NX Compression Technology To Go Closed Source

An anonymous reader writes "NoMachine has sneakily revealed it is closing its source of the NX compression technology with NX 4.0: 'This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4.0 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.'"

NX is a bandaid

[girlintraining]

Rather than bitch about how they're making it closed source, or dismissing the gesture entirely, maybe this should be taken as a sign that the problem NX solves needs a different solution. Like, oh I don't know... maybe revising the X windows protocol so it doesn't suck so hard it has its own event horizon?

Re:So what

[man_of_mr_e]

And nobody had created anything as good as BitKeeper either until there was suddenly a need for someone to do so when the free license was pulled.

Of course that person that came along was Linus Torvolds, not your typical hack.

Re:Buried in tl;dr

[kiwimate]

Well, I thought exactly the same thing as the grandparent - "sneakily revealed" is a fairly remarkable statement.

The link is "http://www.nomachine.com/news-read.php?idnews=331", so it would appear that it's on a regular news portion of their site - hardly sneaky. Furthermore, it's mentioned in the very first paragraph.

Rome, Italy, December 21, 2010 - NoMachine, a global leader in cross platform remote access and application delivery solutions, announced a software preview of its upcoming new products and technologies which offer a completely redesigned client GUI and restructure its flagship suite of NX Server. The new products will not only extend the current functionalities of NX application delivery and remote access products, there will also be new naming conventions adopted. This release marks an important milestone in the history of the company. Version 4 of the software, in fact, will be only available under a closed source license.

Beats me how they're being sneaky about doing it, at any rate. Shall we agree that the summary is (shock, stunner, surprise!) badly written, or at least very biased, and go on to debating the impact of the move?

Re:Fast remote X connection...

[seifried]

For example comparing a server's /etc tree with another one, and applying changes.

Ever consider "diff" and "patch"? Seriously....

Re:NX is a bandaid

[IGnatius T Foobar]

One might even think about writing a Wayland compositor that speaks RDP, making use of all of the existing clients on every platform.