Discussion on:

Open source community up in arms over proprietary software for Ubuntu

"if you want Linux to continue to stagnate on the desktop and business levels, go ahead and fight for your distributions right to ONLY use proprietary software."

Did you mean OpenSource instead of proprietary there? Nobody's fighting for ONLY proprietary software. They're fighting for only open source software right?

Game devs are finally looking at Linux.
These open source zealots need to go hide in a cave and never be seen, they could ruin a good thing.

When I tried out Ubuntu back in 2008 it had some proprietary software and stuff you could buy as well as all the free stuff. For many years it's been possible to buy some proprietary software to run on Linux, like Cedega and Crossover, it's just Ubuntu made it available through their main repository control centre. Which made it easier to find and install, and also gives you a better feeling that it'll work properly or they wouldn't have it there.

There have been proprietry packages available in Linux distros for ages.
As long as they are optional and you don't lose expected functionality if you choose not to take up that option, no problem.

I've as much time for these burgers telling me what I can and can''t do with my machine as I have with Mr Shuttleworth doing so.

No having can't from them or must from anyone else. Linux is about options, if there's only one, it's not linux.

Shocking! People would like to be paid for their work. Shocking again! There are enough Linux users that commercial software is looking at us as a revenue stream not a bunch of geeky flakes. This ladies and gentlemen is acceptance at being a main stream player in computers.

Do you know what is next???? PhotoShop for Linux, Quiken for Linux, and... dare I say it... Word for Linux.

Microsoft would take several years of living off it's savings before it would be pushed kicking and screaming to port Word to The Cancer OS (tm). Maybe IE so *nix users can get full functionality from there hosted services like Office 365 but then only if the IE/Windows bundling didn't maintain IE's market share.

Quick is more likely a candidate if enough accounts start asking Intuit for it though Intuit has it's own customer hostile issues. (weee what fun the last version update was) Intuit is more likely to push people to use the hosted service rather than local install version too though so half dozen of one, six the other..

Adobe could make a good go of Photoshop provided they do not repeat there last attempt where they price themselves out of the market then claimed no one would pay for software (no, people just wouldn't pay several hundred dollars when the product did not justify the price when compared to other options.)

Steam is very interesting given the number of "but it won't run my latest game title" complaints and gamers being a driving force in the market. I hope it drives nVidia to at least deliver an equivalent driver (what they give now is good but it's still missing functionality provided by the Windows driver version). The real issue is replacing DirectX though. I truly hope Steam can motivate developers to consolidate on a full-service OpenX stack (OpenGL + audio + inputs). Either way, Steam will be going on to my Debian desktop unless they limit it to a specific child distribution.

nVidia has already pulled their **** together
steamforlinux . com/?q=en/node/127

And many popular engines are being ported or already are, such as Source and Unity

That would be fantastic news if it's happened. Last I read the *nix driver build still lacked functionality present in the win driver build. What I got with the last update is very good but I've not seen another update since (I'm relying on the repository version though).

Personally, I'm fine with it being a closed binary blob provided nVidia can find bugs and deliver updates as fast as would be possible if opened to a community hoard. I just want functionally equality and well documented interfaces so third party devs can actually use the gpu functions to there fullest.

I still dream of the day when I don't have to kill all my running tasks just to reboot for a few hours of gaming in the evening.

So nVidia will probably release them eventually.

I'm waiting for it on the Windows side also. I'd be tickled to find out some of my CTDs and lockups are due to video driver issues. I'm pushing a freaking 560 GPU so I can't say the hardware isn't up to the task (my CPU.. that's another matter given how heavy Skyrim is on it).

For me, crashes that are hardware related are rare, usually the crash is from a bug in the game, usually during a save.

But other issues like, if anything modifies breezehome, then hearthfire causes your game to crash when you try to enter breezehome. Or if you try to save during the mission in that tower where you sent back in time after drinking that potion, the one to fix everyones dream problems. If you save after drinking the potion, your game will crash, but even the end of mission auto save will cause it, so you have to disable all auto saving as well.

My steam page if your interested.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/sinisterslay/screenshots/
I'm currently working through Super Skyrim Bros.

ha.. that's even better than the hundred foot tall My Little Pony you can ride around on

My own game is pretty much built around Better Vampires by Brehanin.. but Wars in Skyrim, Deadly Dragons, Immersive Patrols also fill it out. For me, the game is unplayable without at least those mods inplace (sadly, WIS died dramatically a while back so don't delete your copy if you have it)

is steam for linux out of beta now? I thought the article even mentioned that the beta program was still on with the maximum 1000 "testers" leaving the rest of us to wait for the official release. Hm.. seems I have some reading to do this evening.

