News.com has published a 2002 in Review piece on the open source segment of the technology industry. Open source had a very good year in 2002, even as (or perhaps because) the rest of the industry suffered financially. Linux made strides in adoption at large companies and saw some major improvements in power and usability, Open Office became usable, Microsoft started to get scared, and Sun finally succumbed to “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Most of all, even though scores of small companies went out of business as venture funding from the last millennium finally ran out, Open Source software is still around, and flourishing.
I applaud Open Source. Very soon Linux will be easier to use than Windows, and faster and more stable to boot. Of course all the MacOS X/BeOS/Amiga/OS2 users will stamp their feet and loudly complain, but what can you do? All those closed source OSes are abandoned and efforts to revive them are one step away from trying to communicate with the dead. And Mac users, give me a break! Your dinky 500MHz “supercomputer” isn’t faster than my PC. You’re just paying 2x the price for a nice case with 4x slower clock rate (2GHz -vs- 500MHz? are you kidding?)
“I applaud Open Source. Very soon Linux will be easier to use than Windows.”
I doubt that Linux will ever be easier to use than Windows. The very nature of its UNIX ancestry makes this a very difficult taks to accomplish.
And not only that, but most Linux programmers don’t care. what the end user wants. They only care what they want. And an operating system that is easier to use than Windows isn’t usually very high on their priority list.
Eh? What crack art thou a-smoking, good sir? Have you tried it lately? It’s unbelievably slow to load (developers are still apparently learning what “modularity” means) and program response latency is horrid no matter what your system specs. I think. Maybe hyperthreading makes it faster? It’s practically unusable on my P3-600 and only marginally better on my P4-1600 with 512MB of RAM under Win2K. Plus the filters are still messed.. AbiWord 1.03 does a better job of .doc files.
Bah.
Wake me when OO isn’t one massive binary masquerading as several different programs.
*(for reference: Word 2000 loads in >3 seconds on my P3-600 without “fast Office startup” enabled.. that is, I deleted the startup entry for Office 2000. So, no, pre-loaded components have nothing to do with anything here)
nice troll, very good job! I applaud you, sir. Would you perchance be a member of the Slashdot community too?
“And not only that, but most Linux programmers don’t care. what the end user wants. They only care what they want. And an operating system that is easier to use than Windows isn’t usually very high on their priority list.”
LOL….tell that to Red Hat, SuSE (largest employed linux development staff), Mandrake, Lindows, Lycoris, Xandros. Linux will eventually become easier to use than Windows. Its all a matter of time. The linux installation of all of the above distros is far superior and easier than XP by a long shot. Next on the list is installing and uninstalling apps easily. You have to remember that development under linux is about 10 times faster than that of Windows. The very latest installments from the above are really nipping at XPs heals in terms of functionality and ease of use already. Im curious to see where Linux will be in 2005 when the next version of Windows (Longhorn) is scheduled to be released. Since M$ typically only releases a new OS once every 3 to 5 years and most linux distros have a new release 6 to 12 months, I think Linux will have the advantage…..but thats just my opinion. I could be wrong.
years ago, on usenet, they said that Linux would never be cross-platform. Now it can run on PPCs, MIPS, SPARCs, etc. in addition to x86.
Years ago, on Usenet again, they said that Linux would never have good networking capabilities and would never have the scalability of other Unices. Now, it is the most used *nix, and very soon would conquer the Internet server market, and later on, other server markets.
Years ago, they said Linux would never have any other desktop other than CDE. Now we have KDE and GNOME which is inching their way closer and closer to the quality of Windows and Mac OS.
Years ago, they said Linux would never be easy to install. Now, it is perhaps the easiest part of Linux, and most distributions are even more easier to install than Windows itself.
I can go on and on, but I think you are basing your theories on history itself. If history always had its way with Linux, you and I wouldn’t be talking about it now.
“LOL….tell that to Red Hat, SuSE (largest employed linux development staff), Mandrake, Lindows, Lycoris, Xandros. Linux will eventually become easier to use than Windows”
I doubt it because of the nature of Linux. And on top of that, Red Hat’s and SuSE development staff combined is a fraction of the size of Microsoft’s development staff. And they only have a fraction of the money to spend on usability studies and such.
If there is one thing Microsoft has done well, it’s listening to what the average end user wants. Linux vendors don’t do that as well. They are more interested in targetting the server arena.
“The linux installation of all of the above distros is far superior and easier than XP by a long shot.”
