Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 10th Oct 2012 22:37 UTC
Donating to software projects - or, more accurately, open source projects. It's hardly new, it's hardly rare, and I'm sure most of us have donated at some point. That's probably why Canonical has opened Ubuntu up for donations - but with a twist.
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RE: Not donating to distros.
by moondevil on Thu 11th Oct 2012 08:52
in reply to "Not donating to distros."
Member since:2005-07-08
RE[2]: Not donating to distros.
by spiderman on Thu 11th Oct 2012 09:38
in reply to "RE: Not donating to distros."
Member since:2008-10-23
No, that is not what I am saying.
I do roll my LFS distro BTW but that does not matter to the point.
The effort of packaging IS worthy.
What I'm saying is that:
The packaging is the final step. You have to take into account all the effort and weight it. When you buy a commercial operating system like Windows for $100/year, something like $1 goes to the packaging an 99$ goes to development. With free software, the opposite is happening.
The effort required to package the software into a distro is relatively easy when compared to develop the software, espicially since the developers use autotools and even go as far as providing rpm spec files and stuff. Look at all the Debian spins. Sometimes, it's just a new wallpaper and some software selection.
Ubuntu is about Unity and the community. They put some real efforts in developing the community. They is worth something but don't forget the montain they sit on. The software they use is worth a lot, starting with Debian and GNU.
RE: Not donating to distros.
by jangoboy on Fri 12th Oct 2012 03:24
in reply to "Not donating to distros."
Member since:2012-10-09
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/19/13 23:02 UTC, submitted by M.Onty
"Microsoft has sensationally abandoned its controversial plans to restrict the sharing of XBox One games, and has also removed daily online authentication requirements for its forthcoming console", reports The Guardian. They had no choice. Still a good move.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/19/13 22:28 UTC
"A snippet of code in the Steam digital distribution platform has revealed that Valve may be planning to let users easily share their games with friends in the future. The Verge has verified the code's authenticity, which was originally spotted by a member of the NeoGAF gaming forum; the code references a 'shared game library' and a notification that would alert a user when their games are currently in use by a borrower." This would change the, uh, game.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
"I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)".
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
"The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 21:03 UTC
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."More News »
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Member since:
2008-10-23
I'm not donating to distros in general. I believe the distro makers are not the ones that deserve the money the most. Excuse me, they do deserve the money, but the distros are the most visible work to the users and they require the least work. In other word, they already receive the most money for working the least. That is why we have like 1000 distros.
Look, we have like 1000 distros, 50 desktop environments, like 10 or 20 browsers, 4 or 5 GUI toolkits, 2 or 3 kernels, 1 compiler.
So where does my money go? To the ones that are the most hidden and do the biggest work. I donate to upstream projects, like GNU.
If Ubuntu disappear tomorrow, it wouldn't hurt at all. I can just pick one of the 500 other Debian spins and the experience will not be affected, maybe that will even be better.
On the other hand, if gcc disappear, the whole free software landscape will be changed, if it survives.
So here is how my money should be split:
€100 to low level stuff (gcc, binutils, etc)
€10 to higher level stuff (Qt, gtk, etc)
€5 to DE (KDE, GNOME, etc)
€2 to applications (Firefox, liberOffice, etc)
€1 to core distros (Debian, Mageia, etc) - a core distro is a distro whose authors provide a significant advancement to free software, like apt-get or the mcc.
€0 to spin distros. There are too much of these already.
Edited 2012-10-11 07:01 UTC