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On my (still working) 6809 GIMIX system:

• Operating system: 8k
• 6809 assembler: 12k
• 6809 C compiler: 16k
• 6809 Spreadsheet: 24k (far more powerful than visicalc, I should note)

I have almost a thousand programs on that system, including cross assemblers, languages, etc... it's very rare when one is larger than 16k. And that machine ROCKS. That's because the 6809 was hands-down the best 8 bit bus CPU ever crafted, and the GIMIX frame, with everything from motherboard to power connectors and sockets gold-plated, ferro-resonant power supply, awesome steel case... probably won't die in my lifetime.

Even if it does, I wrote a complete 6809/OS emulation (with permission from the OS authors and GIMIX themselves) and have all that software running on modern hardware, too, even the graphics. Fond memories. I developed a lot of hardware and software on that machine, particularly early arcade systems for Centuri, Bally-Midway, Arcade Engineering and Techstar, as well as early SSTV software for amateur radio. Those were fun days!

Same way I run XP; VMware under Leopard; I sandbox XP away from the Intertubez, I keep a nice saved copy of the VM, and no worries at all.

What's really fun is when I'm running XP under OSX in a VM, and under XP, I'm running my 6809 emulation, and in the 6809 emulation, I'm running the debugger. It's like the "13th Floor", only better.

I have an original copy of Tom Pittman's 6800 TINY BASIC on paper tape. I recovered it with my working SWTPC 6800 SS-50 machine from about 1975 using a home-brew paper tape reader I built long ago. It loaded and ran, so I popped it onto cassette tape using an SWTPC AC-30 interface (which is all this machine has for "mass storage", it only reads paper tape, can't write it), imported it to my Gimix 6809 SS-50 machine from the cassette tape, popped it onto DSDD floppy, then used an S9 format serial transfer utility I wrote (*nix style) to get it into my Mac Pro via a serial/USB interface. Both the 6809 and 6800 machines can send S9 serially as a feature of the system monitor (SBUG for the 6800 and GMXBUG for the Gimix), but I wanted a record of it on the 6809 for later reworking, hence the middleman.

I've got all my writing - personal letters, an article I published in Kilobaud magazine, that kind of thing - from the late 1970's that was done on the 6800 and the Gimix 6809, all of my 6800 programs, and everything I ever did on the 6809, as well as all the software - editors, assemblers, compilers, an early spreadsheet, arcade games, a bunch of ham radio stuff (baudot to ascii converters, morse code and radioteletype software, "log" programs, antenna calculators and so on.)

And while emulation may not count as a recovery tool for the purposes of TFS, I wrote a 6809/Flex emulation which boots PSYMON and then FLEX, that can read and deal with all of the 6809-era stuff in a native fashion... even has a graphics engine that runs some of the arcade stuff I wrote back when that was the place to work. I designed arcade hardware that used the 6809, and built an SS-50 board for my Gimix to make design easier, and when I did the emulation, well, hadda have that there as well. :)

So that's 1975 data to 2010 hardware, about 35 years of recovery span. With the emulator, that recovery will extend for quite some time, basically as long as anything can run XP, real or virtual (which is where my emulator lives.)

Me too. I have fully working SWTPC systems, GIMIX, a COSMAC ELF, an SC/MP, and some others from the days before Apple. [rubs hands together, grins.]

I sold an Altair 8800 and an Altair 680 some years back -- made what I thought at the time was an obscene amount of money on both sales -- but methinks I still should have waited longer. Never did get my hands on an IMSAI chassis.

Best part is, I have written full-machine emulations like this one to replace the real things, so when they go... they're not really gone. It's still fun to do 6809 assembly programming. Not so much fun to do 6800, 6502, 1802, 8080 or z80 assembly, but still.... fun anyway. :)

It's right here: ReFlex

Download the archive, then use the contact form on blackbeltsystems.com to write to me, and I'll get you going. You'll probably enjoy it - it's very fast and there is a metric f-ton of software on the (virtual) disks that come with it. Assembler, editors, commands, etc.

It works on XP or earlier for sure; I gave up on Windows after XP, so it's possible it'd have to run in a compatibility mode or something under Vista or 7. Or not. I didn't break any rules that I know of when I wrote it. Of course, that doesn't mean Microsoft didn't...

It's right here: ReFlex

Download the archive, then use the contact form on blackbeltsystems.com to write to me, and I'll get you going. You'll probably enjoy it - it's very fast and there is a metric f-ton of software on the (virtual) disks that come with it. Assembler, editors, commands, etc.

It works on XP or earlier for sure; I gave up on Windows after XP, so it's possible it'd have to run in a compatibility mode or something under Vista or 7. Or not. I didn't break any rules that I know of when I wrote it. Of course, that doesn't mean Microsoft didn't...

sample and fix, total fix time, about 3 seconds, two operations. Which is not to say that the Photoshop tool isn't cool; it is. But these aren't difficult tasks unless you simply have little skill at image editing. The video talks about those tiny, super-easy edits of the scene with the tree and bench as taking "all day"... that's a spit coffee, LOL moment, right there. Total fixup time for that image, same issues addressed... maybe five minutes or so. The best part of the demo was the outward fix of the missing sky on the panorama; that would take at least five minutes by itself with the tools I have (to do it as nicely.)

I'm sure the new CS will be great. All of Adobe's releases are great. The only thing better than CS is the marketing behind it. :)

I still have working, fully loaded SS-50 bus machines from about 1982 with all kinds of cool cards in them like speech synthesizers, A/D and D/A, graphics cards, memory, etc. I wrote a lot of 6800 and 6809 assembly code back then... in 1994, I wrote a complete 6809 system emulation, including the OS from the time (6809 Flex) and emulation of an arcade graphics subsystem I designed so I'd always have a working "machine" to fool with my old code. Virtual disk drives, ports, timers, etc. Still runs great; I run it under XP, which runs under Parallels, which runs under OSX. :o)

I also have a SOROC terminal and a paper tape reader, and a mint tiny BASIC on paper tape (for the 8080.) The first machine I had that I didn't actually build out of TTL was based on a National Semiconductor ISP-8000-8A SC/MP I got in 1976. I published an article about using the SC/MP as a Baudot printer driver with the SWTPC 6800 in the November 1977 issue of Kilobaud. My first published work, in fact.

The first machine I ever owned I built out of TTL in... I think 1970... as there wasn't any other option at the time. A couple of 74181 ALUs in the middle, all manner of other stuff in there, register memory files.... Man, that was a wild nest of wires and sockets. The power supply was a nightmare. But I learned a lot doing it. You can't (or maybe you can) imagine how enthused I was when the 8080 and 6800 hit the market, and the downright euphoria I felt when the 6809 came out.

I still think that the 6809 was one of the best designed MPUs ever from a programming standpoint. I can still write 6800 and 6809 opcodes straight to paper. Even fairly complex things like the 6809's LEA instructions. And calculate its 2's complement branch offsets more or less instantly. Now there's a chunk of neurons I'll never get back....

