3 out of the box for a while followed by RHAT getting nuked for many millions of damages and unable to continue with its very widespread contributions to many projects would not be a good trade. </blockquote> Well, you Fedora/RHAT people can make the World believe that OGG/THEORA is the word... just like IBM tried to convince that OS2 was the word... but then you had to purchase a set of compilers at US$800,00... or face the hell trying to run gcc... Consequence: a 10000 feet pit-fall... Who dares with OS2 nowadays? <blockquote cite="mid44291494.2070003@warmcat.com" type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite">AVI. Quicktime. ASF. MPEG. DVD playback. Flash. Java. These are </blockquote> Well Java seems to be coming along via gcc. Flash exists in a non-free form. AVI is just a container format, the problem is more the varied codecs that can be used on the data inside it. IIRC you can buy a licensed Linux DVD decoder app somewhere.</blockquote> <div align="justify">The java that comes along with GCC runs only about 10-20% of Java Applications in market. Want examples: try to access any Brazilian bank using "Fedora standard Java". You'll get stuck... But why would people try to access his bank acount from his own computer? A little walk is healthy... So each loving soul under the Sun have to download Sun JRE (at least) or the complete JDK. Flash for Linux literally sucks... it is slow, and again there is no support for shockwave. People says that's due to the needs of using ActiveX for ShockWave run... I'd say that the status of Java within GCC is the same status of wine... an unfullfilled promise. </div> <blockquote cite="mid44291494.2070003@warmcat.com" type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite">*not optional* in 2006, any more than the ability to read Microsoft Word files in a word processor is optional; if we try to treat them that way, consumers will blow Linux off. Evangelizing for SVG and Ogg </blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">3. We can buy the rights to the technologies we want as a straight commercial transaction from the patent-holder. </blockquote> Let me imagine the negative case. RHAT and the community are drained and pummelled by a limitless number of patent attacks they are forced to defend once they get into that game of either entering the grey zone or getting their wallet out. Even JPEG is a danger area. Unless the strategy includes turning off the patent attack tap somehow it seems an unlikely "way forward". </blockquote> <div align="justify">Even being alive is in a danger area: you can die at any moment. Recent events show that you even can die because a B-737 piloted by an insane freako crashes against your building... So law issues are a joke. Want to get rid of them... simply open a subsidiary in a country that does not sign international patents laws and release the job from there... But if dangers are to be listed, Fedora should be stripped from X-Windows (issued by Xerox and disputed by HP), and most other things... like disk access drivers (patents by IBM), tape access drives (some patents from IBM and others from several companies), video-device access methods (NVIDIA and others), diskette support (IBM), ISA/EISA support (IBM), etc... etc... etc... In software market everything is gray zone. You issue MySql and AFAIK it is not really "open source", but them you stripe it (so RHEL can have the full flavour and the others don't). And you take care of compiling everything in non standard directories, so if you want to download the "real thing" from MySQL you have to completelly uninstall what comes along with Fedora distribution and take care of all dependencies. And NEVER EVER use yum again... under the risk of uploading a module that will screw everything. You may not know, but what was done to PHP in FC-5 is a shame. There is no f_ck_g way to make international encoding to work well. setlocale(LCC_ALL,'pt_BR') stopped working as well as any other setlocale. Modules previously present in RC4 "disapeared" just with a simple yum update. They were removed from system without any question of the kind: "The f_ck_g module will be removed, you agree? <yes> <no> <info>". Result: I upgraded a server in 20 minutes and everything stoped to work... that meant 20+ hours of straight work of coding and recoding (man, I had to code calendar months and other stupid things) to have the basics running back. By the way, I got sick cause of that, so I am able to issue RedHat (rs rs rs). Traditional programs as phpBB and phpCA just don't show Portuguese characters if I define encoding as iso-8859-1 in /etc/php.ini but if I define it as utf8 some other things wont work either... They say that's a bad combination between PHP and MySQL (typical), but code WAS working earlier. That's a hell of life... Not to mention /var/log/messages /var/log/httpd/errror_log getting bigger and bigger with standard programs... with things like... php: $_SERVER[...] not defined... 'HTTP_ALL' for instance... Other anoyance is that, after upgraded to FC5 some problem with sensors code started a stupid window saying that my processor was overheating and frequency was being downed. Not once... but a message per second until server stops... Obviously I don't work in a morgue, but temperature is controlled around 20C... and besides that hardware checks showed no problem with the box ... Solution: get the kernel source, recompile it, reinstall it and start everything back. "Just a little work", but if you're not a systems analist or programer or anything like that (I mean, if you just receive a box to do a specific work) you will have bad times... USB behaviour is poor. I have an OV511 device that sometimes is initialized and sometimes not. At this exact moment, the system is not identifying my camera... but if I do something like: modprobe OV511 I get a turrent of videodev errors... Standard procedure: use M$ method: shut down, power off, power on... Oh... why in the hell I didn't fill a bugzilla??? (rs rs rs). The same happens with flash memories (pen drives) and even a f_ck_g printer (EPSON STYLUS CX3500). In this case we don't even have the correct drivers in the system. We have to make the box "imagine" that it is working with a CX3200. Don't have cartridge monitoring and anything like that... And system zeroes cartridge counters as fast as I type this e-mail... and that sucks to disconect the printer, connect to a M$ box, run SSCSERVER (yeah, russians really do great jobs), zero the cartridges and bring the printer back... Other anoyance is that every time you issue a complaint, you people treat us as assholes... just like if we don't know anything of what we are complaining about. The case for RAID1 is typical... Now it seems more people are complaining about and it is impossible to say that thousands of flies are wrong... We send all the reports the system gives us and most of time the answer is that there is just not enought information to do anything... Seems that you've learned with M$ what a customer support is... By the way, with RAID1 and LINEAR, the system dies without registering a single line anywere... just get stuck. Obviously I can instrument the drivers to see what is going on... but I do much doubt that any correction will be included in main-stream code, just cause I'm not "Fedora partner", the "code is not tested" or "is uncomplaint with other things" or... because in the future you can be issued by using my GPL code... </div> <blockquote cite="mid44291494.2070003@warmcat.com" type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite">really would be time for those of us who care about the future of Linux to find a commercial partner with more ambition and more guts. </blockquote> Why not do that anyway if they are so easily found. -Andy </blockquote> Casimiro Really pissed off... </body> </html>