The current testing shows few errors in steam, mostly game errors.

hm.. search field shows Skyrim as compatible with Linux though Bronze ranked.

"However, Bronze applications generally have enough bugs that we recommend that our customers use them with caution."

I love the game.. Christmas I'll be coming up on a year and still going strong. But wow is that a bit of an understatement. Two lockups last night in two hours of gaming.. but no CTDs so I guess that's something. Bless Bethesda for doing such a detailed open world.. just wish they'd designed the engine and mod interface to both fail gracefully.

It seems all their games have frequent lockup issues and poorly optimized code. Probably because they mostly just do console ports.

I know in Oblivion eventually people had modded the core of the engine to fix problems, I imagine eventually the same will happen to Skyrim.

Yup, unofficial patches out for Skyrim, Dawngard DLC and Hearthfire DLC but I'm not sure they address anything more than the ESP/EMP database files. Here is hoping TES6 ships with better crash management.

I have been applying them as I find bugs, instead of the whole sale unofficial patch mods. Things like the gourmet fix.

I'd laugh if disabling an unofficial patch fixed the windmill outside whiterun; blades, mast and grinding stone are in the right place across from the meadery, roof and walls are shifted over closer to the city wall and floating about twenty feet up. That's probably related to the landscape patch if it's not a core engine issue though.

I've also learned to be very stingy with mods, avoid things I don't really need and update them one at a time so you can see which one causes issues.

Finally did my first hello-world mod with CK though so that's been a lot of fun the last while. Modified the Predator Vision mod, modified Vampire Lord form a little. Now if I could just figure out how to double or triple the experience per point for werewolf/vampirelord perk trees because you can max both those out in a single day easy at default.

I really should set up a page for my skyrim notes, mod list and personal tweaks. The thing I love about the game and it's plugin system; everybody's game can be a totally different experience.

I got 3 items on my workshop if your interested.

M$ seems to be pushing ahead with Office 365 and you already have Google Doc. While the current iterations isn't that exciting as long as they stick with open standards it will run fine with Firefox or the browser of you choice and the platform of your choice.

Without getting into semantics of what % of the desktop market Linux owns the bottom line is M$ makes the most profit from its Office product and would not turn away a fractional percent of new revenue if they could win on a new platform.

I was thinking local installs versus the hosted application but yeah, Office 365 behaving well with non-IE standards would open it up to other platforms.

Office is indeed on of the biggest cash cows they have but I think Balmer and the old boys club would have to be ousted before they'd get enough young blood to recognize the potential customer base on general purpose Linux based distributions. Right now they have a "cancer os" hostile management and strong motivation to keep Office primarily tied to the rest of the solutions they modern business has become addicted to. (and it is very much an addiction given the "withdrawl" of legacy documents, exchange data and user recognition; speaking as someone who keeps a "can my users switch to this" test rig updated.)

Microsoft is clearly moving toward having more native apps be served by HTML5 in Windows 8, and they're moving to have it be fairly transparent to the end user that this is what is happening. You're in a web-app, just like Chrome - but you're seeing it the same way a native app would appear.

Microsoft realizes that SaaS built on HTML 5 micropurchases is an exponentially bigger revenue source than the "buy once, use until you upgrade" legacy model of their traditional desktop OS - and Windows 8 is an interim hybrid solution designed to deliver *both* experiences in one platform as the transition takes place. It seems like no one else gets that, and you would think that every tech blogger worth his or her salt would have realized this after just spending a short time with Windows 8. Instead, they're all too distracted comparing it to Android and iOS and picking apart how it isn't as good as a tablet OS as those platforms. That isn't the play Microsoft is running here. Windows 8 is competing with ChromeOS (and has a better plan for early adoption - Google would do well to integrate ChromeOS and Android into a single OS that supports mobile apps and native desktop apps to compete with Win 8).

Ubuntu is well placed strategically to be a player in this platform too, if they can get over their traditional ideological reluctance to make proprietary, closed-source pure distros their *default* install on end-user machines.

Personally I'm more in the wait and see camp for Windows 8. On tablets or low angle touch screens it could be very interesting. Granted, like most businesses just now getting Win7 in place, win8 will be the version skipped outside of what personal devices users try to bring in after Christmas.