I did some work for Centuri (an arcade game machine manufacturer) where I built them boards that would plug in where the 6502 was in their then-current hardware, and put a 6809 there instead. Just a few gates and some socket hardware, and goodbye 6502! Lord, I despised the 6502. What a bass-ackwards... nevermind. Then I wrote them a few graphics demos that left a few executives spitting coffee. Nothing like a hardware multiply (and the ability to do easy division by multiplying via a table of reciprocals) to step up from an MPU where the main claim to fame is bloody 8-bit role-reversed index registers...

Oldest working non computer hardware I own is a console AM radio from the 1930s. It's even still mostly original... it'd almost certainly work better if I went in there and replaced a lot of components with their modern equivalents, but it's more interesting as is, and in fact it still works quite well. Doesn't complete with my current radio gear, but then again, the currents stuff doesn't have the charm of a polished wood cabinet, either.

Darwin, I'm oooold. :o)

No, control of softare isn't only useful for programmers. All that means is that if gmail changes something, and you don't like it anymore, you're stuck.

Look. If gmail -- an online service -- changes something, and you have server AND client source code, and you're a programmer, so you can change your client code, you MAY be able to work out a compatible new version, or you may not. You can change the server code all you want, but you can't make Google use it. Thank goodness. Because I trust them. But I *don't* trust you.

If you're not a programmer, having the source code won't help. Neither will having an old, incompatible version you refused to upgrade. Neither will having an older server of your own, because then you're not running gmail, are you? So in the end, you're probably stuck if you're a programmer, or not, and if you have source code, or not, and if you have a home server, or not. That's the risk of letting someone else hold your data. You want to have your own server, with your own code? Fine. When it gets out of sync with developments in the rest of the world, don't call me. Don't call anyone. It's your problem. Your code. Tough luck, Mr. Independent.

Your posts here on slashdot? They're gonna go away someday; when slashdot does, or perhaps sooner, when they have a policy change. Your ability to comment already evaporates shortly after the article posts. Your ability to edit is absolutely non-existent. The moderators act like frontal lobotomy patients with big red buttons they get a cookie for pushing, which do something completely unknown in another room entirely -- and that includes the slashdot mods, not just the users on a rampage.

You trade the benefit of community for the risks and costs of sharing. You wanna have a "slashdot" on your home server? Fine. You can have that. But you're not going to get the community, which is where the value is. Further, if you're really good at making your point, *no one* will post on your private slashdot, because you'll have convinced them that it's bad to let someone else hold your data.

Same thing with GMail. You trade some really smart, helpful people working on an email system that is really quite nice and VERY convenient, for some not very annoying ads on your web page and the risks associated with someone else holding your email. It's not a bad thing. You're not going to live forever, and things don't have to run or save your stuff forever. There can be both free and commercial software. Doesn't have to be GPL to be free, either.

Look here, this is a calculator I wrote to massage DSLR data and planet sizes to see if you could actually see something useful in the resulting image. It takes YOUR data, massages it, and gives you an answer. You don't get the source code, and it runs on my server, not your client. It's free. This, apparently, would terrify RMS. Which result would only make me laugh. You need the info it calculates? It's free. Go ahead. You won't use it because you don't have the source code? Then you're being silly. And so is RMS for his whole bizarre quest after purity of his own tired, restrictive, lawyer-infested vision.

Real freedom doesn't require lawyers or licenses. Count on it. You want real freedom, look to PD. There it is, pal. But that doesn't mean that independence trumps community, or that wanna-bes working in their basement have a ghost of a chance at beating commercial enterprises at the software game. There are very few freeware success stories, software that beats most commercial competition. Apache. Linux. PostgreSQL. That might be it. Gimp is so terrifyingly lame that Photoshop can sell for $800 or more. And that goes for most free software. Even those three examples still have competition. And the head of Oracle isn't exactly poor, is he? Microsoft does ok with servers and OS's despite Apache and Linux. So curious, these facts.

RMS (or RMS minions) ha

Fact: We have far more space to cover than most countries, and we cover it with highway, not rail. The auto industry knew, and knows, this. The problem is simply that the means of propulsion is in transition. Peak oil (see chart) seems to have pretty clearly passed, and even if it hasn't, geopolitical issues are having the same effect. So motive power is really the key issue here.

What Detroit needs to do -- and what I think it will be forced to do -- is convert to long range electric vehicles, that's all. Light through heavy. That's what the environment needs, that's what petroleum product availability will require, and that's what works with the US infrastructure.

They can do this. It's all about the power sources. Batteries are getting close to what we might be able to put up with, and the promise of ultracaps is still somewhere over the horizon (and if it ever gets here, that'll pretty much be the end of batteries.)

As for rail, land is too expensive / valuable in the US for any real rail development. Look at the highline, an east-to-west rail passage that is extremely busy; but no amount of congestion has been able to get the rails or the government to invest in a second line so that they don't have to delay trains by side-tracking them to spurs to let one train pass by another. This is where they already own the right of way. Nothing is going to get them to open new right of way. Financially speaking, it is incomprehensible.

Electric is the coming thing. Petroleum, hydrogen, hybrid, ethanol, all these will fall by the wayside, because nothing can compete with the distribution system or the mass efficiency of large electricity generating stations. Even petroleum produces far more power in a central electric generation situation, even accounting for transmission losses (which are not as high as most think) than it does being consumed on a per-car basis. But that's not the kicker; the kicker is that we can transition to any mix of any type of generation we want once the transport system is electricity based, because any type of electricity generation system can add power to the entire grid. That means a measured transition to nuclear, solar, wind, wave, geothermal, anything reasonable that comes along.

The problem - as always - is getting US concerns, both political and corporate, to invest in systems and ideas that extend beyond the next quarter, or at most, fiscal year. Everything is about the next quarterly report or the next election. The obvious weight, horsepower, pollution and efficiency advantages of electric should have anyone with any sense investing their heads off. Detroit will get the message eventually. That, or they'll die. And in that case, we'll have a whole new industry springing up, good riddance to the old.

You're all invited to try out, and share, if you like, WinImages. It's free to download and there are no restrictions on your tryout other than technical support - unpaid copies don't get any. WinImages is an extremely powerful image editing and manipulation suite with a strong emphasis on layered image handling and efficient tool interaction.

With regard to the subject at hand, we've offered user configurable tool caddies for years now. You can select any tool that suits you for any particular type of job, drag it into a new or already populated tool caddy, name the resulting tool set, and save it for (re)use at any time. Adding a tool is as simple as drag and drop.

WinImages operates under Windows 98 and up, under Parallels or Bootcamp under OS X, and I suspect it probably works fine under Wine though I don't actually know that.

If you would like a copy, use the contact form here (except between 2:00 am and 2:30 am MST) and provide us with your name and your email. We'll use the email to send you your download information, and nothing else unless you contact us and tell us otherwise. Your name goes in the registration info for the program - and to anyone you give the program and registration info to (which is perfectly OK to do - just give 'em the whole thing so they're aren't w/o the docs or a properly working install, etc.) Or you can give 'em the program/installation and tell them to get their own free code from us, if that suits you better.

