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Connectix Considering Open Sourcing VGS?
Araquel writes, "MacOS Rumors is reporting that Connectix is considering releasing an Open Source Linux version of its Virtual Game Station product (VGS is a PlayStation emulator for Macs). MacOS Rumors is calling for people to e-mail Connectix, requesting that they actually release the source code."
I'm all for this but didn't we go though something like this with Loki and Blizzard and the fact that emailing is interperted as spam? How about snail-mailing them?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
They mixed up the VGS/VPC thing just like the guy who sent in that last Connectix story to Slashdot. MacOS Rumors does not have any knowledgable sources except for the stuff they swipe off the front page of AppleInsider, and even that's wrong half the time. They're the Apple equivalent of the Weekly World News, they post anything and everything that gets emailed to them, including obvious pranks and fake rumors.
Either it's complete spoof, or Connectix is looking to the open source community to provide them legal protection, just as it's been trying to do with DeCSS...
I'll be really sad if connectix does this. They spent quite a long time developing this peice of software, withstood the first of two lawsuits standing, and are basically about to throw the money they could have earned to the wind...
Of course the 2nd lawsuit is a patent case, so maybe they know they've violated some patents... In which case, again, OSS seems to be the savior for projects which are dependant on other companies patents.
If their product is legit, they should keep it for themselves and make some money. If it's not, then it certainly shouldn't be open sourced. It'll just tarnish the whole OSS movements repuatation.
And don't anyone tell me they can earn money from it after open sourcing it... Maybe they can, but not enough to offset their costs... Open source software sells (when it does) for multitudes of times cheaper than commercial software. It's all fine and dandy for programmers with day jobs, but i don't think it meshes well with a company's economics, bills, and shareholders.
(obligatory counterproductive moderation comment here)
/. earlier this week. As we all know now, that story was completely misreported; it was Connectix which was bundling Red Hat with their Virtual PC emulation software for the Mac. (Okay, so calling it 'Virtual PC *for* Red Hat Linux' isn't the best idea, but...)
This is absolutely 100% not true in any way, shape, or form. MacOSRumors is well-known among people with functioning neurons for outright fabrication of information; in this case, the 'kernel of truth' they built this story around is the erroneous 'Connectix is bundling VGS with Red Hat' story posted here on
Connectix is not on record as stating a Linux port, open or otherwise, is in the cards; as of now, the only non-Mac port is slated to be to Win9x.
C'mon! After having already had one bogus Connectix/VGS story in a week, you'd think a little bit of verification work would have been done! This is a new low... Slashdot's gone and trollerized itself!
Also, look at the "international" section of the FAQ (right below the "legal" section), which talks about the geographic-region encoding.
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The shareholder is always right.
it will be Sony. Software will be nice, but Sony makes the hardware. They've been bringing the cost down for years now - they can spit out those chips like popcorn.
Furthermore, the PS2 development box runs Linux on the Emotion Engine. Consider a Linux box running an Emotion Engine (and yes, that port is long since completed and works just fine), with a complete set of PS/PS2 graphics and sound chips, and the drivers to go with them. If that doesn't make you drool, it should. With a top-flight, pre-configured (i.e., easy to use) desktop, that would be the Linux box for the masses.
This might even address Judge Jackson's "application barrier to entry," at least somewhat. Out of the box there'd be the thousands of PS and PS2 titles, and all the Linux ones too. Zoomba.
Of course, the PS2 development box also writes DVDs - so much for DeCSS :-)
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Klactovedestene!
Here's another emulator story (which I submitted, but got rejected... I think the /. authors don't like me)
Someone has created a Dreamcast VMU (Visual Memory Unit) emulator. I believe that he has even been able to get a program he made with it to download to the VMU and play a mini-game he made himself. It may not be a Dreamcast emulator, but it's a start.
Also, there's a few pages geared toward accelerating Dreamcast emulator development here and here.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
What is with slashdot and all the rumors lately? I come here for news not speculation. This is quickly turning into a rumor discussion forum. Is there not enough tech news to go around that they have to make up news? We do a lot of bashing on the "sensationalist" media here, and now this site is becoming sensationalized.
I realize slashdot and Macosrumors used to be (or still are?) affiliated with each other, but the slogan says News for Nerds not fun possible stories that might be coming in the tech industry...
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
MOSR is good every once in a while. But it's a rumor site; people here seem to be forgetting that. The name alone tells you to take everything on that page with a grain of salt, if not the whole shaker.
No, MOSR isn't very accurate. But they don't claim to be. Look at the name, for crying out loud.
