Dissociated Press

As part of the Great Weekend Update (switching my main desktop from Ubuntu Breezy to Ubuntu Dapper) I decided it was also time to switch mail clients.

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for quite some time, but I decided I wanted to switch it up a little bit and use something new for a change. I reviewed Sylpheed 2.0 last year, and almost decided to switch then — but decided to hold off because it’s such a royal pain moving mail back and forth between clients. But, since I was already doing some workstation housekeeping, I figured now was as good a time as any to switch.
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The Linux community, or at least large chunks of it, have worked really hard to entice large companies to develop applications for the Linux platform. I consider it a sign of success that a company like Google would take the time and effort to port a desktop application like Picasa to Linux, and — even though I’m not a big digital photo person — I was quite happy the other day when Google made the announcement.

And then I read this entry, carping because Google didn’t port Picasa in a pleasing enough manner:

Dear Google,

Yesterday you announced Picasa for Linux. But I’m a bit confused. I don’t find it. All I see is a Windows binary installation and a Wine installation. Is that what you call a Linux version?

And it goes on, in what I’d consider a snide and insulting fashion. For added irony points, the poster is running Google ads on his site…

Far be it from me to suggest that any Linux user refrain from speaking their mind, but I hope that Google — and other companies that might want to port apps to Linux — understands that this fellow is squarely in the minority.

I installed Picasa on an Ubuntu Dapper system, and it seemed fine to me — no major glitches, and it integrated well enough into the desktop that I didn’t really notice that it was a Wine app or app running under Wine — whatever the correct phrasing there. (It’s almost midnight, I’m tired, and I can’t be arsed to look it up right now…) From my limited testing, it seems to run just fine. So, the quality argument goes out the window as far as I’m concerned. (I wonder if the poster even bothered to run the app to see if it was “bad quality” as he suggests?)

Would it be better if Picasa was a native Linux app? Probably, but it is what it is, and it’s a great deal more than Google is obligated to do.

Google’s Picasa project also resulted in a bunch of patches going back to the Wine folks. Again, this is all for the good. The Wine project has been slowly, slowly, slowly working its way towards a 1.0 — and Google’s patches no doubt will provide a nudge or two in that direction.

Finally, the poster complains about Google releasing a non-open source program. I’d love it if Google had released Picasa as GPL’ed software, or under a different open source license — that would certainly be a generous and beneficial thing for Google to do. But the fact that they didn’t release it under an open source license is not a reason to go whining about the fact that they at least met the Linux community part way by releasing free-as-in-beer software that runs on Linux.

As far as I’m concerned whining about Google releasing Picasa for Linux — even as a non-open source Wine app — is kind of like complaining about the food at a party. If it’s not to your taste, or the host or hostess decides they’d rather not share the recipe with you, then be gracious and say “thanks anyway.”

To complain to the host that their offering is unsatisfactory, without even a hint of appreciation for the effort, is boorish and unlikely to generate any future invites. Complaining when large companies take a few steps towards Linux by offering applications for Linux isn’t likely to help “the cause” — whether that’s attracting additional applications, or encouraging companies to develop open source apps.

I agree with Robert Love:

Releasing a Picasa variant for Linux signals that Google cares about the Linux market, for one reason or another. Simple as that.

As a side note — I do understand where a bad attitude towards Wine ports might come from. Many, many years ago, Corel offered a Linux version of Corel Office that used Wine. It’s my understanding that Corel did put a lot of work into Wine, but the Corel Office for Linux was very, very bad. I tried it a few times and it was amazingly unstable.

However, that’s no reason to assume that Picasa is as unstable, but I can see where one might develop a slight bias.

Wrote up an article for Linux.com on setting KDE shortcuts. You’d be surprised how handy they can be, if you take the time to set them up… of course, other folks may not have the same mouse aversion that I do, but if you like to avoid switching between keyboard and mouse as much as possible, they’re worth exploring.

I’ve been thinking about DRM and “content management” lately, partly because of the DRM protests in Seattle on Wednesday.

The entertainment industry insists that we must have DRM to “protect the artists.” To make sure artists get their fair share, we’ve got to prevent unauthorized copying of music and movies.

This might work, if it’s implemented as a top-down solution. From what I’ve read, the biggest problem with seeing to it that artists get paid is from the recording companies and movie studios themselves. So, we should start by implementing DRM on master recordings, digital prints, and any other media that the entertainment companies use to create DVDs, CDs, and whatever forms of media come next.
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I used to blog about open source for ZDNet before taking the full-time gig with Linux.com, and one of the things that alternately amused and concerned me was the comments that criticized ZDNet and myself for biased articles, when it was — in my mind at least — clear that what I was writing was a blog entry and opinion and therefore not subject to the same criteria that one would hold a news article to.
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Okay, another Vim tips article is up on Linux.com, this time I cover using folds, which is a method of hiding lines of text — really, super useful if you’re working on longer documents.

I hope people are enjoying the Vim series, or at least finding it useful. I plan to cover a few more topics before I wrap it up, any suggestions or thoughts would be appreciated.

Quick story up on NewsForge about updates to PostgreSQL to address SQL injection vulnerabilities.

If you’re running PostgreSQL, you need to update (if you haven’t already)! Doesn’t look like Ubuntu has any packages yet, but I expect they’ll be along shortly.