I still have a couple SWTPC KC tape controllers, they both still work - I had kind of a old computer fest here a few years back, wrote 6809, z80 and 6800 emulations, gathered up all my old software and so forth. Was interesting. I was able to recover every tape I'd made; I thought the oxide would fall off, but no, they played back fine. I even read back a paper tape of BASIC; now that was a bit of a flashback. I keep the paper tape in a sealed can. It's some kind of oiled paper, holding up very well indeed.

You might be talking about WinImages. I'm not affiliated, I've just seen the guy around here too.

Personally, I never downloaded it.. the quality of the images on the website dissuaded me.

OK, I release program A as PD (if that is indeed possible)...

Of course it is... what an... unexpected remark. Huh. Have you truly never run into a PD release? Here's one for you, a multiple read-client / single write-client flat file database written in python that implements a very useful subset of SQL and comes in at under 20k. In fact, zipped, the database engine, two database examples, a test / example program, and the docs come in at about 13k bytes and don't use any library that isn't part of python itself (re and os are used.) There it is, you can do anything you like with it. And I hope you do. :-) At least download it and read the docs, so you can see the terms (none) and see what it can do. So there's some actual PD software; mystery solved.

You make a new program B based laregly on A and release it (C) all rights reserved.

A still exists, unmolested, as PD at this point. So no harm or change of status has come to A at all. B is a new work, so it could have any type of release. Copyrighted, GPL'd, PD, BSD, etc. There is no harm to A in the fact that B contains A to any proportion. To the extent that B is new work (let's say it is mostly A, as in your example), that new work should be controlled by the author. A, which is not new work, is still out there and still controlled by the fact that it is PD and available to anyone.

For a very specific example, my database engine, above, is "A". You take it and incorporate it in something you write, unspecified, we'll just call it B and stipulate that B contains A, or perhaps it is more enlightening to call your aggregate production "AB", indicating some of my stuff, A, is in there. Now, my database engine, A, is still available. You wrote new stuff - I have no claim on what you wrote. That's the PD outlook. You wrote your stuff, it is yours. I chose to release A as PD, but that was my choice. Why should you be obligated to do the same? It isn't as if your incorporation of A into AB devalued A somehow. Quite the opposite. You added value and your own personal twist, now you are, and should be, responsible for the disposition of AB.

Third person gets B from you and now does not have the four freedoms with respect to B.

No, no, just wait a minute! They never had the four freedoms with respect to B; they had the four freedoms with respect to A, and they still do. I didn't give them A, I gave them B. They can still get A, presumably from the same place I got it. Or perhaps even from me. A != B, after all; doesn't hurt me a bit to hand out copies of A, no matter what my plans and intent are for B, or how much, or how little, I've changed it. So nothing has been lost, and of course, the community has gained B in whatever form the author, me, has chosen to bring it to them based on the new work. Also - in your scenario, B is "based largely on A" and so your access to A gives you - largely - what is in B. Presumably, this would allow you to create your own B without any particular trouble. So there is very little sense in the idea that A should control B in this case, even if you're just trying to take the work that B represents. But there's another side of this coin - when B is by far the larger part of the code. Then where does the justification for A controlling B come from?

It seems to me that what you are arguing for is that by writing A and releasing it as GPL, A gets to control all software that incorporates it downstream, regardless of the magnitude of additional effort or anything else for that matter.

It appears I've established that your outlook, that A should control B, is without merit other than it gets you additional free stuff you didn't have to write yourself. Which certainly has value, but as it is coercive — A controls B by force o

This is not going to happen, and you know it.

Yes, I do know it is highly unlikely, and that's why I also know it is highly unlikely Linux will ever see a whole raft of commercial applications. The solution is to create a standard GUI; as long as Linux doesn't do that, it's going to remain way out in left field. IMHO.

There ain't no such thing as "no license", except for public domain.

Certainly there is. I can sell you anything I like that I have rights to without requiring you to look at, agree to, or be bound by, any license. And in fact, I do exactly that with a major application right here. Look ma, no license! None at install time, either, in case you were thinking I slipped one in somewhere else.

Further, you can develop for Windows without ever having bought Windows, it's just a binary format you have to cobble up; people do that (cross-develop) all the time. The Windows and OS X widgets are available in such applications for use, no license, no nothing. You're confused if you think the situation is otherwise. Under Linux, there are restrictions, however. You can't use a GPL or LGPL item. Linux is the limited territory here, not Windows, and not OS X.

This is incorrect.

No, it isn't. It's plain English. Regarding (0), you're not getting any source, or anything that will compile or be involved in any non-runtime link. Period. So (0) is "right out", as Monty Python would say. Regarding (1), it says, and I quote:

A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system (emphasis mine)

That's all it says; it does not say, nor mean, anything even remotely like that which you attribute to it. If I don't provide source code, I have to link as described there, which says that I must use a copy of the library already present. There is no permission to distribute LGPL'd libraries given or implied; these are the two conditions of 4, one of which must be met. Neither can be; therefore, I can't produce my software for linux unless I develop my own GUI, as it requires a GUI; and no, I'm not inclined to create yet another redundant GUI for Linux. Though it needs an obligation-free one quite badly.

Remember, 4 must be met; and 4 offers (0) or (1). Not any of these imaginative alternatives you made up.

If you (or any other slashdotter) would like, you can visit my contact form and I'll see that you get a copy to evaluate. just use my name in the form (Ben) or mention slashdot. WinImages is a Windows application, runs under Windows 98 and up. Also runs fine under Mac Parallels for Intel / OSX and of course, bootcamp. Haven't heard of anyone getting it going under Linux's various Windows-like solutions, but it shouldn't be much of a challenge - it does, after all, run under Win98. :-)

...Photoshop would be free-as-in-beer, they would still be non-free

You can get software that does a lot of what Photoshop does, and a lot that it doesn't, without paying and still be 100% above board and legal. Check out the WinImages page on (non)-piracy. Basically, you can copy the software if you have it, or get a copy from someone who has it, you just don't get support. You can't be a pirate if people won't agree to treat you as one. ;-)

Parent's signature used to be a line bragging about how photoshop only has 20 layer blend modes and his software has 85 (or something akin to that). He has since changed it, why I am not certain, but likely because he took a lot of flack from ./ users trying to tell him that having a shitload of layer blend modes does not a great image editing app make.

I've look at his software, and if he was positing it as better or more useful than photoshop (to the average industry professional), I believe he is mistaken. The UI is absolutely attrocious. Fyngryz-- I know you're going to take this as a personal attack, just as i've seen you take other similar comments as a personal attack, but I assure you it isn't. Your UI is not good, that's a plain fact. The behind-the-scenes execution of your software may be amazing, but I'll never know because the UI is so offputting. You need to hire a good UI designer-- the money you spend will be more than made up for by an exponential rise in sales.

Perhaps I'm wrong, maybe he isn't referring to his own app though. If so, go ahead and name a single program that is better than photoshop-- notbetter from a technical standpoint that it might have more layer blend modes, but better in that it has more layer blend modes, and is also equivalent or better in all other areas (UI, platforms it will run on, etc). Lord knows lots of people (myself included) dislike adobe, and we'd readily spend our money elsewhere if something better existed. But it doesn't, hence why PS is *the standard* in the industry.

