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GNOME GUI

Miguel de Icaza's startup 209

Posted by Nik from the another-IPO-in-the-offing dept.
El Volio writes "Yahoo is running a story about Miguel de Icaza's new company, focusing on GNOME software development." The new company's called "Helix Code", although that name's temporary. The plan is for all the products to be given away for free, and then charge for support, a common revenue model.
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Miguel de Icaza's startup More

Miguel de Icaza's startup

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  • I'm still waiting for all apps to work together to have cut 'n paste support as well as Windows has. E.G. you can select ANY text, almost anywhere, right click, and hit copy. Then you can paste it into ANY text box, anywhere in the system. Can this happen in Linux?
  • We are creating applications like Microsoft Office, for GNOME

    Is this a good idea? Do we really need yet another war over how the desktop should look, or could we please agree to disagree and make our applications independent of the window manager and GUI classes? Are we just re-inventing our own MFC with associated incomapabilities and holy wars?

    When will Linux split into KDE/Gnome/whatever camps that are mutually exclusive and can not share applications?

    Anyhow, who wants to pay for an office package when StarOffice is free???

  • I mean a real implementation, not just GPM stuff. Last time I checked, it was annoyingly difficult to get a block of text from, say, kedit, into, say... this box that I'm typing into right now.
  • Since when is it gnome that gives Linux a point-and-click interface? I didn't notice any reference to the fact that gnome is not "the official GUI of linux". As we know, there is none. Most people use XF86, which Gnome plugs into. More people use KDE than Gnome too, last I heard. I for instance don't use Gnome or KDE. I use E. IMHO (dont flame me for this) E is the most stable, powerful, and fast GUI I've ever used. Most people would disagree with me [laff] but that's my opinion. The point of my post though, is that this article seems to make Gnome out to be the only solution for a GUI in linux. That's not so :-).

  • it's not gpm, its X. It really isn't that difficult, you highlight the text with a mouse. To highlight text with a mouse, you hold down button 1, and drag the cursor over the desired text. Then, you click button 2 on the location you want the text to appear, and wala, copy & paste!.
  • This has been around forever. Highlight the text, the middle click to paste.

    Only works with text. The point, surely, is to be able to drang-and-drop and cut-and-paste objects and components. Text is so old-fashioned.

  • The plan is for all the products to be given away for free, and then charge for support, a common revenue model.

    While I support this model as the way of the future for the software industry.. it occurs to me that it may or may not be whats best for the consumer.

    On the one hand, the company would wish to make a good product so that more people are using it (and potentially purchasing support). On the other hand, the company has less incentive to make the product easier to use - since the more intuitive it is, the less is the demand for support (resulting in lower revenues).

    Not a big issue at the moment, since most open source software isn't aimed at the "average user". But this could be something to watch for the future. Particularly in areas such as this one - "Office" type applications.

  • Re:Point & Klik (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    powerful perhaps, stable and fast, your delusional.
  • I think this is different because they're providing specialized support for primarily the software that THEY produce.
  • The way I see it, the more support for Linux there is, the better it is for all of us. Since when is anything about Linux supposed to revolve around one (or just a few) sources?

  • It's existed about as long as X has... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ever tried middle-clicking?

    I don't like it as much as Windows's copy-paste scheme, though. Things I don't like about it:

    1. You have to use the mouse -- no copy/pasting without the mouse, which is a HORRIBLE inconvenience for those of us who realize that they keyboard is usually much faster than the mouse.

    2. If you highlight ANYTHING ELSE, the text is no longer copied. Quite often, I want to copy an URL and paste it into the address bar of Netscape or something -- OOOOOPS, when I highlighted the current URL in the address bar of Netscape to copy over it, the text in another window that I DID have highlighted stopped being such, and I can no longer copy it. The FASTEST way to replace text is to paste over it, but that's not possible with X. The fastest way to get rid of text is to highlight it and backspace, but that's not possible with X if you already have something highlighted that you want in that space!! You have to go through the AGONIZINGLY slow process of using the backspace or delete key and waiting for each and every character to be deleted individually.

    That's one of the things I hate most about X, although I'll admit it could be nice at times. I DO wish there were a TRUE global clipboard, that stored text regardless of whether or not it was still highlighted, and text has to be deliberately replaced there -- control-c or something standard like that. (What's this alt-c garbage Netscape does?)

    Ah well. It'll never happen. And Netscape menues will never be accessible via the keyboard. Arggh.

    It's still better than Microsoft!!!
  • YES, THIS is what I am talking about! Thank you for explaining it better than I could.
  • The problem I see with the idea of making money off support of a product is this: The more stable and easy-to-use your product is, the less money you make! This is an ironic situation, whereby overwhelming success in the ease-of-use department could almost be your undoing.

    "I hear it's really easy to use. Do I even NEED support?"
  • De Icaza said he has been working on applications that run in the GNOME environment, such as a spreadsheet, called Gnumeric, which can now perform more financial functions that Microsoft's Excel, thanks to the vast network of programmers contributing to the code. He said he hopes to have the first batch of applications ready next March.

    So he understands, or the article implies, that software development can only be done efficiently on a large scale in an open source community model. That is a good observation.

    But then how is he going to make any money? If he can't develop he can't sell (the code is open source) so he'll have to rely on service contracts. Is that the deal? If so, do count me as an investor in the IPO. There can only be so many Red Hats, and the market is looking increasingly crowded.

    Am I missing something obvious?

  • On the one hand, the company would wish to make a good product so that more people are using it (and potentially purchasing support). On the other hand, the company has less incentive to make the product easier to use - since the more intuitive it is, the less is the demand for support (resulting in lower revenues).

    Interestong point, but from what I've seen and experienced, applications that Miguel has been involved in have been mostly bug-free and don't have much of a learning curve. You yalk about the average user- and yeah, I agree, I've never spent a dime personally on support for an application for home use- but in the workplace I sure as hell have. So, let's see- the education system in the country of mexico, burlington coat factory, home depot, etc.... See what I'm saying? This company will have no problem whatsoever obtaining support contracts for superb software
  • I can't believe it, it worked!

    I opened up KWrite, typed `funk` and did what you said. It actually worked.

    I've never been able to paste text into Netscape. You cannot use the menu options or shortcut keys to paste text from KWrite to Netscape. For large pieces of text, I would open up the file in Netscape and copy it using the shortcut keys.

    Now, why didn't I *know* this other way? I've been using Linux since 1993. Maybe we need an X tutorial?

    Hmmm?
  • Spend lots of money to develop Gnome, then give it away and hope to make money on support? Well, everyone at Slashdot seems to think that's the business model of the future, but I don't think it will succeed. I'll take every bet they will end up doing some SCSL-like licensing tricks in the end, or completely drop the whole Gnome thing and just use the name to do some other business (did anyone say Transmeta?).
  • I think that charging for support is quite fair as long as that technology thats given away includes full documentation. I mean, it'd be bad for a company to sell a product that does stuff, that wont work unless u call to learn how to use it.

  • arrogance in general (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 14, 1999 @02:38PM (#1534080)
    ``In 14 months, he led 300 programmers all over the world to create a product that makes Windows 95 looks crude; it's restful, it's aesthetic,'' said Frederick Berenstein, co-chairman of the Linux Fund, which is investing in de Icaza's company. GNOME makes Windows 95 look crude? Definitely not. IMHO Windows Explorer is a great file manager, very intuitive and user friendly. GMC pales in comparison. Windows 95 is a rocket on my P75 w/40 megs of ram. The GNOME panel takes so long for the "main" menu to pop up compared to how long it takes for the start menu to pop up. Changes the color schemes in Windows 95 is simple and painless, in GNOME it takes forever, limiting you to only the pre-defined bloat (except for the swing metal one )themes that it comes with, or else you need to spend too much time making your own theme. Not that GNOME doesn't have its own merits, like lots of configurability, neat applets for the bar, etc. but it does not make Windows 95 seem crude in comparison. I'm sure this will get moderated down as flame bait because I disagree with the general consensus here at /. But lets face, its simply ridiculous to make statements like the one above, and to then tirelessly back it up because someone else disagrees with you and seems to favor the evil evil Microsoft design. The arrogance and self righteousness of the linux community will eventually destroy itself. It is already causing people to move to other alternatives, ones that aren't surrounded by people with unjustified superiority complex's. So moderate this down to a -20, but mark my words. The arrogance of the linux community will destroy itself.
  • Ummm... they are giving the applications away and selling support.

