Your thesis seems to be, "You can not compete on a playing field to which you do not have access." This amounts to the assertion that software written in a portable way cannot compete with software that is deeply integrated into the underlying OS. If this were true, there would be no issue about moving Linux apps to Windows because the best Linux apps wouldn't be portable.
I think Yellow Dog is a great Distro for learning Linux, mostly for non-technical reasons. It's a small distro that still has a sense of community. The lead developers can be found answering questions on the newbies list.
Newbies leaning Linux are also well served starting with a Red Hatish distro because that's what they will encounter most out in the world.
YDL also supports RPM, Apt-Get and Yum as package management tools so you can learn to master them all from one distro. Yum actually migrated from YDL to Fedora. I think it's the least painful package management system this side of OS X's drag and drop.
Only if the consolidated widget company never distributed the product. If they distribute it, they have to comply with the terms of the GPL regarding derived works.
But that was my point. The vast majority of organizations are not selling software so for that vast majority, GPL and BSD are the same. The only licenses that are really 'free' in the sense of the FSF definition are those like the RPL that are much more viral than GPL.
I do know of a number of companies that use the GPL to drive commercial license sales. Troll Tech, Sleepycat, MySQL come to mind.
But this is just analogous to companies that sell archiving software and give away the de-archiver to drive sales. Do you really think that the Troll Tech model wouldn't work as well if the Linux version were released under the BSD license?
With the BSD license, a competitor or potential customer can run away with your product, with no obligation to fulfill any sort of quid-pro-quo. With the GPL, the competition and customers either have to follow the rules and release the derivative works that they distribute with your code, or they have to come to you to buy a commercial license that lets them out of the GPL obligations.
With respect, Bruce, if someone is in the business of selling software or products where a significant amount of the value comes from software, the chances that they will choose either a GPL or a BSD style license are small. In any other case, the GPL doesn't provide any competitive advantage over a BSD style license. If the amalgamated widget company releases the software that drives their widget making robots under the GPL, there is nothing to prevent the consolidated widget company from taking that software, improving it and keeping the improvements proprietary.
What bothers me about this thread is that here we have Eben Moglen essentially validating Steve Balmer's FUD.
When Balmer argued that everyone with thoughts of making money from software should stay far away from the GPL because the law is complicated and one might license one's code under the GPL by accident, the community laughed at him.
Now the FSF says that SCO put some of their code under the GPL by accident because they didn't do a diligent enough code review.
The only reason I ever ran Virex was to be a 'nice guy' to friends who use Windows and make sure that in forwarding some MS Office document from one Windows user to another I don't forward a virus as well. Virex has probably caught about 50 Windows viri over the years but never once anything that would actually execute on my Mac.
Fink is 'the' package management system on the Mac and the only one I use. I think my reaction is very typical: "Goodbye Virex."
I really doubt this is some anti OSS plot. Sounds to me like the PHB asked the programmer if the new version of Virex was ready, the programmer said something like "Yes, as soon as I move some libraries into the bundle and put some acknowledgements in the 'Read Me' file."
The PHB said "We'll do that stuff for the next release."
The update installs a couple of new headers. To kill the annoying messages about how your precompiled headers are out of date every time you try to build something, enter the following in terminal:
Stallman says "The system is a variant of GNU, and the GNU Project is its principal developer." Presumably the "principal developer can be determined by some objective metric such as lines of code. I don't doubt that in the early days when "GNU/Linux" was a compiler and kernel that the compiler was bigger, but in a current distribution with stuff from XFree86, Cygnus, maybe K Development and a bunch of others is the GNU portion really that great?
You can get Darwin's source, but IIRC, you can't redistribute changes you make. I think everyone here will gree that this is less of a Good Thing than GPL or BSD liscenced kernel code.
The APSL is actually more viral than the GPL. Unlike the GPL, it requires you to distribute changes even if you only deploy the modified code within your own organization.