Might be true. But how many end users install their own operating system? So I don’t see it as all that important.
However, what about installing software? The average end user finds InstallShield a lot easier to use than rpm by a long shot. So if Red Hat is so interested in ease of use, why are they still using rpm? Why haven’t they developed an InstallShield like tool?
“You have to remember that development under linux is about 10 times faster than that of Windows”
Development of Linux is faster in some areas. But the GUI system isn’t one of them. The problem up to this point is that making Linux easier to use is largely not in the hands of the Linux developers. It’s pretty much at the mercy of the KDE and GNOME developers, and the XFree86 team. And god knows what have the XFree86 developers are smoking. :p
“Years ago, on Usenet again, they said that Linux would never have good networking capabilities and would never have the scalability of other Unices.”
I would argue that this is still correct. Linux still doesn’t scale well past 16 way processing. And its NFS support still sucks pretty bad.
“Now we have KDE and GNOME which is inching their way closer and closer to the quality of Windows and Mac OS.”
It’s getting closer, but it still has a long way to go. And granted KDE looks pretty nice, but IMHO, the QT widgets are pretty ugly compared to the MFC framework. The GTK widgets are even uglier.
And like I said, the problem for Linux is that the task of making it easier to use is mostly out of their hands. It’s at the mercy of the KDE, GNOME, and XFree86 developers.
“It’s getting closer, but it still has a long way to go. And granted KDE looks pretty nice, but IMHO, the QT widgets are pretty ugly compared to the MFC framework. The GTK widgets are even uglier. ”
Oh… Yes, I will admit that QT and GTK are both major improvements over Motif. But then again, that didn’t take very much.
Personally, I like the FOX toolkit better than both QT and GTK. I think it produces some pretty decent looking windows and such. And its also more cross platform and has bindings for more languages.
i see XFree86 as the major thing that’s holding Linux on the desktop back right now
many people blame the X protocol, but that’s not accurate because commercial X servers run very well
and XFree86 is developing very nicely, just slower than the rest of Linux…i can’t wait until they finally go multi-threaded and improve performance
i use Red Hat Linux 8 on my laptop and i find very few reasons to boot into linux, basically courses that require windows programs (such as VB and MS Office…yuck), and a few specialized programs that i like to use that only run under windows (Wine barfs on them still)
but as far as web surfing, listening to music, document creation, and hobby programming, Linux functions as well or better than Windows
-bytes256
“Very soon Linux will be easier to use than Windows, and faster and more stable”
You act like Windows isn’t evolving as well. Just because you can get newer versions of GNU/Linux more often, does not mean that Microsoft is standing still and not working on Windows.
Talk to me when they fix the Linux directory structure and software install problems. And don’t tell me that apt has solved the problem. It has helped, but is still not anything that the average user would use. Without these being fixed, there is no way in hell Linux will be easier to use than Windows.
-G
Christmas season, an FNAC store at Spain. Where there used to be piled boxes with the latest Suse, Mandrake and Red Hat Linux operating systems, now you only find Microsoft products galore. Linus is missing in X. Are the vanishing linuxettes ‘communicating with the dead?’, I don’t think so, just in bad shape.
However I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Mandrake has been ‘communicating with dead’ users via e-mail, asking them for more and more money, because their business model is worldwide great…
The necromail goes like this: “Good news, business model is more solid than ever. Bad news, we need $4Million USD fast or we go under.” (http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/future.php3)
Future looks bright for Red Hat Linux, future looks dark for the rest of them. Meanwhile the Beast, convicted and all, is getting away with the antitrust case (not very scared), it is also increasing staff when everybody else is cutting jobs. And this is a good year for Open source?
For me, the 2002 Open source deception has been Xandros Linux, great expectations, same old, same old result. In 2003 I’m looking foward to see the release of the ReHMudi distro (Red Hat multimedia) and of the Chandler PIM (osafoundation.org).
What exactly about the directory structure needs fixing? Should Linux instead do what Windows does, and put everything either in C:WINDOWS or C:WINDOWSSYSTEM? How is that any better?
And don’t tell me Win is easier to use, I was installing Win2k the other day. After installation, I went to install updates, just like one would with any Linux distro. However, with Windows, you have to reboot after installing certain updates, and others must be installed independently of others! In the end I ended up having to run windows update maybe 10 times, and reboot like 5 times! Damn! On RedHat you run up2date once, maybe reboot if there is a new kernel, and that is it.
