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Neil Williams wrote: > > WE MUST TALK ABOUT FREEDOM - continually. That could get tedious ;) >>It certainly >>would make no sense to me to use Rhythmbox, with its truly hideous >>auto-resizing table, when iTunes is available. auto resizing table? Sorry I'm missing something about Rhythmnbox here, sure the interface might not be inspired, but the only resize I can see is the first time you play a track, when it redraws to show the current track and artist at the top. Compared to most music players, its refreshing lack of attempts to look like the hideous silver coloured plastic monstrousities of physical CD players, would seem a plus. The interface doesn't have to be constrained to the symbols people chose to stick on tape decks in the days when sequential access was a physical requirement. Ah - I see the resizing table issue - hmm never had a problem with it myself. Do you want it fixed? > If you learn nothing else about GNU, remember this: > GNU is primarily concerned with tomorrow, not today. We suffer the > inconvenience now on behalf of those who will benefit from retaining our > freedoms into tomorrow. I really don't see the inconvenience any more. Unless you mean the slow startup due to using gcj for Java support of the Wizards in Open Office 2? I'm pretty much accepting that all general purposes operating systems have their issues. Every time I touch Windows (or MacOSX) I'm surprised at the extensive shortcomings these platforms have. Matt moans at the lack of a Flash player that supports the latest elements of flash, but I left Windows for the lack of Icon programming language (amongst other issues). Although I note that both Windows and MacOSX now have Icon. There will always be some applications missing on some platforms (at least till how we produce applications changes radically, by then platform will be irrelevant). Certainly the development platform side is far better catered for on Debian, and if you want these sorts of tools on MacOSX, you end up in a minority area running it under X. In that sense, source code availability is perhaps the major differentiating feature remaining. The issue that could come unstuck is around if there is sufficient motivation without the direct financial motivation shrink wrap software sales produce, but judging by the rate of arrival of packages in Debian unstable, the answer is no. What I could do with is easier selection of hardware, i.e. finding out what is really supported well, and what isn't (and this applied to Windows as well, MACOSX - hmm haven't bought one of those). > VB masks the problem because the runtime library is a monolith. Stop skipping to implementation detail. There are good and bad technical decisions made in all software, how the process works to correct bad decisions might be relevant, but specific issues aren't. I don't think the methods of handling runtime library changes in VB is a specific proprietary issue. Neither is backwardly compatible APIs in shared libraries, implementation of recognisably modern Unix shared libraries date from at least 1988 in SVR4, and SVR3 had something simpler, and the current Linux model reflects what SUN were doing a few years later. Choosing proprietary languages like VB has long been regarded as a dubious option. However standards based languages are only better when there are competing interoperable implementations, or ideally a free software implementation (since that creates the possibility of porting the language in future, rather than rewriting to code). However there are a number of ideas here, that need careful seperation. For example many businesses argued for "Open Systems" as a way of providing the same API from several vendors. And I think there is business value in this, over and above any value added by free implementation, of course multiple free implementations might be the best possible solution. For such reasons, in the absence of submarine patents, or other mysterious action by Microsoft I expect Mono may outlive Microsofts interest in .Net, even if it is never used as widely. > The ideology is why we are here No it is why some of the people are here. > it is why we have GNU/Linux in the first place and it is the ONLY thing > that will ensure that GNU/Linux continues into the future. Aye. > Compromise is unacceptable. Only if you feel it is a point of principal for you. $ vrms No non-free packages installed on derek! rms would be proud. Reading the discussion one could be led to think that MP3 players are not available, when in fact most distros have perfectly fine MP3 players. Redhat removed MP3 players from their distros because they were worried about the legal issues, mostly due to the position on software patents in the US, of course being free software projects outside of Redhat they didn't disappear because Redhat didn't ship them. Although to be honest, how a process of encoding spectral transforms for compression of sound can get a patent these days is a bit of a mystery, Fourier died in 1830. http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_80mm.html The free software movement is quite healthy, but the bigger threat I think is this desparate desire by content providers to control content and formats via patents/DRM etc. Possibly the right thing to do, is kick them when we can. Perhaps the FSF should speak nicely to the developers whose code was purloined for the Sony DRM tools. I mean we know it was run on over 500,000 machines, Sony may owe a lot of money. Certainly the publicity from this will make DRM a harder sell, but it isn't surprising, as we've been saying nobbling a computer so it can't copy data from one disk to another isn't the way of progress. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html