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Slashback: Switchover, EULA, Perspectives
It's the little things. Time for another cumulative patch for IE, it seems. (Mozilla may have its share of security problems, but at least there's a new build broken in unique and exciting ways more frequently :)). Logica writes with a snippet from this ZDNet article, which reads: "Microsoft released a collection of software fixes Monday to plug six security problems in its Internet Explorer browser, including one that could be exploited to take over a victim's computer."
"Users are urged to download the latest patch."
What happened to the tar-and-feather clause? djmurdoch writes "Back in January, Borland promised to come up with new EULAs without some objectionable terms. They've just posted the new EULAs. Gone are the anti-competitive product clause, the right to audit, and the requirement to give up a jury trial. They still have required registration, and you can't use a 2nd hand copy. They've added a requirement that it be licensed to one named user; you need extra licenses to share a copy. Not perfect, but a big improvement."
Keep in the loop as consolidation continues. craig writes: "AT&T Broadband has now posted instructions for their cable modem users to change their e-mail addresses from @mediaone.net to @attbi.com. The instructions have been posted here. The instructions seem to work, and my upgrade has been smooth.
The instructions have been posted on the web, but it looks like they have not been e-mailed to current AT&T Broadband subscribers. It is probably a good idea to follow these instructions before they are mailed to the masses, because chances are, this is migration is going to keep AT&T Broadband customer support very busy. The old @mediaone.net addresses will stop working on March 15, as was mentioned in this previous posting on Slashdot."
And although it's been said many times, many ways ... LiquidPC writes: "Apple's Ernest Prabhakar is reporting that BSD is now 3 times as popular on the desktop as Linux, largely thanks to MacOSX, of course. He also commented that Microsoft now has Office running on a Berkeley UNIX."
This patch was mentioned in the recent MSN Messenger "virus" story. Just to recap, the "virus" was no virus at all, but just an exploitation of the old (as in, known since December) document.open bug in MSIE. This was fixed with Monday's patch. Everybody using IE should have installed this already, but those who haven't should do so now.
Their info is at http://www.cox.com/info/ My conversion went off without a hitch, and the pretty little box they sent the stuff in has become a favorite toy of my neice. (it looks like a little house. Meanwhile, my @home still works
Many web-caches, firewalls, embedded systems for machine tools, routers... are BSD based, instead of linux based for instance, since the BSD-license is much more corporate-friendly.
But the end result is that no one really notices how widely deployed BSD really is, since it remains hidden by the same persons that sell BSD products, therefore weakning the creative environment witch originated the system.
That's how you really see the advantages of a license like the GPL, forcing others to contribute to the environment in a positive way, instead of being merely predators, and generally getting more steam into the project, instead of simply grabbing others efforts.
Well, just my 2 (euro)cents :-)
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
no, it is the other way around. MS got a Berkeley UNIX and have somehow gotten the bloat that is Office to run on it.
it did not say that the Berkeley Group had gotten MS Office to run on a UNIX.
Well, you might or might not have to rewrite the GUI code to get it working under Linux. MS Office for OSX is a Carbon-based app, and Carbon is a wrapper around the Cocoa system that emulates the OS9 GUI API. So all you would actually need to do (in that area) would be to write a wrapper around GNUStep that provides the same interface, and in theory it would work.
Sorry no, Carbon is not a wrapper around Cocoa. Carbon is a peer API layer to Cocoa. You could (in theory) remove Cocoa entirely from a Mac OS X machine and still run Carbon apps. Carbon is an entire operating system (Mac OS 9) written on top of Darwin. Essentially it uses Darwin as an advanced Hardware Abstraction Layer.
Carbon is a very complex piece of software. It is several million lines of mainly C code that took several hundred person-years of write. Reproducing that work would be highly non-trivial, especially as you don't have the full specs.
Sailing over the event horizon
MS as supported commersal (sp) UNIX's for quite some time (MSIE, Outlook & Media Player have been on solaris for a long time), and Office has been on MacOS also for a lonnng time, I really don't see how this is a glorous moment for any OpenSource License.
It's just MS support other _commersal_ OSes.
mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
On the contrary... 1) a visit to JB Patches, will show an entire list of patches, the more recent ones being 'comprehensive' (i.e. across the product, not just highly focused). 2) they offer free downloads of their Ent. Trial (30 day trial?) by which you can see what bugs there are, before laying down your cash. Also available is the free Personal edn, which has no time out. No, it doesn't have the full 'enterprise' feature set. No, its license does not allow it to be used for.... is it "commercial development"? But it also allows for 'try before you buy'. 3) sure their s/w has bugs. sure they charge for subsequent upgrades, where there are both bug fixes and new features. But this was largely true 'back in the good ole days', which you are longing for. It is also true of other 'for profit' companies. 4) Yes, I lament w/ you the loss of the earlier book-type license models. It is your second sentence that I think is not only unfair, but also untrue. However, I also agree w/ your 3rd sentence, so I guess we're in 66% agreement. :-) Competition is good. Let the market place decide. But let it decide based on a true understanding of the facts.
No, talking to Sorenson won't help. A few years back I asked about whether they'd be interested in making a BeOS version of their codec--since BeOS handles such things at the OS level, any media application would immediately have it available for their use. (This was back before Be's infamous focus shift and when they were getting a lot of positive attention in the A/V marketplace.) A Sorenson rep wrote back and said that they couldn't do that, because the codec is exclusively licensed to Apple for use in QuickTime--I was explicitly told the only way to get it on BeOS was to get Apple to port QuickTime to BeOS. Not the QuickTime file format, which a lot of other programs support, but actual QuickTime the program.
I like Apple (sometimes), but I don't really expect them to do much in the way of directly supporting Linux. The only commercial, closed-source app I could imagine them porting to a free Unix would be WebObjects, and I wouldn't be surprised if they ported it to FreeBSD before Linux.
Linux will get benefits from Apple, as you observed, if the Free Software Foundation deigns to accept the work Apple is doing on GCC. Having "one of the biggest GCC compiler design teams in the world and giving all that code back" doesn't mean the FSF is actually going to use it. I hope political considerations won't be an issue, but even without those they tend to be notoriously picky.