Novell will (continue to) support KDE after all

[Scott Elcomb]

On 11/16/05, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 11/15/05, Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > How much better might the open source desktop be if all the programming,
> > human design and documentation skills of the community been funnelled
> > into one program rather than split between two (or more) desktop systems?
>
> I seriously doubt that it things would be any better, and it is
> entirely possible that things would be worse, because there would be
> bigger fights inside the (singular) project as to what design
> directions to take.

The pressure of a serious, unified, and demonstrably solid linux
desktop project would give most of the industry players pause.  In the
long term, and if sucessfully managed, it'd likely cause just as big,
or bigger fights within M$, and Apple as they attempt to come to terms
with the f/loss factor.  Again.

There are all kinds of approaches to doing it.  It's just a matter of
haggling, then strategizing and managing.  Same as any other
problem-solving situation.

> Which was that on AmigaOS and MVS and some other such places, you
> could write scripts that would interact with applications while they
> are running to do useful things.
>
> In about the last year, some efforts in this regard have re-emerged,
> but it has been 11 years since Commodore stopped selling Amigas, and
> we still can't expect to be able to write scripts to meaningfully
> control applications like Gnumeric, OpenOffice.org, and such, so one
> of the major original "selling features" of the desktop environments
> still remains unachieved.

Only barely familiar with MVS and never got my hands on an Amiga. 
This form of scripting sounds similar to VBA (Visual Basic for
Applications) and/or WSH (Windows Scripting Host) though - are there
any similarities between these and the MVS/AmigaOS forms of scripting?

> > FOSS proponents dismiss such POVs at their risk.

Any proponents of anything dismiss POV's at their own risk.  Doing so
is not conducive to communications of any sort.

> We have recently seen a change where people are getting interested in
> it from a business perspective where they expressly don't want there
> to be changes; that is certainly a recent digression from the original
> intent.

In particular, this seems to show up in those organizations fighting
with tooth and claw to "prove" that their Intellectual Property
"rights" are being violated.

It's not only a digression, it's downright disgusting.  But.  Alot of
folks are getting it now, especially -outside- the software industry,
and the concepts are spreading via osmosis.

--
Scott Elcomb
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