Samsung Sponsors the Development of Enlightenment 199
An anonymous reader writes "The Enlightenment window manager project has shared on its website that it now has the backing of a major (top-five) electronics manufacturer that will be actively sponsoring the project and using Enlightenment on its devices. No manufacturer was named, but Phoronix has dug deeper and found out that Samsung is sponsoring Enlightenment. Phoronix provides independent confirmation along with citing a new Enlightenment program that Samsung sponsored and then released under the LGPL-3. They also have videos of some of the new work to this window manager that Samsung funded."
Re:LGPL-3? (Score:3, Informative)
The copyright holders can change the license to new releases however they want.
E17 is pretty stable now (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using it for months as my desktop at home and on my laptop. It is quite usable and I've had zero crashes for a while now. Rasterman has always had a focus on small-screen devices, so this development doesn't surprise me. But if you haven't checked it out in a while, you should.
Re:LGPL-3? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, being BSD licensed, you can release a fork under a new license I believe since BSD is a permissive license.
The reverse, however, would not be true.
Cheers
Re:LGPL-3? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, being BSD licensed, you can release a fork under a new license I believe since BSD is a permissive license.
The reverse, however, would not be true.
What you believe is wrong. The BSD doesn't let you change the license terms of the source code at your will. You must have permission from the copyright holder(s) to do so.
Re:LGPL-3? (Score:4, Informative)
To further add you may be confusing this with the fact that you can include BSD code inside other code that is licensed under another license, but this doesn't change the license that the BSD code is under.
Re:Seems Obvious (Score:4, Informative)
Awesome [naquadah.org] is awesome.
Re:LGPL-3? (Score:2, Informative)
Sure you can include BSD code in an LGPL application. BSD is perfectly compatible with the GPL and LGPL.
Re:LGPL-3? (Score:4, Informative)
That is true. However, Samsung != the copyright holders. Samsung could, however, fork it and create their own thing, which would not be the same as Samsung developing the original unforked e.
Windowmaker and GNUstep (Score:5, Informative)
I wish someone would do the same with Windowmaker and GNUstep, but I suspect the licensing has closed off that path.
Re:LGPL-3? (Score:2, Informative)
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org] ...
Short of getting into a pointless pissing match to sort out all of the minor semantic differences between what we've both said, it's effectively something you can essentially change the license of by only including the statement that it contains some BSD code. Or at least, you can release your software under any license you choose even if it includes BSD code.
You yourself have pointed out several times in this thread that you can do this. The nit-picking is identifying every little way in which one is ever so slightly is semantically different from the other.
Essentially, we're belaboring the point and not really adding much.
Cheers
Re:LGPL-3? (Score:2, Informative)
Short of getting into a pointless pissing match to sort out all of the minor semantic differences between what we've both said, it's effectively something you can essentially change the license of by only including the statement that it contains some BSD code. Or at least, you can release your software under any license you choose even if it includes BSD code.
There is no minor semantic difference. You just have poor reading comprehension. What that statement is saying is that you can create derived works using BSD license code and release the program as a whole under a proprietary license. But the license to the BSD code is still covered under the BSD license.
You yourself have pointed out several times in this thread that you can do this. The nit-picking is identifying every little way in which one is ever so slightly is semantically different from the other.
I've pointed out that one can create works using BSD code and release that under a different license. But this isn't the same as saying you can relicense BSD code at your will. There is a major difference between the two.
Re:E17 is pretty stable now (Score:3, Informative)
But I follow the commits pretty regularly, and many of the component software and libraries are reaching a 1.0 and mature status. They have a very clear roadmap to reach a stable release. As I said, I'm not saying they will make a Christmas release. But to go from years of, "it will be done when it's done" to "possibly release by Christmas," that's a pretty major shift in thinking.
But I'm not taking the developers' word for it, nor should you take mine. Try it out. I think you will be impressed with the progress. It truly is already in a workable state for day-to-day use.