Also people say “Oh ease of use is not Linux developer’s priority, Linux developers despise making software easy to use, etc.” That is not true. What is true is that volunteer developers have limited time so they work on what they want to work on.
Instead of bitching about Linux and trying to bring OS/2 and BeOS back from the dead, why don’t you whiners contribute some code?
simba: I doubt that Linux will ever be easier to use than Windows. The very nature of its UNIX ancestry makes this a very difficult taks to accomplish.
No one ever said writing a secure and stable UNIX kernel was easy. But it only took 1 man to start it.
simba: I would argue that this is still correct. Linux still doesn’t scale well past 16 way processing. And its NFS support still sucks pretty bad.
NFS is obsolete, might be replaced with sftp/lUFS or even samba/CIFS. And the scalability of Linux could have fooled me, but I guess most of the Linux supercomputers I hear about are clusters.
And how did Windows get tcp/ip? You don’t think the BSD tcp/ip stack was easy to use and came with IE, do you? The functionality is there, it just takes one of these corps like RedHat, Lindows, etc. to put it together and wrap a nice easy to use GUI around it. But the advantage of Linux over Windows in this case is that all the enhancements that get rolled into the GUI get copied to all the distributions. Bluecurve for example is a very nice theme that RedHat basicly gave to the community. Its a community effort to make a desktop the community can use. Microsoft is simply making a desktop that they’re targetting for people who don’t know anything about computers but got extra $100s to burn. There are only a few million people like that in the world. The rest of us want a cheap and useful tool to get our work done, not a $3000 word processor.
“And the scalability of Linux could have fooled me, but I guess most of the Linux supercomputers I hear about are clusters.”
Yes. They are Beowulf clusters. But internally Linux doesn’t scale well past 16 processors, unlike Solaris, for example, which can scale to at least 128 processors. What I am getting at is that Linux’s SMP support isn’t all that great.
Beowulf is nice, but requires special programming for an application to be able to take advantage of it. In contrast, any multi-threaded application can take advantage of SMP since the OS itself worries about what processor the thread runs on. The application doesn’t have to care. With Beowulf, a multithreaded application will not use the cluster unless it has been specifically programmed to be Beowulf aware.
This year we got low latency and much improved threading in the kernel. KDE has come of age and konqueror now has tabbed web and file browsing among other things. I especially enjoy the ftp, cvs and .tar.gz file browsing features. And desktop sharing is fully integrated into the GUI making partnered coding projects that much more enjoyable. Mplayer, Xine and Ogle made significant improvements for multimedia, now streaming DVDs, xvid ogms and quicktime content (dare I say legally?). But we can’t forget XFree86 and their work with Xvideo, DRI and all the drivers they’ve kept up to date. X may not be progressing as fast as some would hope, but you have to admit they’ve been holding their own, providing drivers for all the latest hardware without hardly any help from the hardware manufacturers. Its amazing how much work they do that goes unnoticed. It may or may not be threaded, but it plays my games and movies very well. Did I miss anything?
With Beowulf, a multithreaded application will not use the cluster unless it has been specifically programmed to be Beowulf aware.
Then why don’t they make a Linux system beowulf aware, sos we can get some multithreading for our applications?
I forgot XFS! The kernel now has ext3, reiserFS, JFS and XFS for journaling filesystems.
“Then why don’t they make a Linux system beowulf aware, sos we can get some multithreading for our applications?
”
Well, Beowulf is mostly a set of kernel mods, so it is an actual modification of the Linux system.
Linux does support mulithreaded programming natively. The kernel supports POSIX threads. With SMP, these threads can run on multiple processors with no special programming on the application side. But Beowulf requires that the application know about the cluster in order to be able to run threads on different nodes.
Look into MOSIX if you want clustering that doesn’t require special programming on the application side. MOSIX can run threads on different nodes without the application having to be specially programmed. I’ve heard that MOSIX doesn’t perform as well as Beowful, but that’s the price you pay for the additional overhead that makes the clustering transparent to the application I guess. Of course, with MOSIX, any multithreaded app can supposedly take advantage of the cluster. (I assume as forking app like Apache could too since it could spread its child processes out across multiple nodes without having to care which node they are running on. Apache would just see it as one machine.)
I doubt it because of the nature of Linux. And on top of that, Red Hat’s and SuSE development staff combined is a fraction of the size of Microsoft’s development staff. And they only have a fraction of the money to spend on usability studies and such.
