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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."
I used to like Borland.
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.
If *BSD were to take over the desktop that would be wonderful. However, Apple employees telling a conference that thier OSX is number one so *BSD is number one is misleading. True that you can get Darwin under the APSL, but the version that is so popular on the desktop is only available for cold hard cash.
Apple uses good code in MacOS X but it seems telling people *BSD is #1 is an attempt to keep the developer community busy working on Darwin so Apple remains the true victor.
So whats the progress of the Sorenson codec on non-OSX UNIX? How about Aqua themes? How is Apple helping me again?
MS Office X runs with Apple's Carbon compatibility layer (even though it's no longer able to run on MacOS 8 or 9.) This isn't the same as running on Apple's Cocoa Nextstep-based libraries and not at all like running on raw Unix.
So yeah, it's running on Unix, however pretty much entirely within a proprietary Apple compatibility library that is MacOS X specific and itself unlikely and probably unable to be ported to other Unix flavors.
Great for MacOS X folks, not very relevant to the rest of the Unix world.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Until one month ago when my powerbook G4 arrived. Now I have XFree86, Gimp, Gnumeric, Octave, Gcc, Xemacs... all my favorites running in BSD. I'll probably install Linux just for the heck of it, but IMHO there's not too much reason to do it. Darwin/XFree86 is absolutely perfect when it comes to development of your own projects. This is because you don't have to worry about some company that owns the libraries and interfaces from changing things and screwing up your code or ruining your knowledge. Since the Darwin/Xfree combo is completely opensourced, I have faith in my fellow progammers that they will continue to support the combo despite Profits or Marketshare.
Anyways, True transparent terminals are pretty cool. So is IPhoto/ITunes. Each recognized my Digital Camera or MP3 player respectively and each has a great intuitive interface. Having a legal DVD player is also a plus.
I guess if there is a point to this post (not much of one), it's that using Darwin/Xfree is using GPL software. The Aqua interface and kewl G4 processor are bonuses. That's why OS X will continue to impress Linux users.
What, no update on CmdrTaco's engagement?
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Apple is alive through the good graces of MS. If MS wanted, they could have killed Apple years ago. With their investment ontop of the 'deal' they have over MSExplorer and MSOffice - Apple is alive today ONLY because MS and Apple worked out a non-competition arrangment. This provided MS with a the 'image' of having competition.
Fastforward to Corel. Corel decides GNU/Linux is the right place for them to go, they build Corel Linux OS, port Draw && Corel Office (via tonnes of work on Wine). Corel gets in a pinch... and BAM, MS makes a deal with them to work on
A) They can now also control/stear/prop-up Corel as proof of 'competition'
B) They de-ligitimize GNU/Linux by removing Corel's support.
Now, here's the kicker - how are these two things relevant/related??? Well, I personally feel Apple's adoption of BSD is a 'poison pill', encouraged and supported by MS, against GNU/Linux.
You see, with Apple boxes with a relatively Open UNIX (via FreeBSD) MS is effectively capable of stearing users - who WANT A FREE UN*X -- to Apple. MS even supports Explorer and Office on OSX.
Apple adopts FreeBSD because
A) they cant compete w/ GNU/Linux, *BSD or MSWin
B) It makes a strong alternative to GNU/Linux
C) it supports Apple/MS hegemony.
Flight of Fancy? Maybe - but I am really tired of MS swooping in and making sweet deals w/ their former competitiors in order to
A) prop up corpses for the US DoJ
B) further entrench MS Office and MS Win by screwing with the natural course of competition/innovation*.
*eww, i feel all dirty after having used that word now - i mean real innovation, not the chomsky-1984-doublespeak that has loaded the word with propaganda.
It would not have happened, if it were not for Microsoft having to follow up and provide Office for the latest mainstream Apple OS. It proves a lot of things: that there is no inherent reason for Microsoft's applications not to run on Unix-based platforms, which has implications for those looking at anti-trust remedies, and such.
And note that even though Linux has wider acceptance than FreeBSD, and far more application support, device support, and so on, this did not happen for Linux first, and it might never happen. This is solely because of the commercializability allowed by the BSD license. GPL'd OS's are far less likely to be embraced by a major player like Apple.
There's a lot of interesting debate between GPL and BSD licensing. I'm a much bigger fan of BSD/X-Windows, etc., licensing, as commercial outcroppings of these are often more interesting, solid and, well, commercial-grade than purely non-commercial products.