The GPL doesn't prevent your code from being stripped and added to proprietary projects. It's happened to me. I worked on some GPLed code for a poor school district. The rich school district next door took our program and hired paid staff to enhance it. Then they adopted the attitude "We don't want the kids in the poor district to have this. They might score as well as our kids on the achievement tests."
The GPL may keep people from taking your code commercial but they can take it proprietary. If you want to prevent that, look at the APSL.
It's not forced. It works fine without being registered
As to why I want to do it, I have an MS mouse and really like it because it fits my rather large hands, it worked fine under Mac OS ancient and it works fine under MOS X. I never did buy that one button and no wheel thing.
The problem with MS mice is they're poorly engineered. There is no shielding where the cable enters the mouse. So they short out after about three months just from mechanical wear.
Since I registered it before Passport, that's not a big problem. I phone the nice lady and she FedExes me a new one. By now MS has spent much more on FedEx than I paid for the original mouse.
So that's how I feel about most MS stuff. It may feel good but it's poorly engineered. You need to register it so they will give you a new one when it breaks.
You are correct that ordinary users can install software in/Applications. Thanks for telling me that. You are also correct that Office keeps per user prefs in ~/Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft
About Office v. X.
Bloat - yes. I installed most of the optional parts and it says here "405.6 MB on disk (403,531,723 bytes)." Running as root - no. It doesn't need any privileges. Why would it? It keeps all its shit in/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Office.
Biggest negative - I paid for it and I can't register it because I would have to get a Passport.
I happen to have written a QuickTime transcoder here. If, in a fit of altruism, I transcoded popular movie trailers from Sorenson and put them on the web would I be guilty of something?
If that's what he wants, he should modify the GPL.
My friend, with a little help from me, produced some GPLed educational software for a poor school district with some hand me down computers. The teachers from the school district shared the software with other teachers at a statewide conference. Fast forward a year. My friend's wife discovers that a rich school district has had staff programmers improve the programs. She asks for a copy and is told that the rich district has a policy against sharing. My friend goes to the district and is told that they are keeping "their software" because it would look bad if the kids from the poor district district scored as well on statewide tests.
Surveys show that 70 - 80% of programming is internal rather than commercial so, for all we know, 70 - 80% of GPLed code has been taken 'internal private' inside organizations that think they have a competitive advantage from "their" program.
Fast forward a few years. Apple closes this GPL loophole in the APSL. Does RMS hail the innovation and modify the GPL? No he rails against the APSL as non-Free while dodging any substantive discussion of the issue. One can only suspect pure ego is at work. It's non-Free because he didn't think of it first.
"The patent statement was last updated in July, and in October Apple made a public statement that they would no longer support any patent agreement for web standards except royalty-free. Does anyone else see problems in the reporting here?"
No more than usual. I'm afraid this has been the standard for awhile.
IANAL and I know little about patent law but I suspect that by distributing free PNG codecs for Mac and Windows Apple has invalidated any claims for royalties that they may have had. Common sense, an admittedly poor guide to the law, says that if you give something away, you can't later demand a royalty payment. QuickTime does include PNG codecs and the docs say so very explicitly.
This looks like a routine patent disclosure to me. I hope someone who understands the legal issues will respond.
When I need to code cross platform I start with a cross compiler and two targets. That way I know with every build whether I'm getting platform specific and it's easy to isolate the platform specific stuff.
Check out Metrowerks compilers for cross platform stuff.
Several historians have argued that what distinguishes the "Western" world view is the greater acceptance of the notion, promulgated by Aristotle and embodied in Thucidides view of history, that there is some kind of objective truth out there that is independent of our beliefs and desires. A corollary is that we can come closer to knowing this truth through mental effort, experiment, and by discarding prejudices.
These historians argue that this unique idea came into the world once in classic Greece and has been diffusing ever since. If we accept this framework then globalization is simply the final stage in the diffusion of the meme.