Someone moderate this anti /. parent down! Squash the indignant!
If an infinite number of monkeys typed at an infinte number of
If an infinite number of monkeys typed at an infinte number of
computer keyboards, they would all be
While I realize this story is most likely not true (see the post that's moderated up at the top, I doubt anything will replace it), if it were true, everyones reaction who knows anything at all about emulators should be saying "Well, duh". There are probably not a handful of closed source emulators, but there are hundreds and hundreds of open source ones.
Being surprised at this would be like being surprised at a roguelike being open-sourced.
The emulation community is a good example of what *REALLY* happens with open source stuff. Linux is really a big freak in the open source world, 99% of other open source projects release their code to no avail and are never improved upon and their code is never used to create variant software. One emulator, SNES9x, was railed against for having closed source. Everyone shouted that as soon as the source was released, the pieces of the SNES that were not emulated yet would be within days. The source code has been released for around 2 years now and no one has modified it save the 2 original authors. It's a perfect example of what happens in most open source projects, there is an element of risk thrown in with open sourcing your software. Sure, all bugs are shallow with enough eyes, but wheres the guarantee those eyes will show up or that people more competent in the subject than the original authors won't want to start over from scratch and do it themselves? More often the latter happens than anything else. They see someone did something cool and decides to do it themselves in a different way and they improve on it in that way... same thing that happens in the closed source world.
Esperandi
You'd still have to buy the games. And if you get someone to hack the code for you to remove the copy protection, you will do a great deal of harm all the way around. To Sony, to game companies, to Connectix, and to the open source movement.
Even if the idea of pirating every PSX game you can imagine makes you jiggle like Captain Kirk with a tribble down his pants, you should keep that private, it makes you look like a bottom feeder.
Esperandi
Also, I remember there used to be some kind of partnership between BLM and Slashdot, several years ago. Can anybody provide more info? What was lowly Ryan Meader's role in the creation of Slashdot? This is going back at least 2 years.
The only proof I can find (other than my memory of a mention of BLM on Slashdot a couple of years ago) is this page, which has a capture of a MOSR page from December, 1998. Look down at the bottom, it says "For those who don't follow the development of Linux (for those interested, Slashdot is an excellent place for all manner of geek news -- not that we're exactly totally unbiased, as Slashdot is a BLM partner)".
Anybody know anything about this? Maybe this has something to do with the recent stories from MOSR being posted lately... maybe Rob feels bad for Meader, whose site does nowhere near this much traffic. But then again... (funny).
_________________
rooooar
"Alternative Web site." Boy, if Meader hadn't lost Slashdot he'd be a happy man now...
Anyway, this seems to answer my question.
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rooooar
Connectix will be shipping a version with RedHat preinstalled soon. Someone below linked to the press release.
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rooooar
As a former BLM "employee" (read: Ryan's bitch for nine months), I had the wonderful joy of watching him work. He greatly overstates the amount of email he receives. He makes stuff up out of whole cloth. I HAVE SEEN HIM DO THIS. I once said "Wouldn't it be neat if Apple did x?" About an hour or so later, I read on Rumors that "reliable sources" had informed him that Apple was indeed planning to do x.
I was also around during the time when /. and BLM parted ways. It was a Very Big Deal, and not amicable for either party. (Hint: It was near mid-April 1999. What happens in the middle of April? Bingo. Ryan lost all of BLM's financial data in his Hard Drive Crash of December 1998. He kept no backups. Smart guy.)
Additonally, BLM's "business model" changed no less than four times during the nine months I was there, and has changed a couple of times since. I came to the office for "strategy sessions" which consisted of him rambling about wanting to finance research to facilitate leisure space travel for about five minutes before retiring to his desk to smoke a bowl and play Quake. Working for a company that would rather buy illicit substances than pay its employees instills such a wonderful sense of morale.
Indeed, Ryan Meader's sole skill appears to be getting people to do work for him for free until they finally realize what he's doing to them. There are no less than five people (which basically comprises most of BLM's non-Ryan and non-Sarah entire core workforce throughout its existence) that have been burned by him within the past eighteen months.
This is being posted non-anonymously for two reasons. Firstly, I hope it lends some sort of credibility to my statements, as it is indeed all true. Secondly, I don't really give a flying fuck what Ryan has to say or do about it.
ok, i think i know what happened.
/. saw this, misinterpreted this as saying that _vgs_ is coming to redhat. this was almost immediately updated, saying that no, this story was totally false, the product of much crack-smoking.
