Novell vs. Microsoft, Gnome 1.x removal, cokehabit and stuff, 14-21 Nov 2006

Well, the day for weekly stuff.

There are few things are going on. Some of them Gentoo, some are not, so lets get started:

1. I would start with Novell-Microsoft deal. Albeit not news anymore, this one caused a lot of stirring in FOSS community. If you have missed the deal, then in a nutshell: Novell will pay ~40M $ to Microsoft, and Microsoft will pay something to Novell. What is it for we do not know, but it will allow Novell to claim idemnification for its clients from MS, and also MS already started telling that Novell pays for Microsofts' intellectual property used in Novell Linux products.
While intriguing where will this thing go, I really don't think its a good idea for any linux distro to pay for "intellectual property" which is possibly used in Linux based OS. And I agree on this with Red Hat's people, saying to Steve Ballmer, "show us the violating code, and it will be removed".
That's why, by the way, Jonathan Schwartz said all those things about OS importance. He just reacted to this deal....

2. Gnome 1.x removal caused more hateful fan-mails than even xmms procedure. Which is strange, especially because of xmms removal issue. I noticed plans to remove Gnome 1.x and friends couple of weeks before, and all that despite the fact that I occasionally visit forums. I mean, that somehow information did came to me, so I don't understand how people pissed by xmms removal do not pay attention to what is happening, and then complain again about Gnome. Thats childish and unfair, BUT I do understand their behavior.
   Besides giving notification, or in addition, some other kind of warning/notification system may need to be developed to announce such things. But people should also cool their spirits and try and understand both sides - understand developers why do they decide to retire packages (trust me, its not to screw you for fun), and understand users that do not enjoy dealing with removal problems.
3. Finally!! User representatives meeting had place last weekend, and it was very cool to catch up will all of them missing in action (yes, there was some timeout as it seemed). Loki99 suggested to have a long meeting in 3-days span, which came out really great. Some of the things that were discussed were CMS system for gentoo-userreps.org (which is not very operational at the moment), and also my ideas about userdays and video docs.
   I really like hanging around those guys, they are very cool. And I have an opportunity to learn a lot there.
   
4. cokehabit was demoted as userrep. I can't (and won't) get into the details why did it happened, enough emotions get around this one as it is. I hope that userrep project will still do great and that users and developers will benefit from it.

Thats all for now, more will be here as it comes :-)

Feedback is always appreciated

Removing Packages from Gentoo, video editing tools and How Importants OSes are? 7-14, Nov 2006

OK, so this time there's still nothing much. Not a lot stuff happening in Gentoo, at least not on the surface.

Few things then:

1. Antarus has suggested a new official way of getting rid of packages from the tree. The main point being that old packages being removed are not completely deleted, but moved to alternative tree. Such a tree would have to be manually added to a system, and then packages which are removed from "official" tree are moved there and don't exist on official tree anymore. In addition, bug reports on such packages in official bugzilla will get INVALID resolution.
   The logical implementation would be, of course, an overlay. Call it "obsolete" overlay or something similar, so noone would question what is it for.
   
2. I've been playing around with 2 video editing tools: Cinelerra and Lives. While Cinelerra seems more able and professional, some things are much easier in Lives, such as sound-movie mixin'.
3. Jonathan Shwarts SUN CEO, says that OSes will probably stay like forever: "It reminds everybody again how central OSes are to the evolution of the Internet, ...... Every 10 years, it seems like everybody wants OSes to go away so we all dismiss them."
   Although I do understand an importance of an operating system, I don't really agree with him. I think that with time, our computer use distinctively becomes combination of 3 usage types: web (and web-based), media and games. For those, OS do not really matter, especially for web and media, because even today you can surf the web and experience music/movies on almost any platform and in universally the same way. So while OS might matter for low level development, it matters less for users.
4. I saw Mark Shuttleworth's (Ubuntu leader? initiator? mover? doesn't matter, go for person) at Ubunto Developers Summit at Google (link to a video, its 55 minutes), and what I liked especially was what he said about Gentoo: "....and there are Gentoo, which solves things in a way which attracts some people.....so we would like to figure out how to work with them [Gentoo developers] more closely"...
   Man, I like this guy, but more than that, I like his attitude to open source ideas. Maybe because I think the same way?
5. I just saw this little toy, which "offers 5832 1GFlops 64-bit processors, each dissipating just 600 milliwatts of power" and "our Gentoo portage tree points you to all of the source code in the system, both community-developed and SiCortex-specific".
   Me want !!!!!

That is about it. Council reports are not in yet, as well as bugday (or at least I haven't looked at them yet).

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