On the GUI Selection in UserLinux
By Bruce Perens
[reproduced from the UserLinux site]
Version 0.1, December 15, 2003.
In the original UserLinux white paper, I made it clear that the project would
play favorites among the software choices available to it, and that the
resulting process would be painful. You can't say that you weren't warned.
But it turns out not to be particularly painful, except for one issue: the
selection of the GUI used in the system. The selection of GNOME as the GUI of
the UserLinux project has raised a good deal of opposition from KDE
supporters.
GNOME and KDE are both Free Software. Both are developed by lots of good
programmers, with the support of honorable business people. Many people in
the Free Software community have a huge emotional (or even financial)
investment in KDE or GNOME, because they have put a lot of development into
one of... (more)
Bruce Perens is an established leader in the free software and open source
community. As the former leader of the Debian project and the original author
of the Open Source Definition he has been deeply involved in the open source
community for most of its existence. Bruce was the original trademark holder
for the term "Open Source."
Along with Eric Raymond, Bruce cofounded the Open Source Initiative, which
has become one of the top organizations promoting open source software around
the world.
Currently Bruce is a consultant specializing in assisting corporations,
governments, ... (more)
Last Monday at the Desktop Linux Consortium Conference at Boston
University’s Tyngsboro, Massachusetts Campus there was a lot of talk about
a “UserLinux” distribution. The topic was sparked by remarks by Bruce
Perens who voiced a need for a distribution that was designed to meet
community needs for a desktop operating system based on the Linux community
favorite Debian distribution.
I contacted Bruce who has been kind enough to interject some comments to my
own text. They are marked [thus].
The thought of UserLinux sparked my thinking. The thing I like about Linux is
that it’s ... (more)
On January 26, 2004, a new virus became rampant. I have reports that the
virus payload has two purposes: to send an email spam for a mail-order
"Viagra" vendor, and to perform a denial-of-service attack on SCO's web site.
Denial-of-service attacks via virus have been a common trick of email
spammers. They were first used to take out some of the anti-spam blacklist
sites. Several of those sites had their (non-spam-related) business so
heavily disrupted that they closed the doors of their anti-spam projects
rather than be attacked again.
The Open Source developers are a target of s... (more)
SCO management had a problem. Their quarterly financial report was going to
show only twenty thousand dollars in income for their SCOSource licensing
program. And so, in an announcement timed to distract people from the bad
financial report, SCO announced two new lawsuits and license purchases from
Computer Associates, Leggett and Platt, and EV1 Servers.
Computer Associates' CEO was quick to blast SCO, pointing out that CA had
settled a breach-of-contract suit unrelated to Linux with Canopy Group -
SCO's main investor - and one of its other companies, Center7. The settlement
ter... (more)
Bruce Perens, a leader in the free software and open source community, is a member of the International Advisory Board of Linux.SYS-CON.com. He is the creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of the open source movement. Bruce is founder or cofounder of the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Standard Base, Software in the Public Interest, and No-Code International. He is the creator of Busybox, which has spawned its own development community and is part of most commercial devices using embedded Linux.
Sue Poremba
Scott Sellers
Anthony Franco
Daniel Morris
Wayne Walls
Niki Acosta
Jereme Hancock
Oren Michels
Marvin Wheeler
Douglas Kim
