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> What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bu

by kunai 14y ago

> What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings Exactly. Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. Mir, Unity, etc. all don't seem to play too well with other distros and are very tightly integrated with Ubuntu; if this continues Ubuntu might turn into a slightly more open OS X, which isn't good at all.

hmo09 14y ago
Apple already have more developers contributing to useful upstream code than Canonical (Webkit, cups, LLVM).
- HerraBRE 14y ago
  Placating the tech crowd by giving away fragments of low level code is really just marketing and a way to retain talent that would otherwise refuse to work for them. It's not as if their users can actually use any of that stuff to change how their macs work (without switching to a different OS or browser).
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 14y ago
    WebKit for one has fairly wide adoption outside of pure Mac OS X. As for the rest of it, just because something is open source don't expect many people to use it.
    - gillianseed 14y ago
      Yes but then it's also being developed by far more companies than Apple. For 2012 Google submitted roughly twice as much code to Webkit as Apple (which came second), apart from them we have smaller yet notable contributors like RIM and Nokia (7% and 5% respectively).
      - Retric 14y ago
        Let's not forget that reduced maintenance costs are often touted as a reason to opensource code in the first place. And when you consider it was developed by Apple and so presumably fit there needs well when released it as working code, it's not surprising that adapting it to new use cases involves more work than maintaining it.
        hdevalence 14y ago
        It was developed by the KDE project as KHTML. The reason that it's open-source is that it was Apple's fork of an existing free software project.
  - vor_ 14y ago
    You'd be complaining if they contributing nothing. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
    - phaemon 14y ago
      He said they weren't doing enough. You're pointing out he'd also complain if they did even less. Seriously?
      - HerraBRE 14y ago
        Actually, I was just pointing out that they are not open in any meaningful sense of the word - their products are very, very closed and controlling and that's how they like it. Comparing them to Canonical is in my opinion very silly for that reason, it's apples to oranges.
- macco 14y ago
  Apple is the biggest tech company in the world. Canonical is a company, that focuses on Linux User experience.
- tedks 14y ago
  Didn't Apple buy CUPS specifically so that they could keep parts of it proprietary? They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC, which will probably have a net harmful effect on the free software culture.
  - tzs 14y ago
    > They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC Definitely and only? How did you determine this?
    - tedks 14y ago
      It's sort of obvious? I can't see any other reason Apple would have for it, other than making compilers researchers have slightly easier lives. It'd certainly make sense after they were forced to open source the frontend for Objective-C.
      - tzs 14y ago
        Apple had two technical needs that GCC could not reasonably satisfy. One was to compile Core Image filters. When you make a chain of filters, they treat it as a single complicated filter which they JIT compile and optimize for your GPU or CPU (I believe they decide at run time which to target based on what will be best for the particular complex filter you have defined). Another technical need they had was for a compiler system that could be easily and tightly integrated with other tools, such as IDEs and debuggers. Either of the above would have required extensive modifications to GCC, and they would not have been able to get those modifications into the upstream. The result would be Apple would have to maintain a fork of GCC. They'd be spending a lot of effort porting things from upstream into their fork.
        tedks 14y ago
        So would you say that Apple is definitely only funding LLVM so they can drop their dependency on GCC?
hazov 14y ago
Which standards are these? Besides using the kernel compiled with gcc and using dynamic linked ELF binaries as their default and a libc on the system the only standard that I ever knew of was LSB, which I believe does not include anything about graphics (I can be wrong).
- noselasd 14y ago
  They're defacto standards. Not formal standards. The fact that you can compile and run a GTK program that will run on most linux and even other unix like systems without problem. It means that someone creating a program, proprietary or open source, can, with little effort run that program on most linux distros. We have quite a handful of internal GUI tools, some use Qt, some use GTK, written in python and some in C or C++. The GUI stack makes up the biggest stack here, but they use a few other libs as well, e.g. cURL, openssl, gsl. All these are readily available, and we run these on various versions of RHEL, Debian , Ubuntu and FreeBSD beacuse of the defacto "standards" provided by these environments. Even porting these (at least some of them) to windows, where many of these libraries are available would take too much time because of minute details - there's other real problems we need to focus on. We hope we still can run these programs on Ubuntu in the future though, but it will not take that much to make it infeasible
  - hazov 14y ago
    I actually do share your fear. That's the reason I run Debian. I really hope this does not destroy Ubuntu as a Linux distribution (which I believe is the standard you and the poster I answered was referring to), as long as it remain based on Debian I believe there's little to fear.
justincormack 14y ago
Much more open. Like actually open. There is a reasonable case that there has been too little innovation in the last 10 years. I first used X Windows more than 20 years ago and it was amazing then but holding stuff back with old standards now?
jjcm 14y ago
Standards are great and all, but holding on to those standards is what's keeping back the UX of linux. Gnome3 is familiar, but very dated. X is supported by all, but it's a tangled mess that everyone hates. Yes Ubuntu is straying from the pack, but I'd rather have them stray and the rest follow when they find something good then have the entire linux community sit in the same place they have been for years. Regardless of what path Ubuntu takes, I think it will be good for the linux community to have that diversity.
- thechut 14y ago
  Exactly this. My chosen distro is Linux Mint. Based on Ubuntu but going its own direction.
  - Cthulhu_ 14y ago
    > Based on Ubuntu but going its own direction. Like how Ubuntu is/was based off Debian but going its own direction? ;)
    - thechut 14y ago
      That's what open source is all about my friend! First distro I ever used was Debian, only as a live CD though because those were back in my WinXP days. But I immediately fell in love with apt. Then about 2 years ago I moved to Ubuntu, its nice but I didn't love Unity (didn't hate it either, just different). A friend recommended Mint, and I have been hooked ever since.
- zobzu 14y ago
  Yeah, like Unity cough or upstart cough. RH is doing similar stuff, although they're more deeply involved, and while I don't especially like how they impose some of their technology, at least it's generally well though out.
  - signed0 14y ago
    Upstart is available in the Debian package repos, and it was used for a while by Red Hat before they switched to Systemd.
mseebach 14y ago
There are very few standards in the GNU/Linux world. GNU and Linux has, by themselves, become standards through ubiquity. POSIX is one, yes, but it's woefully inadequate when you've gotten used to all the bells and whistles any modern GNU/Linux distro puts on top of it by default. And what about the BSDs? They certainly doesn't play well with Linux, or vice versa, but that's hardly an argument for calling either an agent for closedness.
dspeyer 14y ago
Slightly more open? In what way is Ubuntu closed?
- rrouse 14y ago
  They are not talking about Ubuntu being closed. They are saying that Ubuntu would drift toward being more like Mac OS X, but be more open than Apple is with Mac OS X.
  - dspeyer 14y ago
    They said "slightly". OSX is hardly open at all. Only a few pieces are (important pieces, but still). Something completely open is more than slightly more open than OSX.
zem 14y ago
how is it "slightly more open"? from what i can see, all the code in ubuntu is open-source to the fullest extent of any accepted definition out there, including the full freedom to fork and start a distro that pulls from both ubuntu and third-party patches if you feel that canonical is not accepting said third-party patches readily enough.
adeaver 14y ago
On the one hand those standards came from somewhere, and that somewhere is likely someone else forking an existing project and making changes to it. On the other hand, adhering to standards that are years old isn't a great way to advance. Standards have to grow and adapt and, wait for it, change.
buddylw 14y ago
An open OS X, while slightly oxymoronic, sounds pretty fantastic to me.
geon 14y ago
> Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. That reason being that they grew out organically. And the landscape isn't even unified as it is! Mist distros come with Gnome, but you can run KDE if you are a bit more leet, or if you want something more lightweight you have xfce. Unless... I'm happy Ubuntu is showing some vision for what their OS can become and work towards that goal.

