Patents in the Blagosphere

Patents seem to be all the rage at the moment, ever since NPR did a piece called "When Patents Attack!" It's a bit dry, but gives a really good overview on the current patent situation. Well worth a listen, or a read (pdf) if you prefer.

The Economist also recently did an article entitled "Patents Against Prosperity" that gives a revealing look into the ridiculousness of recent patent legislation.

And then there's this recent post on Google's own blog, calling out its competitors for effectively ganging up on the open source Android platform. In an update to that very post, it looks like the Department of Justice was having none of it, going so far as to slap the GPL on all acquired patents:

"All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux System."

Here's hoping all of this recent dialog pushes patent reform into public discourse. I've got my fingers crossed!

Linus Torvalds moves to XFCE.

Albeit grudgingly, Linus Torvalds himself has gotten fed up with Gnome's disregard for usability, and has switched to XFCE. Along with Ubuntu Studio's somewhat recent switch, this is great news for XFCE, hopefully heralding further adoption and contribution to the project.

So nyah. :P

A Year In The Life

So it's a little more than a year since my last post, but I'm sure you'll forgive me. What's happened in the world of Linux gaming!?

Well, nothing revoutionary. But there have been some important and exciting steps forward. On my ATI 4670 card, I can now play some modern games, such as Doom 3 and UT2004, using the open source driver. I am using the r600g driver provided in the xorg-edgers ppa. While it's disappointing to have to use an unstable, unsupported external repository just to get basic functionality out of my hardware (yes, I just called speedy 3d acceleration "basic functionality", welcome to the world of the User) this is an unprecedented event in Linux for me. I'll be excited to see if this driver makes it into the 11.10 release of Ubuntu.

Hot on the heels of my fresh driver adoption, I gave 0 A.D. another whirl. I was excited to finally be able to get my hands dirty with this forthcoming open source game project, and it did not disappoint. While the game is still in early alpha, and only very basic gameplay is implemented, I had a grand time goofing around with it. This project is very promising, keep your eye on it.

A few more things: I've also been following the OpenMW project very closely. Unfortunately, development has been a slow trickle, though a constant one. My fingers are always crossed that development speeds up, but given the track record of projects like this, it's not likely. XFCE also finally implemented the freedesktop.org menu specification, which is awesome, but it just means that now I'm in the market for a good menu editor. Lastly, I got nQuake and Skulltag (a Doom port) working on my machine, which is tons of fun.

Slowly but steadily we are moving forward, which is great. Things could be better all around, but for now I'll enjoy what I can!

Busy busy

Sorry I've kind of abandoned this. I plan to post lots more when I have time, but I have been super busy with work. Stay tuned!

10.04 Tomorrow!

I've been busy busy with work, with no real time to post. But Lucid Lynx comes out tomorrow! Wee!

Banshee

And now for something positive. One application dear to my heart from the windows world is Winamp. It's an awesome multimedia player geared toward music management. It's closed source and has had some bumps along the road, but it's very solid and has an amazing interface. I've missed it something terrible since I switched to Linux.

The Linux world has basically nothing to offer when it comes to music players. Most FOSS players don't feature media libraries, and those that do are either bloated, unstable, or have too many anti-features to be worth it. Basically none of them have good interfaces. Rather than dwelling on that crapstorm though, I'd like to recommend Banshee. It's great.

Yes, there's a few nitpicks I have about it. It isn't Winamp, but it's the best thing out there. And after months and months of muddling through awful media players, it's a breath of fresh air. It's solid, full-featured, and has a surprising lack of anti-features for a Gnome affiliated project. Good on them.

Short and sweet. Hooray for music, hooray for well-developed applications.

Wine Whine Whine

As promised, a post about Wine. I'd like to pretext this post by saying that I've had nothing but awful personal experiences with Wine. This post in no way reflects an unbiased or balanced viewpoint. I'd also like to say that as much as I hate Wine and wish it never existed and think it's awful, I have a huge amount of respect for the hard work and dedication of the Wine devs. I have nowhere near the kind of skill needed to do what they have done. Moving right along.

Wine touts itself as a compatibility layer between Windows executables and the Linux kernel, allowing Windows-native applications to be run in Linux without any Windows software. Most relevantly, Wine is used as an ace-in-the-hole by Linux devs for why Windows users have no excuse not to convert, implying that any Windows application can run just fine on Wine, and life will be grand, and flowers and rainbows will be everywhere. The Wine devs even go so far as to host a database for applications with compatibility scores, so you can get an idea how well something will run before you give it a go.

I'd like to address this first from an ideological perspective. Hacking together, literally reverse engineering, a compatibility layer between a terrible proprietary system and a very particular open source system is just silly. The idea is so bug prone and monumentally difficult that I don't understand why someone even bothered. Then implying that this solution should serve as a replacement for a natively running application is just a joke.

Secondly, I'd like to address this from personal experience. Wine just doesn't work for me, even for applications with Gold Star Platinum +1 Super Awesome ratings in the Wine AppDB. Take for example, Guild Wars. The additional comments in the AppDB go so far as to state "everything works fine! awesome!" I wish I could show you a screenshot of everything not working "fine! awesome!" but I can't even do that. My entire system crashed during the installer to an unresponsive black screen. That's something that just doesn't happen on Linux. Except with Wine, it seems. I've tried running other things through Wine at various times in the past, all with similar, if mildly better results. Nothing ever actually worked.

But Raevol, you cry, just submit a bug report! Submit a patch! Do your part! No, dear reader. Stop this nonsense. The Wine project is completely irrelevant. Linux needs its own native solutions. People turn to Wine because the applications that exist on Linux are crap, and need to be improved. So let's improve them.

An exception to that last statement is the case of applications that can't be ported because of Intellectual Property, like games. I can discuss my views on those politics until I'm blue in the face, but let's bypass that for now. In this case, these applications should really really be implemented through virtual machines. It's much easier to emulate hardware than it is to reverse engineer an entire operating system. One might argue that performance becomes an issue, however I would argue that optimizing a VM is much less difficult than emulating an entire OS.

Good? Good.