Gnome Founder Miguel de Icaza Moves To Mac 815
TrueSatan writes "Miguel de Icaza, via his blog, has explained his gradual move to the Apple Mac platform. 'While I missed the comprehensive Linux toolchain and userland, I did not miss having to chase the proper package for my current version of Linux, or beg someone to package something. Binaries just worked.' Here is one of his main reasons: 'To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl.' Reaction to his announcement includes a blog post from Jonathan Riddell of Blue Systems/Kubuntu. Given de Icaza's past association with Microsoft (CodePlex Foundation) and the Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman's description of de Icaza as a 'traitor to the free software community,' this might be seen as more of a blow to Microsoft than to GNU/Linux."
Re:It's been decades. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is a true statement (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Whatever.... (Score:5, Informative)
Classy. This machine is working perfectly under Linux. I'm sitting 12 feet (3.5 meters) away from the *two* 50 inch TV's its running out to. Sound is perfect and it's been up for five months....... So yeah.. I like Linux. I like it a lot, and rarely have to fix *anything*. In fact my wifes I-Maxi_pad requires more attention than this machine.
i'm sticking with *nix. THANKSKBYE.
Re:This is a true statement (Score:4, Informative)
If the LSB worked anthing close to how it was envisioned, developers would flock to the platform and then so would users
LSB solves some bits of the problem, but not the most troublesome. It does not help you with libraries or kernel changing ABI in a backward incompatible way, something that causes packaging headaches when upgrading a given system.
What is a bit frustrating is that it could be done cleanly, if developers just took the time for it. For instance NetBSD base system is nicely backward compatible. A binary built on NetBSD-0.8 is still able to run 20 years later on NetBSD 6.0.1. And you can throw a package built for NetBSD 5.0 on NetBSD 6.0.1, it works... provided you have also installed the dependencies for it, which are provided in other packages outside of NetBSD base system, and this is where things goes wrong. Package A will need version 1.0.1 of package B, you have version 1.0 installed. You need to upgrade B. But B is required by packages C, D, E... Z, and you will have to upgrade them too. But they require new versions of others packages, and so on.
Re:This is a true statement (Score:4, Informative)
Every phone is locked into a version of Android and doesn't have much life past that stream.
That's really not very true at all. Most popular devices have a CM port, as do many unpopular devices. There are many phones for which it is very true, and it is sad to own one of them, but there's also lots of options out there today that will likely be supported down the road. You can wait just a little bit before buying the latest and greatest, and then you know which devices will be supported, because you can see which shipping devices are already supported. Just stay away from AT&T, because they're bootlock Nazis.
Re:I did this a long time ago... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:de Icaza (Score:4, Informative)
If you want a Gnome 2 type experience in Gnome 3 and know about Cinnamon I'm hard pressed to understand to what you are objecting to?
Re:Join the party (Score:4, Informative)
I see your story and raise you a survey [pcworld.com]. And another, from closer to the same time period as your story. [nytimes.com]
And then some [jdpower.com] a little bit [jdpower.com] more up to date [jdpower.com].
Re:de Icaza (Score:4, Informative)
But it's precisely his "contributions" for which he's being attacked -- he's drawn immense amounts of development effort into fragmentation, bloatware, and attempts to be nearly-compatible with something Microsoft is going to abandon and wreck as soon as they think the compatibility shims are good enough to be a threat.
Re:So he is leaving... (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly what I was thinking. He is running from the issues. The biggest problem GNU/Linux has is the communities insistence on cloning the competition. We should explicitly be advising people to replace hardware instead of “supporting” non-free drivers/firmware. It is not critical for user adoption. Linus was bitching about NVIDIA's lack of cooperation fairly recently and he is nearly a proponent of proprietary software.
The Trisquel distribution / community has had no problems with new users taking up GNU/Linux and its completely free. There is a simple solution to users looking to switch. Point them at free software friendly hardware. Its extremely easy to do since ThinkPenguin was founded in 2008. They are committed to providing proper support across distributions and versions by utilizing only free software friendly chipsets. It has worked *really really really* well for helping new users take up GNU/Linux. They also have the largest catalog of hardware targeted at GNU/Linux in the world so its not hard any more.
Oracle Java, Flash, and other proprietary drivers/firmware are a problem although not as easy to solve. However we don't want to go playing catch up here and should be promoting alternative solutions in the places where these components are needed. Apple did it with the iPad and we can do it too. A really simple solution to what is probably the only critical flash pieces is entertainment. For that we should simply setup a web site that makes searching DRM-free content easy for non-technical users. All it would need is an evolving list of of DRM free entertainment sites / or indexes and maybe the installation of adblock plus on users computers. Then let Google handle the actual search query and limit it to this DRM-free user generated list. It can even be designed so that you can add it as a search engine option with a click of a button.
Re:Philosophy is nice and all... (Score:4, Informative)
Even more interesting is that the kernel for OSX is FreeBSD - you know, UNIX.
Its not. Its based on Mach. It has some FreeBSD and NetBSD parts, but the kernel is not from FreeBSD. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X [wikipedia.org]