/. story, ignored the update saying it was false, and decided that this meant that connectix was considering open sourceing vgs. again,this is a false story based on a false /. story.
/. seems to have seen the macosrumors story, didn't check the facts (or references), and now we're seeing this, a false /. story based on a false macosrumors story that was based on a false /. story. whee!
last week at macworld tokyo, connectix announced that they would start selling virtualpc (_not_ virtual game station, this is a product that emulates intel on a mac) that bundled redhat for linux. i'm not sure why they're bothering with this, as linuxppc works just dandy and uses a redhat base, and connectix is charging the same $ for it as they're charging for the dos version, but anyway....
a couple days later, someone at
that day, macosrumors saw the
now
therefore, i would now like to present both slashdot and macosrumors both the pulitzer prize and the newberry award for fictitious journalism.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
OK, I've put together a theory on how this rumor ballooned so wildly out of proportion, so read below if you want my idea. ;-)
;) Hopefully this will be avoided in the future!
:)
Slashdot posted an article that mixed up Connectix's plan to bundle Redhat with their emulator Virtual PC (VPC) with Connectix's Macintosh-only Virtual Game Station (VGS). Before an update could be posted to explain the confusion, MOSR's prestigious Ryan Meader saw the post. Using his common tactics for obtaining information for MOSR, he stole the incorrect information and embellished it with his own lies. (If anyone is feeling like I personally don't believe anything MOSR says, you're right. Please check the archives at http://www.mosr.net/ (the site is now defunct, but as I said, check the archives) if you want to see some very good rebuttals of pure crap/stolen news Ryan has posted.) Anyway, a Slashdot reader who read MOSR saw the story, which corroborated the incorrect story he saw earlier (perhaps he had not reloaded Slashdot to see the update yet) and so he submitted it. It was picked up as a story again at Slashdot because it appeared to lend credence to that same story that was (mistakenly) posted the day before.
Sadly people have submitted MOSR topics before to Slashdot. I would recommend that people don't submit MOSR topics, as well as advising Slashdot that they shouldn't pick up stories like that.
Oh yeah, remember that this is merely a theory, although from my point of view it does seem very likely.
No. I refer you here for a straightforward rundown of Ryan's reliability.
Not exactly true. Ryan was pretty friendly with Jason Haas of LinuxPPC, Inc. for a while and tried to bamboozle him into some strategic partnership. Then there's the fact that Ryan thought that Linux was Hot Shit until he caught wind that Mac OS X had a BSD layer that was derived from FreeBSD 3.2, at which point he, without consulting his then-sysadmin/bitchslave (me), DECREED that BLM's LIVE PRODUCTION SERVERS (oh wait, there was only one left by then--the power supply in the other exploded and he didn't feel like paying to get the computer fixed) would be switched over to FreeBSD early one Sunday Morning, despite the fact that I had informed him beforehand that I had absolutely no FreeBSD experience, and neither did anybody on his pay^H^H^Hwork-for-free-roll. What a fucking genious.
Please see above.
I guess I took him on his word when he said:
"And on top of that, it would make an entirely free way to play playstation games. "
I didn't parse that as "And on top of that, it would make an entirely free way to spend $60 on playstation games and then play them!"
Esperandi
But I'm certain he will claim that he would never think of pirating PSX games.
You're right, the DMCA doesn't say that. The original lawsuit against Bleem! was not in reference to the DMCA. It was basically saying that Sony would lose all kinds of software revenue because of illegal use.
Think back to the Rio case, this issue is similar. the *ONLY* reason that the Rio is legal is because it "couldn't" be used to distribute MP3s (the software has since been hacked and now it can, but this is not Diamond's fault or legal responsibility). This is kinda the same thing. You can compete with Sony, but only if you're going to compete with them fairly. Offer a similar product that doesn't infringe on other peoples rights and such. being able to play copied games (and there are thousands flying around the net) would make this like another mod chip lawsuit. One side claims that its for playing japanese games, Sony claims its to play copied games (it is). I don't know who won that one, but the courts are almost never on the side of emulators so I wouldn't tempt them.
Esperandi
Yeah, reverse engineering is explcitly legal as spelled out in the DMCA, old news. But the court case going on now is about patent infringement. People don't seem to be realizing that it doesn't matter if you come to the same conclusion separately, if they're copyrighted the process, you have to change yours or get some nice fines and maybe prison time...
Esperandi
You can't patent ideas or concepts, only very very specific designs... being as the Connectix product is software and everything in the PSX is hard ware I don't see how patent law would apply, but I guess the courts will show.