Lastly, this REALLY isn't an attack on you. So resist the urge to call me a useless AC or whatever, and re-read what I wrote-- there might be painful things there, but there is also some good advice that *MIGHT* make your app *BETTER* than photoshop.

I've just read your page on priacy, and I must say, I'm really impressed with your attitude. May I ask how well it actually works? I know I'd feel bad about "redistributing" it, even to my friends, and rather I'd persuade them to actually buy the product, but I'm not the typical warez kiddy either...

cheers,
mitch

Yet exactly how often is commercial software available with the source code as well?

(a) We're not talking about commercial software vs. the GPL, we're talking about PD source code vs. GPL'd source code. (b) Commercial software may offer no source, some (as we do, for instance for scripts, for plugins) or all; again, this is entirely up to the developer, but in no way does this relate to PD offerings.

The issue of proprietary drivers alone is a major reason many people look for GPL version if they exist. This ability to go in, dig around, fix a couple of variables or lines of code and make it work is huge.

And PD source code for drivers as opposed to GPL'd source code for drivers would hurt or diminish this ability, exactly how?

Yes, the commercial companies could do this. They never, ever do. That all are asses about it.

Nope, not all of 'em. Many are pretty myopic, certainly, but not all. For example, we released the entire mechanism for our plug-ins (essentially, plug-ins are drivers for our image and animation manipulation engine) free of charge. You can use that mechanism to write stuff for our app, or, for instance, you could take the code and jam it into the Gimp and thus make the gimp run our plug-ins. No restrictions. The code and details are online, and begin here. Previously, when we were doing hardware, we coded up an entire paint program and handed out the source code - essentially a specialized driver for the graphics hardware. You're not going to get me to argue that holding back driver details for software or hardware targets is the socially best-scenario move; clearly, it isn't, and we don't go that way ourselves. Nor do we find that we need the GPL to get us into, or keep us in, the proper mindset.

fyngyrz, your view of freedom is backwards here, because real life situations almost never involve a user nerfing other users

No? Where are all these viruses and worms coming from, then? Why do I see perfectly good and on-topic posts on slashdot being crushed by moderators, who are really (usually) just other users? Why is it that a bunch of users will promote a product based upon familiarity or looks when functionality is far superior in another product? I'll tell you why: Because people "nerf" other people all the time. Some people don't, and those drive the community forward. You can't legislate or bind by rules when it comes to behaviors that cannot be controlled; you can't impose your opinions on people who will not listen, and it doesn't matter if you're right or not, you simply can't do it. Those people who wish to contribute, or do business in a manner that benefits the community in ways that may not lead to direct profits, will do so regardless of rules. They aren't doing it because they were told to. They're doing it because they want to.

The developers of GPL saw this a long time ago. They saw that one day companies would copyright everything in sight, even down to trying to patent life itself. This required aggressive action on their part to KEEP it from happening.

It hasn't been prevented, or even slowed down. That's a fact. On the other hand, the GPL has served to prevent ideas from reaching large numbers of people by making the task of including GPL'd source code in commercial products much harder than it needs to be. Conversely, PD source code can't be glommed by a company any more than GPL'd code can, and this brings up the question, why use GPL at all if your goal is to get ideas in at the "you can't isolate this idea" level? Put the idea in PD source, distribute it reasonably well (trivial to do), and that's it - it'll never be non-PD, it can't be patented because the PD is prior art, it can't be copyrighted because the PD is

That's just wrong

No. I'm talking about source code here when I say "product", and in that context, it is precisely accurate. GPL with regard to use of a compliant executable is, at least as far as I know, irrelevant. It is when a developer, by manipulating the source code, does something forbidden (like mix proprietary code with GPL'd code) that restrictions upon the developer come into play.

You do have to abide by [the GPL's] conditions if you want to modify or redistribute [GPL'd software], but you typically can't do that at all with proprietary software, even after you've paid for the ability to use it.

But that is a developer's choice, and it isn't by any means a defining characteristic of commercial software. For instance, it isn't true of ours: See here. Specifically, you can redistribute our software. Even if you haven't paid for it. Or in other words, you are free to do so. Freedom springs up where you least expect it sometimes. Funny old world, isn't it?

You are free to do with the software what you will, but you are not allowed to steal it, or claim it as your own.

This is not true. The GPL isn't about giving credit or "stealing" something that is being given away. I am more than happy to give credit where credit is due and desired. In fact, although I wrote most of the code in the product, my name isn't even on that list, because I don't care about credit personally. The GPL has nothing to do with "claims of work as one's own", nor does such a thing present any kind of a barrier. What the GPL restricts is the ability to use that code without exposing your own IP or complicating distribution issues, while adding a layer of legal concerns that represent a looming potential liability which a real company, doing real work under real constraints which it is duty and honor bound to consider because it affects the company, the company's shareholders and/or owners, employees, customers, and of course the product itself. We can't just go dancing off into the night willy-nilly when something has a restrictive license; it has to go to lawyers, everything has to be examined to the last detail including what is a library, what is compiled in, where the source code will be, what provisions for maintaining access to it will be set up, and so on. The GPL sets up barriers to commercial use, intentionally so, and that - not anything to do with "credit" or "theft" - is the sum total of the problem.

The last time "free" meant what you mean was in the time of the Greeks, when you were not truly free unless you could enslave someone else. That's not my kind of free

Again, not so. I can release something PD and you can do anything with it. The fact that it is PD and public sets the lower bound, and it becomes impossible for anyone to say "that isn't PD anymore", while there is no upper bound, no need to be concerned about source code, compilation, libraries, modification, etc. And you can still acknowledge the author(s) (give credit) and you are not in any way "stealing." The "right thing", as you put it, is anything you would like to do. If the ability to do this ever went away, it would be a tragedy. And it certainly hasn't gone away at this point in time; I use PD for my community minded works and I would never choose the GPL because it restricts what people can do with my contribution, and I am not interested in restricting them. Plus, look at it the other way: You can use my PD code in your project just as easily - no, more easily - than you can GPL'd code. Because there are no concerns beyond those you would have for code you wrote yourself. I don't demand recognition, I don't demand exposure of your (or my) code, I don't demand you do - or don't - change it, I don't impose "responsibilities" on you, I don't demand anything. I'm just saying, here's this code, I wrote it, it does thus-and-such, and if you'd like to use, modify, or ignore it in whole or in part, you're free to do any combination of those things without any additional concerns imposed by me, whether in my direction or anyone else's.

As I said initially, if you want to use GPL, by all means, please do. But don't go imagining that the GPL is the bottom line in freedom. It isn't. PD represents freedom. GPL is just a license that isolates use that is restricted to a subset of the choices one could make were the code PD or one's own. Choosing the GPL is choosing restrictions. Choosing the GPL is fine, but pretending that the GPL is definitive of "freedom" or even just "free software" is misleading at best.

Also - and this is so obvious I can hardly believe I have to say it - When I give you my code, you are not enslaving me. I wrote the code, I made a choice about what to do with that work product, and I was the one who set the limits

Sure it does antialiasing. And some other interesting tricks with boundaries as well. However, those buttons were made at that resolution, with antialiasing off, because they are they product of a script a customer supplied (see here for that one, and some other scripts that use antialiasing). We're perfectly happy to use those buttons as they are as a "thank you" for the script. We're not too concerned that they're a little jaggy. Thanks for your feedback, though.