by kunai 14y ago

hmo09 14y ago

Apple already have more developers contributing to useful upstream code than Canonical (Webkit, cups, LLVM).

HerraBRE 14y ago
Placating the tech crowd by giving away fragments of low level code is really just marketing and a way to retain talent that would otherwise refuse to work for them. It's not as if their users can actually use any of that stuff to change how their macs work (without switching to a different OS or browser).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 14y ago
  WebKit for one has fairly wide adoption outside of pure Mac OS X. As for the rest of it, just because something is open source don't expect many people to use it.
  - gillianseed 14y ago
    Yes but then it's also being developed by far more companies than Apple. For 2012 Google submitted roughly twice as much code to Webkit as Apple (which came second), apart from them we have smaller yet notable contributors like RIM and Nokia (7% and 5% respectively).
    - Retric 14y ago
      Let's not forget that reduced maintenance costs are often touted as a reason to opensource code in the first place. And when you consider it was developed by Apple and so presumably fit there needs well when released it as working code, it's not surprising that adapting it to new use cases involves more work than maintaining it.
      - hdevalence 14y ago
        It was developed by the KDE project as KHTML. The reason that it's open-source is that it was Apple's fork of an existing free software project.
- vor_ 14y ago
  You'd be complaining if they contributing nothing. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
  - phaemon 14y ago
    He said they weren't doing enough. You're pointing out he'd also complain if they did even less. Seriously?
    - HerraBRE 14y ago
      Actually, I was just pointing out that they are not open in any meaningful sense of the word - their products are very, very closed and controlling and that's how they like it. Comparing them to Canonical is in my opinion very silly for that reason, it's apples to oranges.
macco 14y ago
Apple is the biggest tech company in the world. Canonical is a company, that focuses on Linux User experience.
tedks 14y ago
Didn't Apple buy CUPS specifically so that they could keep parts of it proprietary? They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC, which will probably have a net harmful effect on the free software culture.
- tzs 14y ago
  > They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC Definitely and only? How did you determine this?
  - tedks 14y ago
    It's sort of obvious? I can't see any other reason Apple would have for it, other than making compilers researchers have slightly easier lives. It'd certainly make sense after they were forced to open source the frontend for Objective-C.
    - tzs 14y ago
      Apple had two technical needs that GCC could not reasonably satisfy. One was to compile Core Image filters. When you make a chain of filters, they treat it as a single complicated filter which they JIT compile and optimize for your GPU or CPU (I believe they decide at run time which to target based on what will be best for the particular complex filter you have defined). Another technical need they had was for a compiler system that could be easily and tightly integrated with other tools, such as IDEs and debuggers. Either of the above would have required extensive modifications to GCC, and they would not have been able to get those modifications into the upstream. The result would be Apple would have to maintain a fork of GCC. They'd be spending a lot of effort porting things from upstream into their fork.
      - tedks 14y ago
        So would you say that Apple is definitely only funding LLVM so they can drop their dependency on GCC?

