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What 2008 May Hold In Store for FOSS
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Dec 31, 2007 01:11 PM
from the hoping-for-nothing-but-good-things dept.
from the hoping-for-nothing-but-good-things dept.
eldavojohn writes to mention that LinuxPlanet has a brief discussion on what 2008 may hold for FOSS. The list includes thoughts on KDE 4, OOXML, DRM, and 3-D desktops. What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to in 2008?
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opengl console (Score:5, Interesting)
Not perhaps the highest priority of the FOSS world, but sometimes you just gotta go with 'it`d be fun'.
Re: (Score:2)
You could render the terminal on OpenGL, but that would affect any program run on the terminal, not just bash.
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
If it ever does that, I'm going to tcsh.
I'm going to have nightmares you
jerk insensitive clod.
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"It looks like you're trying to pipe three dozen commands together
"It looks like you're trying to telnet to a server
"It looks like you're trying to use awk and grep
Re:opengl console (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:opengl console (Score:4, Funny)
Aha, you must be one of those Gentoo people
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There was a point where the head security guard was like "dust for prints on the shift and control keys; keys geeks use, but other people don't". I remember thinking "that's a pretty good idea".
My hope for 2008 in FOSS (Score:5, Funny)
More Linux games! :( (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do they keep selling themselves to DirectX instead of OpenGL? GRRRR!
Re:More Linux games! :( (Score:5, Informative)
Because DirectX and OpenGL are not equivalents. OpenGL is only an API for drawing graphics; with DirectX you can not only do graphics, but you can also handle sound, input, networking, and more. The only open source equivalent to DirectX that I'm aware of is SDL, which is perfectly usable, but honestly it's not nearly as powerful as DirectX is. If you want just as much power, you'll have to go hunting through half a dozen common different alternatives for every aspect of your game, and none of them will work on every Linux system out there.
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Re:More Linux games! :( (Score:4, Insightful)
Those two can most certainly be compared.
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Re:More Linux games! :( (Score:5, Interesting)
There are 2 reasons Microsoft has a hold on the games market:
1. They provided a decent, well-supported solution first (well by the time they got to DX7 or 8 anyway)
2. Big games developers can't just change the way they work without a very VERY good reason.
The only way we can expect a shift in Linux support in games is if Linux market share gets to about 20% and ATI/nVidia really start supporting open source drivers properly so Linux drivers can as fast (if not faster) than the Windows ones. It will happen... it'll just take time.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Loki tried it, and failed miserably. There really isn't that much demand out there.
Actually, I believe that Loki were very successful, as in, the company was profitable and the business model worked, and everything company wise was ok... The problem, from what I understood was more of the CEO and his wife using the companies funds as their personal bank account. Even if not, though, don't forget that Linux has changes substantially since 2002! In 2002 I would have never considered giving my sister any distro of Linux. Now my sister is dual booting openSuSE and Ubuntu debating with herse
Won't happen (Score:3, Funny)
I also understand that some of the more recent portions are written in Perl 6.....
Free Beer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Free Beer (Score:5, Funny)
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heh, half mentioned in the summary (Score:3, Interesting)
The other half is FreeBSD 7. Given it is on RC1 now, it'll be there in Feb is my guess.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
it was originally supposed to have the final build on Dec 12. In the new schedule, RC1 was Dec. 12 and it wasn't built until last friday morning (Dec 28), RC2 was Dec 26, and not out yet. Beta4 (not listed on the page) was, I believe, second week in Dec, and not Nov 28.
It's perpetually late. But perpetually late is better than badly bugged.
Had to be said (Score:5, Insightful)
Clueless (Score:2)
Huh?
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What does it matter if the other APIs are Windows only? I thought competition was a good thing. The fact that WPF is tied to Windows do
Truly 2007^H8 is the year of Linux on the desktop (Score:2)
2008: The year of the Linux desktop! (Score:5, Funny)
What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to. (Score:5, Insightful)
Same with the novel (or insert song, program, etc in here). You might have (and without copyright likely would have) been paid to write the story in the first place. Once you've been paid to write, you write the novel. Now, you can choose to only give it (or you could technically sell it) to the people who already gave you money, but the bottom line is you will have already been paid to write it. Once it's done your part is done and if people want to make copies of it to sell, or to give away, that's their own concern. If you want to keep raking in cash you better have written a story good enough that people are willing to pay you to write another one. And you better be willing to write a number of "sample" stories to begin with if you want anybody to start reading your stuff.
With music, it's even easier. You could in the same way be paid to write the songs, or more likely you would be paid for live performances (ie, you are actually gonna have to get out there and do work again).
With software, GPL isn't needed because if you release a closed source version of my code I'm just gonna decompile it, reimplement the changes in a high level language, and rerelease it again. If you want to be paid for software, someone will end up hiring you to do a custom program for them (ie, you must work, not live off imagined entitlement), or you can write free stuff and charge to support it (again, working).
