Lindows.com Announces Mozilla-Based Nvu Web Publishing SoftwareWednesday October 29th, 2003Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com, has announced that his company is starting a project to build an easy-to-use Web publishing product for Linux. The new application, called Nvu (pronounced 'N-view'), will be based on Mozilla Composer and released under the Mozilla Public License. Lindows.com has contracted Daniel Glazman of Disruptive Innovations to be the lead developer, though the company hopes to attract other contributors. Version 1.0 of Nvu is expected in the first quarter of 2004. See the Nvu FAQ for more information. Can someone who understands this perfectly answer some questions about lindows and GPL ? (No speculation please) - Is Lindows OS licensed under GPL ? - Can someone who purchased lindows OS CD, distribute it freely ? - Can someone who got lindows OS source under GPL, modify it trivially and redistribute it? - Can there be portions of lindows OS not covered by GPL ? only some parts of Lindow OS are licensed under GPL, the redistribution is illegal even if the distro contain only proprietary installer or artwork. if you are interested about redistribution of Nvu, i readed in another place that it will be licensed unded MPL. There should be no reason why this product won't run on Windows so I hope on that web site they'll also promote windows builds when they become available rather than leave it to a 3rd party to host them... The reasons: 1) As a user of both Windows and Linux I like being able to use the same apps across both as much as possible 2) People who want to make the transition to Linux will find it easier if all their favourite tools are available on both platforms I wonder if this will be a different project than Composer standalone. Seems pretty pointless to have two separate ones. Re licensing worries - although not terribly specific it does say on the nvu website that it will be open-source, so I wouldn't stress about it too much. And I hope there'll be a Windows version too; in terms of code quality and other aspects, Composer is certainly the least sucky free GUI Web page editor. Even I use it sometimes when I'm really lazy and am just typing out crap that I might otherwise have done in Word... By the way, check out the screenshots, the FTP sidebar looks pretty cool (those may be just mock-ups, who knows). --sam > it will be open-source, so I wouldn't stress about it too much. Er... except that changes made to composer for Nvu may not be back-portable to the main Mozilla tree, depending on the license... the result could well be a fork of Editor (and with all of Editor's hooks into layout proper, possibly of layout). Should that be cause for worry? Why would it not be back-portable? Dabiel Glazman has stated before that all work put into Composer++ he hopes will be back-ported to mozilla and checked in. The only obstacle I could see from this would be *Drivers* not wanting some of the features. In any case, I really doubt that Mozilla Foundation will start a seperate Stand Alone project, after all, Daniel said he would be the maintainer, and heck, Lindow's is *paying* him to do the work. It couldn't get much better. Lindows has specifically said it will be licences uncer the MPL (which composer currently is), so again, unless I'm missing something it should all be back-portable. > Lindows has specifically said it will be licences uncer the MPL (which composer currently is), so again, unless I'm missing something it should all be back-portable. Actually all* the code in the mozilla.org CVS is licensed under a MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license. This is very friendly to embeddors - they can use the code under the terms of the MPL (which does not require derivative works to be open source i.e. they can add non-MPL files, they are just required to contribute back changes to existing files) or under the GPL (so they can link in other GPL code) or the LGPL. However, it creates a problem for Mozilla.org, since, even if the developer open sources all their changes, the license they use doesn't have to be identical to that required for mozilla itself. So Lindows can release all their changes under MPL, but if they don't also license their changes to be used under both GLP and LGPL, those changes can't be folder back into the main tree. In the absence of further information, I prefer to believe that Lindows is a team player and will allow (most of) their changes back into the main tree; the reference to MPL alone on the website is probably just a lack of clarity on the part of the author. I certianly don't see that forking layout would be at all helpful to them. *OK maybe not quite all. But that's not the point. i've just been trying to buils a site with composer and it has been such a nightmare that i do believe it is unusable at the present time. it really hashes up source code and has some serious bugs in, such as converting links to local file names, and a host of other issues that have made it a nightmare to work with. it does look good, but it has a long way to go You can turn off "hashing up the source code" in the preferences. Not sure about the other problems. The FAQ has been updated. The answer is: It is under tri-license and is going to be backported. |