A few observations:
The Grand Inquisitor was right. The notions of "objective reality" and faith are incompatible at their root. He may have been right that the sum of human happiness would be greater if we tortured the trouble makers who challenge our deeply held beliefs into recanting.
Aristotle was wrong to some extent. There is clear objective evidence that beliefs and expectations matter in fields from medicine to economics to psychology and particularly intelligence testing. Whatever "objective reality" is, it's not just something that waits passively to be discovered.
The Aristotelian view seems easier for political conservatives, maybe because they believe in an innate and discoverable "human nature." All my Marxist friends are Lysencoists.
Even in the west there are a lot of folks who instinctively reject the Aristotelian view. This includes all the Navajos, all the New Agers all the "Born Again" Christians and many of the liberals that I know.
One problem with porting QuickTime to Linux is that QuickTime needs a complete Window manager API because it has its own internal API for managing windows, menus, dialogs, etc. These routines call through to the underlying API which must have a large common subset of functionality to support the x-platform nature of QuickTime. So while QuickTime for KDE or QuickTime for Gnome are reasonable concepts, QuickTime for Linux is not. Of course, there is already QuickTime for Java which uses the Java API and runs on Linux.
The other thing is that Apple needs to do a LOT of work to bring the Cocoa API up to rough parity with the Windows, Java and Carbon versions. They won't make any commitments as to when, if ever, that work will be underway. If they took on Linux before Cocoa their developers would go postal.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is what I get when I view the Gap site in Safari:
"We're sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using.
Our site works best with the following browsers:
PC users
Internet Explorer 5.5 and above. Download browser: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx
Netscape 7 and above. Download browser: http://browser.netscape.com/
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above. Download browser: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox
Mac users
Netscape 7 and above. Download browser: http://browser.netscape.com/
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above. Download browser: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox"
It sounds like they have decided to only support a couple of browsers and they reject others based on the useragent string.
Your thesis seems to be, "You can not compete on a playing field to which you do not have access." This amounts to the assertion that software written in a portable way cannot compete with software that is deeply integrated into the underlying OS. If this were true, there would be no issue about moving Linux apps to Windows because the best Linux apps wouldn't be portable.
According to the date on the linked article, this is from last August.
I think Yellow Dog is a great Distro for learning Linux, mostly for non-technical reasons. It's a small distro that still has a sense of community. The lead developers can be found answering questions on the newbies list.
Newbies leaning Linux are also well served starting with a Red Hatish distro because that's what they will encounter most out in the world.
YDL also supports RPM, Apt-Get and Yum as package management tools so you can learn to master them all from one distro. Yum actually migrated from YDL to Fedora. I think it's the least painful package management system this side of OS X's drag and drop.
Only if the consolidated widget company never distributed the product. If they distribute it, they have to comply with the terms of the GPL regarding derived works.
But that was my point. The vast majority of organizations are not selling software so for that vast majority, GPL and BSD are the same. The only licenses that are really 'free' in the sense of the FSF definition are those like the RPL that are much more viral than GPL.
I do know of a number of companies that use the GPL to drive commercial license sales. Troll Tech, Sleepycat, MySQL come to mind.
But this is just analogous to companies that sell archiving software and give away the de-archiver to drive sales. Do you really think that the Troll Tech model wouldn't work as well if the Linux version were released under the BSD license?
With the BSD license, a competitor or potential customer can run away with your product, with no obligation to fulfill any sort of quid-pro-quo. With the GPL, the competition and customers either have to follow the rules and release the derivative works that they distribute with your code, or they have to come to you to buy a commercial license that lets them out of the GPL obligations.
With respect, Bruce, if someone is in the business of selling software or products where a significant amount of the value comes from software, the chances that they will choose either a GPL or a BSD style license are small. In any other case, the GPL doesn't provide any competitive advantage over a BSD style license. If the amalgamated widget company releases the software that drives their widget making robots under the GPL, there is nothing to prevent the consolidated widget company from taking that software, improving it and keeping the improvements proprietary.
