Ian Murdock writes a bit about
OpenSolaris and the Nexenta people who are creating a GNU+Solaris based
OS. He writes a bit about the fact that the Debian community hasn't
exactly embraced their efforts, but have rather been rude to them. A
small thing caught my eye though:
It seems to me the argument that linking a GPL application to a CDDL
library and asserting that that somehow makes the library a
derivative work of the application is, to say the least, a
stretch—not to mention the fact that we’re talking about libc here, a
library with a highly standard interface that’s been implemented any
number of times and, heck, that’s even older than the GPL itself.
It's not so much that you make the library a derivative work of the
application as that you are making the application (that is, the binary
/usr/bin/dpkg or whatever you are linking) a derivative of both the
dpkg source code as well as the libc binary) and this is problematic
when the libc in question is under the CDDL and dpkg is under the GPL.
which is what was shipped with it, and I think there might be a newer
firmware out there which fixes some of the issues.
I just got my Nokia 770 and I must say it's a nice device. Some
initial experiences are:
No pen calibration on bootup. Nice and cool. All other handheld
devices have that, but the 770 seems to work just fine without it.
Kudos.
It's not a PDA. No PIM thingy built-in, the device asks for its own
name, but not the user's.
It doesn't show that it's running Linux. I find this quite cool, as
it shows that you can produce devices which run Linux and feel like
they're targetted at non-geeks.
The device feels sluggish and lacks feedback when doing stuff,
whether it be closing an application, launching an application and
so on. This makes it sometimes hard to know whether it has
caught your action or not. Also, sometimes menus pop up for half a
second, then goes away.
The 770 has support for multiple applications at the same time.
Works well enough, I guess.
I want something to protect the screen, or I know it will develop
scratches from the pencil over time. I guess I can get something
from a shop in not too long.
When putting the lid on, it's quite neat that it turns off the
screen the moment the lid closes. I'll have to investigate how they
do this. Hub thought it might
be a magnet. Getting an X-Ray of the whole device would probably
show.
The feed reader needs work, I want to mark stuff as "read"
explicitly and not just have a rolling list of news where I need to
know where I was.
Reduced-size MMC cards appear to be cheap. Around 30€ for a 512MB
card which should be enough for a fair amount of music. I need to
find an Ogg Vorbis player as well.
All in all, mostly happy, but there are still a bunch of rough edges
which should be smoothed away in a few more revisions.
I'll see if I can get a development environment up and running on it,
as well as getting a newer firmware onto the device (if I can find it;
I wonder if the developer rootfs on maemo.org is newer or not..), but
all that's for tomorrow.