My company's WinImages offers most of what Photoshop does, plus a considerable number of features that Photoshop does not, particularly in the area of layered image editing. WinImages is about $50, starts and runs faster, has a smaller footprint, and offers UI methods that can save a step for every application of a filter or effect, particularly helpful when you're doing extensive image repairs or editing, for instance. The $50 price is a discount that applies if you have any Adobe, Corel or JASC product, so for instance, if you have Adobe's free PDF reader, you're eligible, meaning, anyone is eligible if they want to be.

WinImages is Windows-only, though it runs perfectly under Parallels on OSX. Not aware of how it might behave under Wine, though I would think it should do ok; we're not "deep-dippers" when it comes to OS features, preferring to create our own in-program solutions.

Slashdot inhabitants should also know if they put "slash" anywhere in the second line of the address, we'll apply a 25% discount to the overall order.

The movie industry is making a bundle off of you. And they're then using that money to directly attack you and the things you believe in.

The entertainment people make some products that I want. I am willing to pay for these items, because the value I receive for the particular products I am interested in is, in my opinion, sufficient. Not perfect, but sufficient. They are as entitled to an opinion as I am about what they think is the correct way to do things; the law supports how they operate, or at least, the common interpretation of the courts of that law. So the place to agitate is indeed political, not at the companies themselves (who, if forced to remove DRM by law, will still hold the opinion that they would rather have DRM.)

The fact is, I enjoy movies a great deal more than I suffer from DRM. This makes my choice about what to do with my discretionary funds very easy. Not all things I object to balance out this way, but movies and music both do. None of this affects what I do at the political level, or for products that I control, where I enforce policies such as this one.

I appreciate that these choices may not be your choices. In that case, you should be the one voting with your sacrifice of entertainment. It isn't a choice I care to make.

being 'vocal' about DRM on slashdot is fucking worthless when you're shoveling money at the companies for making it! We're concerned because they're making money off of you by raping all the other consumers.

I directly fight DRM in the publishing industry, and in the software industry as well. Aside from that, speaking out is definitely not worthless; discussion is a critical part of society's management of divisive issues. I prefer not to go straight to civil disobedience or violence, myself. One more thing: I don't object in the least to paying for entertainment, be it music, plays, movies, software, whatever. My objection centers around how I am able to use media and hardware I purchase. I bought a component system because it was DRM free and it had everything technically needed to handle the task at hand. My options once that turned out not to be usable were either not have hi-def 1080p movies, or move to HDMI. Neither precludes discussion, funding countering viewpoints, or a focus on my own productions that eschews DRM. Given that, I'll go with the 1080p. You, of course, are entitled to your opinions and choices.

This experience has led me to real-word realization that most of what passes for law is just bullshit designed to keep someone rich.

...another function is to maintain a powerbase, partially religious, partially straight power. Sorry to hear you were a direct victim of the war against personal liberty.

"I don't steal"... I do copy software. I do it at work if it can improve my personal productivity ... Ditto my graphics image processing software.

You couldn't "steal" ours even if you wanted to, because we refuse to consider you a pirate. :)

Yes, it is WinImages. You just have to grab it from the right page to get that price, which we offer via paypal only. That page — entirely coincidentally, I swear — is the photo/image editing page. The product you get is the full version, but download only - no CD, no copy protection. We do permanently back up your purchase and program keys for you so if it's lost, you can grab it again at no cost. Just takes a whack at our contact form.

$30. Funny story. Funny to me, anyway. There's a very odd thing that happens with marketing. At $99, the program sells quite well. We're well down the ROI curve (after 22 years, you can probably hardly imagine how far) and we wanted to make it less expensive. So we dropped the price to $49.95. It stopped selling. Not slowed down - I mean stopped. We put it back up to $99, and it immediately began selling again.

Huh, quoth we. So we put up a set of offers that said if you have this or that product, we'd sell it to you for $49.95. We don't ask for proof, we actually don't give a northbound rat's southern end, we just wanted to sell it for $49.95. Sure enough, it sold just fine. $99 value, a bargain at $49.95. I think. I guess.

Anyway, again, some years pass, and we're further yet into ridiculous ROI (I should have mentioned that when it was new, the software retailed for about $1000/copy, was marketed through dealers and distributors, used in Hollywood and TV and so on, and we sold many, many copies.) We were almost a year into making something entirely different for the Mac, and Wi is just sitting there, just had a decent upgrade, doing just fine, but I'm still thinking it can be dropped further. I'd really like to see more "regular" people using it. It's certainly easy enough for any basic work, my kids all used it, it's just god-awful powerful if you stretch its legs. Which isn't a bad thing, at least, IMHO.

So we tried. Several times, several prices. Fact: There is no low price point that works. Then, whilst perusing some online coupons for something unrelated that I really had to work hard to dig up to get a discount on something for a friend, it suddenly occurred to me that if we had something "hidden", it might turn into a little bit of a bargain for the end user, plus add a little bit of that "found a deal" excitement.

Sure enough, as long as we didn't actually mention that page, a slow but steady trickle of people found it and got WI for that price, pleasing the heck out of me.

So that's the story of the $30 price. All I can say is I write code. I'm no artist, as several posters here have taken me to task for, and I am no marketing guy. I don't pretend to understand why pricing works the way it does, and I find it more than a little annoying, I'd much rather sell 100+ copies a day for $10 than 20 copies at $50, but that simply doesn't work.

Oh dear god! you aren't seriously talking about the heap of junk which is WinImages, are you?

http://www.blackbeltsystems.com/kowMEfDEpics/wi_sc ap.jpg/

The screenshot just about says it all, if your own website can't show examples that don't look like utter crap then what hope does anyone else have? I see higher quality output from MSPaint users, let alone GIMP and PhotoShoppers.

Are your clients all interested in producing ultra low quality animated web graphics they're going to travel back in time to the mid-nineties to sell to web content producers?

of course he's missed the point - have a look at his flipping website http://www.blackbeltsystems.com/ [blackbeltsystems.com]

the poor fellow is trying to make it the world of graphics and uses wordart for his banner!!!! what a comedian

i think that point here is he's seriously pissed that more people will have used fauxto in the last 30 minutes than will use his products, ever.

you can hardly blame him, not much fun knowing you may well be another roadkill on the information superhighway.

if you want to know the extent to which parent is divorced from real world then have a quick look at his website http://www.blackbeltsystems.com/

never mind your weak product lineup, someone who is trying to get a start in your particular field should steer clear of using Word Art for the banner. Seriously dude, even if you were selling fishtanks that site would look a bit ropey.

have a look at someone who is serious in your business (adobe.com) and.... whats the line? oh yes, maybe you are trying to fight a global nuclear war with a handgun. That sound you can hear is an incoming ICBM. How silly do you feel?

as to tfa, fauxto is the one that stands here. as a beta its beyond impressive. when linked up with other technologies it becomes clear that this is the way to go.

even just as a demonstration of what flex/flash can do its incredible.