It may be just coincidence by MS released an updater for the Mac version of Office yesterday. It's available here.
The description reads: "This update addresses several stability issues with PowerPoint(R), Excel, and Visual Basic for Applications for Officev.X."
What bothers me about this thread is that here we have Eben Moglen essentially validating Steve Balmer's FUD.
When Balmer argued that everyone with thoughts of making money from software should stay far away from the GPL because the law is complicated and one might license one's code under the GPL by accident, the community laughed at him.
Now the FSF says that SCO put some of their code under the GPL by accident because they didn't do a diligent enough code review.
The only reason I ever ran Virex was to be a 'nice guy' to friends who use Windows and make sure that in forwarding some MS Office document from one Windows user to another I don't forward a virus as well. Virex has probably caught about 50 Windows viri over the years but never once anything that would actually execute on my Mac.
Fink is 'the' package management system on the Mac and the only one I use. I think my reaction is very typical: "Goodbye Virex."
I really doubt this is some anti OSS plot. Sounds to me like the PHB asked the programmer if the new version of Virex was ready, the programmer said something like "Yes, as soon as I move some libraries into the bundle and put some acknowledgements in the 'Read Me' file."
The PHB said "We'll do that stuff for the next release."
Actually, it's Sun's Open Firmware. Apple just licensed it.
For those just wanting to get a feel for the language, Apple has a small tutorial here.
The update installs a couple of new headers. To kill the annoying messages about how your precompiled headers are out of date every time you try to build something, enter the following in terminal:
sudo fixPrecomps -all
What other scripting frameworks for Mac OS X are out there? Well there is a very nice one here.
Stallman says "The system is a variant of GNU, and the GNU Project is its principal developer." Presumably the "principal developer can be determined by some objective metric such as lines of code. I don't doubt that in the early days when "GNU/Linux" was a compiler and kernel that the compiler was bigger, but in a current distribution with stuff from XFree86, Cygnus, maybe K Development and a bunch of others is the GNU portion really that great?
Good post but you got this part wrong:
You can get Darwin's source, but IIRC, you can't redistribute changes you make. I think everyone here will gree that this is less of a Good Thing than GPL or BSD liscenced kernel code.
The APSL is actually more viral than the GPL. Unlike the GPL, it requires you to distribute changes even if you only deploy the modified code within your own organization.
The GPL doesn't prevent your code from being stripped and added to proprietary projects. It's happened to me. I worked on some GPLed code for a poor school district. The rich school district next door took our program and hired paid staff to enhance it. Then they adopted the attitude "We don't want the kids in the poor district to have this. They might score as well as our kids on the achievement tests."
The GPL may keep people from taking your code commercial but they can take it proprietary. If you want to prevent that, look at the APSL.
It's not forced. It works fine without being registered
As to why I want to do it, I have an MS mouse and really like it because it fits my rather large hands, it worked fine under Mac OS ancient and it works fine under MOS X. I never did buy that one button and no wheel thing.
The problem with MS mice is they're poorly engineered. There is no shielding where the cable enters the mouse. So they short out after about three months just from mechanical wear.
Since I registered it before Passport, that's not a big problem. I phone the nice lady and she FedExes me a new one. By now MS has spent much more on FedEx than I paid for the original mouse.
So that's how I feel about most MS stuff. It may feel good but it's poorly engineered. You need to register it so they will give you a new one when it breaks.
Using Carbon and Cocoa in the same application is as easy as:
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
#import <Carbon/Carbon.h>
Since Carbon is a C API and since ObjC is a superset of ANSI C, you can access all of Carbon from a Cocoa program.
You are correct that ordinary users can install software in /Applications. Thanks for telling me that. You are also correct that Office keeps per user prefs in ~/Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft
About Office v. X. /Applications/Microsoft Office X/Office.
Bloat - yes. I installed most of the optional parts and it says here "405.6 MB on disk (403,531,723 bytes)." Running as root - no. It doesn't need any privileges. Why would it? It keeps all its shit in
Biggest negative - I paid for it and I can't register it because I would have to get a Passport.
