Gnome 2.14 + Podcast review

Yesterday evening I did an apt-get dist-upgrade (Mabye upgrade alone was enough, not quite sure. For the moment I mostly do dist-upgrade, if there is no dist to upgrade it seems to fall back to the normal upgrade).

48 MB to upgrade, that seemed a lot,off course upgrade. Today I logged in and checked the about gnome dialog. It seems 2.14 has arrived on my ubuntu dapper drake. Haven’t noticed that much changes to the 2.13.9.? I was running before. So I’ll reread the release notes πŸ™‚

Yesterday evening I was talking to a client and the popup came that new updates were available. He’s a microsoft guy, so I explained him a bit about what the updates and all were all about. I explained to him, imagine that microsoft would popup something saying, we have a better and newer version of the kernel, drawing dll’s,… He said, well they do that, that are the service packs. Hmm I wonder, Windows xp is out around 2001 – 2002, right? There are 2 service packs available. Just imagine that on linux. My guess is, we would be still running 2.4 or 2.2 kernel. Okay I know there are still companies out there that prolly run a 2.4 or a 2.2. But they have the choice to upgrade and off course, linux fixes it own problems you don’t have to buy other software to protect you from bugs they can’t or won’t fix.

Makes you wonder if microsoft would go as fast as linux is going at the moment. Or would the bad rap still stick and nobody would join? That is off course if there were people who had the knowledge,brains and will to understand the source code of microsoft.

On another note, I was listening to my daily podcast during my commute from Bree or Leuven to Diegem (Brussels). On the linux link tech show there was the head of open source of sun. At first they off course made some jokes about sun and opensource, but in the end it got really good. I especially liked a part that goes something like this.
Sun donated openoffice to the community. First they bought the company that was working on the source and afterwords they just gave it away, now why could a company do that?
Well, imagine this: Sun has more than 100.000 employees wolrd wide, they were all using microsoft office. The costs of linces compared to the costs of buying the company that was working on openoffice were more favorable to buying the company. So we bought the company and released the code.

Now that’s something I really dig, why aren’t all big companies like that? We would have a lot more good opensource software.

He afterwards did admit that sun had a bumpy ride. He pointed out that sun first started as a real opensource company, but due to a lot of factors they weren’t as openminded as in the beginning, but now they were again focussing on opensource and we would see more news of sun in the oss community. He even said that the sun jvm would become opensource, unfortunately he didn’t say when.

So go over to the linux link techshow site and download their podcasts, they’re really good and very informative!!

2 Replies to “Gnome 2.14 + Podcast review”

  1. Playing devill’s advocate, I guess it would be more justified to compare Windows releases with Debian stable releases. Microsoft is also developing new stuff, but as they do it in a closed way, we don’t get to try them. Just as we don’t have new software within Debian stable. (Of course we get security updates.) Even Windows Service Packs sometimes provide new features.

    This is more about how you release and how often, than about closed vs open source. Of course, more updates are probably a consequence of open source of course.

  2. You’ve got a point there, but I’m not comparing to debian stable but to ubuntu. πŸ™‚ If I run Debian it will be testing or unstable sometimes even on production machines because debian stable goes to slow to keep up. It’s okay if you have a mission critical application that cannot go down for even a second.
    Even if you compare the stable ubuntu releases hoary or warty (who haven’t yet got a real long lifespan). They still have more security updates and feature updates than windows IMHO. Haven’t used mac os, so no opinion on that. My point is, I’m using linux on my desktop for 2 years or so (had a long period that I used windows) and I can’t imagine going back to it, with Linux every day is an adventure and some new nice cool feature may get apt-get updated πŸ™‚

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