Bring back CP/M... And my tapes!

Y'know... (looks around shiftily) I actually missed my 6809 Flex system (a "brother" to CP/M, timewise and interface wise) so badly I wrote a complete emulator for it, and in the process, taught it how to use unconscionable amounts of disk space.

I used to work in the video games industry, so I also added an emulation of a graphics board I designed way back when that I particularly liked (it had vestigial hardware line drawing in an 8-color bitmap) so the emulation has a text mode interface like you'd expect (and like CP/M) and it also has graphics you can fiddle with if you are so inclined.

Sometimes there's a lot to be said for simply going back and writing some fun stuff in 6809 assembler, at least for me. Keeps one cognizant of how things work to some degree. Plus the emulator can outrun a 'real" 6809 by quite a bit, so it feels quite snappy.

I even considered taking your product for a spin, but if you can't be arsed to hire a web designer to sell image manipulation software, I can't be arsed to take you seriously.

I hereby deduct one point from your diatribe's validity score for presuming that programmers are artists. Then hire an artist. If OSS applications can get volunteers to make great icons, and sometimes even a useable UI, your commercial software company has no excuse. In addition to the webpage, those Windows 3.1-esque giant icon buttons in the UI have got to go. Oh, and the shitty fractal terrain example images, too (it's 2007, and terragen 2 is coming. Hell, Terragen 1 from years ago looks loads better, and it's free/cheap.) You claim big clients, show big results.

I deduct another point for not addressing product issues. Production artists have to ramp up on lots of applications quickly. Showing off a cluttered mess of a UI on an unreadable webpage with horrible dayglo fractal sample images in the screenshots does not give me confidence in the production-worthiness or ease of use of your tool. If you want to reach people, consider explaining why your morpher is a better option than Combustion, Fusion, Shake, or even an ancient copy of Elastic Reality from the top shelf in the closet, for example. Another example is that when examining your 70+ layer modes, fully half of the first ten should really be composed of multiple operators, both to increase flexibility and to reduce clutter (why should I have to memorize, and pick from, a list of 70, if half of them are "inverted foo"? Why layers instead of nodes, for that matter, if you're touting a powerful procedural compositor with a robust scripting language?)
Perhaps the most glaring red flag is the lack of a user-to-user forum. That suggests either that nobody is using the software, or that you don't want people talking to each other about it.

I deduct another point for characterizing your criticism as "constructive" when it was simply an opportunity to bluster about web pages. I just suggested some positive steps you can take. So did the GP, for that matter. Harsh criticism is a day-to-day reality of the industry you're serving, and people who take it personally wdon't tend to last long. Don't get mad, you're getting valuable feedback from your target market.

Finally, I deduct another point for being offtopic. Since I'm replying to your reply, it's on-topic now.

HAND.

Make a case that your software will make artists lives easier and more productive, with great sample images and clear feature examples, and you just might have a hit.

you're missing an important problem with emulation. Unless the "computer" is given the same processing hardware (a biological brain), then emulation is inherently slower. It still takes a considerable amount of power for a modern CPU to emulate a console CPU from just a decade ago

I'm quite familiar with the problem and landscape of emulation. I'm the author of this emulation, which is by far the fastest of all the 6809 emulations out there, last I heard. :) Also some others; but that one, you can play with. I'm not assuming that neuron emulation is the way to go; I just point out it is a way one could go, should all else fail.

We HAVE TO KNOW the questions to ask before we can create a program to solve them.

No, really — we don't. I can list many things that produce emergent behaviors (meaning, we didn't anticipate them), from fractals to cellular automata to fuzzy logic to genetic algorithms. We can create the methods that create the methods, or we can even go a step back from that. We can also zero in on a solution to a problem through successive approximation; trying to solve it, solving small parts, even guessing when intuition fails.

Still, none of this says that someone won't go - eureka - and simply solve the problem with a complete understanding of what they've solved. No, we don't understand it now, but that does not by any means, indicate that someone will not understand it tomorrow. That presumption is just hubris. There's always some clown sitting in his mom's basement that is twice as smart as you and I put together, and who has better hardware as well. I like that guy. :)

I thought your points about Linux were well made.

However...

Our product is many times more complex to use than, for instance, Photoshop.

I wouldn't brag about that too much. I realize you're probably proud of your creation and all, but your very website gallery seems to prove the arcaneness of your software as it has only one decent image whereas the rest is utter junk for weirdos. Who uses your product? And for what? Based on the samples, I'd rather use MS Paint.

Since I'm accidentally being a jerk, without meaning it in a personal way, I should go ahead and clue you into realizing your company website looks like the hobbyist garage job from hell. Spend a little dough; get a pro to improve your image.

Decoration is irrelevant to serious tool users.

Heh. Yeah, as a professional retoucher, why would I mind all that neon green on screen while I'm doing color correction?

It's just irrelevant decoration!

DN

Remember DR DOS, Netscape? I expect that photshop will stop working with Windows pretty soon.

That's actually not funny. We make Winimages, a graphics product of similar complexity to Photoshop. It's about special effects, animation, and high complexity image editing. It's been running on Windows since about 1992, and it's definitely not been a given that everything stays solid from one windows version to another. For instance, NT and RISC windows versions arbitarily befuddled some UI functions (font rotation and skew, for instance) and XP outright destroyed the consistancy of window metrics that spaced titlebars from client windows. Then there was the Win95 file dialog as compared to the Win98 and later file dialog which handled multiple file selection differently (but still insanely) and so on... and these are just off the top of my head. There are certainly many more.

Microsoft is pretty annoying when it comes to maintaining compatability from one version of Windows to the next.

First and foremost, there was never a mention ANYWHERE in the article of a religious group - yet you automatically assumed that was the case - or if not, went ahead and slammed many different religious and cultural groups.

Hmm. "Utah." Ring a bell?

I, as another person has posted, also believe that parents should be interacting and supervising their children - and not leaving everything up to the government.

That "other person" was me.

The only real problem with what this person is doing is your own. You don't want it because it ANNOYS you. How? Because it stops YOU from downloading it at work.

No. I outright own my various operations. If I want to download prawn, I can. Sadly, I'm usually too busy at work. My SO and I do check out the goods at home, though. I deserve a little credit for that, I think.

In any event, this person is only trying to make it easier for people to _filter_ porn, not eliminate it.

My post was intended to demonstrate how ridiculous, and offensive, censorship is in any venue, via humor. I'm truly sorry you didn't understand.

...there's a term called morals. You'd be surprised what a better place it would be if people exercised it every once in a while.

Frankly, I don't see a lack of sexual morality as one of the larger challenges we face.

We have an utterly unjust war going on, our civil rights are being rapidly eroded by local, state and federal government, school boards (of all people) are trying to re-define what science means, children carry guns to school, drunks turn cars into ballistic weapons and get to walk away while munchie-addled pot smokers go to jail, our president is a drooling moron, a huge portion of the nation has no healthcare...

