James Gosling claims that there’s a patent grant for Java, but he does not understand the issues fully. Here is what he says: There has been a big debate about implementation languages in the Gnome world. It’s been all over the map, but one point of concern has been a set of formless dreads about […]
Joining the club promoting the O’Reilly conference, see my talk on D‑BUS. Also, rml stole my title! But I plan to go listen to him anyway, and perhaps buy him some beers. D‑BUS development looks like it’s moving again, at least a bit: Michael Meeks, Jon Trowbridge, Olivier Andrieu, Thomas Leonard and others on the […]
Of course I have to agree with Luis that sticking as close to trunk as possible is best — that’s one of the big reasons we switched to the 6‑month time-based releases, to keep “what the developers are working on” and “what users are using” as in-sync is possible. If you want to see wasted […]
Four new desktop developers joined Red Hat in the last week; keeping me busy. One of the slides at my linux.conf.au talk on the desktop was Commercial Involvement Will Grow, and I had these bullet points: Companies have contributed relatively little to the desktop so far; perhaps a tenth of what’s been contributed on the […]
More text on how usability will never happen in free software. That article is spot-on when it talks about how usability is more than adding some easy config tools on top of an existing system. I also love the accurate point that technical users don’t like the broken bits either. But after two years I […]
Bad Bush. Gave a short talk about the desktop at the Red Hat World Tour event near MIT yesterday; lots of people showed up for the talks, including Richard Stallman. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–03.html#30)
Since people are asking about the AFL again, here is the story. The idea of the license is to be an X/BSD-type license written in proper best-practice legalese (see below). There’s a patent clause right now that was well-intentioned but kind of broken; a revision to address the patent concern is supposed to be in […]
Christian writes: As for the (l)ongoing language debate I think we need to allow for people to both use Java and C# (or any other language) that has a big enough community around it to ensure that bindings are kept up to date and follows the development of the rest of the desktop. I agree […]
Miguel writes: Havoc, you are skipping over the fact that a viable compromise for the community is not a viable compromise for some products, and hence why you see some companies picking a particular technology as I described at length below. To be clear, I don’t mind if companies unilaterally choose a technology to use […]
Miguel summarizes my argument as “we need to pick Java to avoid fragmentation,” I’d put it more generally “we need to pick a viable compromise,” again my attempt to summarize options people have brought up: Stick to C/C++ for the forseeable future; possibly enhanced by UNO or XPCOM or equivalent. Build a third language and […]