For ChromeOS and Android, why even integrate them? What does ChromeOS provide that can't be provided under Android. 4.2 bring multiple user profiles so ChromeOS won't even have that. More likely, it'll simply be Chrome browser on top of Android OS. Heck Google has even finally started addressing the mass of vendor's child distributions based on Android.

Ubuntu is also a wait and see with the more recent focus on the proprietary repository but yeah, a default install with the expected proprietary titles may do well with consumers depending on price point (and there would have to be a retail cost to cover the proprietary licenses at least).

I didn't see the nesting of this thread and misunderstood your point. You're right. I was evidently the guy standing at the corner having a heated debate with a traffic sign, this time.

AUTOCAD!

Have you tried recently?

I know in most other windows programs, you just run the setup.exe and it installs normally, you can't really tell the difference from a native program.

It's supposed to run on OSX 10.6. I would think it would work in one or more of the BSDs. But when it comes to BSD, I'm just a noob, so what do I know?

It runs on OSX. It doesn't seem like it would be much work to get it running on BSD or *nix, but I'm neither a Linux user or a developer.

You have the BSD back end but you'll need the stuff in Apple's added layers and I'm not sure one can get that onto a BSD yet. Apple is opening the source of a lot of it's stuff but not sure about Carbon or whatever the new window dressing and makeup is called.

It really does. Check the autodesk website; you can download a free trial of the whole AutoCAD for Mac 2013.
On another note, have any of you checked the AWS (AutoCAD WS) extension for Chrome? It is not full AutoCAD but it lets you do lots of stuff right off the browser. Maybe in the future the underlying OS will be irrelevant.
Just a thought...
Thx

I started with AutoCAD, but Solidworks is just easier to use.

nt

Unfortunately the business world seems to have settled on .doc/.docx and other MS Office formats as the de facto standard. Libre Office can read them but there are problems. For Libre Office to be a truly adequate solution they would have to resolve the remaining issues in writing/modifying MS Office formats. As a college student I am required to turn in my papers as MS Word documents and I can't afford to have formatting issues show up because I used a program which interprets formatting differently than MS Office.

versions of MS Word as well as they aren't uniform across them either.

However, on the international stage (ie most of what's outside the USA) more and more business and government is moving to and requiring the use of the Open Document standards of .odt etc. It's because of the need for this on the International stage that the US gov't depts pressured MS into handling .odt etc some years back.

I did some tertiary studies a few years ago and one of the professors initially insisted that all assignments be handed in with certain format specs and stated we had to use MS Word 2007 to prepare them. I handed him a written request to supply said software at his expense. I got called into the faculty dean's office the next week and asked to explain. After I did the requirements for specified software and version specific format got dropped as they didn't like either having to supply the software out of their budget or having to refund the fees of several students due to them introducing special requirements for the course after it started. Sometimes the little guy does win.

Ran into a problem with Office licensing on hosted servers. I won't go into details, but Microsoft's stand is that if any portion of Office code resides on a server and users potentially have access to that code - they have to pay a user license, even if the software is only there to export a flat file into an Office format that will be copied to a share somewhere that officially licensed Office users will access. Make sense? If even a single Office .dll is there, and you've got 100 users hitting that machine, each one requires a license. Trust me, we danced with Microsoft for weeks trying to find a solution to this.

We considered Libre Office and OpenOffice - and neither was an acceptable solution. They just don't work right in a Microsoft oriented corporate environment. They simply don't scale beyond small to *medium* business if you plan on having any interaction with the rest of the corporate world.

Ultimately, the licensing cost was prohibitive for the benefit gained and there was no FOSS or 3rd party alternative, so we had to drop the service being rendered for the time being. If *any* FOSS Office solution would have fixed my problem, I would have adopted it in a heartbeat.

"They just don't work right in a Microsoft oriented corporate environment."

This shows there are outside influences at play beyond the capabilities of the software itself.

I've seen this played out in other organisations - In one two Division Heads claimed Open Office (this was before Libre Office) just couldn't do what they wanted. Detailed investigation showed it could do exactly what they wanted - and they gave a long list. But it meant they had to recreate a few macros they used daily because the current macros used proprietary MS code that didn't work in OO - and they didn't want to spend time doing them. It took another member of staff a whole hour and a half to recreate the fifteen macros involved. The two heads just didn't want to do the work.

