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Japanese Makers To Forge An Internet TV Standard
An anonymous reader writes "Five Japanese TV manufacturers will form a working group to hammer out technical specifications by October for
digital TVs with Internet access. They will develop a consumer electronics version of Linux to provide functions and performance required for digital products. The resulting source code will be made available through the General Public License procedure."
Finally, you'd have an OS/interface that would be the same for most TV's worldwide, and wouldn't need loads of effort and reprogramming to localize for different markets. And that's not mentioning the possiblity of a widely available set-top that could conceivably run a very decent browser (mozilla/phoenix). Maybe it's not what we geeky Americans drool over, but the business/marketing sense in it is obvious.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
This is a pretty cool idea, especially if it means I can set up real time television streaming a la shoutcast. We've got a ways to go on bandwidth is most places to make this ubiquitous, though. It'd suck if it just turned into an alternate closed delivery scheme for digital cable.
$ cat Farscape_4x22.mpg | vidcast -v -dtv dig_tv &
Woo.
This could never have happened in Capitalist America (troll, yeah, I know), where companies are too retarded to realize that you need to cooperate with others if you want to make *standards*.
As soon as someone figures out how to get these digital TVs to send shows from one TV to another (and from one home to another), Hollywood will do to this what it did to ReplayTV and SonicBlue... crush them with legal fees.
TiVo Upgrades
That's a great use of GPL.
Yes it is. The GPL can only succeed where there is the opportunity for companies to make profits. This is how they pay those "programmers" who develop the code, that "only" works on their hardware, even tho it is now GPL now, and anyone can use it.
I understand that lots of people have a knee jerk reaction to a company making money using GPL to make money, but uh, that is the idea: make money selling the hardware and servicing the software. If you can't use GPL to make money, no one will want to use it. Really.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
You obviously haven't had the utopian vision of a society that shares its code for the common good, unlike other evil entities that exploit, control and enslave its users with a monopoly that can, and apparantly does have the money to pay off the corrupt politicians.
Thats swell. But you still have to eat.
I think somewhere in there is some truth, but the GPL was started by people who were trying to STOP you from making money off it, but to entice you to add to the pool of useful code, at least thats the impossible dream I had when I read it.
I don't believe for a minute that the GPL was designed to STOP you from making money. Not for a second. It was designed to keep IMPROVEMENTS basically in the public domain. My company and your company may compete, but one wont have an advantage only because of software. Of course, this is not true either, since I can take ANY GPL software and make tons of changes, and NEVER release my source code. Legally. As long as I don't distribute the binaries, I don't have to release the the source. The main limiting factor of the GPL is to the DISTRIBUTORS. Not users. It keeps RedHat from changing Apache in a way that will only work with their brand of linux, without releasing the code. It helps prevent forks in the code.
But the GPL was not invented to STOP you from making money. I wonder how many people actually have READ the damn GPL instead of just talk shit about it?
Quoting from the GPL...
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price....
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
GPL is free as in speech, NOT always free as in beer. I can make all the profit off of GPL I want, it was designed so I COULD, so everyone could. It insures I can't stop YOU from making money with it. I can't distribute it modified without sharing the modified source. This point seems to get missed all too often.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!