    Best wishes to Miguel, Nat and anyone else involved...
  • I hope the future's bright for Helix. Admittedly, I'm not certain that he'll be able to support the company completely on support contracts (I'm more in favor of the consulting approach; charcing to write entirely new OSS or add major features to existing OSS). But I wish them the best anyway
  • If you sell software, sometimes with source (in the case of developer's controls/libraries) and provide free technical support, you are a commercial bad guy who doesn't "get it".

    Give software away, sometimes with source, but charge $$$ for each technical support question/incident, you are a open source angel with nothing but good vibes and intentions for all mankind.

    It seems like one of these business models promotes shipping stable useful code, and one of these models only makes money when users have problems.

    Am I missing something here?

  • As easy to use as you make an app, some people are still going to want tech support and hand-holding.

    There's no way that they'll make as much money as Microsoft makes from MS-Office, but they shouldn't have any problems making enough to live on.

  • If you turn on the "keep menus in memory" option in the global panel preferences the menus come up right away.

    This was originally disabled by default, but in October GNOME it is now enabled by default since the memory costs aren't as high as were thought.

  • Okay, so all of you wondering why a company would concern itself with developing intuitiveness into an app whose only money garnering feature is the possiblity of securing a support contract haven't worked with enough users.

    How do I know this?

    I work in the school computer labs. I've seen the brightest people working with highly intuitive interfaces (Kai Krause is the master, all bow down.) and still struggle.

    Trust me, even if he manages to develop the most intuitive tools possible, the company'll still get support contracts from paranoid businessmen (or frustrated IT people).

  • Wow in cambridge. I thought he was from Mexico, I hope he likes snow. I am looking forward to his next releases of GNOME adn the apps. I hope though that there will be XML support in these apps, as well as Word 6, 7, 8, and wordpad files support. Yes I nkow that Corel has this support but not all the Word files I have can be read by Corel. If GNOME were to offere an alternative to Word, it would surely be a bigger hit than it already is. I do like som eof the GNOME apps.

    send flames > /dev/null

  • of microsoft if ms would give it out for free... you all know what i mean, make a shoddy product that wont work, then charge $30.00 a minute for support.
    now i'm not saying it'l be like that, thats just what pops into my head

    all aside, i wish helix and Miguel both luck



    -confidential

    AIM: confdntl98 ICQ: 150685 E-Mail: above... you can figure it out ^_~
  • Well, I'd have to say that I sort of agree with you. I would moderate you up, but I already posted in this thread and I cant moderate a thread that ive posted in. sorry :)

    Windows 95 does have a very good, user friendly look and feel. Gnome, who's purpose it is to look good, is not as good as Windows 95's GUI. MS has put tonnes of work into their GUIs. I see most linux programs trying to copy the MS GUI concepts.

    Where linux has not been concentrating so much on the GUI, it has concentrated quite intensely on the behind the scenes code. If you notice, most of the linux apps around are still in their 1 versions. That sorta means that they're still working on the inner workings... the GUI should generally come last anyways. So there is still some time for GUI stuff to be developed. Its going to be a while until linux develops a really mature gui system that is extensable (different rendering engines, themes, etc). But at least the work has started.

    Lets not say that the project is done and good before it really is even done. Put some work into it and make it really robust.

    Also, developing for one widget set is dumb... there should be some kind of abstration layer between GUI and internals.
  • Have a look at the GPL please.

    You'll find that from now and forever more, the source is free.
  • You have to go through the AGONIZINGLY slow process of using the backspace or delete key and waiting for each and every character to be deleted individually.

    Some (but not all) applications and/or toolkits support control-U as a way of erasing an entire text field (Netscape on UNIX being one of them; the GTK+ toolkit does as well).

    I DO wish there were a TRUE global clipboard, that stored text regardless of whether or not it was still highlighted, and text has to be deliberately replaced there...

    You mean like the X CLIPBOARD selection, which many - but, alas, not all - applications support. (Then again, not all applications necessarily support "paste primary selection" - the mechanism you describe, which is quite often mislabeled "cut and paste" - either.)

    ...control-c or something standard like that. (What's this alt-c garbage Netscape does?

    I don't know why Netscape insists on using Alt for so many keyboard accelerators, unless it's an attempt to avoid colliding with the Emacs key bindings it offers in some situations. GTK+, at least for some text widgets, binds "copy to the CLIPBOARD selection" to...

    ...control-C. For example, you can use control-C to copy text from a text field, control-X to cut text from a text field, and control-V to paste text into a text field.

    I wouldn't be surprised to find that Qt did so as well, at least when configured to provide a Windows-style UI (I think Motif might use some other bindings for cut/copy/paste - I heard a claim that they were pre-Windows 3.1 keys, used by Windows in an attempt to avoid getting beaten up by Apple, who appear to use +{C,V,X} for hose functions, and that 3.1 went to Control-{C,V,X} when Apple's suit ceased to be a threat - so maybe Qt uses those bindings when configured to provide a Motif-style UI).

  • Have you tried optimizing your configuration of gnome? Install a colour based instead of pixmap based GTK theme, just as win 95 has. Now have your panel ONLY have the pager app and the clock and the foot/start button menu. Now boot. Hrm... seems to be running a little faster than Windows Explorer to me....

    Now, I'll just customize a few things here and a few things there... put a nice e theme in... tweak some more...

    Hey! Cool! I have now a *cool* looking and relatively safe (ie: no BSoD) and streamlined desktop!

    If you were to run the various pixmap window tweakers on the windows machine, you'd be running slower, too.

    Anyway, my point is, don't expect magic out of a linux system just because it's a linux system... expect magic out of it because it's been engineered that way, and yet still remains within the actual things you can actually do wth the limited number of cycles on your processor.



  • Conflict in Business Model? No. (Score:3)

    by Tiamat ( 25392 ) on Sunday November 14, 1999 @02:59PM (#1534096)
    There seems to be some concern that the support-based business model contains within it a conflict of interest: that businesses which rely on support won't 'want' to make their products easy to use. These fears seem to assume that this business model is targeting the basic user who wants to center paragraphs, bold text and send one-page memos.

    These support arrangements seem to me primarly to offer support to corporations and "Power Users". Clearly, corporations are willing to pay for the peace of mind that comes from guaranteed support -- does anyone remember when "no one was ever fired for buying IBM?"

    Power Users are willing to pay to have developers help them to do things that 99.9% of the other users of the program wouldn't dream of doing. (How do I get this mail merge to take data directly from a relational database? How can I ensure that page 425 of my dissertation is formatted using this 'style'? Etc, etc.)

    The best thing about this business model is that it provides that large base of basic, individual users the legal right freely to use a very efficient, and very Inuitive program. The kind of conspiracy theory that holds that Miguel would be involved in a project to deliberately confuse users is more than ridiculous.

    David
  • Yeah, you're missing something.

    Free software isn't about not paying for it. If miguel sells his apps, that'd be fine. As long as he doesn't stop people from passing on the apps, including source code (and modifying them, of course).

    Remember, RMS used to make money by selling emacs tapes.