hazov 14y ago

Which standards are these? Besides using the kernel compiled with gcc and using dynamic linked ELF binaries as their default and a libc on the system the only standard that I ever knew of was LSB, which I believe does not include anything about graphics (I can be wrong).

noselasd 14y ago
They're defacto standards. Not formal standards. The fact that you can compile and run a GTK program that will run on most linux and even other unix like systems without problem. It means that someone creating a program, proprietary or open source, can, with little effort run that program on most linux distros. We have quite a handful of internal GUI tools, some use Qt, some use GTK, written in python and some in C or C++. The GUI stack makes up the biggest stack here, but they use a few other libs as well, e.g. cURL, openssl, gsl. All these are readily available, and we run these on various versions of RHEL, Debian , Ubuntu and FreeBSD beacuse of the defacto "standards" provided by these environments. Even porting these (at least some of them) to windows, where many of these libraries are available would take too much time because of minute details - there's other real problems we need to focus on. We hope we still can run these programs on Ubuntu in the future though, but it will not take that much to make it infeasible
- hazov 14y ago
  I actually do share your fear. That's the reason I run Debian. I really hope this does not destroy Ubuntu as a Linux distribution (which I believe is the standard you and the poster I answered was referring to), as long as it remain based on Debian I believe there's little to fear.

justincormack 14y ago

Much more open. Like actually open. There is a reasonable case that there has been too little innovation in the last 10 years. I first used X Windows more than 20 years ago and it was amazing then but holding stuff back with old standards now?

jjcm 14y ago

Standards are great and all, but holding on to those standards is what's keeping back the UX of linux. Gnome3 is familiar, but very dated. X is supported by all, but it's a tangled mess that everyone hates. Yes Ubuntu is straying from the pack, but I'd rather have them stray and the rest follow when they find something good then have the entire linux community sit in the same place they have been for years. Regardless of what path Ubuntu takes, I think it will be good for the linux community to have that diversity.

thechut 14y ago
Exactly this. My chosen distro is Linux Mint. Based on Ubuntu but going its own direction.
- Cthulhu_ 14y ago
  > Based on Ubuntu but going its own direction. Like how Ubuntu is/was based off Debian but going its own direction? ;)
  - thechut 14y ago
    That's what open source is all about my friend! First distro I ever used was Debian, only as a live CD though because those were back in my WinXP days. But I immediately fell in love with apt. Then about 2 years ago I moved to Ubuntu, its nice but I didn't love Unity (didn't hate it either, just different). A friend recommended Mint, and I have been hooked ever since.
zobzu 14y ago
Yeah, like Unity cough or upstart cough. RH is doing similar stuff, although they're more deeply involved, and while I don't especially like how they impose some of their technology, at least it's generally well though out.
- signed0 14y ago
  Upstart is available in the Debian package repos, and it was used for a while by Red Hat before they switched to Systemd.

mseebach 14y ago

There are very few standards in the GNU/Linux world. GNU and Linux has, by themselves, become standards through ubiquity. POSIX is one, yes, but it's woefully inadequate when you've gotten used to all the bells and whistles any modern GNU/Linux distro puts on top of it by default. And what about the BSDs? They certainly doesn't play well with Linux, or vice versa, but that's hardly an argument for calling either an agent for closedness.

dspeyer 14y ago

Slightly more open? In what way is Ubuntu closed?

rrouse 14y ago
They are not talking about Ubuntu being closed. They are saying that Ubuntu would drift toward being more like Mac OS X, but be more open than Apple is with Mac OS X.
- dspeyer 14y ago
  They said "slightly". OSX is hardly open at all. Only a few pieces are (important pieces, but still). Something completely open is more than slightly more open than OSX.

zem 14y ago

how is it "slightly more open"? from what i can see, all the code in ubuntu is open-source to the fullest extent of any accepted definition out there, including the full freedom to fork and start a distro that pulls from both ubuntu and third-party patches if you feel that canonical is not accepting said third-party patches readily enough.

adeaver 14y ago

On the one hand those standards came from somewhere, and that somewhere is likely someone else forking an existing project and making changes to it. On the other hand, adhering to standards that are years old isn't a great way to advance. Standards have to grow and adapt and, wait for it, change.

buddylw 14y ago

An open OS X, while slightly oxymoronic, sounds pretty fantastic to me.

geon 14y ago

> Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. That reason being that they grew out organically. And the landscape isn't even unified as it is! Mist distros come with Gnome, but you can run KDE if you are a bit more leet, or if you want something more lightweight you have xfce. Unless... I'm happy Ubuntu is showing some vision for what their OS can become and work towards that goal.