With the upcoming Cairo-based version of Gtk+, Gtk+ is turning into an excellent cross-platform toolkit.
I think it would do OpenOffice a world of good to adopt Gtk+ as the standard toolkit and gradually phase out its own internal toolkit. By sharing the cross-platform development with Gtk+, both OpenOffice and Gtk+ would benefit.
It is interesting to see that choice is good, unless someone may have the choice to install software from Microsoft.
Sometimes, offering choice is good, sometimes offering choice is bad. For example, offering kids the choice of chocolate or crack is a bad choice, and you don't want people offering them that choice. In the same way, we don't want people offering kids the choice between open source software and an overpriced product from a convicted monopolist.
And for a given set of choices, some of the choices are good and some choices are bad. For example, when Im thirsty, being given a choice between having a glass of beer and a glass of toxic sludge is not a useful choice because the option of a glass of toxic sludge isn't actually a practical one.
So, I'm glad you realize that choice isn't always good.
Given who the laptops are going to, my guess is that Microsoft would have to give away any version of windows that actually ran on the computer. It is not as if the owners a going to have spare money lying around to buy a license.
That's selling products below cost with the intent of establishing or maintaining a monopoly or other advantage. US trade representatives get quite upset when other nations and companies do it, and they are right. Microsoft should not be allowed to do this; no company should.
I do science in the real world. I can safely say that's a patently ridiculous assertion. We rely on any software we can get to work. Often that's commercial software, because people who develop good software in science frequently take it commercial.
Yes, and that is a serious problem. In fact, many scientific results published today are simply not reproducible at all (and a large part of those that are, it turns out that they are wrong). A lot of scientific results boil down to "software X from manufacturer Y has determined that...", but the exact procedure used by manufacturer Y to do that is proprietary, unpublished, and available only in vague generalities.
The fact that you think that raising this point is "ridiculous" only shows how much science education has deteriorated: you don't even notice how bad it is.
Any decent software maker will have already done all the validity testing necessary and is glad to make that data available.
Your view of the use and effectiveness of software quality assurance is evidently as naive as your view of the scientific method.
I'm sure some people would like to casually have the software, but since they know they're only ever going to sell a very limited amount of copies to a subset of the people, it's probably the only way to cover their costs.
Except, of course, that a lot of the value of systems like Matlab and Mathematica has nothing to do with the companies that produce it, but with the users that produce stuff for it. You're not paying for the costs of producing Matlab or Mathematica, you're mostly paying for the contributions and value added by other users.
That's why you're better off using one of the excellent open source scientific computation and visualization packages: MayaVi, SciPy, Octave, R,...
It seems to me that only 1 enterprising individual needs to make a free one for IE. (there might already be one. I didn't do a through search)
Yeah, but anybody who invests their time and effort to help improve a company's money-making commercial product is usually a real dope.
Microsoft is a rich company that believes in for-pay development. If their model is so great, let them develop their own extensions, and let people pay to get them.
Have a look around for various CLR and.Net concepts Microsoft has patented - and they apply specifically to stuff running in a CLR. They are not general patents.
Yes, and people know about them and they don't apply to Mono. If they did, Mono would have worked around them.
Confirmation you have no clue. Linux is not a technology invented by Microsoft whereby Microsoft has applied and received patents for concepts that apply absolutely specifically to anyone implementing their own CLR.
You're confusing patent and copyright. The fact that Linux wasn't written by Microsoft only protects Linux users against copyright claims, not patent claims. In fact, most of the concepts and ideas in Linux were invented by other people, some long ago, some more recently. It is likely that Microsoft does hold patents that "read on" Linux (both the kernel and user space). The only question is whether those are valid, not because of prior art from Linux, but because of prior art from third parties.
They're not general patents that apply to Java or Linux or anything else.
Funny you mention Java, since, Sun does hold patents on fundamental aspects of Java and the Java runtime. Unlike Mono, open source Java implementations do seem to violate them. Furthermore, this issue is not addressed by Sun's "open source" release.
Quite to the contrary. Apple can squeeze the Macbook Pro and the Mac Mini into those sexy, tiny boxes only because they protect them with styrofoam. Other manufacturers have to use big boxes because they use less material inside and instead rely on air and spacers to protect the product.
Sure: cellulose beans (dissolve in water), preformed recycled cellulose molds, cardboard spacers, thin foam strips, inflated plastic film (not good but a lot less waste), etc.
How do I know these work? Because every non-Apple computer product that I have bought over the last couple of years has come packed in styrofoam.
It's also not really that bad for the environment
You know, you Apple fanbois are really something. If Apple says "white is black", you defend that, too.
For practical purposes, it's not recyclable. See here for some of the other environmental problems:
Jobs is agreeing that Apple is still producing a lot of toxic waste, so I think it's unjustified to call Greenpeace's message "FUD". What Jobs is saying is that the company is aware of the problem and has already been trying to address it, and that they are actually ahead of the competition. He is also saying that Apple hasn't communicated very clearly about it in the past and that they will improve this.
It seems to me that both Greenpeace and Jobs are doing their jobs, and there really isn't any big disagreement.
I don't know about how Apple disposes of their waste, but I do know that their packaging is not environmentally friendly: Apple still uses lots of styrofoam and plastic bags. Those are not only bad for the environment, they're also a pain to get rid of.
If someone who has actually used Powershell beyond what cmd.exe can already do would like to rebut something I said, please do!
I think you're missing the point: more (data types, commands, options, features, etc.) are not necessarily an advantage in a shell. The UNIX shells hit a sweet spot between scripting and interactivity. Three decades of practical experience and evolution have gone into it. Along the line, people have tried all sorts of thing (object oriented shells, XML shells, etc.), and, given a choice, people always went back to the UNIX text shells.