A small company, NeXT, manage to create IMHO the best UI (as in how productive it is, not how easy it is for a Windows user to learn it or how good it looks). And they are a small company.
Be too also made a very good UI. Small company too.
I can go on and on with examples, but it doesn’t matter how big you are. Besides, as a big company, Microsoft doesn’t have a all that great UI, usability-wise. IMHO, Apple has the most usable UI for a modern OS (older OSes, especially OS 9, NeXT, BeOS, Amiga OS etc. not included) – they aren’t a big company.
If there is one thing Microsoft has done well, it’s listening to what the average end user wants.
Well, I hope they do. Cause most of the brain-dead aunts, uncles and my very own parents can’t even use Windows without needing help in doing things like installing new hardware (like printers, scanners, etc.) or even installing new software.
What exactly is your defination of average end-user?
Linux vendors don’t do that as well.
The most successful Linux desktop companies couldn’t care less about the consumer market, rather the corporate market.
They are more interested in targetting the server arena.
Sure, can you say “Lineo never succeed because it was more interested in targeting the server arena”? There are plenty of desktop-only companies, like Ximian, Hancom, etc.
Might be true. But how many end users install their own operating system?
It is true, and two years ago, many bitched about it. Now, people are bitching about other things. Besides, more enterprise customers install Windows themselves – the enterprise market is where Linux for the desktop would gain more users, not the consumer market.
However, what about installing software?
I don’t know about Xandros, LindowsOS, and other new desktop distributions, but for Mandrake, SuSE and Red Hat it is a wizard that automatically downloads the dependancies from the net (RH users have to pay for RH Networks for this, BTW), or taking dependancies from the CD if available.
The average end user finds InstallShield a lot easier to use than rpm by a long shot.
Easier, maybe. But easiest? Nope. Not even close. I lost count on how many calls I get a month asking help in installing new software.
So if Red Hat is so interested in ease of use, why are they still using rpm?
Because there is no reason to dump it. I have checked with my mom as a guinea pig (someone who hardly uses the computer), installing RPMs on Mandrake is as easy as installing it on Windows, without any help from me. Of course, neither was perfect.
Why haven’t they developed an InstallShield like tool?
Why should they? if they are gonna develop something so different, they may as well copy Mac OS X’s idea. Just drag and drop the *.app file from the CD to anywhere on the hard disk. (for downloads, mount the image or extract the archive and drag and drop it to anywhere on your hard disk).
Development of Linux is faster in some areas. But the GUI system isn’t one of them.
KDE development is very very fast compared with Windows and Mac OS. Sure, maybe not 10x faster, but faster nontheless. I wouldn’t be suprised by next year it would have caught up.
I would argue that this is still correct. Linux still doesn’t scale well past 16 way processing.
Compared with a decade ago where it can’t scale at all, I’d say this is a huge improvement. Besides, when NUMA finally gets supported in the kernel (perhaps in 3.0), it can go way more than it can with its SMP support.
Oh, BTW, if you check closely again, there is many groups trying to fix NFS. Maybe 3.0 would see better support for NFS.
It’s getting closer, but it still has a long way to go.
Yes, a long way more to go, I never said it would be tommorrow where I can say “bye bye Explorer, KDE is better than you.”
And granted KDE looks pretty nice
Except maybe the upcoming release of 3.1, I’d say it doesn’t look pretty at all.
but IMHO, the QT widgets are pretty ugly compared to the MFC framework.
A lot (and I mean A LOT) of people would disagree with you. I have friends that make Windows custom apps as a living, they say Qt is nicer to program with, and if they can switch, they would (but obviously they can’t).
The GTK widgets are even uglier.
Talk about stating the obvious
It’s at the mercy of the KDE, GNOME, and XFree86 developers.
I’d say no, again. Yes, in some ways, but with new Windows-clone distributions like Lycoris and Xandros, it shows that a company can drastically change the UI of the desktop.
Oh… Yes, I will admit that QT and GTK are both major improvements over Motif. But then again, that didn’t take very much.
Well, I personally think QT is a fine toolkit/API. It has many faults here and there, but the same with every API, including Win32.
Personally, I like the FOX toolkit better than both QT and GTK.
I tried using it, but never could understand it. The only GUI app I ever made, BTW, is a currency convertor written in Python and Qt. It took me 3 days to learn both and use it.
