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Beryl 0.2.1 fixes licensing issues, can now be used in Ubuntu and debian

blog.beryl-project.org — Though Beryl 0.2.1 does not feature anything new, all licenses have been fixed. It can now go into Debian and Ubuntu. Plus, version control has now been moved from SVN to Git.

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  • schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13I thought Git was a relatively simplified tool that's only used in the development of the kernel. If it steals the thunder from SVN (and CVS), then it must be quite powerful. Sourceforge recently (last year) replaced CVS with SVN. Maybe Git is the next step?
    • mazza558, on 10/12/2007, -12/+3"...has now been moved from SVN to Git."

      Tee Hee.... "Git"
    • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7and I thought bzr was the next big thing http://bazaar-vcs.org/
    • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6"I thought Git was a relatively simplified tool that's only used in the development of the kernel. "

      Git is spreading like wildfire; FreeDesktop.org moved completely to git from CVS, for example. I'm not so sure I like it as compared to SVN, but I also don't administrate a large project server, so I'm not sure just how congested it gets on the back end. Git's supposedly much less complex (it was designed for multiple contributing users) and easier to maintain.
    • Mejogid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5The reason these revision systems exist is because they all have different merits and drawbacks. Although they ultimately perform the same tasks, they are all suited to very different projects. Check out http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php for a comparison of cvs and svn and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29#Unique_characteristics for some of the advantages of git. The fact that beryl is moving to git doesn't make it the better system by any measure (apart from for the beryl project itself, presumably).
    • geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm a big fan of svn but I'm open minded, this is the first I've heard of git. After a minute of looking at git, it supports robust branching/merging, keeping tarck of merges nicely. There are addons to svn to do this and this will be merged into svn but already git seems pretty nice since it tackled this problem from the start. If there are nice windows/linux clients then I will be even more intrigued.
    • Protoss, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Already got a good Linux client...Apt-get install git-base, then just run git!
    • GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Git is a distributed system like BT. There is no server and each user has to sync with each other. SVN is obviously the standard checkout/commit server offering.
    • burke, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Oh God! They switch their repositories around more often than they do the version numbers. Christ. Now I have to figure out how to use a Git repo as a portage overlay.
  • anmol2k4, on 10/12/2007, -6/+15So with this licensing issue fixed can they now contribute back to compiz ?
    • cmost, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4"So with this licensing issue fixed can they now contribute back to compiz ?"

      Please, let's stop beating this tired drum. Whether or not Beryl contributes code upstream is neither here nor there. If Compiz is expecting developers who take their OPEN SOURCE code to contribute back then they need to go to a proprietary license or stop bitching about it.
    • straxus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I've never understood this either. If you really want people to contribute back, you wouldn't choose a BSD style license. You'd choose the GPL, or some other copyleft license. Don't bitch when people use the rights you *explicitly* gave to them.
    • Vinvin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Contributing back to Compiz has nothing to do with licensing issues. If they didn't do it before, they probably won't be doing it now. It would be weird, too, as Beryl and Compiz have very different goals, and although they don't differ a lot at the moment, they're heading at totally different directions. Which is a Good Thing (tm) IMHO
  • JamesWilson, on 10/12/2007, -5/+16For the love of god can Ubuntu and other distros please make it either on by default or an easy to configure option? I am frickin tired of spending hours dicking with trying to get it to work at the command line, time on the forums, and on IRC. And yes, there is tutorials online but they don't always work how they claim.
    • Mandeep, on 10/12/2007, -24/+7probably not, apparently linux users like to do that kind of crap through terminal. what id like to see is the beryl project actually move towards stability instead of more plugins. all theyre adding right now is unstable eye candy so geeks can masturbate to it.
    • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -3/+21in feisty you just click "enable" in the "Desktop Effects" menu item. This assumes you have the proper 3D acceleration enabled, which can be had by checking the checkbox in the "Restricted Drivers" menu item.

      ask and you shall receive!
    • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Only works for systems where AIGLX works; for ATi closed source driver users, this means no dice.

      Until ATi fixes their driver's support for Composite, ATi users are going to be stuck in the dark ages and will have to muddle around with Xgl installs, manually adding the startup script, and rebooting.
    • psylence, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Apologies to people stuck with ATI cards, but last time I installed Beryl I followed the following steps:

      1) Add repository w/Beryl in it
      2) Install Beryl
      3) Run beryl-manager

      DAMN that was hard, took ALL DAY.
    • sanguinemoon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1diggapleaze is essentially correct (I tried Herd 5 of Feisty last night and it was right in the preferences, it didn't actually work because that was just the live CD and Nvidia GLX was installed) However, Ubuntu actually uses Compiz and not Beryl and that's actually a good thing right now. My distro this week is the Mepis 6.5 beta and it does have Beryl.
    • msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5If you want to run linux, please explore the usefulness of the command line. Writing a tutorial or how-to for navigating a GUI can get really cumbersome, and if it needs screenshots, can take considerable loading time for each page. What a gui installation tutorial explains in 8 pages can often be accomplished with a few lines of copy/paste for the command line, and a paragraph explaining what it does.
    • phaed, on 10/12/2007, -1/+41) deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb edgy beryl-svn >> /etc/apt/sources.list
      2) sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install beryl emerald-themes
      3) beryl-manager