    Now if Miguel gives or sells his software (with source), and charges for technical support, this *is* better. This is better because I don't have to go to Miguel for technical support - so I only will if he's good. And I can choose to provide my own technical support on his products for my clients. Furthermore, I can improve his software, for the benefit of my clients - or, heaven forbid, even my friends.

    Free software is about the freedom to copy and modify. Money doesn't come into it...

    Jules

  • The title of this comment may be a little facetious, but for the most part it's true. Most home office users don't buy support contracts, either. Not even all small offices do, unless it comes with the site license.

    The entire "give the software away for free and charge for support" concept--it seems to me--came from people used to the traditional market for Unix software and applications: enterprise customers, research facilities and universities. In those markets, commercial software is supported constantly by the vendor. It's most of what you're paying for--you're more or less buying the support for $20,000 (or whatever) a year and that includes "free" updates to the systems you've purchased. In this environment, charging for support for open source software is pretty natural.

    In home and SOHO environments, though, this model is unprecedented, in a canonical sense of the term. Some software comes with 90 days of free technical support, and some companies have a "knowledge base" of software. And that's it.

    The question is: are people really crying out to change that? Don't give me a "yes" answer too fast. Even most newbie Linux users are net-savvy enough to find a newsgroup to ask for support on or to use Red Hat's free knowledge base, and anyone can manage to get to their local Borders and pick up "Linux for Dummies."

    And this is just for the operating system, which is generally the most complex piece of a desktop OS. The chances are that most users aren't going to have any problems with a desktop app that require a support contract--they might have trouble with installation, but that's it. Nearly anything else they can ask a friend, find a web page, get a book, post a message on a news group, and so on.

    At risk of sounding doom-and-gloom, this is a problem I see with the entire "give it away" philosophy. Flame if you will, but as has been observed before, all software has development costs associated with it; the free software world has had the fortune that most of those costs have effectively been eaten by universities and a select few companies.

    When you try to make money by starting commercial projects as open source, though, they need to end up paying their way somehow. Red Hat and Linux distributors to date have essentially sold neither software nor support, they've sold convenience. Red Hat wants to move to a subscription-based model, it seems, and that's understandable--each "unofficial Red Hat" CD someone buys with no support is an indirect material harm to their business. (Again, that sounds harsh, but if you sell at a profit margin of 50% and 60% of your potential customers get your product without giving you money for it, you're losing money.)

    But can that really work for a "desktop application"? I'm not sure that it can't... but I'm not convinced that it can, either.

  • Use Alt-L to bring up the Open Page dialog, in which you can paste the URL with Ctrl-Insert.

    Alternatively, paste the URL leftmost in the Location field and press Ctrl-K to kill to eol, which gets rid of the old url (the cursor will be in the right place).

    Note that I'm absolutely not trying to downplay the problems [slashdot.org] with Linux's "select'n'paste" method.
    --

  • Well, while they're making a new clipboard... hehe. 'they' being whomever of course ;) they should make it so that u can do instead of only ctl c ctl v or whatever... it shoulb be ctl c and a number or something like that, so that u can store it in clipboard 1 or 2 or 3 or 4. and paste 3 then 1 or 2 hehe :)

    that'd be really really sweet. :)
  • There are a lot of officetools around... If U goto sun [sun.com] or corel (WordPerfect) [corel.com] U can get some office warez allready.

  • Re:It *worked*! (Score:4)

    by Guy Harris ( 3803 ) <guy@alum.mit.edu> on Sunday November 14, 1999 @03:11PM (#1534104)
    I've never been able to paste text into Netscape. You cannot use the menu options or shortcut keys to paste text from KWrite to Netscape.

    If control-C copies text in KWrite, try using control-C to copy text in KWrite and using Alt+V to paste it in Netscape. Control-C copies text in GTK+, so I copied a bit of text from a GTK+ application using control-C, and pasted it to Netscape using Alt+V. (The text was "eat me", a phrase that sums up my personal attitude towards Netscape's Alt-oriented key bindings.... Yes, there's presumably some reason why Netscape works that way. That's unlikely to make those key bindings less irritating to me....)

    Now, why didn't I *know* this other way? I've been using Linux since 1993. Maybe we need an X tutorial?

    Probably not a bad idea.

    Note that "X" has many levels - the core X protocol only specifies, as I remember, that the notion of "selections" exist, and the ICCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCM (Inter-Client Communications Conventions Manual, or so) specifies only that there exist selections with names such as PRIMARY ("the stuff that's inverse video because you selected it"), SECONDARY (does anything use this other than XView?), and CLIPBOARD ("the stuff that got copied to the clipboard, unless the CLIPBOARD selection holder exited - xclipboard will at least allow that to survive said owner exiting, although it may only preserver the text version of it) and, I think, the way they're intended to be used.

    It's the toolkits and applications that implement stuff such as control-{X,C,V} as cut/copy/paste, and "paste primary selection" with the middle mouse button, so not everything running on X necessarily implements all those conventions, or implements them using the same mouse and keyboard bindings (for example, XView, being an OPEN LOOK toolkit, has its own keyboard and mouse bindings; the middle button, as I remember, means "extend selection" there, rather than "paste current selection").

  • If you mean copying from app to app, within one X session, that's already possible. (Most apps will copy to the clipboard by simply selecting text, and paste from the clipboard with the middle mouse button.)

    Qt (and thus KDE) has a class which allows for the sending of text to the X clipboard.

    My guess is that Motif, Gtk+, and all the other widget sets and toolkits give the developer convenient access to the X clipboard, as well. And, if not, one can always use the X library functions themselves!

    If, however, you are referring to copying and pasting from one VC to another, that would probably require kernel-level support. This would be non-portable and, therefore, not popular for developers of portable systems like GNOME. (unless I'm off, and Solaris, *BSD, and the rest already have such a feature.)
  • Not to be offtopic, but...

    Well, I'd have to say that I sort of agree with you. I would moderate you up,...

    Moderation isn't about pushing someone up that you agree with! It's about promoting meaningful discussion! Don't moderate people down if you don't agree with them, moderate them down if they truly *are* trolling, or offtopic.

    That said, here's my attempt to bring this back ontopic. I agree with the above poster : Windows 9x/2000/NT is a very good GUI. It's a good answer to the question of how a user should interact with an Operating System. That doesn't mean its the ONLY answer!

    Keep that in mind.


    jawad

  • ...and the contributions by others. If the Gnome people decide to make a new version that's not under GPL, they just have to get rid of other people's code, and nobody can stop them.
  • Interesting point...

    Does that mean that when Linux is an absolute breeze to set up, RedHat stock will crash because no one will need technical support?


    jawad
  • Quite often, I want to copy an URL and paste it into the address bar of Netscape or something -- OOOOOPS, when I highlighted the current URL in the address bar of Netscape to copy over it, the text in another window that I DID have highlighted stopped being such, and I can no longer copy it.

    I just learned a shortcut for this the other day. I found out that you can simply middle-click anywhere in the Netscape window and it'll paste it in the Location bar and bring you there right away. Talk about a hidden feature!

    And Netscape menues will never be accessible via the keyboard. Arggh.

    Well, here's another suprise I discovered just yestarday. I had my keyboard on my lap, and it slipped down and hit the bottom of my desk, hitting a few keys on the way. A netscape menu popped up! Trying a few keys in the general area where this happened, I discovered that the F10 key brings up the Netscape menus.

  • >>> If miguel sells his apps ...

    If Miguel sells his apps, he's not going to let you pass your copy on to other people. If he makes his money from sales, he can't let you do that - it ultimately destroys his revenue stream.

    >>> Money doesn't come into it...

