Picasa for Linux

[Marco Cabizza]

[Conrad, you forgot to post to the list]

Il giorno dom, 28/05/2006 alle 15.37 -0600, Conrad Knauer ha scritto:
> On 5/28/06, Marco Cabizza <mc at newglobal.it> wrote:
> 
> > It's really bad even on the formal side,
> > because it should _depend_ on wine, not ship its own version.
> 
> As I understand it, its for quality control; by packaging it with a
> version that's known to work really well, it avoids the various issues
> Matthew Garrett mentioned.  It BTW vaguely reminds me of the idea
> behind klik (http://klik.atekon.de/).

By using wine? I am using Debian and it doesn't work, should I file a
bug (where?) && get the reply "we don't know what your issue is, stay
tuned"? :)

> > Until then, f-spot is more than enough.
> 
> I'm sure, but its not a bad thing to have more software available for
> Linux (well, so long as it isn't Bonzi Buddy or things like that ;)
> Basically if it gets Windows users to try Linux, all the better (we
> want to get bug #1 fixed, ne?
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/1 ;).  Then once they're
> using Linux, they can compare it to native software and see which best
> suits their needs.

99% useful software for Linux runs natively. If Unreal Tournament 2004
runs (perfectly) natively I don't see why Picasa shouldn't :)

> Consider non-libre software like Opera; if someone is using Windows
> and really likes Opera, the fact that it is available under Linux may
> entice them to at least try it.  If they then say, discover Konqueror
> and like it better, then they're very likely to switch, ne?

Opera has the QT interface for Linux and we can consider it "native"
even if it's statically linked. Still, they ship an ELF.

> I think that in the short-term anyway, the best strategy would be to
> lobby Google to make the redistribution licensing more friendly so
> that it could be included in multiverse (or at least get them to
> create a repository like Opera did).

Unfortunately in my opinion the licensing issue is not enough. We don't
want poorly-ported software - if Picasa *might even be* considered a
porting - in our distributions. People will just see that their favorite
software, Picasa, runs poorly under their Ubuntu Linux system, and say
in the end that:

1) Emulation sucks because it's slow
2) Software for Windows is better the DIRECT Linux equivalent (Firefox
as well respects this rule)

I am not the only one[1] who thinks so, by the way. Speaking of
emulation, in fact, we should consider it just if there is _NO_ free
alternative to non-free software (I think about Flash for graphics and
animation (there actually are alternatives for web-releated stuff[2])),
and this is not the case.

So, people, let's get realistic and forget Picasa for a couple minutes
until we get a _real_ version for Linux :)

~marco

[1] http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/?2006/05/27/410-dear-google
[2] http://osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects

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