Oh BTW, for the rest of you that never heard of this before, http://www.fox-toolkit.org/
I heard it is nice, but their documentation is pretty confusing. Thus making my whole experience with it frustrating.
Besides, Simba, Beowulf is used for speciallized apps. Just like any super computer. I don’t see why I would need a Beowulf cluster to run Apache or Samba or sendmail etc…
2002 is over, the review of progress made by the open source community is viewed with respect and apluase.
As the reviews have been popping up left and right with a new shifted possative view of linux, take note that there as well has been an increase on trolling. These trolls have also flooded into designated Linux boards.
When I first tried Linux Yes, it was a nitch OS. Many said it will not progress beyond what it was at that time.Well, it became accepted as a great server solution. “Oh,well, uh, that is all it is good for”. well now many people are enjoying Linux on the desktop(I myself am one of them). Not everyone will, however over time more people will like it.
Not saying that it will dominate the market in any time frame, Only that many people will like it reguardless of the childish stances made by those who can’t stand to see change.
compairing Open source OSs in light of their past is only showing your wounded pride.
Linux is here to stay, it has only one philosophical direction to go……
Forward.
A small company, NeXT, manage to create IMHO the best UI (as in how productive it is, not how easy it is for a Windows user to learn it or how good it looks). And they are a small company
Be too also made a very good UI. Small company too.
Well, I never cared for the Be UI. As far as NeXT, I don’t have any experience with it, but if WindowMaker is a fairly decent clone of it, then I would say it is nice for a relatively experienced user, but not so great for the typical end user. (the WM dock, in my opinion, is a huge waste of screen space though, something that also existed in NeXT).
but it doesn’t matter how big you are.
I think it does matter to a certain extent because UI design is an art that requires quite a bit of R&D to design a decent one. R&D costs money.
Cause most of the brain-dead aunts, uncles and my very own parents can’t even use Windows without needing help in doing things like installing new hardware (like printers, scanners, etc.) or even installing new software.
And you think they could do it under Linux if they can’t do it under Windows? Installing printers on Linux is quite a bit more difficult than installing printers on Windows. Installing scanners on Linux is even worse.
Besides, more enterprise customers install Windows themselves – the enterprise market is where Linux for the desktop would gain more users, not the consumer market.
The enterprise market is where UNIX and Linux installs do have a big advantage over Windows, which is that it is easy to script an install so that it is automated. You can start it and walk away and come back when it is done. The same script can be used on all systems. But I don’t think most enterprises install Windows themselves anyway. They have the vendor do custom installs for them before the system is delivered.
Easier, maybe. But easiest? Nope. Not even close. I lost count on how many calls I get a month asking help in installing new software.
Granted InstallShield is not perfect. But it is pretty close to an idiot proof install. And if you get calls from users who can’t figure out how to use InstallShield, they would probably have even more trouble figuring out how to use rpm.
Oh, BTW, if you check closely again, there is many groups trying to fix NFS. Maybe 3.0 would see better support for NFS.
They’ve been trying to fix NFS since kernel 2.2. Some results would be nice instead of just “we are trying.” This isn’t rocket science. NFS has been around for a very long time.
A lot (and I mean A LOT) of people would disagree with you. I have friends that make Windows custom apps as a living, they say Qt is nicer to program with, and if they can switch, they would (but obviously they can’t).
Well, they can switch. But not cheaply. QT is available for Windows, but from TrollTech’s web site, it’s anywhere from $1,240 to over $2,000 per licence depending on whether you need the Professional or Enterprise version.
Personally, I like the FOX toolkit better than both QT and GTK.
I tried using it, but never could understand it. The only GUI app I ever made, BTW, is a currency convertor written in Python and Qt. It took me 3 days to learn both and use it.
The FOX documentation is not that great, which is unfortunate because FOX is nice toolkit, it’s free, cross platform, and has bindings for a lot of languages.
“Besides, Simba, Beowulf is used for speciallized apps. Just like any super computer. I don’t see why I would need a Beowulf cluster to run Apache or Samba or sendmail etc…”
Well, clustering for Apache and so on can be useful for fail safe redundancy and load balancing. Beowulf doesn’t have very good fault tolerance though so it wouldn’t work well for that. It’s designed for performance and not reliability.
I’d say no, again. Yes, in some ways, but with new Windows-clone distributions like Lycoris and Xandros, it shows that a company can drastically change the UI of the desktop.
Lycoris and Xandros desktops are just modified versions of KDE and GNOME though. So even these projects are pretty much as the mercy of KDE and GNOME.