Re:Used E again recently.... (Score:5, Informative)
Are you talking about e16 ? Compositing and GL work fine in it (I'm using the release packaged in Debian). I'm actually quite surprised that people don't list it as one of the compositing window managers like Beryl / Compiz.
It doesn't have as many extra features as Beryl / Compiz, but it has the few I care about... namely - composited drop shadows, true-translucent backgrounds in gnome-terminal, translucent window movement, and composited miniature windows in the pager.
It's actually been much more stable than Beryl on my system... eventually Beryl seems to exhaust the video memory and I get lots of video corruption, which seldom happens under the e16 compositor. It's also pretty easy to turn compositing on and off when I want more GPU resources dedicated to an OpenGL app or game.
Re:Some explain the Linux GUI thing? (Score:5, Informative)
They're different layers.
X is the graphics system. It provides the video driver and makes pretty pictures show up on your screen.
Enlightenment is a window manager, it gives those pretty pictures borders so that you can drag them around.
Gnome is a Desktop Environment, which is a couple hundred programs that are designed to work together and work the same way. This includes a window manager, menus for launching programs and a place to hold minimized programs and icons, a file manager, network configuration tools, a terminal, calculator, scanning software, music player, cd ripper, graphics editors, etc etc.
X is always there.
The features that Enlightenment provides works using X.
The features that Gnome provides works using a window manager and X. Gnome provides Metacity as its window manager by default, but you can use others like Enlightenment.
This is highly consistent.
Re:Some explain the Linux GUI thing? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm going to assume this isn't a troll, and instead is a real question. Crash course for everyone else:
Unlike OSX and Windows, the graphics subsystem is (almost) completely independent from the core of the OS (kernel). This means that the graphics can be completely removed with little-to-no effort, leaving just a text-based system.
This is because the X-windows system is implemented by Xorg the program. Like any other program it can be killed/removed, etc. This program just happens to take over a terminal window and show pictures.
A program wishing to do graphics talks to X and tells it to do stuff, using the X11 protocol. This can be direct memory access, a Unix socket, or a network socket - X doesn't care.
However, this is a pain. X (delibrately) doesn't specify any widgets like buttons, etc. Moreover, if you draw a window it will take up the whole screen - X has no concept of multiple windows.
So, you need a window manager. This basically hands X one "window" (composed of all the others, including the taskbar and window decoration like titles, etc). GNOME and KDE include window managers (Metacity and kwin, respectively).
But we still don't have buttons or other widgets. For that, we use a library - usually GTK or Qt. There are whole packages of software, plus glue (like settings managers), built on these libraries - the desktop environments GNOME and KDE.
None of these parts are dependent on each other. You can run a GTK window in a KDE environment, or a Qt program in a GNOME environment (it's just a library, the widgets will be different). You can use Metacity in KDE.
So for a graphical desktop you need:
X (somewhere, locally or remotely)
Window Manager \
Widget Library - - compose a Desktop Environment (KDE, Enlightment, GNOME, Xfce)
Utility programs /
I may be wrong on some details, but this is it in general.
Re:E17 is pretty stable now (Score:3, Informative)
Nah, more like nine years. According to wikipedia: "Version 0.17, also referred to as DR17 or E17, has been in development since December 2000."
I used to look forward to it during a couple of years at the beginning of this decade but have long since given up and lost interest.
Re:OK a little clearer. (Score:3, Informative)
There are no more layers in the Linux GUI system than in Windows. X, which provides the basic graphics operations, is roughly equivalent to the Windows GDI; the window manager and the desktop environment provide the functions provided by the Windows shell; and the toolkits like GTK and QT are the equivalent of the standard controls in win32. The basic architecture is not very different - it's just that, on Linux, the separate pieces are independent and properly specified, so that you can use a variety of different options at each level.
Re:Seems Obvious (Score:4, Informative)
*sigh* Why do people insist in this lie? The Matrix had no sequels or video games.