April 28, 2008
freesoftware, General
13 Comments
I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 from 7.10 today – I set the upgrade going when I went away for lunch, half hoping that it would be done when I got back. So here’s my experiences so far.
- The upgrade stopped with a question screen after about 15 minutes. The installer wanted to know if I wanted to replace one config file which I have never touched with the distribution’s version.
- After that, the install blocked a further 9 times, one time for an OpenVPN password, when I would have much rathered it carry on without starting the VPN, and eight further times for config files. I had only changed one of these files since my previous upgrade, and would have liked that file to be kept without a question being asked.
- After rebooting, my screen was filled with error messages from crashing applet, many of whom have not been installed on my panel since I upgraded from 7.04 (because they didn’t work with 7.10).
- Apport was nice enough to offer that I create bugs for each one, which I tried to do, but apparently there was a problem with Firefox after the upgrade due to a release I’d previously installed separately, so that didn’t work until I restarted Firefox, at which point it worked swimmingly. Some bugs reported in Launchpad, but I really lost track of where I was at.
- Upgrading Gossip lost old account information. Apparently the DTD for accounts.xml changed, and the new version of Gossip can no longer parse the old accounts file. Bug reported.
- The Xrandr applet works again, after being broken in 7.10. Nice.
- Dasher still crashes when changing language or dictionary, or when importing training text. Hitting F1 in Dasher does nothing. The Dasher manual installed doesn’t correspond to the Dasher user interface. Bugs reported.
- Suspend/resume gave me a black screen the first time. I know stuff is happening when I open the lid; the wifi indicator shows that I have network, the hard drive light is flickering, but I have no screen. I’m hoping it’s a one-off, and that it’ll work now.
All in all, not what I’d come to expect from Ubuntu, although not an unfamiliar experience for me over the years. Perhaps a straight install would work better than a second dist-upgrade on a system that has actually been lived in. I haven’t tried everything yet, obviously, and I’m looking forward to seeing if there are any improvements in the support of my webcam’s driver – although I’m not holding out much hope.
April 21, 2008
freesoftware, General, marketing
10 Comments
Lots of people are up in arms because Red Hat’s desktop team released a statement containing this: “we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future”, and Ron Hovsepian said “Novell’s Suse Linux at the desktop is unlikely to be popular with consumers in the next three to five years”. To me, this is not defeatism, it is simply an example of positioning in action. Last year at Solutions Linux in Paris, I did a little experiment, designed to show that Mandriva have a problem with their positioning. I asked several people to tell me what market they thought the following popular distributions targeted:
- Red Hat
- Novell
- Ubuntu
- Mandriva
The answers were unanimous:
- Red Hat: Enterprise servers
- Novell: Enterprise desktops
- Ubuntu: Consumer desktops
- Mandriva: Ummm…
Read the rest…
April 15, 2008
General
7 Comments
There are two questions about Creative Commons for which I don’t really have an answer, I thought that this might be a good place to ask.
- Can a company use CC BY-NC (or any other NC licenced) music as hold music for its phone system? Since it’s a company, playing the music to eventual clients, at least one person I know has decided that he’s not allowed to use NC music for this purpose, but there doesn’t seem to me to be any commercial application of the music here. Is this a grey area, or is there a clear-cut answer one way or the other?
- Can I distribute a translation of a document released under CC BY-ND-NC? Or does a translation count as a derivative work? And if I can publish the translation, does it also have to be under BY-ND-NC?
Update: The consensus seems to be that the answer to (1) is “this is unclear” and the answer to (2) is “of course I can’t”.
April 1, 2008
General
5 Comments
In what I fear may be the start of a stream of bad news today, France have made public their decision to abstain in the OOXML standardisation vote. This comes the day after it was reported in the media that France planned to vote against standardisation.
Like others, I’m disappointed to see these announcements made on the eve of the deadline, since it gives no time to either side to argue their case for a change in vote. One French commentator has commented “it now looks like OOXML will become an ISO standard”. He has more information than me on the subject, but if many more countries change their abstentions to positive votes, or their no votes to abstentions, then the chances are he’s right.
March 27, 2008
freesoftware, General, work
16 Comments
I was talking to someone yesterday (who will remain unnamed) about perhaps providing a modified version of some GPL software for them. Unfortunately, he told me that his hands were tied on the issue since a directive came from the head legal guys that the company was not to distribute any GPL software which might, eventually, be infringing on the company’s patents. Why? Because to do so is to make a promise, on behalf of the company, to provide a royaly-free worldwide irrevocable patent licence grant to users of the software. Once the Pandora’s box is opened, the patents are worthless.
At least one person has told me that the guy was probably just politely telling me that he didn’t want to pay for what I was offering, and that the whole patent thing was just an excuse. That’s certainly possible, but in this case, I don’t believe it to be so. I’ve heard “no thanks, we’re not interested” often enough that I know how to recognise it.
If this is true, I am sure that these guys are not alone – there are companies out there who are consciously not participating in free software projects for fear of losing the opportunity to monetise their patent portfolio.
Am I the only one who finds this state of affairs perverse?