You know, I just can't get worked up about someone pumping hormones over depictions of sexual activity as an actual "problem", other than as one more vector for the government to attempt to control the population. If that's the main focus of your attention, then you and I are two very different people. My concerns about actual sexuality are limited to informed consent and physical safety. I rather think those should be the government's concerns as well, and that should be the end of it. I suspect you wouldn't want my morals forced on you; the reverse is also true: I am almost certainly not interested in conforming to your idea of morals.

Just because YOU haven't experienced something due to your hard-heartedness doesn't mean other people haven't. You are doing exactly the same thing you wrote by forcing _your_ beliefs on others.

So... you seriously believe I was suggesting we put religion and politics on ports we can close... not just nationally, but involving the UN... and leave porn running free around the net.

Listen... I have this really, really terrrrific bridge I'd like to sell, and as it happens, I'm going to make you a very special offer (strictly because I like you... you're obviously a fine, thoughtful fellow.) It's in Brooklyn, and once you own it, you can charge tolls, whatever you want. Just ten thousand bucks, and it's yours. You could make the purchase price back in one day, and hey, I'll let you have $5000 credit, so you only have to pay 1/2 down, the rest when you get it, no hurry, because I trust you. What do you say?

Am I still being too subtle for you?

... and just for the record - the right religion won't debunk logical or scientific thinking. If you think we've mastered every scientific principle and theory in the universe, you are grossly incorrect.

As the maker of WinImages, as you can imagine I'm rather biased towards it, but either of these would more than satisfy the needs of the vast majority of photo editing folk. Not only can one find the basic features one needs to edit photos, there are other features available you can't get in Photoshop — and they are useful, to the point, and powerful in the context of photo editing. Some examples include PSP's handling of brushes, which is vastly superior to Photoshop's, and WinImage's approach to area selection, which likewise makes Photoshop look like a horse and buggy.

You have to keep in mind that Dvorak is paid to rant. He takes advantage of the ignorance of his readers by asserting that the market is free of tools, when that is in fact not the case at all.

...and you whine because it doesn't look like your other apps?

No. I don't. Try to read for comprehension instead of maximum possible hysteria.

My primary objection was it doesn't use native fonts; my secondary, and noted as tentative, objection was that they used java for the DB component. The former is a functionality problem, a big one for people who do DTP and have an artistic and financial investment in fonts, the latter is a potential problem that I've seen bite other applications. I did mention that the UI is an issue for some Mac users; that is nothing less than the truth. However, it is not for me. I run Linux, Mac and XP, jumping about as I need to all day long. Doesn't bother me a bit. In fact, it's kind of fun.

Gimme a break!

....erm, well, if you insist. However, perhaps you would reconsider that, considering the hint my URL gives you. :-)

But the whole Mac mentality of "aesthetics are all that matters; performance, compatibility, market share, software availability, and price don't matter" is stupid.

Actually, since that's not the Mac mentality at all, your accusation is without any basis in fact.

For example, most of the Mac applications that I use whip the living heck out of the linux and XP apps in the same genres, not only in functionality but in reliability which is something that has great, and legitimate, value. On top of that, OSX is basically linux/unix/bsd-like under its skin, and that means that the really cool stuff that we find for linux can often be made to run there — examples of such things include Apache, PostgreSQL, and about every H/M/L-LL you can think of (including python, he said with great satisfaction.)

Performance... it's there. Compatibility is decent, depending on what you're looking for. It's quite commonly a graphics platform (just as linux is quite commonly a server platform) and compatibility (and performance and features and etc.) in that area is outstanding. Price... I can't see it as a problem. Does $500.00 for a really functional (and pleasing) RTR computer feel like too much to you? If it does, OK, but I'd have to say you are in the minority in that case. Sure, you can buy expensive Macs, but you can buy expensive PC's, too.

That, and Apple's inane penchant for replacing useful parts of Unix (init, cron, inetd) with insanely large, bloated, and overengineered replacements (launchd) in the name of "enhancement".

I will say this: They know their customer base pretty well in the general sense, and if they think that a touchy-feelie GUI thing is a better idea than hand-editing your crontab, I'm unlikely to be the one to step into the aisle and try to second guess them. There are other issues, too: Installations tend to be very heavy because they install everything you might need, regardless of if you actually need it or not. You can get hundreds of megs of storage back on a typical Mac just by pulling out localization resources you won't ever use. And so on. Every OS has high points and low points. But running OSX is, frankly, a very reasonable and pleasant experience. Installing software just works (I won't bore you with the linux experience, I'm sure you know exactly what the issues are there.)

With regard to OO, it has some distance to go before it can offer the functionality you can already get on the Mac, and that assumes that there is a native install that integrates well with the OS (fonts...) at some point. Without that, I can tell you frankly that a lot of Mac users will stay away. You can rant and scream about it all you want, but the fact is, the UI on the Mac is extremely consistent and consequently many users have a very narrow view of what is acceptable.

...what I've seen commercial software doesn't want to add is costumizability(sic).

We make commercial graphics software and we provide for (one or more) custom tool sets and have for years. You can set up "operations caddies" of any organization (4x8, 16x5 etc) and drag tools in and out of them at any time, save them, load them, etc.

It's used just as you imagine; you can set up a specialized caddy for image repair work, one for special effects, one for ray tracing, one for landscape generation, one for painting, one for animation... I'd say that it is one of the features I use most.

We had to do this, as our complete toolbar has so many operations on it you can get lost even if you're an expert, and just as the parent describes, when you're doing one thing, you're not going to need a lot of specialized tools. Caddies just make sense. Does a mechanic drag every tool out for every job? Of course not.

As a Photoshop (and, occasionally, GIMP) user, I would be glad to know of what, in your opinion, is a good photo editing application for professionals? Am I missing out on something?

Could be. Have you tried this?

Much (a great deal much) more powerful layered image handling, faster area selection / masking methodologies, more extensive wand and keying capabilities, a different approach to a lot of things. Many of which were designed specifically with the idea of image editing in mind.

Disclosure: My software, my company.

I'd like to see them keep adding all the features they can, although I do wish that some of them were more "discoverable"--I certainly didn't realize how much was hidden behind the ctrl, alt & shift keys at first...

Call me crazy, but may I suggest that if you want to discover features in software (of any variety) that you have a nice sit-down session with (a) the documentation and (b) a notebook? A few hours invested there (or less... not all software is documented to the degree that ours is) can give you the "these interesting features are in there and this is basically how to use them " of an "expert" if you use that magic skill television is destroying. You know... we used to call it "reading" back when I had to walk uphill both ways through boiling lava and six foot deep snow just to carry a lower-case letter home to my mom.

:-)

So what alternative tool, specifically for web design imaging that would help out the professional graphic designer more than Photoshop, would you suggest?

Here is a definitive answer to your question. :-)

Disclosure: My company, my software.

And, as it happens, we make graphics software. We're a small company with a product that has considerably more features, and more power, than either the Gimp or Photoshop, and we do very well with it. There is no problem (for us) having the Gimp, at no cost, and Photoshop, at relatively high cost, marketing to the same group of people. With a moderate price model, we can (and do) convince owners of other products to give ours a shot without any particular problem.

