Re: Next version of XD for SuSE 9.1?

"Will Evolution be available for the next upcoming bleeding edge version
of <insert favorite distribution here> in the future?"


*Please*, folks, before continuing with this discussion, think about the
facts:

* Evolution is *free* software, released under the GPL and will remain
  so in the future

* Evolution 2.0 will be part of the Gnome 2.8 Desktop


Think about it. Evolution is free software. Now what does this mean? Any
Linux distro is free to package it and provide it to the end user. Just
like any other package. What is the difference between Evolution and
Mozilla? OpenOffice.org? Apache? MySQL? Perl? bash? KDE? Linux?

Sure, there are different licenses used. Only nuances from a users point
of view. Do you care and debate them?

Yes, there is a company behind Evolution. So it is with a lot of
free/open source software (see [1] to mention just a few).

Ever looked behind the scenes? Well, let me assure you, there are a lot
of hackers not affiliated to Ximian/Novell at all. There are general
Gnome hackers from all over the planet. There are Sun hackers. I have
seen hackers well known from Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian. And there are
a lot of independent hackers not related to any of the above. [3]


Evolution will be part of the Gnome 2.8 Desktop. Right, you already
heard about this. But what does it mean?

Well, it means, you should not worry whether Evolution will be available
for a particular distro. You should ask the distro if they will ship
with Gnome 2.8. If they will do so, Evolution 2.0 most likely will be
included.

You do not depend on Ximian/Novell to be so kind as giving Evolution to
you. It already is there and packaging primarily is your distros
business anyway.


> > or is this a competition thing? is this SuSE saying "we don't want app X
> > to work with distro Y"? 
> 
> We don't necessarily want to dedicate scarce resources to building,
> testing, and supporting app X on distro Y.  If you care about distro Y,
> which we don't support, here's the source.  Have at it.  Patches
> gratefully accepted.  We have absolutely no intention of *preventing*
> app X from working on distro Y.

Remember, we are discussing free software. The sources are available to
the public. The above mentioned scenario likely will never ever happen.
This is closed source / proprietary software practice (if at all) and
fundamentally does not apply to free / open source software.

<anecdote> 2 days ago, the latest unstable Evolution version 1.5.8 was
released. While most mirrors (including the master mirror) weren't even
up-to-date, I saw a patch contributed by a member of the community to
make GCC 3.4 happy and compile those very sources. </anecdote>

...guenther


[1] Sun actually sells StarOffice (which is OOo plus support, a printed
    manual and some proprietary "goodies" which are available for free
    by the community). You can buy MySQL for a couple of thousand bucks.
    The engine behind KDE is called Qt and can be bought from Trolltech
    (in fact, needs to be bought if you plan to sell your product).
    There are foundations behind Mozilla and Apache, paying developers.
    A lot of Linux [2] developers are getting paid fulltime jobs, too.
[2] Linux actually is the kernel. Likely everything you see and love on
    your desktop is not Linux. But this is a totally different
    story... ;)
[3] I'm sure I forgot one or the other company -- please forgive me,
    this is not on purpose.


-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0.@ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}

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