Ogg Vorbis http://www.vorbis.com going to 1.0 release in 2002 was by far the biggest thing for me in open source. Ogg is already used in heaps of best-selling games like Unreal Tournament 2003, Serious Sam, James Bond 007, etc, because it’s simply superior to mp3 and totally royalty-free. My whole CD collection is in the process of being Ogged with the great CDex http://cdex.n3.net/
Also, various open source video and audio processing software is simply on the cutting edge, IMO. VirtualDub & DScaler, to name just two of a whole bunch of useful utilities with no commercial peer.
not forgetting the great Mozilla 1.0 release. Very important landmark for open source, and browsers in general, with great features like Image Manger and right-clicking banning of ad servers, unseen in any other browser I’ve used, with top stability (and decent looks with a downloadable skin to replace the defaults
There are serious problems with open source. It takes too much time to write a very good software. Open source people usually don’t have much time to dedicate to these projects.
However, Open source has a good chance of beating commercial companies, only if developing countries have more access to technology, and people there also adopt open source and contribute to it. If developed countries switch to open source solutions, that will also boost the open source movement. After all of these, open source will be a really strong competitior in all areas.
Right now although people want to compare open source with commercial solutions, especially with MS products, open source is not there yet. It has a strong chance for the future though, because it doesn’t make sense to me to pay lots of money for the operating system itself. Operating system should be open source at least, or it should be free or almost nearly free. In the future, MS may reduce its Os’s price to a very low amount.
Right now although people want to compare open source with commercial solutions, especially with MS products, open source is not there yet.
___________
Have you used Mozilla? Have you compressed files to Ogg format? How can you say these two free technologies/products can’t compare to products from the multi-billion dollar Microsoft, with their windows media audio codecs & IE? And soon, we’ll have more than one quality open source video codec to call our own.
——–
Linux is here to stay, it has only one philosophical direction to go……Forward.
———
The next Linus — probably in India or China — will come up with something that knocks off Linux (on the desktop at least).
History repeats itself…Linus proved that one person building on the work of others, as is almost always the case, can change the course of things…no reason to think that NOW we are in a static period where the operating systems NOW are the only ones for the future. Linux can get deep-sixed quite easily…especially when its marketshare on the desktop is so tiny.
I think when 64-bit comes to the mainstream on the desktop then there will be a good opportunity for someone to really bring forth something fresh and exciting. I just wish we knew know which of the 64-bit (AMD or Intel) processors will be the way to go.
I can agree with that possability. Which is why I made no speculation as to Linux dominating any market at any given time frame.
-Note-Speculation follows-
To note my own personal observations. GNU/Linux could possablly be the foundation of such a new upstart.
China presently racing to create their own mainstream Opensource based OS.
Also the Present concentration of GNU/GPL vs Proprietary software in India, Based on the number of software developers projected to be produced from India.
Could it be that because of the nature of GNU/GPL, any new upstarts will aswell elevate Linux with itself?(granted, that this only holds as a possability if GPL code is used)
Only thinking to myself that the the possability that you, boshon are mentioning Might not be a bad thing for the Opensource community or Linux itself. It is a 50-50 chance.
hmmm, who knows?
“Have you used Mozilla? Have you compressed files to Ogg format? How can you say these two free technologies/products can’t compare to products from the multi-billion dollar Microsoft, with their windows media audio codecs & IE? And soon, we’ll have more than one quality open source video codec to call our own.”
These aren’t very good examples since both of them were basically gift horses to the OSS community that had been under commercial development for quite some time. Mozzila especially. So this is not an example of OSS comparing to to a commercial product.
And as far as quality open source video codecs, I haven’t seen any. And that’s a problem where Linux and such really suffers. For example, last time I looked, I can’t get a Sorensen 3 codec for Linux, which basically means that Linux can’t play most newer Quicktime videos. (in reality of course, it can’t play most Quicktime videos no matter how old they are because there is no Quicktime player for Linux.)
These aren’t very good examples since both of them were basically gift horses to the OSS community that had been under commercial development for quite some time.
——
Ogg Vorbis was under commercial development for some time and a “gift horse” to the community?
And as far as quality open source video codecs, I haven’t seen any.
——–
xvid (xvid.org) is under heavy development, along with Theora (theora.org). With more planned for the future. That’s why I said we’ll have our own open source video codecs *soon*, not now (at least not in their final form).