And I think this is one of the great examples of where such truly free, and not the forced-freedom of the GPL, achieves a measurable positive result for the industry.
(I think a better overall solution for the industry would be for monopolistic entities to be required to fully open, publish, and standardize the data, interchange, and communication formats and protocols. We have limit choices on what roads to use, but because the specifications are standardized and open, we have a choice of cars to use. I think the government should force proven monopolistic entities to open *all* their interfaces.)
But, in the world of Enron and MS Campaign contributions, and a populace that in general doesn't care (current company, largely excluded
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
All you guys saying we have to call a certain operating system by the name "GNU/Linux" just because major portions of it come from GNU, are now saying MacOSX is not BSD.
Well screw that! MacOSX has more BSD code than Redhat has GNU code. Make up your minds how you're going to name on OS. You can't have it both ways.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
How does that quote go again? "Never ascribe to malice that which is caused by greed and ignorance." -- Cal Keegan
.NET was the One Runtime To Bind Them All, and Corel was auditioning for the role of Isengard. It's hard to tell which caused what, as they all happened within weeks of each other.
.NET announcement could have come out a year earlier. Derek has roughly the same opinion about .NET as Miguel de Icaza, except where open-source/free-software licensing is concerned.
Corel has been "in a pinch" for years, certainly long before anyone in Corel considered the idea of using Linux (remember the Java fiasco?). The enormously huge fall in Corel stock value came months after the enormously huge inflation in Corel stock value--remember it went from $3.50 to $60 (CDN) in just one year for _no good reason at all_, so it's hardly surprising that it came crashing down again.
Aside from stock market capitalization, Corel had no significant revenue from anything Linux--certainly nothing close to the millions they were spending on it. If you spend money without earning revenue, and only earn enough income from selling worthless stock to pay for deficit financing...sooner or later, you'll run out of money. Hard. The insider-trading allegations against Mike currently in front of the OSC are probably just one of many securities-related irregularities waiting to become public knowledge.
Interestingly enough, Corel did produce some actually interesting and profitable products--and quietly sold off those products to other companies. It's like Mike enjoys the challenge of running unprofitable businesses with poor business plans or something...
When Corel was doing the GNU/Linux thing, only two groups of people in the company bought into the idea of "open source" or "free as in speech": one group of people were engineers hired after the decision to do the KDE/Linux (*) thing, and the other group of people I can count on one hand. Except for Mike, all of those people were engineers, QA people, new hires, or bottom-level managers--none people with any real corporate decision-making authority.
* Yes, KDE/Linux...after all, everyone knows KDE is better than GNOME, so why not purge out as many GNU packages as we can while we're at it? Even gcc was targeted at one point, but due to political reasons the alternative never materialized, so gcc was kept.
The general attitude in the company toward Linux was that Linux was either 1) a fad that would find its niche and go away, like Java; 2) a fad that would just go away; 3) possibly a small but important market, like the Mac--but nobody wants to touch it until it becomes a whole lot more like Windows. Understandably this view was held by many of the senior developers on Corel's Windows products, but a number of key Corel Linux people felt that way too.
With one notable exception, the Corel executives had no intention of producing products with any kind of open-source license--some just couldn't grasp the concept of "free as in speech", much less find motivation for actually doing it. They could understand "free as in beer" well enough to use it as a marketing technique, but could not fathom why other people would use "free as in beer" for non-marketing purposes.
Put another way: they seemed to think that open-source people craved attention. These guys really thought they were doing the KDE and Debian people a favor by distributing millions of copies of ancient versions of their free code linked to Corel's non-free code written by inexperienced, fresh-from-Windows, where's-my-Visual-Studio-For-Linux? developers, and they were genuinely surprised each and every time when their license terms ended up being flamebait on Slashdot or gnu-misc-discuss or debian-legal.
They were genuinely disappointed when millions of Linux users failed to immediately make the switch from Red Hat to Corel after the release. They were also disappointed when their lawyers told them that the GPL was "ambiguous"--they were hoping for something more concrete, like "inapplicable" or "unenforceable", not something that could put the company on the losing end of a precedent-setting lawsuit.
At the end, four things happened: the stock crashed, Mike left the company, all the Linux people with any marketable skills left the company, and Derek's first action as new CEO was to declare that Microsoft
Everyone had their personal agendas planned out months in advance anyway. If it wasn't for Mike, the Corel