Friday, February 27, 2004

Nmap License Terminated on SCO -- 6:35 pm CST, Update by The Master

According to posts all over the net (check out the one on Groklaw), Fyodor has terminated SCO's rights under the GPL to distribute his Nmap security software. This is huge, since I think it's the first case in the GPL community of a GPL author terminating SCO's right to distribute software due to their attacks on the GPL. Here's to hoping that the Apache, X, and Samba crews do the same.

A.T. Hun comments: I believe that Apache and X are under different open source licenses. I'm not very familiar with either one.

DX:IW 1.2 Patch Released -- 6:31 pm CST, Update by The Master

The Eidos Deus Ex: Invisible War support page has posted the version 1.2 patch release. This one appears to be mainly optimizations that should help out various systems with graphics issues. Here's to hoping it fixes the end movies on my machine.

Thursday, February 26, 2004

ESR Rants on Linux Usability -- 11:18 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Eric Raymond posted his rant on the usability of Linux (or lack thereof). In particular, he talks about an attempt to get CUPS configured correctly. Unfortunately, I've run into this very issue on a number of occasions. I love bonking the "Help" button only to have nothing happen or get a message saying something like, "The manual has not been written yet." Thanks Slashdot.

The other day when I went to recompile arts (KDE's sound system), the INSTALL file claims that the make install will install everything in /usr/local/kde/ by default. The reality is (as ./configure --help showed) that it will install everything in /opt/kde. It's a small issue, but it wasted at least 10 minutes of my time as I attempted to verify which one was right. That was needless.

The Master comments: The one place where Open Source software is going to fail miserably is in help and documentation. There are very few programmers on this planet who are writers, or who enjoy writing. Since writing documentation and help files is not what programmers are good at, those areas always suffer in open source. Unfortunately, I doubt this issue is ever going to be solved. So, everyone who uses this type of software had better get used to dealing with the source code, and google.

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