March 30, 2005

A grand slam of open source in summer?

Earlier today, I caught a Slashdot article that indicates MySQL 5.0 will be released this summer. Fedora Core 4 is similarly scheduled for June, and Mozilla Firefox / Thunderbird are slated to occur at roughly the same time. GCC 4.0 will probably happen sometime shortly before then.

All things considered, this looks like a lot of big projects are having major releases at practically the same time...

Have I missed any? Maybe we could do a low-level campaign to have them release all on the same day...

Posted by WeirdAl at March 30, 2005 7:12 PM
Comments

What about OpenOffice.org 2.0 ? I think that will also be a major release targetting a lot of office-users. Although I did not find a release schedule. http://development.openoffice.org/releases/ooo_roadmap.pdf does not seem to include 2005 yet.

Posted by: Martijn at March 30, 2005 9:54 PM

Well... Moz can't be compiled with GCC 4.0 (yet), as what I've heard.

Posted by: minghong at March 30, 2005 11:59 PM

The current tentative schedule http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OpenOffice_org_2_x.html indicates that 2.0 will be out in May/June.

Posted by: Jude at March 31, 2005 3:20 AM

Ask Daniel to postpond NVU 1.0...or better not, all the happy NVU users wouldn't agree;-)

tom

Posted by: funtomas at March 31, 2005 3:30 AM

They plan to release OpenOffice.org 2.0 in May/June 2005.
See http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OpenOffice_org_2_x.html

Posted by: Eduardo at March 31, 2005 4:36 AM

Sarge? Maybe? Possibly? I hope so!

Posted by: Sam at March 31, 2005 7:13 AM

And don't forget that our beloved MSIE is having a 7.0 beta release this summer ;]

(From Alex: That isn't open source, and it isn't final.)

Posted by: Rodent at March 31, 2005 6:49 PM

Speaking of programs that aren't open source, RMS (the first programmer of GCC) says that GCC is not open source. Read his response to a poster on the GCC mailing list and a letter to News.com for details.

He makes a good argument; this program, like other programs in GNU, he initially developed as part of the free software movement in order to respect people's freedom when using a computer. Whether you agree with the free software movement's philosophy or not is besides the point (although I'm sure he would like to persuade you to side with the free software movement), the issue is not allowing the program to be cited in an ahistorical fashion. I think just as so many open source advocates insist on giving Linus Torvalds credit for the Linux kernel (despite that many other hackers have worked on the Linux kernel for years), we ought to respect RMS similarly and call GCC a free software program.

Posted by: J.B. Nicholson-Owens at April 2, 2005 8:16 PM

I'm sorry I forgot to raise this in my earlier post, but please also read "Free But Shackled - The Java Trap" with regard to OpenOffice.org v2.x. RMS has examined the question of "[w]hether the program can be used in the Free World, used by people who mean to live in freedom" and it seem particularly pertinant for OO.org v2 because some of OO.org's functionality will require installing a non-free Java runtime engine (such as Sun's proprietary JRE). Hence OO.org 2.x is free software (being that it is entirely licensed under a free software license--the LGPL), but it is not entirely useful to users who wish to run nothing but free software because doing so would require installing a non-free program.

Perhaps someday there will be a free JRE that is functional enough to run OO.org v2.x programs and other Java programs caught in what RMS calls "the Java trap". But today, to live in freedom requires doing without some parts of OO.org v2.x.

Also, the Firefox builds distributed by the Mozilla Foundation include non-free software called "Talkback" which will guide the user through filing a bug when Firefox (or Mozilla Suite) crashes. So, the only way to run a free Firefox is to build it yourself or get your binary from someone who built it without Talkback. RMS has urged the Mozilla Foundation to distribute free builds of their software so that more users can more easily run free versions of these programs.

Posted by: J.B. Nicholson-Owens at April 2, 2005 8:29 PM

that last statement from owens is not valid, when you install firefox you have the option of not installing talkback.

Posted by: poningru at April 3, 2005 8:23 AM