[Sussex] Distros

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On Tue, 5 April, 2005 12:07, Geoffrey J. Teale said:
> Eh?  Most of the big banks run their operations on Linux post 9/11 -
> are you talking about Microsoft Money type software?

Yes, if you want to do any kind of home or SME accounting or payroll type
stuff you can maybe struggle with GnuCash-the-overcomplex or buy Crossover
and run Quicken, or buy Windows and run Sage.

> This is an increasingly small set of things.  I know of several print

Small, yet ridiculously important, like the glaring lack of top-to-bottom
CMYK support.

> far better environment than photoshop now.  The real problem is that
> designers know there way around photoshop and don't want to learn a

Inertia is definitely a factor, but there are still huge gaps of software.

> Hmmm.. odd because not only are there several excellent tools to do

No there aren't, they all suck. Put any of them next to even the crappy
editing software you get with a DVD burner, or iMovie or Adobe Premiere.
Please contradict me with real examples because I would love to find
something that works better than avidemux and isn't insane like cinelerra.

> this, but major Holywood movies have been edited with free software.

A bunch of movies have been touched up and processed with Film-GIMP, but
that is not editing. Any movie editing that has been going on with Linux
will have been with distinctly non-free software. Again, I would love to
have URLs here proving me wrong :)

> Yes there are admittedly a number of specialist applications out there

That's the serious rub though, a significant number of users (I would say
most) each have at least one specialist application they like/need and
Free/Open source software, for all the amazing progress it has made, is
not yet covering these.

> that are not yet covered by Free Software, but the core platform is
> really very well served now.

I agree there, the core platform is indeed very well served.

> Yup.  How is that a priority?  Yes we'd love games to be free

It's not really, but it is an area we would be wise to foray into, at
least from the POV of game engines/platforms. I think RMS has spoken about
this before, saying he thought the way forward would be open games
platforms and proprietary game content that you buy and play.

> software, but it's a losing battle right now so we don't fight it
> particularly hard with our limited resources.

Indeed and it's only going to get worse, people are estimating top-budget
titles for the next generation of games consoles coming in at around 10
million bucks!

> The HURD is no more or less "Free" than the Linux kernel.  If the FSF
> was interested in maintaining a distro it could have been doing so
> since the first GPL'd linux kernel in the early 1990s.

Sure they *could* have, but politically they clearly wouldn't. I bet you
they release a Hurd based distro when it's ready though ;)

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net