    Money comes into _every_ equation, unless your planet doesn't use it. This one (earth) does.
  • Just the other day I was trying to explain a stance from my martial art to a friend over IRC, and he couldn't picture it and couldn't picture it, so I sketched him something in xpaint, dcc'd it to him, and a minute later he said, "Ohh!!"

    See? ;)

  • MS might take hime to court or kill the kid.
  • I think you're being slightly optimistic here.

    Firstly, almost every office of any size already uses Microsoft Office for office-like functionality and they likely won't be switching soon.

    Added to which, they aren't paying for support on small productivity apps - the type of lucrative contracts you are talking about have to do with things like Oracle and SAP, where the support contract really is crucial.

  • Remember wilberworks.com? The company which went into business in 1997 with the intention of sustaining itself solely by offering support for The Gimp. Well take a look at it and see how booming their business has been.
  • They are positioning them selves to be bought up by Red Hat.

    Great thinking, IMNSHO
  • more widespread, standard clipboard would be nice, yes.
    what i think would be _really_ nice in linux, or at least in the GNOME environment, is better support for drag&drop between apps along the lines the mac os uses. This is the one thing i really miss in X more than anything else. (and, for that matter, i miss it in windows, although there it's no so bad becuase every app except Mirc and Pirch supports copy/paste in a logical manner)

    Here on the mac if someone mentions a URL on IRC, i can just select the url, grab it, drag it to the little MSIE or NS icon in the app switcher and have it open. or drag it to the desktop and have it wait there until i need it. It makes my desktop hideously cluttered, but it's worth it.

    Meanwhile if i am running ircii in rxvt or whatever that GNOME terminal program is, and i have netscape open behind it, i can rarely even get copy/paste to work between the two.

    This is not something that needs a lot of attention, obviously, but i think it's something that maybe they should look into as the next step in teh evoloution of their GUI.

    Either way, between KDE and GNOME (although personally i find KDE so nasty and cumbersome that i feel much more comfortable using Bash to deal with files.. which coming from a native mac user is saying a LOT) look carefully at the linux GUI choices available and ask yourselves if this is something people at large will want to use. It's all very well and good to _say_ linux can conquer "the desktop", but if you really look you'll see that there are so many incredibly _basic_ things in the available GUIs (which is the one part you know most people are going to want to use if they'll have to do it a lot..) which just don't work as well as they do in practically any other available GUI. Things like universal copy/paste, or drag&drop, or preferences dialogs that write the config files for you, or remotely consistant scrollbars, or menus that launch programs (the ones every Window Manager has, similar to the start button or apple menu) which can be changed without restarting the window manager, or in general "intuitive" programs (programs which you can use _without_ reading the documentation). Yes these are minor things, but the minor things are REALLY IMPORTANT. The linux community as a while needs to either put some serious work into fixing problems like these for usability by people who aren't willing to forgive the binary simply because of the liscense of the code, or else just accept that linux and X are things which will be resigned to the role of servers, specific tasks, and use by people who don't mind a CLI and are willing to read the documentation _before_ they do anything.
    Note i'm not saying this second option is a bad thing, or that the linux community has a real need to go with the first option. I'm just saying until you seriously do something toward the first option, don't claim linux is going to replace windows on a massive scale anytime soon.

  • Non-commercial radio ... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Contributions to non-commericial radio stations during pledge drives may be a good model here -- a percentage of consumers will pay for something they can get free, because they realize that if they don't pay, it may go away. Our local station KALX [berkeley.edu] just had a successful fundraiser, and their audience is tough with a dollar -- college kids at a state school!
  • I have the feeling that most of you are thinking relative to the existing business model. But if you put services first, there are some real possibilities.

    Imagine you are Joe Newbie. You install GNOME and suscribe to the Support service by miguel's company. You pay a nominal fee each month. Then every other week you get a CD in the mail with various updates and bug fixes. Also you get a newsletter with various happenings in GNOME world.

    Lets say that Joe newbie is having problems with Gnumeric crashing. He emails support with his problem and gets a reply that they have fixed the problem. The fix will be installed on the next CD or can be downloaded. Not only that but the fix will be distributed to all the subscribers.

    Now lets say Joe Newbie wants a certain feature. Like perhaps animated icons. He emails support and they say that they will charge a fee but the fee is less for subscribers. The feature will be developed in six weeks and will come on that CD. If the feature is benificial for GNOME as a whole it will be on everyone's CD and included in the next GNOME distribution.

    Gnome support could develop themes, desktop wallpaper, alternate icons, etc. They could propietize these which I don't think is against the principles of free software: they are creative works.

    Many users will like this service. They always have the latest stable software.

    ***Beginning*of*Signiture***
    Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!
  • I'm sure this will get moderated down as flame bait because I disagree with the general consensus here at /.

    So moderate this down to a -20, but mark my words. The arrogance of the linux community will destroy itself.

    ARRRRGGGG! I hate it when people do this. Play the rebel annd show everyone you are breaking the trend. If someone moderates you down then they are evil conformosts.

    I think the slashdot community is perhaps the most open minded. You wouldn't have been moderated down even without the pleeinng. And conformity is something most slashdotters dislike and you won't be demoted for being different.

    Even if someone does moderate you down, slashdot has this nice moderator check to double check against unfair moderation. Beleive it or not but sometimes the system works.

    Now I would like to respond to your comment. GNOME looks ten times better than Windows using a really nice theme. I do digress that Windows is faster. October GNOME is much faster than that ucky 1.0.0 release. Unless you have started Netscape, GNOME is really responsive. I think the fault lies with X because the GUI is slow even without GNOME. Then again someone commented a while ago how Windows uses hardware accels for its fine GUI performance.

    You do have a point about GNOME not having simple color schemes. I wonder how difficult it would be for their to be a way to change the colors of the default theme.

    ***Beginning*of*Signiture***
    Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!
  • >> applications that Miguel has been involved in have been mostly bug-free and don't have much of a learning curve.

    Then what the hell happened to the Gnome code that shipped with RedHat 6.0 ??? I understand that October Gnome is supposed to be better, but I haven't used it yet.

    Small to medium sized American businesses are willing to pay for code, and support, though the latter is a harder sell. Mainly because they buy support once from Microsoft or Compaq and they get the brush off for their trouble. But we all see companies daily where everyone complains about MS instabilities and can show you several any time you want, but everyone also upgrades to every new MS release in the hope that the problems will be lessened. That just goes to show that you can build a successful business out of purposefully shipping lousy products, which makes you wonder why take the trouble to write good products. Unless for OSS bragging rights?

  • I just learned a shortcut for this the other day. I found out that you can simply middle-click anywhere in the Netscape window and it'll paste it in the Location bar and bring you
    there right away. Talk about a hidden feature!

    Okay now right click on a link, and hold the right button down, see where it says "Open Link in new window Button 2" ?....middle button = button 2, talk about hidden features!..Hehe sorry I couldn't resist myself.
  • Yeah, you're missing something. It doesn't cost them anything to reproduce the software, but it costs a crapload to develop it in the first place. Redhat is doing good, but does Icaza really have what it takes? I'm not sure. First he has to develop something interesting, because what's out now isn't going to cut it. Yeah, Gnumeric is good, but nobody would buy support for just that.

    They're going to need to bring together a whole suite of software that is freakin' excellent. I mean, really really good. That's expensive -- even when you've got open source developers working with you.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

    • The more stable and easy-to-use your product is, the less money you make!

    The corollary to this is that if you make unstable software that is in constant need of an incompatible upgrade, then you can make tons of money. That's the Microsoft business model.

    I think this business model is less about building software than it is about finding specific customer needs to address.

    If this build-it-for-support-contracts model is to work, then the actual product is just a big marketing tool for your contract support. End users won't be buying your support much, but I could certainly see the Linux distro companies paying to make sure that the hot products worked seemlessly in their latest releases.

