Many FSF Priority Projects Still Not Progressing

[siride]

Software I use daily on my machine are (from the top of my hung-over head):

Inkscape, Gimp, Blender, MyPaint, x264, mplayer, flac, deadbeef, thunar, VP8, GCC, Transmission, openbox, tint2, rxvt-unicode, gedit, shotwell, 7-zip, gsopcast, Firefox, Virtualbox and likely tons of other shit I can't think of right now.

Many of these are backed by corporations/organizations, Blender, GCC, VP8, Firefox and Virtualbox but really there are tons of useful FLOSS projects which doesn't have any corporate or organizational backing, like Gimp, Inkscape ,Mypaint, x264, MPlayer, Shotwell, 7-zip which are all amongst those I listed and which are indeed great and 'successful'. And these are just projects I use daily, ask ten other users and the list will likely contain tons of other applications.

All the big ones are backed by corporations. The little ones are good, sometimes, but there is no innovation there. The ones you mentioned -- Gimp, Inkscape, Mypaint, Shotwell, MPlayer, 7-zip -- are all decent pieces of software to some extent, but they are not innovative. Most are clones of proprietary software that solved the hard problems years ago, and some, like Gimp, aren't even good clones and certainly are years behind their proprietary rivals. It's great to have free versions out, but you can't really hold them up as major success stories in the software world.

[XorEaxEax]

All the big ones are backed by corporations. The little ones are good, sometimes, but there is no innovation there. The ones you mentioned -- Gimp, Inkscape, Mypaint, Shotwell, MPlayer, 7-zip -- are all decent pieces of software to some extent, but they are not innovative.

Can you point me to this 'innovation' which is somehow a special attribute of proprietary software?

Most are clones of proprietary software

Then pretty much ALL proprietary software are clones of proprietary software. Obviously given that proprietary software has a longer history than open source software there will be proprietary examples of just about every open source project available, but the same holds true for just about every proprietary project available. Photoshop did not invent software photo manipulation, they created the best software for photo manipulation and thus became the industry standard.

that solved the hard problems years ago

What are these hard problems that was solved?

and some, like Gimp, aren't even good clones and certainly are years behind their proprietary rivals.

Gimp is obviously not a 'good clone' of Photoshop as it is evidently not aiming to be a 'clone'. Apart from Photoshop what are these rivals you claim it's 'years behind' ?

It's great to have free versions out, but you can't really hold them up as major success stories in the software world.

Why not? Don't they have lots of users? Aren't they being actively developed? Can't they be successful unless they kill off proprietary software in the same category?

[Del_]

Guys please keep it civil. You are all better than this. Phoronix is doing a fantastic effort for the GPL projects of this world, and PTS uses GPL. The accusations made in this thread is not doing anybody any good.

Siride, linux itself was a spare time project for quite some time. Kdenlive still has no corporate backing to my knowledge. And the list goes on. GPL is not about to loose anything, it is gaining momentum every day.

[Ex-Cyber]

The ones you mentioned -- Gimp, Inkscape, Mypaint, Shotwell, MPlayer, 7-zip -- are all decent pieces of software to some extent, but they are not innovative.

You asked for "successful", and given examples you now complain that they're not "innovative". Please put down the goalposts.

[not.sure]

Was this the backup article for when the steam-whatever big news stuff would fall through?

[dashcloud]

the DWG stuff is even worse than in the article

The LibreDWG situation is even worse than what's mentioned in the article:

People are actually not using the library (and therefore not developing on it) because the license is incompatible with the FOSS software out there:
the library is GPL3, but that's a showstopper for many projects because they're at GPL2 only.

See here for a very in-depth look at the situation both with the library and with the major CAD programs that would use the library:
What's up with DWG adoption in free software

The same site recently did a follow-up to their article to see how the situation has changed, if any: LibreDWG controversy: 2 months later

If you'd like to know what's going on in graphics and design part of the FOSS ecosystem, Libre Graphics World is one of the best sites in terms of coverage.

[yogi_berra]

However, Google Chrome OS mobile devices haven't exactly been flying off the shelves.

Who wants a thin client with big brother recording all of the clicks and selling that to advertisers?

[yogi_berra]

what pisses me off are when he consciously tries to misrepresent them in order to make them look bad. It's the worst kind of shit I'd only expect from some Microsoft-pro BS site

If that were even remotely true wouldn't he post about Apple more often as it appears to be his desktop of choice?

[XorEaxEax]

If that were even remotely true wouldn't he post about Apple more often as it appears to be his desktop of choice?

Yeah, it's not like he is giving lots of coverage to the Apple sponsored llvm/clang development... Funny to hear that he runs OSX, puts some things in perspective I guess (if it is indeed true).

[XorEaxEax]

the library is GPL3, but that's a showstopper for many projects because they're at GPL2 only.

Well the number one problem was that the implementation is incomplete since there's not enough documentation for this proprietary format. Also the slow speed of development is stated by the devs (a bunch of brazilians) to be because they are all doing it on a volunteer spare-time basis.

Also how many CAD projects are there in need of this which are GPLv2 only, you said it was a showstopper for several projects? Personally I think stuff like libraries are better served by something like LGPL but above that I believe in the divine right of the code author to decide which licence suits his/her code best.

I agree with you on Libre Graphics World being a great site for those interested in FOSS graphics apps/development.