I have seen the same thing in another company and they had good reason to keep MS Office 97 on the system as the eighty-seven macros would NOT work in Office 2007. Since that one unit head was the only one using them and the others only needed basic word processing and spreadsheets the rest of the office switched over to OO and that guy stayed with MSO 97 but we all wondered how long we could keep his system going with XP and MSO 97 in light of hardware changes over the years that we can't get drivers for.

Is formatting errors in opening Office documents in non-Office formats. This is code level translation problems - it comes from trying to reverse engineer a closed format into an open source application, and I don't see any fix for it.

We don't experience these issues going from one version of Office to another. We see it when we try to go from any version of Office to a non-Office alternative.

I mean, there were some bumps going to Office 2010 with .___x files, and that delayed adoption for us... but eventually, it just starts to occur in an organic manner with Office and now the majority of Office users are on 2010 and we don't need to worry about backwards compatibility as much. That doesn't sort itself out the same way with the FOSS alternatives - for whatever reason.

issues with Microsoft Word 2003 NOT properly opening older Word documents, in most cases it not only screwed up the format it corrupted the files too - thank heavens for back up procedures. On trial and error investigation I found it could handle Word 95 and Word 97 and Word 2000 files, but nothing prior to that. Documents saved in Word 6, Word 2a, and earlier were destroyed by Word 2003. Later, a friend found that his Word 2007 did the same to his Word 95 files.

At the time I had a huge number of Word documents that I was legally required to keep in their original form for many years - contract negotiations that had to be kept for the life of the contract and 8 years after that. Some of the contract being ten years, some fifteen years. Most have now expired and I got rid of them, but it showed me how MS have changed the internal workings of MS Word format code and that stuff from different versions are NOT fully compatible with all the other versions.

I now use Libre Office and it gives me an option to save in a variety of MS Word formats, and when I do save in the one I know the other person uses they have reported no troubles using the document. And I've had no troubles with viewing and using what they send back, except for the Changes info from a person using Word 2010.

This is another case where you're talking about Office 97 and Office 2003 and I'm beta-testing Office 2013 Technet on a Windows 8 box and thinking... "how do these claims apply today?"

I mean, Windows 95/98 and XP and Office 97 and 2k3 were kind of the glory days of Linux and FOSS seeming like they might have had a shot - so I suppose it isn't surprising that we might see Linux users now pining for the good ol' days when Microsoft was the evil, insecure menace that required a clean install on every upgrade...

But it would be like me claiming that Linux suffers from difficult non-graphical installation processes that require users to know advanced *nix theory like using dpart to carve out slices on disks assigned strange and obscure names...

Or that wireless and sound support almost always requires you to add modules and manually compile your own kernel.

the lack of compatibility with the other MS Word document formats and the fact that the latest versions of MS Word do NOT open the earlier versions properly. Some will IF you find and download special add-in, but it should happen out of the box, and the only reason it doesn't happen is because Microsoft have deliberately introduced changes to stop it happening and to force software upgrades - ie for their profit and not customer usage.

Now, I don't know what it's like where you are, but in many industries legal contract often run for multiple years, seven or ten or fifteen years can be common. For other legal reasons all the documents involved in the contract negotiations etc need to be kept in their original format for the life of the contract and past the time of the final payment in which a challenge to a payment can be made - sometimes for seven years beyond that. It was document in this class that I was having an issue with.

Now, you seem to think Word 2010 and Word 2013 are perfect or close to it, try opening documents saved in Word 2a, Word 6, and Word 97 in these last two versions of Word and see if they open properly or not, and if they get changed by MS Word when they're closed. Word 2007 couldn't do it, and the few I tried in Word 2010 got screwed worse than in Word 2003.

It's this incompatibility that requires people to retain earlier versions of Word, and the differences in the way the latest versions look, feel, and are used upsets some users as well as most people are only happy and comfortable with what they're used to using. Which is why some companies don't like the ribbon format.

Edit - Oops, forgot to say:
The problem with not perfect format layout between MS Word and any other software is solely due to MS NOT using the Industry Standard layouts and instruction codes, so again, the issue is due to deliberate design decisions by Microsoft to NOT play with the rest of the world.