I happen to have written a QuickTime transcoder here. If, in a fit of altruism, I transcoded popular movie trailers from Sorenson and put them on the web would I be guilty of something?
If that's what he wants, he should modify the GPL.
My friend, with a little help from me, produced some GPLed educational software for a poor school district with some hand me down computers. The teachers from the school district shared the software with other teachers at a statewide conference. Fast forward a year. My friend's wife discovers that a rich school district has had staff programmers improve the programs. She asks for a copy and is told that the rich district has a policy against sharing. My friend goes to the district and is told that they are keeping "their software" because it would look bad if the kids from the poor district district scored as well on statewide tests.
Surveys show that 70 - 80% of programming is internal rather than commercial so, for all we know, 70 - 80% of GPLed code has been taken 'internal private' inside organizations that think they have a competitive advantage from "their" program.
Fast forward a few years. Apple closes this GPL loophole in the APSL. Does RMS hail the innovation and modify the GPL? No he rails against the APSL as non-Free while dodging any substantive discussion of the issue. One can only suspect pure ego is at work. It's non-Free because he didn't think of it first.
"The patent statement was last updated in July, and in October Apple made a public statement that they would no longer support any patent agreement for web standards except royalty-free. Does anyone else see problems in the reporting here?"
No more than usual. I'm afraid this has been the standard for awhile.
IANAL and I know little about patent law but I suspect that by distributing free PNG codecs for Mac and Windows Apple has invalidated any claims for royalties that they may have had. Common sense, an admittedly poor guide to the law, says that if you give something away, you can't later demand a royalty payment. QuickTime does include PNG codecs and the docs say so very explicitly.
This looks like a routine patent disclosure to me. I hope someone who understands the legal issues will respond.
When I need to code cross platform I start with a cross compiler and two targets. That way I know with every build whether I'm getting platform specific and it's easy to isolate the platform specific stuff.
Check out Metrowerks compilers for cross platform stuff.
Several historians have argued that what distinguishes the "Western" world view is the greater acceptance of the notion, promulgated by Aristotle and embodied in Thucidides view of history, that there is some kind of objective truth out there that is independent of our beliefs and desires. A corollary is that we can come closer to knowing this truth through mental effort, experiment, and by discarding prejudices.
These historians argue that this unique idea came into the world once in classic Greece and has been diffusing ever since. If we accept this framework then globalization is simply the final stage in the diffusion of the meme.
A few observations:
The Grand Inquisitor was right. The notions of "objective reality" and faith are incompatible at their root. He may have been right that the sum of human happiness would be greater if we tortured the trouble makers who challenge our deeply held beliefs into recanting.
Aristotle was wrong to some extent. There is clear objective evidence that beliefs and expectations matter in fields from medicine to economics to psychology and particularly intelligence testing. Whatever "objective reality" is, it's not just something that waits passively to be discovered.
The Aristotelian view seems easier for political conservatives, maybe because they believe in an innate and discoverable "human nature." All my Marxist friends are Lysencoists.
Even in the west there are a lot of folks who instinctively reject the Aristotelian view. This includes all the Navajos, all the New Agers all the "Born Again" Christians and many of the liberals that I know.
One problem with porting QuickTime to Linux is that QuickTime needs a complete Window manager API because it has its own internal API for managing windows, menus, dialogs, etc. These routines call through to the underlying API which must have a large common subset of functionality to support the x-platform nature of QuickTime. So while QuickTime for KDE or QuickTime for Gnome are reasonable concepts, QuickTime for Linux is not. Of course, there is already QuickTime for Java which uses the Java API and runs on Linux.
The other thing is that Apple needs to do a LOT of work to bring the Cocoa API up to rough parity with the Windows, Java and Carbon versions. They won't make any commitments as to when, if ever, that work will be underway. If they took on Linux before Cocoa their developers would go postal.