> Well worth the $150 million, right? It's not
> like we have an ailing economy that could have
> made better use of it.

What, it has to be labeled as a stimulus package with a big bow around it or otherwise it doesn't help the economy?

Government spending *does* help the ailing economy and a large part of the stimulus package being put together is spending on all kinds of random projects.

In the case of Qt however there are many many special license exceptions which make this not true at all: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/license-gpl-exceptions.html

The only thing the LGPL'ing maintains is allowing licenses outside that list and since most of the open-source ones are on that list (including the BSD-style licenses) this generally is just applicable for proprietary programs.

I think that's for people who want to maintain a private fork of Qt specially modified for their project. Qt has always given source code with their libraries and the commercial edition allowed modified versions of that library to be distributed. The LGPL does not change this restriction and those commercial users who have altered Qt and do not want to make those changes available still can buy a commercial license to allow for this.

The spec and the creator says you're wrong.

Do you have sources or do you just like telling people they're wrong without any data to back it up?

Here's another source if you trust wikipedia more than random webpages that can't be edited by half the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gif#Pronunciation

You're definitely wrong about the pronunciation of gif: http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/

I know everyone says that no one on slashdot reads the articles. But the big secret is that's supposed to be a joke, not a rule.

You mean the one that's the second item on the list in the article? That Google Chrome?

It's apparently more robust and there are some actual advantages in places, but the actual interface was terrible and the system was utterly unusable until the KDE guys ported their toolset to it and gave it the same interface DCOP had.

> Where by "GNOME-centric" you presumably mean "written in C".

Yeah that's actually not what I mean at all.

> In the article, Shuttleworth says they're working with KDE.

Unfortunately their track record of actually doing this is very bad.

So I expect them to do what they always do, which is notice a problem that exists in GNOME that KDE has had a sensible solution to for quite some time and then propose a GNOME-centric standard like libnotify (which is what they're doing) and encourage it's use everywhere. What's more annoying is that the solution they end up implementing often ends up being worse than what existed in KDE. Sometimes KDE then ends up adopting the now dominant cross-platform standard and has to do various tools to work around the braindamage that's been caused.

(For instance, see how qdbus is the only thing that makes using dbus actually bearable because it basically provides a dcop like interface to dbus.)

It is, to say the least, frustrating.