The only trouble we've had is when we set our prices too low -- below $99.00, no one will take the product seriously. We've tried multiple times to set it lower, as we're well down the ROI curve, but it just won't sell below $99.95. We did find a workaround, though... we have an offer where we'll give it to you "at a discount" (for $49.95) if you say you have a Corel, JASC or Adobe product. We really don't care if you do or not; we don't even check. :-) But people will buy that even though they won't buy it if we actually price it at $49.95. The lesson? People are funny.

Aside from the in-your-face issue of price, commercial development, large or small, by its very nature brings something else to the table that open source doesn't, and that is a constant drive to work on the product without distraction or interruption. It does this by virtue of funding the development. This ensures that the developers can be secure in the knowledge they can go home at night and get the cat fed, pay the XM bill, and so on. They don't have to work at night (though of course they can, and if the company is smart they'll reward such behavior.) They can have a rich social life. Still, they get to spend many hours a day pushing pixels, and as a graphics developer, I can tell that is a significant pleasure.

All in all, I see no reason for commercial graphics development to be concerned about open source. Certainly there is no reason for open source to be concerned about commercial graphics development, per se.

Frankly the risk/danger (to everyone) is not other developers. The danger is software patents. The danger comes from the legislature. You can -- without ever intending to -- run afoul of someone's invention and be in a world of financial hurt as you try to defend yourself and protect the time and energy (and money, if you're commercial) you've put into your legitimate development, and the legal system can crash your progress as sure as if they were the on-coming train in the tunnel. In my opinion, that is the problem that needs addressing, and that is what will cause the most disruption(s) to any project, be it commercial or open source.

I see this sentiment a lot, and it is surprising for Linux users, who seem to like to think they're more aware of what "the good stuff is" than Windows or Mac users.

If you want to encourage companies to bring graphics products to Linux that offer more power than the GIMP, why don't you pick the companies that offer more power than Photoshop, too?

1. Better painting, by far: Paintshop Pro
2. Better layering, by far: WinImages
3. Better photo touchup, by far: Paintshop Pro
4. Better CMYK (and other) color separations, by far: WinImages

Both of those products are far less expensive than Photoshop (like, about 1/8th or less!), both offer tons of very useful features you can't get in Photoshop, both offer friendly, timely, human tech support, both have wide open developer programs without hoop jumping, and both of them are faster than Photoshop in key areas. There is very little that Photoshop offers that these programs don't, and a whole lot you can't get in Photoshop that you'll find in them. Both products make the GIMP look like a broken set of crayons, too.

It seems to me that some effort spent trying to get less known, but definitely more powerful apps than Photoshop to move to Linux might be very well spent. But that's just me, and I never was very impressed with how "popular" something was... that's why I run Linux in the first place. Because it is powerful, not popular.

I see this sentiment a lot, and it is surprising for Linux users, who seem to like to think they're more aware of what "the good stuff is" than Windows or Mac users.

If you want to encourage companies to bring graphics products to Linux that offer more power than the GIMP, why don't you pick the companies that offer more power than Photoshop, too?

1. Better painting, by far: Paintshop Pro
2. Better layering, by far: WinImages
3. Better photo touchup, by far: Paintshop Pro
4. Better CMYK (and other) color separations, by far: WinImages

Both of those products are far less expensive than Photoshop (like, about 1/8th or less!), both offer tons of very useful features you can't get in Photoshop, both offer friendly, timely, human tech support, both have wide open developer programs without hoop jumping, and both of them are faster than Photoshop in key areas. There is very little that Photoshop offers that these programs don't, and a whole lot you can't get in Photoshop that you'll find in them. Both products make the GIMP look like a broken set of crayons, too.

It seems to me that some effort spent trying to get less known, but definitely more powerful apps than Photoshop to move to Linux might be very well spent. But that's just me, and I never was very impressed with how "popular" something was... that's why I run Linux in the first place. Because it is powerful, not popular.

And, as it turns out, our software presently runs on Amiga, looking like Amigaware (naturally, as it started there), RH9 and Fedora Linux, where it looks "Gnomey", Windows (many versions) and we expect to release a Mac version in about 90 days. The Mac version has some new tricks in it, but I won't talk about those yet. I'll be mentioning it in the Apple section here, though, no doubt, when the time comes. The Mac version looks like the current Mac OS, since this is our first foray into it. It'll look older shortly, when they release the newest version of their OS.

There is another benefit of writing tight, smart C code instead of jumping on the object-ornamented / ornery / obituary bandwagon: With every generation of machines, our software consistently goes faster. In comparison, with every generation of object oriented OS-bloatware, there is tons more to do (often for little apparent benefit at the application to user level) and the applications run slower, and slower, and sloooower... Photoshop isn't the only self-mutilator here, all you have to do is use Google and Google Groups to check out the complaints of other graphics applications getting quite a bit slower as they version-up and people being told to "buy a modern machine" so they can just get back to the speed they had before. And, of course, you can see the OS itself requiring more and more horsepower to run the same apparent speed as it versions-up.

In my opinion, Photoshop isn't a 900 pound competitor. Adobe's marketing is the 900 pound competitor. A distinction with a difference. We don't market very hard; we just make a product that does a lot more. On the other hand, we don't have to market anywhere near as hard; we're a lot smaller and we don't have the infrastructure to support that Adobe does. For which I am quite grateful, as I own the company outright and it would be very annoying, to say the least.

Now, I really haven't done much talking-up here, other than to handwave about feature count and be moderately specific about executable size and speed (because it was relevant to the topic.) I could; I could talk about offering 70-odd layer blend modes as compared to PS's 20-odd (which our 70-odd include, of course); I could talk about a faster area selection paradigm (and a PS compatibility/go-slow mode) and then go on in that vein for many paragraphs instead of a couple of throwaway sentences without backup -- but I was really only talking about OS issues originally, and I'd just as soon not wander any further off that course. If you're really curious, there is more on speed issues here, and the site is very, very deep in program docs and higher level marketing material. About 100 megs worth, not counting animations. Please pursue any further interest you might have on the site, and any pr

Think of it as frontier territory with no newspapers, running water, or phone lines."

I prefer to think of it as frontier territory without resource and memory leaks, buggy system calls, and insanely bloated, sourcecode-free "objects" that are larger than most applications used to be but provide unique and special capabilities like "buttons" and "checkmarks."

But that's just me. :-) When I encounter something from Microsoft that is broken (like a file dialog ot the treeview control) then I write my own, make sure it works, fix it ASAP if and when anyone finds anything I missed... so memory where MS's OS fears to tread smells like freedom and clean air. There may not be any toilets, but then again, I don't have to have Microsoft's sewage running all over my applications.

Real conversation from about 2002:

CUSTOMER: Why, when I select more than 100 image files in the "load file" dialog, do the files come in in reverse order and missing any that were past about the 105th selected file?

US: Yeah. Those are problems in Microsoft's file dialog. According to MS, the 100 file limit problem has been in there since Windows 95. The files in reverse order happens because you selected the first file first, and shift-selected the last file, last. You can select the last file first and the first file last, and they'll come out they way you want them. As long as there are under 100 or so names. But you can just download the latest revision of our application and that problem is gone. Along with Microsoft's file dialog.