    The other business opportunity for this business model would be in customization. Say, for example, that the Government decides to fund a big Gnome for the visually handicapped development. Or, say, some PDA vendor wants a Gnome compatible API for PDA applications, then these could be big opportunities.

    I say could as this business model has not yet born itself out, certainly not in broadly horizontal apps like desktops managers and OS's.

    I know of one consultant who has more consulting than he can handle in integrating and supporting his Open Source (GPL) package. I'm sure there are others. This is not really surprising as in vertical applications there's always been a lot of money in integration, consulting and support.

    I'm hoping that Open Source will move the focus of software developers away from big software systems with the, largely unnecessary, every other year upgrade and into vertical application consulting, integration and support. I think that this would be a good thing for the economy.

    I'm not sure that much value is generated in a software upgrade that has more marketing check boxes filled in. I'm much more comfortable about people getting paid to make an application work for a given customer. This is where the rubber hits the road. Customers won't pay someone for a package that isn't generating revenue for them, but somehow, they are convinced that they must move to the latest Windows release out of fear of being left behind.

  • Sun or Corel offers target only for i386 Linux. So what about the freedom? What about the freedom to choose your architecture, freedom to share the code?

    Linux is not only a i386 thing.
  • I agree wholeheartedly with your comments: I'd just like to point out to windows users out there a really nice feature on CRT, my favorite terminal program: highlite something, right click and then select "Open URL" ;-)...


    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
  • If Miguel sells his apps, he's not going to let you pass your copy on to other people. If he makes his money from sales, he can't let you do that - it ultimately destroys his revenue stream.

    Uh-oh... somebody better tell RedHat to get out of the Linux game quick! It seems that they're selling something that other people are giving away *for free*! *gasp* I don't get it... somehow they manage to make money even though they're selling a freely available product, and indeed giving it away for free themselves! (Check ftp.redhat.com [redhat.com] if you don't believe me)
  • If that's your only revenue stream. Let's face it. Brand is where it's at. Why do you think people shop at The Gap? Because the clothes are of high quality? Nope. We shop there because we'll learn how to dance really cool and sing in a boring, monotone that will annoy the hell out of everyone.

    Uh...where was I going. Ah, yes. The Brand. If Miguel creates a strong brand for his company, people may prefer buying it from him so they can say "Hey...look at what I got...I got the Icaza that comes with the poster!"
  • Your implications seem themselves intended to spread the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt that you seem to be accusing others of.
    1. GNOME and KDE can both run on top of X simultaneously, as well as Motif, FVWM, Tk, and others. They can coexist.
    2. Are you trying to imply that there should be no attempt to build higher level infrastructures than Xlib?

      If you have no such infrastructure, then everybody is left reinventing the same wheels, over and over again, in much the way that there is a host of graphics libraries for X.

      And if you do have some such infrastructure, then you'll have to choose between "library sets.

    3. If you're concerned about interoperability, then work on interoperable protocols.

      Set up common document formats; note that both are using XML and SGML, and notably are using DocBook for managing the documentation. Improve the Docbook tools, and you help both.

      Set up services that can be usable for BOTH. Both GNOME and KDE, for instance, have calendar programs that use common data storage formats; a "killer app" would be to create a calendar server that could allow multi-user access to schedules, and allow management of common resources.

      But instead, you have to take a focus that assumes that they are mutually exclusive, when reality is that They are not exclusive.

    4. No, StarOffice is not free. It belongs to Sun Microsystems, and some license fees are waived at their suffrance.

      And, in any case, how does Star Office resolve the "window manager and GUI classes" issue taht you seem focused on? It doesn't; it merely places control over the selection of such into Sun's hands.

  • Uh, how booming has their business been. I can't tell what position you're taking on this issue.
  • It's too bad this guy's an AC-- this comment actually brings up a novel revenue model for OSS that I've never heard before. Moderators, wield your points.

    ~k.lee

  • You're right; the idea of charging support for something that is build to make the users' life easier is a paradox. I believe that GPL'ed software has a place in the SOHO/Home market with some other business model: either charge for specialized "components" (say an analysis package for Gnumeric) or per use of higher-level functions.

    I.e. give away the base software for free and charge people to use extensions/rarely used functions/"plus services".

    Just my $0.002


    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
  • While it is always good to see a flurry of activity spring up around free software, I can't help but wonder if this is going to do anything useful.

    Support isn't the end all be all of free software justification. Someone else hit the nail on the head when they noted that the OS is the most complicated part of a system, and thus support there is justified...but support for an app (or set of apps even) just isn't. Things are easy to use, relatively abstracted from the hardware (which causes most support issues anyway when you don't have to worry about software components conflicitng with each other, as on an MS platform.)

    So what role does support have? Developer support? MS and Sun have laid groundwork there with MSDN and Sun Developer Essentials...but there's already plenty of web pages, FAQs, HOW-TOs, and free (as in beer) components out there to help the budding Linux App Designer.

    What about large-scale IT support? There is at least something here. Having to piece together a set of apps to form your company's entire working platform is formidable, and having an organization like Helix Code to hold your hand and help you make changes, etc would be useful. But this market isn't that big.

    Small-scale groups (like individual departments and SOHO users) won't want to pay for this. They'll just hire a one-time contractor to do this sort of work, or educate one person enough so that they can do it in house.

    Individual users, of course, will pay no attention to this. They will continue to leech off the work of others as they have always done. To them "free" means as in beer, and ONLY that. The average user is mostly concerned with the fact they got it for nothing; especially since they have to work just as hard to get it to work as they do a commercial package.

    So what does this mean? It's a questionable venture. It will likely accelerate the development and acceptance of GNOME, which is wonderful. But I don't see it as being lasting (especially since we still haven't seen a proven example of the Open Source Enhancements and Support business model yet.)
  • if it means you have to pay just to get the program to $@%&!! work then that's the wrong way to go. But if support means "ok we'll work on this feature just for you" then that's a revolutionary idea.
  • "I wonder how difficult it would be for their to be a way to change the colors of the default."

    It'd be easy. It's on my project-list. I'll start work on an app. (maybe a capplet for GNOME) to GUIfy GTK+ colour-theme-writing (new theme-files should automagically show up in the theme-selector), soon, and put a post to freshmeat when I've got some working code, OK?
  • As I recall there wasn't exactly a consensus (as if there ever is around here)but many were skeptical, to put it charitably, and many other postings were along the lines of "fly-by-night", "bandwagon jumpers", "get rich quick schemes", and such, and few, if any, expressed any belief that one should risk one's money with them.

  • I'm still waiting for all apps to work together to have cut 'n paste support as well as Windows has. E.G. you can select ANY text, almost anywhere, right click, and hit copy. Then you can paste it into ANY text box, anywhere in the system.

    Even more so in MacOS -- cut'n'paste there is as universal and robust as standard input/output is in Unix, I imagine because the system was designed around it. Meanwhile, in Linux, I feel lucky when cutting and pasting between apps works the way I expect. Why should I be unable to copy text from KFM to Kdevelop?

    Hopefully this is something that can be improved without tearing X to pieces...

  • Umm, not really. I would like to cut this short since it's not related to the subject; but posting anything favoring a Microsoft product over an Open Source package is almost always a sure way of getting yourself moderated down in Slashdot.

    So is conformity really something most Slashdotters dislike? I don't think so. I agree posts that make any sense will eventually get moderated up, but only after being moderated down by several people, which prevents the article from even being seen by many others. I've seen many quite insightful posts discussing MS Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, or ASP vs. CGI/PHP moderated down as "troll". And I'm not talking about pointless, real flamebait posts or those including profanity.Perhaps this supports the original poster's opinion of the arrogance of Linux community-he definitely has a point.

