This should be my first post getting syndicated on Planet Ubuntu Users. Hi guys!
The CHLUG meeting on Friday had some great talks. Dave Harding gave a great talk on the history, mechanics, and uses of X-Window. His notes are here.
Ed Laly gave a presentation on Asterisk and FreePBX — Asterisk/FreePBX is a system for managing and routing VOIP and plain telephone traffic, if you’re unaware. I knew somewhat what Asterisk was, since the Ubuntu Devs were using it to connect to UDS, but I didn’t realize the breadth of what it was capable of. The best part about it for me is how easy it seems to transition; you can run your house’s phone system using Asterisk, yet still connect through a normal telephone, and you can route long distance over VOIP, etc. Even more impressive is ENUM, which allows you to look up the number you’re calling to see if they’re also using SIP, and if they are, connect to them directly. I’ll be getting fiber this Friday, so it sounds like a neat summer project to get set up.
A few days ago there was a thread on an OpenBSD mailing list that led to a whole lot of bickering, flaming, and FUD. The lengthy thread made it onto undeadly.org, and then later Slashdot, where all Open Source conflicts go to end in tears. I was pleasantly surprised to see Bruce Perens head off the flaming with a first post that explained and defused the situation.
Moral of the story: GPL != public domain. GPL code retains quite a few rights, and most projects don’t choose GPL because it sounds nice. Part of Harding’s walk down memory lane on X-Window was how the release of X11 under a MIT license splintered the code base; vendors took the source, extended it, and closed it. This happened to a great extent in OS X, and could’ve easily happened again in this situation, since the linux firmware developers came up with ideas Broadcom didn’t even have in their original firmware. I’m sure Marcus didn’t have any bad intentions, but there are bigger forces to worry about here; Mitch not defending his copy right leaves his code within Broadcom’s grasp, and Broadcom doesn’t play well with others.</rant>
In other news, for those who weren’t aware, new policy changes mean that you can file a bug if there’s an app you want packaged. I’ve started off by requesting ioQuake3 to be packaged; it’s been in the queue at Debian for over a year now, and if it gets packaged, we can expect easy packaging of World of Padman and Urban Terror (note: Ubuntu needs more games).
In summary, this post has way too many links. I need to read Wikipedia less.
JoeTerranova.net
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Christopher Ingram | 10-Apr-07 at 5:08 pm | Permalink
Just got ioQuake3 and Urban Terror on my Mac. It rocks
Maybe we should figure out how to package this stuff ourselves and submit. It might be more productive.
joe | 10-Apr-07 at 5:14 pm | Permalink
@Chris
I packaged World of Padman today (another quake3 based game). The package works, I’m just trying to get it up to standards. I’ve been considering putting up a “testing” repo for our game stuff, because it’s not going to get into Feisty.
Christopher Ingram | 10-Apr-07 at 7:36 pm | Permalink
Just do a NJ LoCo Repo. Whatever we fudge with can go there, testing or no. When its production quality, then we can just point the ubu maintainers to it, right?