Don't even get me started. Between managing indavidually purchased O2010 licenses and getting setup with a volume license, I really don't know which is less of a pain in the ###. Volume licenses are the same cost per install as non-volume licenses so no benefit there. I'm still not clear on what it takes to get into the open license program and I've talked to three different sources including Microsoft's own sales staff. I get not being able to easily move an Office license from one machine to another without de-registering the serial number. I don't get why the uninstall process does not unregister the serial number (Adobe can do this but MS can't figure out how?). I really don't get not being able to re-install Office back on the notebook it was just activated on so that I can then do the manual deactivation; it was just on this friggin machine. The folks responsible for MS licensing policy need a swift kick in the head with a frozen muckluck.

Office 2010 has been a licensing nightmare and I've only managed to afford four of them so far.. and all because Microsoft Office 2003 won't run on Microsoft Windows 7 so they can't even manage compatibility between there own products.

Word compatibility inside the Windows versions is already less than perfect. I have had great success using both OpenOffice, and now LibreOffice to edit highly technical scientific Word manuscripts- including revision tracking and comments, and dealing with asian font mismatches with my American installations. MS broke their own lock on proprietary formats years ago. the argument is driven more by fear/uncertainty/doubt than actual exploration of the issues. We regularly have Windows Word users 'breaking' each other's document formatting on XP and Win7 systems. The .docx debacle has only made the problem more visible. Compatibility arguments do not long survive actual testing of meaningful differences and honest comparisons with a 'gold' (pure Word user) experience.

You're correct. MS Word doesn't save or interpret .doc or .docx properly. I've created many documents in LibreOffice which do not work in MS Word properly. Ditto, the opposite. Word doesn't work right. LibreOffice does. Simple solution, get everyone to drop Word and install LibreOffice, after all it's free. Alternate solution, to have Microsoft give away Word for free, at least for students (I believe there is such a program at most colleges, or you could use the online version, I suppose.) Back in 2008, most students could obtain Server 2008 and just add their own GUI, also installing ms Office free.
Now if Windows 8 would just come out with a version where you could add your own GUI right out of the box instead of having to disable the Formerly-known-as-Metro interface in order to use it, and allow you to disable all its features systemwide, to be consistent.
There should also be a way to disable the ribbon in Office straight out of the box, it's horrible and unusable, and you have to install an addon in 2007 versions in order to TYPE to find commands without using it. (Did they include that feature in the next version?)
I use an old copy of Office 2003 if I simply MUST use Windows and Word. This seems to work great, no complaint from clients, etc. yet. No need to have 2007 or above; maybe MS could give away free copies of 2003 to anyone who wants them, to keep the cost to the consumer reasonable (free.) They could also give away free copies of XP, the last MS OS that worked properly.
They'd never have to develop a dang thing ever again that way, so development costs would disappear, and they could begin giving away all their software, and become a not-for-profit business that way, the way all businesses need to be run.

Oh shoot.. hadn't thought of that.. brilliant.. let me just call all the partner companies my staff interact with... Ring.. Ring.. so I gave them your suggestion.. I think the admin on the other side just dropped the phone from laughter.. might be a "no".. ok.. let me call the next partner organization we interact with regularily...

but to go to Office 365 in 2014 or 2015 they'll spit the dummy about their data not being secure and dump MS Office.

I think it does anyhow.. Office 2003 support ends in 2014 or 2015 so there will be a long wait before businesses are pushed from 2010 to 365.. granted, that's if Microsoft doesn't ship an incompatible OS and short the listed support life cycle.

At my last several Engineering companies, Word was tossed out. Some years back, it basically just failed as a wordprocessor for large documents. In those days, I switched first to Lotus Office, broke that, then to Word Perfect. WP was surprisingly clumsy, but it worked very well, even allowing sub-documents, a feature I had on workstations in the mid-80s but had to give up moving to PCs.

For collaboration, that was the final standard there. For distribution, it had been Acrobat... I never want an editable document sent to people who are just supposed to read and perhaps comment on it.

More recently, my last two Engineering companies had the usual issues: most people in the company do not use Windows (a few of us hardware people do -- that's where the CAD tools are -- but for software, it's all Linux). We did the .doc-files-in-any-WP thing at the last company, but basically transitioned to Google Docs for most things. This is hardly the best wordprocessor around, but the collaboration rocks, and you don't have to teach non-engineers how to deal with .ODF or .DOC documents in Subversion.

That was already the solution at my current company, in theory, though we still have .ODF files in Subversion, and a few non-engineers sending .DOC and .DOCX files around through email chains.