    On the other hand, strange as it seems, saying "go moderate this down" seems to cause the post o be moderated up.
  • I don't think there's a conspiracy to make things confusing on purpose but there are many usability problems with many programs already and I doubt people will invest the time to make them easier if they adopt this model.

  • Full of assumptions (Score:3)

    by Brian Knotts ( 855 ) <.moc.sseccaedacsac. .ta. .sttonkb.> on Sunday November 14, 1999 @06:01PM (#1534160)
    You're still viewing the whole software industry through industrial-age goggles.

    Software distribution is not like typewriter manufacturing, particularly when it is done via ftp.

    Yes, there are up-front costs, but the "manufacturing" costs and distribution costs are trivial when an Internet-based distribution method is used.

    Even in the more traditional software industry, you don't seem to understand something: support *is* what you're really paying for. Yes, people operate under the fallacy that they're purchasing software, but they're wrong; hasn't anyone read their EULAs?

    So, what are they buying, really? A license? How expensive is that to "manufacture?" No, what they're really paying for is support, just like they do in the Free Software model. The big difference? The Free Software vendors are honest about what they're selling.

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • Well, with proprietary software, they're not just buying support. They're also buying the right to use a copy of the software legally. With Free Software, that right is already given, so all you have left to sell is the support.
  • For home use? Not me. I read or write a StarOffice doc about once every two weeks on my home machine, so the incredible slowness is alright.

    For work use? I'd pay for a Linux office suite with the speed of any of the big three from Windowsworld (MS, Corel, Lotus). Work (for me) means producing big and complex Excel, Word, and Visio files. That's why work happens on my NT Workstation, and everything else happens on Linux -- I'd be losing money if I put up with StarOffice every time I wanted to write a 30 page scope of work.

    Granted, my NT laptop dualboots to Linux so I can use nmap, tcpdump, and similar tools that just don't exist in Windowsworld :-) But that angle of my work doesn't happen as much as the writing, PDF'ing, and mailing of documents.

  • I'm sure lots of companies are considering using Linux for ASP now, I wonder if Marc Andreessen's new company, Loudcloud, will be using it. Other than those efforts that we don't know about yet, there are already a couple of companies that offer Linux desktops that you can use on the Web-a "personal ASP" a la Desktop.com [desktop.com]. You might want to check out WorkSpot [workspot.com], which allows you to have your own Linux desktop via VNC-they will offer various productivity sofware, so I guess that makes it an example of ASP with Linux.
  • What I'm trying to say is that the only *tangible* thing you're buying, really, from the proprietary vendors is support.

    I say that because the original poster was talking about ratios of customer profits as if the more copies out there, the more costs were being incurred by the vendor. That's clearly not the case; the only costs they really incur are from support. Thus, I claim, that what you are *really* buying from the proprietary vendors is, in fact, support.

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • What you say about XEmacs is demonstrably false.

    Try it. Go ahead, select some text in XEmacs, click outside the selected region to deselect, then middle-click to paste. Wa la.

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • Business model.. (Score:3)

    by TurkishGeek ( 61318 ) on Sunday November 14, 1999 @06:32PM (#1534170)
    With all due respect for his programming skills, personality and contributions to Open Source movement, I must say I'm surprised to see that none of the posts discussing the business model mention one possible motive behind Icaza's new company: Making a bundle of money by jumping on the Linux IPO bandwagon.

    I agree the company can be very useful for GNOME and acceptance of Linux on the desktop. I fail to understand if the business model of selling support contracts for GNOME or GNOME apps is completely sound, though. Can anyone working in Fortune 1000 companies tell me if they are paying Microsoft for Windows or MS Office support contracts?

    I believe the company is largely motivated by the opportunity of going to a quick IPO by riding on the Linux IPO wave. Yes, the company is founded by smart, savvy people who contributed a lot to Open Source. Yes, this is no LinuxOne-like scam. Yes, prospects for the company can be great if GNOME is widely accepted in especially the corporate world. But I don't think the business model makes sense until GNOME really takes off and corporate clients start buying support contracts. IMHO, that will not happen anytime soon, at least not before the first couple of rounds of financing for Helix Code. I believe they have positioned themselves either for being acquired by a bigger company, or a quick IPO after showing a token amount of revenues over the next couple of years.
  • This business model kind of concerns me. If all of your revenue is derived from supporting a product there just doesn't seem to be all that much motivation to make the user interface everything that it could be. Ideally a piece of software shouldn't require any support at all. But if your only shot at eating next week it to make the user interface akward, the commands cryptic and the documentation sparce then that's probably what you're going to do.

    Personally, I'd much rather pay for a piece of software that works right the first time. I want to be able to install software and then use it. I don't want to have to send 2 dozen e-mail messages and play phone tag just to get something to work properly.

    Seems to me that the software industry would be better motivated to make quality products if supporting broken products were an expense rather than an asset.

    These are just my thoughts on the matter. Let me know what you think.
  • I had this idea for a license clause in my head, all worked out, and I lost it.

    No wait, here it is. Buried under the Cow and Chicken quotes...

    Wouldn't it be possible to have it so software isn't GPL until AFTER the first sale/licensing/whatever?

    Sorta like, I create version 1.0 of my software. I sell it to people under a "creator" clause, which lets me sell it at a profit (more than at just the creation of the media), but as soon as they get it, it's GPL software. Additionally, they get , while if they decide to redistribute it/incorporate it into their own projects, they are restricted to the GPL's terms.

    Is this possible? Would it seem so far fetched to actually be able to profit from the software you write, yet make sure it's still opensource?
  • ... when he threatened to mailbomb me.
    -russ
  • I consider both statements to be personal opinions and devoid of universal truth.

    I consider the Gnome system to be wonderful, UI wise, compared to Windows. I would attribute 80% of that to the included Enlightenment Window Manager [enlightenment.org], not to Gnome in general. I consider GTK+ to be eons ahead of MFC for making quick and dirty programs with that actually look good.

    As a beginner, which would I prefer? Windows maybe ... for now. Which do I like for what I use my computer for? Gnome of course (I'm using it right now ...).

    I don't think this poster has the right to claim that the other person was arrogant any more than the latter had the right to say that Gnome all-in-all makes Windows look crude. Windows has some points that shine in comparison to Gnome (the Gnome configuration panel sucks ... bad!, but Windows' themeability sucks worse ;-) ).

    The fact that Miguel is doing something new is interesting ... and through the few E-mail contacts I've had with him as a programmer, I'm impressed with his abilities, so I'll be watching closely.

    - Michael T. Babcock <homepage [linuxsupportline.com]>
  • I think the slashdot community is perhaps the most open minded.

    In my observation a great deal of /. has the attitude of "be an individualist, just like everyone else", which looks very open-minded if you happen to agree with them. On the other hand I agree that the moderators seem to be reasonably fair-handed and this kind of posturing is (a) repetitive and (b) annoying.

    Back on-topic for this off-topic thread, I think the only real problem with
    the Gnome stuff is that way too many widgets default to way too large a size.
    I think this is slated to be fixed in Gnome 2.0, but who knows when that'll
    be out. Easy color changes would be nice, but ThinIce is quick and nifty enough
    for me for now.. :)

    Also: on my hardware at least, Windows is not faster than X, it is
    *more responsive* -- so it *feels* faster even when it isn't! For example, in X
    the mouse cursor hiccups when your computer is doing extra calculation; in
    Windows the cursor is (I suspect) updated from an interrupt routine, so it moves
    at a steady speed regardless of CPU load. On the other hand, I've run games in
    X inside windows (using SHM extensions and the like) that Windows would never
    be able to handle *inside windows*. Of course, fullscreen mode in Windows
    clobbers X -- but the fair comparison is to svgalib, and it's fairly even there.

    Daniel
  • Funny, I'm still waiting for Windows and MacOS to support cut'n'paste as well as Linux does. Fiddling with keys in between the cut and paste is a waste of time.