Linux does play quicktime content just fine in mplayer. And no matter who gives their code to open source projects once the code becomes open it is no different than other OSS software. Just like a commercial company buying another and rebranding their products under their parent company name. If you say that mozilla and ogg, etc. are not really examples of open source then that precious TCP/IP stack we all enjoy on Windows is not an example of commercial software. More code has been stolen (legally) from OSS projects than any other. Afterall that’s what the BSD license is all about. I don’t get how anyone can say that OSS code is not similar to commercial code. Its not like a Microsoft developer is any smarter than someone who learned to work and code in a different language half way around the world. Our blind ignorance makes us think the guy getting paid the most must be better, but I think you’ll find more often the converse is true.
“Linux does play quicktime content just fine in mplayer.”
mplayer won’t play quictime content compressed with the Soronsen 3 codec though. And Sorensen 3 is the codec of choice these days for its supperior compression and low loss of quality.
“Our blind ignorance makes us think the guy getting paid the most must be better, but I think you’ll find more often the converse is true.”
Actually, I haven’t found the converse to be true. Most open source softare is not very useful, especially to the end user. Most of it is half baked, poorly done clones of commercial products that lack essential features. For example, K-Office hardly compares to Microsoft Office, and is severely hindered by its lack of Word support.
Open source does OK on common server applications like web servers and email servers. But for most other things, it is severely lacking.
We would all appreciate it if you would stop spreading FUD. You’re a troll, plain and simple. How about you go read a few books and check out the websites of your favorite OSS projects before ever posting here again!
From the mplayer website:
We’ve began preparations for the real release: this pre-release is the RC1. There are quite some features about it which make it the player supporting all modern codecs of the world today. No other player can boast with support for all of RealAudio/Video 9, Windows Media Audio/Video 9, Quicktime Sorenson 3, QDesign Music Audio. This is a peak improvement, and I’m not talking PR now. I’m watching TV with MPlayer even now. I could do so even on my EGA or Hercules display. Quite touching isn’t it.
Not only do they support Sorenson 3 decoding, they also have experimental encoding for video streams. And it can play video without using a GUI. Show us a commercial solution for playing MPEG-4 in DOS on the framebuffer, if you dare.
Open source does far more than OK. It is not severly lacking in any way. It just takes time for all this new code to trickle down into distributions people like you might be willing to try. I don’t care if you don’t think open source software can play and encoding your audio and video content. Use whatever you want, but stop spreading FUD!
Open Source kicks ass over any commercial solution. Microsoft will never create an audio/video player with the capabilities of mplayer, ever. Let alone virtualdub, xvid, ogg, etc. They have no interest in helping you play content, and I have no problem knowing you can’t use the content I encode. See how everything works out so nicely with OSS.
I would like to point out that XivD started out as a DivX clone, and perhaps it is still a DivX clone till today. A free DivX clone that is…
“We would all appreciate it if you would stop spreading FUD. You’re a troll, plain and simple.”
I don’t spread FUD. I can’t help it that you choose to ignore reality and pretend that OSS is utopia. I also can’t help it that you don’t know what you are talking about.
c wrote: Then why don’t they make a Linux system beowulf aware, sos we can get some multithreading for our applications?
A little unclear as to what a beowulf is? And what multithreading is are you?
“Open source does far more than OK. It is not severly lacking in any way.”
Keep dreaming… K-Office isn’t lacking in any way? GIMP isn’t lacking in any way? GNUmeric isn’t lacking in any way? R isn’t lacking in any way? None of these have nearly the features of their commerical counterparts.
And what about the GTK toolkit? It’s not lacking in any way? LOL It’s widgets are ugly and it’s a pain in the ass to program with!
“Open Source kicks ass over any commercial solution.”
This has to be one of the best jokes I’ve heard. There is no OSS office software that comes even close to MS Office for example.
“Microsoft will never create an audio/video player with the capabilities of mplayer, ever.”
mplayer is a joke compared to Windows media player. mplayer is buggy and the codecs are reverse engineered hacks that are buggy.
“I have no problem knowing you can’t use the content I encode.”
Last time I messed with mplayer, it was unable to play the QT Sorensen 3 videos on my web site. I will let you know if that has changed, but I doubt it.
“It just takes time for all this new code to trickle down into distributions people like you might be willing to try.”
Heh… I’ve probably been using Linux since before you even heard about it. There were no distros when I started working with it. You had to install everything manually. Not evel SLS existed yet.