You also have to understand that not EVERYTHING will/would be feasible with copyright gone. It's a shift of society, but for the better. I'm sure if we reinstituted slavery we could achieve some absolutely marvelous feats in construction and such, but that doesn't mean it's something that a fair society should support. I seriously doubt large scale motion pictures as they currently stand would still be realistically profitable (though live theater certainly might return to a much more profitable status). That's not something we can't live without though, and it's certainly not worth instituting insanely oppressive laws over.Copyright instills a limited supply (and source) onto something that by nature is unlimited (and not really even tangible). It's one of the most perverted corruption of economics ever seen.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Copyright instills a limited supply (and source) onto something that by nature is unlimited
I am glad to say this is wrong. First someone has to write whatever it is, and copyrights give them an incentive to write it. Therefore copyrights are more likely to make sure something is written, and therefore increases the supply, than not having copyrights. As it is now, a writer does not have to copyright something, they can instead put whatever they create into the public domain. And how many books, movie
Samba 4 (Score:3, Interesting)
How about fixing what we have now? (Score:5, Interesting)
When most Open Source apps were small, simple and fast I could tolerate the inevitable bugs, and assume that they would be fixed up in the next release. Now it feels like everyone is working to add more and more features and "widgets," but no-one is worrying about overall stability and reliability.
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Check the Coverity Scans (Score:3, Interesting)
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If the GTK and Windows ports of WebKit can get to a state where browsers for the rest of us can be based on them, then maybe Firefox can
What they're missing (Score:4, Interesting)
This will be the open source response to the blurring lines between CPU and GPU task-wise, as the vector computing tasks could be done much quicker on the GPU based on the advances of LLVM, and applications will benefit transparently. It will be very cool.
OLPC vs clothes (Score:5, Informative)
Please do not send any more clothes. You've already killed off the local textile industry and put all the cotton farmers out of work with your free clothes. Who can compete with free crap? Please stop.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1076411.stm [bbc.co.uk]
I no longer donate clothes for exactly this reason.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As silly as this sounds coming from a Linux user.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've yet to try setting my Linux box up as a iTunes library sharing server (which makes sense with the Macs in the house but the media on my Linux desktop), but if that's not easy to maintain (adding/editing content) I'd like to see improvement there. I suppose that falls into the network media sharing server that's compatible with iTunes as a client category.
Also, the traditional complaint about having to fiddle around. Why should I have to assign keystrokes to 8 of my 12 mouse buttons for it to work across everything (comfiz-fusion/kde, wine/wow, fluxbox, etc)?
Correction... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:3d desktops? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the idea was offload the desktop onto the GPU (who wouldn't be doing anything anyways until a game is loaded), which in theory would free up more CPU cycles for the regular old processor.
Secondly, you can supposedly get better vector graphics and quicker response with a 3d engine for a desktop. The best example of this is of course not Linux for the Nintendo DS. Most 2d looking games for it are actually using a 3d engine because its easier to code for and less intensive on the CPU.
That and it looks just as good at any resolution and screen DPI. It wasn't as big of an issue, but if you have a 30" monitor with an unreasonably high resolution and try to increase the size of your icons on a 2d desktop that doesn't use vectoring... You will notice how pixelated everything looks.
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Re:I KNOW I KNOW! (Score:5, Funny)
Quick someone call the japanese. They can build it. It would be awesome even if it didn't have any weapons. Just walking around the MSFt campus would be great for laughs.
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Re:I KNOW I KNOW! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not trying to say we should necessarily support a company that has a lot of bad practices, but they create a huge market for us to make money. When they release a new OS, they beef up the minimum requirements for it and in turn brings prices of last gen products down in price for us to use.
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Re:I KNOW I KNOW! (Score:5, Insightful)
Joe User gets a lot of email. He tends to be organized, so he likes to sort his mail into different folders. He could use procmail or his client's filtering capabilities, but why should he have to? OSS has good solutions to the text classifying problem [sourceforge.net]
If only the email client (or imap server) paid attention, he's already supplying all the input necessary for a text classifier to sort all his mail for him without any additional action on his part.
When Joe (manually) moves an email from his inbox to a new folder, this is a training event.
If Joe notices that an email is in an incorrect folder and moves it (manually) to the right one, this is a retraining event.
This concept could be expanded to other applications: how about a window manager that remembers where you tend to arrange your applications and starts putting them in the right place to begin with? The ability do manually set placement rules like with KDE doesn't count. That's just a workaround for not using the information the user is already providing.
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Re:HURD (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Proves my point (Score:4, Informative)
Tech website speculating about the future of FOSS in the next year.... yeah... it happens. That's great that no one will remember who predicted what. That's not the point of the exercise. The point is to discuss it NOW for the heck of it. It most likely has nothing to do with hating religion.
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