Talk:GNOME Screensaver

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Would be nice a "criticism" section

There's not a lot to go on, because it's a pretty obscure utility. I mentioned some drawbacks in the article. Twinxor t 03:44, 30 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I added a reference to a UI-deficiency bug filed against the project for the "can't configure screensavers" issue. The developer's response ("WONTFIX" is a good summary) has led to heated discussion on that page, plus several threads on the Ubuntu forums. Hopefully linking this in provides sufficient evidence of controversy to avoid the weasel words issue.

Further arguments regarding security of gnome-screensaver versus XScreensaver have not been included. Basically each projects' developer accuses the other of being ignorant of security issues in some way: gnome-screensaver's people accuse XScreensaver of allowing hacks to pull from untrusted data sources, and XScreensaver's people think gnome-screensaver's developer is ignorant for thinking untested code that links in a huge GUI toolkit is secure. A proper review of this squabble might be a candidate for inclusion and may justify a controversy section. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.111.131.227 (talk) 22:36, 3 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Gnome[edit]

Does gnome as a project have to be even more fucking annoying that microsoft? The last few major releases have been nothing more than efforts to remove functionality.

After the next upgrade, I expect to get presented with a metro-like set of icons and a notice in a readme file that xterms are more bother than they're worth with all the bugs and security threats they can cause.

Notice: GNOME Screensaver has been obsolete for a long time. Updating page to reflect this.[edit]

This article seems to assume that GNOME Screensaver is still used for screen locking in GNOME, hence the release version release of 3.14.2. I can assure you all that this is not the case. The last version of GNOME Screensaver is 3.6.1 - see [1]. Since GNOME 3.5, screen locking is implemented using GDM and GNOME Shell. The only place where GNOME Screensaver is still used is GNOME Flashback. I am changing the article to reflect this. Charlesb95 (talk) 15:16, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Done -- Charlesb95 (talk) 16:12, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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License violation?[edit]

On January 15, 2021, Jamie Zawinski, creator of XScreenSaver which gnome-screensaver is a fork of, discovered a violation of the BSD license that XScreenSaver uses in gnome-screensaver not long after he got wind of a security vulnerability in cinnamon-screensaver, and posted about it on his blog:

"...it has recently come to my attention that not only are Gnome-screensaver, Mate-screensaver and Cinnamon-screensaver buggy and insecure dumpster fires, but they are also in violation of my license and infringing my copyright.

XScreenSaver was released under the BSD license, one of the oldest and most permissive of the free software licenses. It turns out, the Gnome-screensaver authors copied large parts of XScreenSaver into their program, removed the BSD license and slapped a GPL license on my code instead -- and also removed my name. Rude.

If they had asked me, "can you dual-license this code", I might have said yes. If they had asked, "can we strip your name off and credit your work as (C) William Jon McCann instead"... probably not.

Mate-screensaver and Cinnamon-screensaver, being forks and descendants of Gnome-screensaver, have inherited this license violation and continue to perpetuate it. Every Linux distro is shipping this copyright- and license-infringing code.

I eagerly await hearing how they're going to make this right."

Nobody took any real steps to address this violation. I think it would be worth mentioning on this article. 199.19.117.220 (talk) 03:27, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]