    To each his own, I suppose.

    Daniel
  • No, that's not true. If Miguel would sell his applications, provided they are free software, people would still buy them from him (even when they can get it cheaper from someone else) because they want to further the development of the product. The normal rules of economics don't apply to free software.
  • 1) Become popular and famous by leading a gui-building project
    2) Announce you're going into business and describe any kind of business plan, however incomplete or impractical
    3) Sit back and wait for slashdot readers to improve your business plan for you

    Yes, well sorry, that was kind of facetious - but I'll throw my $.02 in by saying that, with gnome developing rapidly (it had better, it's got a long way to go) I for one would be interested in subscribing to some kind of automatic update feed where I always had the latest of everything. Would that be worth $20/year? Darn right it would.

    Now that I've got your attention (stop reading now if you're not in the mood for a rant) I have to mention a few things that just have to be fixed in Gnome:

    Keyboard focus handling is abysmal - almost entirely missing. For example, when you put away the panel focus should automatically go back to where it was before you clicked on the panel. Another example: when you click on an app in the pager, it should get keyboard focus (duh). Whenever you minimize an app, the next app on the stack should get focus.

    There has to be a delay between the time the mouse moves off a main menu and the time the submenu disappears.

    When you click a widget and some other widget is supposed to disappear, your click *must still get through* to the widget you clicked on.

    Why is the pager applet tied to the panel task list? That's just wrong.

    Task cycling via alt-tab isn't well thought through, i.e., it's very hard to get to the task you want. There is no excuse for cycling through only the list of raised tasks - you need to be able to cycle through all tasks, including minimized.

    Far too many applications in the suite are unuseable without the mouse. *Everything* with a scroll bar should respond to the arrow keys.

    Good things about Gnome are too many to mention. Especially, it's good that Gnome is now stable and doesn't mess up its configuration like it used to. Nonetheless, I'm running KDE right now, mainly because of the above-mentioned irritations. I recognize that working on the internals first and getting everything stable has been the highest priority till now, but I sure hope that more attention starts getting paid to those little details that really matter to the user.

  • Nope. Doesn't work in KDE.

    Sigh. Maybe Qt doesn't use the CLIPBOARD selection the way other toolkits/applications expect.

    In fact, a quick look at the Qt 1.44 source suggests that the only selection it does anything with is the primary selection, and the same appears to apply to Qt 2.0.2, so if KDE 1.x or 2.x uses the CLIPBOARD selection, it's done by KDE code rather than Qt code.

    For some reason, there's no XA_CLIPBOARD atom for the CLIPBOARD selection, as there are for the PRIMARY and SECONDARY selections - but the ICCCM does discuss the CLIPBOARD selection (section L.2.6.1.3, "The CLIPBOARD Selection", in the X11R5 version of the X Protocol Reference Manual in the O'Reilly series of X manuals), so the lack of an XA_CLIPBOARD atom is insufficient reason not to use that selection....

    As for alt-vs-ctrl in Netscape: Why??? I can't think of any reason why alt would be used rather than ctrl.

    Maybe it's a Motif quirk?

    The Motif 1.2 Style Guide says, in section 4.3.1 Clipboard Transfer, that the "Cut" key (which they seem to imply could be implemented by a combination of other keys) or Shift+Delete "must cut selected elements of the target component to the clipboard", the "Copy" key or Ctrl+Insert "must copy selected elements of the target component to the clipboard", and the "Paste" key or Shift+Insert "must paste the contents of the clipboard at the insertion position of the target component", so it seems to be inclined towards Shift+Delete rather than Control+X or Alt+X for Cut, Ctrl+Insert rather than Control+C or Alt+C for Copy, and Shift+Insert rather than Control+V orAlt+V for Paste, so I don't think it's a Motif quirk - I think it's a Netscape quirk.

  • I know this is off-topic, but I just saw an add banner at the top of the page that "click here" over a picture of a woman's face. to the left of that was a banner that said "X10 and Slashdot" [invite you to visit the wired home of tomorrow , or something like that]. Yep, slashdot. Trade mark logo and all.

    That isn't the only one I've seen, either. I saw one at zdnet or something that showed an alternating picture of the midriff of a woman in a bathing suit and "Click Here" in big letters. They should probably be tied up and made to watch three years of Brady Bunch reruns just for using an annoying animated gif (much like the VA Linux one at the top of the screen now) which was so gaudy that I had to wear sunglasses just to look directly at it, but I'm concerned about something deeper.

    Ya know, d00d, if I wuz a chick, those ad's'd kinda piss me off (TIC). Seriously, These ads seem rather denigrating to women. Not only do they implicitly exclude women from the target market, but they use women's bodies to sell friggin' home control electronics. That's just offensive.

    I'm not saying /. shouldn't run ads from X10, but does it really want to associate itself with that kind of ad by having it's name on there. I think a bit less of 'em for it, and I doubt I'm the only one.

    I remember visiting the home control home page before it was revamped, and it was kind of sexist and control-freaky. So, maybe I'm biased on this, but I don't think so.

  • Most apps will copy to the clipboard by simply selecting text, and paste from the clipboard with the middle mouse button.

    They set the primary selection by selecting text, and paste the primary selection with the middle mouse button.

    The primary selection is not the clipboard; I just tested that with both the Motif-based Netscape and the GTK+-based Ethereal; selecting text, doing Alt+C in Netscape or Ctrl+C in Ethereal, and then selecting some different text caused the latter text - i.e., the primary selection - to be pasted with the middle mouse button and the former text - i.e., the clipboard - to be pasted with Alt+V in Netscape and Ctrl+V in Ethereal.

    Running xclipboard while doing this also indicated that selecting text does not copy it to the clipboard, but Alt+C/Ctrl+C does.

    And, yes, the distinction is relevant - the person who complained that paste-current-selection requires you to clear the field to which you want to paste it (rather than just selecting and pasting the clipboard, which replaces the selected text with the clipboard) was complaining about not being able to copy to the clipboard so that you can paste it and replace the currently selected text. (Yes, many applications let you clear the target of the paste-current-selection with Ctrl+U, but....)

    Qt (and thus KDE) has a class which allows for the sending of text to the X clipboard.

    Indeed? I didn't find the string "CLIPBOARD" anywhere in the Qt 1.44 or Qt 2.0.2 source; it may be called QClipboard, but it only appears to refer to the PRIMARY selection, not the CLIPBOARD selection.

    My guess is that Motif, Gtk+, and all the other widget sets and toolkits give the developer convenient access to the X clipboard, as well

    Motif - yes, as I remember. GTK+ - GtkEditable and its subclasses appear to copy to the clipboard, and "gtk/gtkeditable.c" definitely interns the CLIPBOARD atom. I can't speak for other toolkits, although it'd be nice if they all did (including Qt...).

  • There are only 2 ways of making money in OpenSource, and horizontal software is not one of them.

    Gnome, Gnumeric, Office, etc are all well and good, but they are way too horizontal.

    In the future, nobody will pay for horizontal software.

    The 3 main ways of making money in the future (in this software industry) are :

    1. Traditional flogging of vertical market packages. Make something really neat, like a turn-key system to run a medical front office, or a complete hardware+software solution to control a cruise missile. You need a team of people available to take phone calls 24x7, onsite training, flash office, glossy brochures, regular advertising, etc. All very traditional business sense here, nothing new except that your product uses Linux/Gnome. You need a good management team and plenty of cash to roll this idea off. The idea and the technology itself become almost irrelevant to the success of the venture - it needs to be good, sure, but that is not even half the story.
    2. Consulting. Hang out your sign, sign on with a few headhunters, and sell your time. You still work for the man, so to speak, but the money is better, and the risks are zero. Needs no money to startup.
    3. Online service. Buy a bomb-proof bunker, build a beowulf box, connect in a clump of T1's and provide some essential service on the net. Hire some 24x7 nightowls and a security guard. Build your business model on something simple but essential, pump up the volumes, and skim off a toekn management fee on each transaction.