      that easy.
    • coredump0x01, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2@mandeep
      Don't give me that crap. I've been a Linux user for 4 years and am seasoned in the terminal syntax and prefer to do some things with the shell, but no one likes pasting scripts together, making them executable, and sticking them into parts of the file system to make things work. And you don't even need to do those things if you have AIGLX supportive drivers. You have to realize that Beryl is still a very early version and not many distro's included it by default. Ubuntu feisty will change that. As for stability, the 0.2.0 release has been incredibly stable for me, I've had it running for a week straight and counting since it hit the Unstable repo in Arch.
    • JamesWilson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I do have an ATI card..that would explain it. :)
    • Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thats the beauty of open source projects, If you have an itch to scratch you can code something to do it and contribute it back.
      If you have the coding ability, consider contributing?
    • JamesWilson, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2ah I suck at c++ and low-level programming. I'm good at high-level business programming.
  • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -10/+12until they change the whole thing to MIT so that compiz can use the code too, I see the licensing as still horribly broken.
    • JamesWilson, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1Someone should write a bridge license between MIT and GPL so that projects can work together for the greater good.
    • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4A "bridge license" would do you no good; you could write some boilerplate code that would "insulate" Compiz from Beryl's license, but that kind of patch gets ugly, fast. The GPL is simply more restrictive than the MIT license used in Compiz, so code can never flow in that direction (however, Compiz improvements can flow to Beryl simply).

      This is probably the point in which Beryl and Compiz will start to significantly diverge.
    • diggapleaze, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10i see I'm being buried for what I said, let me explain:

      forking MIT code into GPL code *is* technically legal, but it's just rude.

      It's like going into Costco and taking all the hotpocket samplers for yourself and STILL not buying anything. True, there's nothing in the rules that say you can't do it, but that still makes you a massive douchebag.
    • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7"It's like going into Costco and taking all the hotpocket samplers for yourself and STILL not buying anything. True, there's nothing in the rules that say you can't do it, but that still makes you a massive douchebag."

      At least they're moving it to the GPL and not some closed source license. [Hint: Microsoft did this with their TCP/IP code; why write a whole network stack and maintain it if you can copy one from a BSD?]
    • Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Compiz and Beryl are essentially adjuncts to the X server, and should use the X server license for the sake of compatibility. Until somebody forks X as GPL there's no reason to go GPL.
    • sanguinemoon, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9And if they did GPL x.org,that would be disasterious. X,org has to be able to legally work with all unices, not just Linux.
    • GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6X.org would still work with all Unices. It would just be GPL rather than MIT. There is already plenty of GPL'd software used by other Unices.

      //edit - not that I'd support the move but to say it wouldn't work with other Unices is just fud.//
  • omghi2u2, on 10/12/2007, -20/+3Lets fix Beryl itself now, so it doesn't crash every 5 minutes (literally).
    • psylence, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6pebkac?
    • sanguinemoon, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2I'm going to digg omghi2u2's comment up as a corrective action. It's stupid that his comment got -6 diggs in 36 minutes. My Beryl doesn't crash every 5 minutes, but I have had odd problems with it and what's needed is more improvements to the core and less obsession with piling on even more plugins. But instead of doing that, they release another version that just changes the licenses to be more compatible with Ubuntu and Debian, in other words, trying to those distros include it instead of Compiz - marketing, not improving.

      They need to take a step back from continually adding features and plugins and possibly even release .3 without any new features at all, but major improvements to the code. As he said "Lets fix Beryl itself now"
    • msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3You can't claim beryl is at fault if he claims it crashes every 5 minutes. While It's still considered alpha software, I've ran it for several months now and I've only crashed it a handful of times, none of which brought down the system with it (always failsafed to metacity). There are too many factors at play to say it's strictly beryl's fault for all the crashes.

      Also, the people in charge of licenses and marketing are unlikely to be the same people writing the software. The decision to release a license change as a new version is strange though.
    • sanguinemoon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Actually I can. What they're improving is not the core of the software, but continually piling additional crap on bad core. Beta or Alpha isn't much of an excuse when you look at where they "development" is being put. Digg down the dissenting voices and lament about beta software, but yes, it is their fault for being obsessed with plugins and eyecandy.

      Make the bloody code stable first, come up all sorts of nonsense eyecandy. Digg this comment down to if you it makes you feel better, but it doesn't change the facts.
  • sanguinemoon, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1.....
  • fibonacci1123, on 10/12/2007, -22/+0I'm starting to get sick about this Beryl stuff. Don't they realize that putting all kind of stupid animations doesn't increase usability, they are just distracting the users.
    And who says Beryl is superior to Vista's Aero should think again: Aero can do all this kind of things, maybe even more, but Microsoft is doing usability tests and they know that excessive use of animations isn't good at all!

    Sorry, but I think that Beryl only makes us think Linux is circus and should not be taken serious!
    • Protoss, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Because that Win+Tab thing is so useful? You can only see a fraction of the window, compared to Desktop Wall, Desktop Cube, or the Scale feature (yes, the same as Expose in OSX) where you can see the full window, and with Desktop Wall, even move them in between Desktops...
    • msgyrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11All of Beryl's animations can be *disabled* if you don't like them. It's better to have the choice to disable options in Beryl than to use Vista's Aero and not have any options to begin with.
    • leohart, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Excuse me sir, but you have absolutely no idea about the matter at hand. Maybe you should disable those plug-ins you don't use and stop whining. You are not forced to eat the whole Big Mac with fries and sundae. Please don't use strong words like stupid when making your case. It makes you look like a teenager with a MSCert waving around in this OSX, Linux digg community.
  • Stonekeeper, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1OS licences are the new patents!
    • GMorgan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Not really OS licenses do not stop re-implementation. There is nothing to stop someone like MS taking Linux through a clean room then re-implementing it from the derived standard under a closed source license. Patents are designed to steal the work of others by government granted monopoly. OSS licenses are designed to protect the work of those who value freedom.
    • Stonekeeper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah, I know. I think I'll have to start putting (Joke!) at the bottom of some of my posts as it seems that the obviousness is too easily missed by people.
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