I have received 8 Google Wave invites to give away. I know this is still in demand, but it seems everyone that was interested in Google Wave in my immediate cyber-vicinity already surfing the Wave.

So, I’m opening up my invites to the whole Internet and will give away a invite to the first 8 interested people that comments on this entry. Don’t forget to write a reachable email address.

I expect nothing in return but if want to spend a few minutes considering the rests of the posts on my blog, I’ll be grateful.

Today I’ve read some statements on IRC which I know are true but for which I never found necessary to search for more explanations. Perhaps because they were not relevant enough of because I thought I
superfically understood the issues.

ZFS on Linux

ZFS will never be usable on Linux because it’s license isn’t compatible with the GPL

Well, file, but how is CDDL not compatible with the GPL. Many people can probably answer but I’m not the kind that is very interested in the politics and legal side of FOSS.

KernelTrap has a thread which has some developers discussing why ZFS cannot be included in the Linux kernel. There seems to be a lot of informations about how ZFS rox0r in there but I don’t really care about that. I know it’s probably an awesome filesystem, but it doesn’t really matter since I can’t use it.

This thread reveals that one of the problem particular to ZFS is that Sun has taken several patent about its technology. This is relevant because someone could still reimplement ZFS from scratch without looking at Sun’s code. If the resulting Sun-free code works, it’s doubtful that it will be accepted in the kernel because of Sun’s patent on ZFS features.

The list of non-free software licenses at gnu.org doesn’t tell much.

A high Google hit on the issue, at sun.com, has some pretty graphics that explains exactly the problem. It seems the viral nature of the GPL license comes in conflict with the “un-erasable” nature of the CDDL. That means if you link a piece of code under the GPL license with a piece of code under the CDDL license, the GPL wants that you use the GPL license for the other piece of code while the CDDL says that you cannot relicense code
licensed under the CDDL. This is where the incompatibility remains.

OpenGL SGI

We’ve been told recently by various news
websites that OpenGL as changed its license on OpenGL.

It’s Linux.com that has the best article about that issue, covering pretty much everything I wanted to know.

In very short, SGI did a Good Thing. They also did it so fast that no Linux distribution, except
GNewSense took step to remove the OpenGL distribution from their Free offering.

New year

Happy year 2008. I would like to say that blogging more often is not one of my formal resolve for the year.

I will be happy if I consider I’m still blogging by the end of the year. All my other attemps at blogging regularly have failed.

KDE 4.0 has been released

Everyone following tech blog know that KDE 4.0 has been released this friday. I’m quite happy about that since I’ve been a KDE user since I’m full time on Linux. What has changed over the years is that I’m not longer a strong KDE advocate. I will always prefer KDE over GNOME, but I can’t say I would argue strongly for KDE against GNOME. Both a 2 very complete and excellent desktop environment.

The following is my opinion on KDE 4.0. I have tested the Ubuntu Gutsy remastered LiveCD for KDE 4.0. I’ll admint it’s probably not a complete experience of KDE 4.0, but what I’ve seen is enough for me to say that I will not use KDE 4.0 until a while.

I don’t understand people saying they don’t like KDE because it looks too much like Windows. I don’t really care about how my system look if there is a good operating system under the hood.

The look of the environment for me is not a good reason to dislike a desktop environment, be it GNOME or KDE. I’ve got good reasons to dislike GNOME, and most people probably have good reasons to dislike KDE.

Both environment can be themed to change several aspects of their graphical appearance. Also, you can change components of the system until you find the look that suits you. Once that is done, you are left with what really matters in the environment: the quality of the software suite. That is, I believe, the only worthy point of comparison.

The subject has already beaten to death so I’ll keep the following short. This is not an exhaustive list of my opinions about KDE.

The good: it’s KDE 4.0

KDE 4.0 is the next step for the KDE environment. It will get all the development and all the cool apps. If I stick to KDE in general, I will eventually use KDE 4.x, but maybe not KDE 4.0.

The bad

Unstability

I expected nothing else of KDE 4.0. It’s a dot-zero release and thus as many shortcomings and bugs.

When I tried the SuSE LiveCD for KDE 4.0, I badly wrecked my system to the point I had to shutdown my virtual machine. Don’t ask me what happened, I don’t remember. It was with an older version anyway.

With the Ubuntu LiveCD, Gwenview crashed twice, one time right at the moment it was starting.

This is not unexpected. I’m used to living on the edge with very recent software so I am familiar with applications crashing. Sometimes I will even fire-up the debugger and try to fix the problem.

Lack of KMail

I’m a KMail user. I know I could use KDE 3.5 KMail in KDE 4.0 yes, but I can also run KMail in KDE 3.5.8 too if there is not more reasons to switch to KDE 4.0.

The ugly

There is one thing that keeps me from using KDE 4.0 right now. If someone instructs me how to fix that, I’m a taker.

The huge taskbar

It’s huge. Like, 5 times the size I would want it to be. To maximize screen real estate, I have configured my KDE 3 kicker to be minuscule. It’s current 630 pixel wide, and just 30 pixel high, on a 1600×1200 19 inch screen. There is no taskbar, just the system tray, a small set of shortcuts icons, the clock and the desktop switcher. I’ve become used to switching between tasks using Ctrl+Tab and other shortcuts.

I’m not gonna install KDE 4.0 packages and run a KDE 4.0 session on my system until this taskbar can be shrinked to the size I want.

Yay, Yay!

Book 4 is soon ready for pre-orders, and the guyz still have special gifts for the early pre-orderers, which I will again try to be on December 1st.

The Little Gamers don’t puch much effort into creating new content for the book, but it’s much more fun to handle a paper book than to go through the archive.

It’s the webcomic that I have had the most fun to read, re-read and re-re-read in book form.

I’m not gonna try to sell the Little Gamers to anybody here. Just remember that before going to http://www.little-gamers.com that their comic doesn’t have much to do with gaming (despite some occasional gaming reference), and that the art style, is, mmm, minimalistic to say the least.

Here is a sample. Click the link above for the link to the site since I don’t yet know how to do a image-link with Markdown