    These are the principle means of making a living in the industry. In fact, these basic tennants apply to any industry, in any age since the dawn of civilisation.

    Just tread carefully, get out of bed early and do the ugly hard stuff, and make sure that each day you make more than you spend, and you should be fine.

  • Only works with text.

    You are mistaken. The X selection mechanism is actually one of the few parts of X that I think was done exceptionally well. It's very powerful and uses bandwidth intelligently without getting in the way too much.

    Now, it happens that there is a dramatic lack of applications out there that are capable of cutting and pasting types of data that are not text. But they do exist (Lucid's Energize did it, and XEmacs has APIs for asserting selection values of arbitrary types -- though I don't think any emacs-lisp applications take advantage of that, either.)

    (By the way, the "primary selection" (the click-and-drag-with-left, paste-with-middle thing) and the "clipboard" (the File/Cut, File/Paste thing) are the same thing in different namespaces: they work exactly the same way.)

    The point, surely, is to be able to drang-and-drop and cut-and-paste objects and components.

    Drag-and-drop and cut-and-paste aren't exactly the same thing, but the X selection mechanism can (and should) be used to implement them both. That's what it's for...

    I actually never learned how Motif drag-and-drop works, but I would expect that it uses selections inside.

  • I don't know why Netscape insists on using Alt for so many keyboard accelerators, unless it's an attempt to avoid colliding with the Emacs key bindings it offers in some situations.

    That's exactly why. Having basic Emacs keybindings in all text areas was a hard requirement from day one, so the keyboard accelerators for the menu items couldn't take over the Control key.

  • Netscape's clipboard handling is ... quirky. It seems to have its own internal clipboard (which corresponds to the Edit menu Cut/Copy/Paste), and that seems to be completely independent of the X clipboard functionality: you can select text in a browser window, then paste it to the editor using the middle button, but if you want to use Edit/Paste (or Alt+V) you have to do Edit/Copy (Alt+C) first.

    This is not quirky, this is how X selections work.

    Think of it this way: you drag out some text. That's the "primary selection." Now you do "File/Copy". That copies the primary selection to the clipboard selection.

    Middle-click pastes the primary selection. File/Paste pastes the clipboard selection.

    To get Mac behavior, eliminate the middle mouse button (that is, give access only to the clipboard selection, not the primary selection.)

    People often confuse the primary selection and the clipboard for the simple reason that xterm doesn't have a menubar, and therfore doesn't have File/Paste, so people raised on Unix instead of real GUIs tend not to notice that the clipboard selection exists at all.


  • By the way, if you're interested in playing with selections, XEmacs is a great way to do it, since it provides direct low-level access, which otherwise you'd have to write C code to get. For example:

    In a Netscape window, select some text with the mouse.

    Fire up XEmacs, and switch to the *scratch* buffer. (This is a lisp-interaction buffer, if you type a lisp expression and then type Ctrl-j after it, it will evaluate it and show you the result.)

    • (x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'TARGETS)
      [TARGETS TIMESTAMP TEXT STRING LENGTH FILE_NAME OWNER_OS
      HOST_NAME USER CLASS NAME CLIENT_WINDOW PROCESS COMPOUND_TEXT]

    That just asked Netscape what data types it is capable of converting the PRIMARY selection to. The list was returned. Let's try type TEXT:

    • (x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'TEXT)
      "xterm"

    There's the text I selected in Netscape. Pretty basic, let's try another:

    • (x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'LENGTH)
      (0 . 5)

    That says that 5 characters are selected (for not very good reasons, it's returning the high and low 16 bits of the 32-bit number as a pair of shorts. This is an emacs quirk.)

    • (x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'FILE_NAME)
      "file:/tmp/foo.html"

    That's the URL of the document in which the selection exists.

    • (x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'TIMESTAMP)
      (19110 . 3060)

    That's a time_t of when the selection was made.

    And so on... By letting the owner announce the types to which the selection can be converted, and letting the requester of the selection look at that list and decide which one they would prefer, very complex and efficient interations are possible. It allows format negotiation, and good decisions about pass-by-reference versus pass-by-value (e.g., if an image is selected, do you want its name, or its bits?)

    Wouldn't it be nice if when you selected some text in Netscape, and you pasted it into a text editor, it was pasted as plain-text, but when you pasted it into an HTML editor, it was pasted as raw HTML, with formatting intact? Sadly, Netscape doesn't do that, but that's the sort of thing the X selection mechanism is for.

  • You can bring up the menus with F10, but you can't select in them unless the thing you want to do has an accelerator key. That's annoying. Or am I just missing something?

    Hit F10 to bring up the menu. Use the left and right arrows to select the menu you want. Hit Enter to pop down the menu. Note that all the menu items on the menu have one character underlined. If you type that character, it's the same as selecting that menu item.

    The difference between these underlined characters (called "mnemonics") and the global keybindings (called "accelerators", and listed on the right side of each menu) is that accelerators have to be global to the application, and mnemonics only have to be unique within their menu. Also mnemonics are single characters and accelerators are usually chorded (being Control or Alt or Shift keys.)

    I think you're supposed to be able to use the cursor keys to move around on the menu and then hit return to select one, but that doesn't seem to work for some reason. I'm not sure why.

    • While Microsoft's use of incompatible file formats is part of their strategy, the unstable software part is not. That is simply a byproduct of the COM/OLE object strategy. Unfortunately, the Linux desktop folks are headed that way, but at least in Linux if the desktop dies the rest of the machine does not go along with it.

    It may not have been a conscious strategy on the part of Microsoft management, but bloatware and getting releases out to schedule rather than due to engineering criteria leads to instability. Perhaps the Linux desktop people are doing the bloatware part, but I don't see anyone pushing out new kernels on the public before they are stable.

  • > IMHO Windows Explorer is a great file manager, very intuitive and user friendly.

    It was also the application that caused more reboots than any other on my Windows 95 system.

    > So moderate this down to a -20, but mark my words.

    A fine thing to say in a rant about arrogonce.

    --
    It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
  • That may be the only thing that has a cost to the vendor you're buying, but I still disagree that it's the only thing you're buying. There are commercial software vendors who sell software without support, and they still charge money for it. The only thing they're charging for is the right to use a copy of the software legally. Sure, nothing tangible is being sold, but the software is being licensed, and money is still changing hands. I'd wager than a large portion of home users who purchase software purchase it for this license, not for the support. I know I personally rarely use the support, but I still purchase the stuff, mainly because it's illegal to obtain otherwise.
  • Actually, only halfway. The point is that there's nothing inherently easy about the Windows cut-and-paste system, or inherently difficult about the X system, they're just different. Which isn't to say that there aren't particular points which could be improved (for example, it might be nice to select a picture and middle-click paste it into the Gimp), but the overall interface is fine -- and in practice no-one really uses the more complex features of Windows/MacOS cut-and-paste anyway. [1] Frankly, most UI-complaints you hear are just "it doesn't do it how I learned!" rather than observations of significant interface flaws (which do exist, more's the pity).
    And in any event, the original poster was just talking about text, which X already does problemlos. [2]

    For the record, I learned Windows and MacOS long before touching X.

    Daniel

    [1] Before you flame me, I'm sure that you, your kid sister, and your dog all spend all your time cutting and pasting images, spreadsheets, and birthday cards between programs -- but how often do *most people* do this?

    [2] OpenView programs seem to be broken in this regard, and of course Netscape is but Netscape is just broken in general. Everything else I've tried works nicely.

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