not all change is progress
August 30, 2015
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0:08:19 News
0:41:21 Photo Editing
As a keen amateur photographer, Jesse wanted to find out how good the better-known Linux photo viewing and editing applications actually are – so he set the team a homework challenge. On this occasion, the incompetence of one of your Luddites was far exceeded by the developers of one of the apps…
IntroJoe and Jesse talked about Vysor, a beta Chrome extension that allows you to mirror and control your Android device from your desktop.
0:08:19 News
Linux Foundation Proposes Open Source Best-Practices
Badge
Conservancy
and Debian announce Copyright Aggregation Project
A New Linux File-System Aims For Speed While Having
ZFS/Btrfs-Like Features
Go 1.5 released;
now self-hosting
Contiki 3.0 Released, New Hardware from Texas Instruments,
Zolertia
China Chipmakers Tap ARM Designs to Challenge Intel,
Qualcomm
Rockchip’s “Light Work OS” is Android with a Start Menu,
windowed apps
Your new phone will have less Google bloatware, and that’s
awesome
Smartphone sales up as demand for high-end devices
rises
Apple’s former CEO John Sculley unveils two sleek and cheap
Android smartphones
$300 Cyanogen-powered ZUK Z1 coming to Europe, US in
September
Meet Wileyfox, an ‘edgy’ new mobile brand powered by
Cyanogen
0:41:21 Photo Editing
The Luddites attempted to use FotoXX, Shotwell and Gwenview to complete a series a photo viewing and editing challenges set by Jesse, with varied success. If you want to see how we got on, Jesse will be posting the task list and all of the images to our Google Plus community.
Your comments about the Software Freedom Conservancy:
whether Bradley Kuhn or Karen Sandler (who are the
central people) want to sue people or not, whether it is
their raison d’etre or a last resort, and whether they
want to make money for themselves or work in (what they
perceive as) the public interest, is not a matter of
opinion, there are actual facts to refer to.
Lawsuits about GPL viloations are very rare (which is why
they are news), and a lot more companies are infringing
the licenses than get sued for doing so.
In case of the Debian collaboration, there is also a
mechanism in place that leaves the developers that hold
rights in the software largely in control of what happens
with their copyright and what action is to be taken on
behalf of them.
When you criticise the people involved essentially ad
hominem and call their character in question, I would
think you ought to do so with some more argument and
substantive engagement. If you are interested in it, you
could have watched Kuhn’s talk and the q&a on it at
debconf. If not, maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned it at
all (or without the tendentious insinuations).
Thanks Daniel, well put.
Also: Joe – if litigation doesn’t sit right with you,
what workable alternative do you propose? Conservancy
has often worked behind the scenes with violators for
*years* before moving forward.
Thanks for mentioning the Linux Foundation CII’s Best Practices badge effort!
The MOST important thing about this project is that it’s
in an early stage. It’s an open source software project,
and we really want feedback. You can send us feedback as
GitHub issues, GitHub pull requests, or via the mailing
list for general discussion. More info here:
https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge
Here are a few clarifications. First, we currently planning for a badge to be valid for a year or two. Also, the vulnerability response requirements simply mean that if you don’t respond in a timely way, or don’t fix vulnerabilities long after they’ve been publicly known and reported to you, then you lose the badge. Those deal with problems like abandoned projects. The badge requirements are specifically designed so that anyone with a small OR large project can get a badge; e.g., you won’t need to pay anyone to get a badge.
You guys seemed dubious about requiring HTTPS, but there’s no requirement for HTTPS in the current draft criteria. HTTPS is only RECOMMENDED for now; it’s not a MUST. There is a requirement for “Secured delivery against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks” but that can be implemented in several ways, including HTTPS, ssh+scp, or digitally signed packages. We might make it a MUST in the future, but that depends on how easy/cheap HTTPS is to deploy (I have hopes that “Let’s Encrypt” will make HTTPS far more common).
We’ve drafted criteria, and we’re building a small web application that will try to automatically verify what it can (and let projects report information when it can’t verify it). It’s OSS as well, of course :-).
Again, if anyone has thoughts/comments, please go here to
review the current draft and send feedback:
https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge
Thanks!
Jesse missed probably the best photo management application, which is Digikam. This is a Qt app, but I am fairly sure it runs on Windows too. It was recently covered on FLOSS weekly if you want the full rundown. The last time I tried F-spot it died completely when faced with importing a large collection of photos.
Like Jesse I also store my photos in folders which are date stamped. One nice feature of Digikam is it allows you to store Comments, tags, etc in EXIF and IPTC fields, as well as it’s sqlite database. So your metadata is attached to the photo, which is useful if you ever want to move away from Digikam.
Thanks Ian, I knew there was a big one I’d missed. No doubt there are more – which is both the fun and issue with FLOSS I continually find. I’ll have to try digiKam as it certainly looks powerful and I’ve heard it mentioned often enough that I should do my own investigation…that’s if I can get over those awful blue folders ;)
Just to follow up on Ian’s comment, it says in
the ‘about’ section of Gwenview “An image
viewer”.
Digikam is the (very powerful) photo management
app for the KDE framework. Within Digikam one
would do edits using Showfoto (Right click on
desired photo – open with…).
It’s almost the UNIX way – 1 tool to do one job, and do it well :-/
That’s the problem coming to things like this fresh – too much choice/where do I start?
Eric Raymond and I wrote an article about windows of
opportunity for platform upgrades back in 2006:
http://catb.org/esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html
The article explained when people do and don’t switch desktop software, and it boils down to hardware changes forcing people to upgrade off of DOS to access more than 640k or off of 32 bit XP to take advantage of more than 2 gigs of RAM. You need not just a new OS kernel, but rewritten apps that use new APIs to access more memory.
Microsoft was a niche player on 8 bit desktops, became a monopoly on 16 bit desktops, and retained control during the 32 bit and 64 bit transitions. This successfully shut out Linux and OS/2 and BeOS and so on. This is over and done with 64 bits will last beyond moore’s law hitting atomic limits, we won’t see another API shift like that on the desktop.
But the desktop is dying. Desktop sales have declined every quarter for over 3 years now. Windows 10 is consolidating its hold over a shrinking niche.
Linux (Android) on the phone is a leading OS. It’s hard for this generation to see that as the new normal the same way it was hard for Vax admins to see the PC as the new normal, but time marches on. Windows 10 is re-fighting yesterday’s battles, it’s going to win but not going to matter.
Rob
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