Things like 3D acceleration are decades behind Windows.
Actually, 3D acceleration in Linux is technologically ahead of Windows. What's behind is driver support, although that's coming around.
People use Windows because most people are not looking for the same things in an OS that you are.
Well, nobody in my family uses Windows anymore: they have all switched to either Mac OS or Ubuntu, both of which are considerably less hassle and overall cheaper.
Wake me up when *nix gets an object-oriented (rather than text-oriented) shell.
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." (Douglas Adams)
C# is a nice language, Mono implements it on Linux and uses the Linux APIs that I like, and that's all I really care about. It makes no more difference to me whether my C# programs run on Windows (actually, they even do, thanks to Gtk#) than it did whether my C or C++ programs run on Windows.
This "cross platform" stuff and "truly portable" stuff was a Sun marketing gimmick for Java, and it is really old and tired by now. I've seen what Java "cross platform" support amounts to, and I don't want it, either as a programmer or as a user.
No it hasn't, because the questions that need answered are conveniently side-stepped in the Mono FAQ. As an exercise, find yourself the extremely flimsy and amateurish patent grant
Patent grants on what? If there are no Microsoft patents that Mono violates, there is nothing to be granted.
Every open source project is at risk at being sued over patent infringement. For Mono, people have been unusually diligent to examine any potential threat from Microsoft and avoid it.
So, unless you can point out a specific patent problem with Mono, you're just spreading FUD.
And why does your criticism not apply to Linux? Unlike Mono, Microsoft has explicitly said that Linux is infringing lots of their patents and that they do intend to enforce them. So, what do you suggest? Should we all stop using Linux because Microsoft might sue for infringement?
I believe the Ms-PL is different from Apache in that it requires retention of attributions in the code. That seems reasonable and harmless. The license also seems compatible with just about everything other than GPLv2, but it's incompatible with GPLv2 in the same way Apache 2 is, something that will get fixed in GPLv3.
Also, given that both Sun and IBM have created their own open source licenses, why should Microsoft not get one too?
No, it isn't. Section D merely says that you must include a copy of the license with your distribution, not that you must place your all code under that license. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to require.
Section C is the advertisement clause a-la BSD before it was changed.
No, it isn't. The BSD advertising clause placed vague advertising requirements on the recipient. This clause simply says that whatever attributions are present in the software must remain there. It doesn't say anything about advertising.
This license limits your rights to re-license the code as you like which makes it very different then the BSD/MIT/X11 licenses.
That, too, is incorrect. You can't change the license on BSD, MIT, or X11 code either. What you can do is put your modifications under another license (say, the GPL), which means that the combined work is then subject to the new license and the original license. For the GPL, that just happens to work out as if the entire work was under the GPL. Well, you can do the same thing under the Ms-PL (except for the patent clause, but that will presumably be compatible with GPLv3).
Ms-PL is not OSI approved because OSI does not support license proliferation. Microsoft has not convinced them that there is a need for a different licence.
That's a pretty strong statement; do you have any pointers to official OSI statements or is that merely your guess? The OSI may not like license proliferation (who does), but in the past, they seem to have approved lots of similar licenses.
However, it could be read that the source code must be distributed under that license.
No, it couldn't be reasonably read that way. "Including a copy of a license" doesn't mean "placing your code under a license".
although the patent retaliation clause already make the license incompatible with the GNU GPL v2
pretty much every web-app has uploadable content. any time you fill out a form you're uploading content. every just by modifying the GET params, you could be uploading content that will display on the web page.
Yup, but banking apps only show you what you have uploaded.
but that's not XSS, that's just a browser vulnerability.
Well, if a bug in your browser permits third party to be uploaded onto your bank's site (something fairly harmless in itself), then you may have a dangerous XSS. Using a separate account also protects you against some forms of social engineering.
It will disappear when they are ready to drop litigation bombs.
The legal situation surrounding Mono has been more carefully analyzed than any other open source project I can think of. Unless you can point to a specific legal problem with Mono, you're just spreading FUD.
What disturbs me more is how the term "open source" has been co-opted and soiled by Microsoft when the license terms which will only be FSF approved when microsoft owns the FSF.
The Microsoft Permissive License looks like a perfectly good open source license to me; it's basically like Apache. In particular, it includes patent grants. The FSF probably doesn't like the Ms-PL because it's BSD/Apache-like.
If you can identify a specific problem with the Ms-PL, please point it out. Otherwise, please stop spreading FUD about it.
Probably not, since the Microsoft Permissive License has a GPL-like 'viral' clause, which means that if Mono used the code, Mono would probably have to be licensed under the Ms-PL.
I don't see a "viral" clause in the Ms-PL. All the Ms-PL requires is that you include its copyright notice with your distribution and that the Ms-PL licensed code itself remains under the Ms-PL.
"Is Mono still necessary?" Yes.
Yes, but not because of the license. It's because Mono does a lot more than run CLR and.NET code.
If it's under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL), then it's being released under a BSD-like license with an explicit patent grant. I think that would really put to rest whatever remaining concerns people have have had about possible Microsoft patents on core CLR technologies.
More generally, I think Microsoft has really shown signs of change with the CLR, IronPython, and related technologies. Maybe they are starting to "get" it at least a little.
(However, Ms-PL isn't OSI-approved yet; what's up with that?)
Who cares what Ballmer thinks at this point (actually, who cares about Ballmer at all)? The iPhone is gonna ship in a couple of months and then we'll know.
I won't be buying one for $500, but if they subsidize it to under $200 and if it can do it synchronization over the air, I might.
"Listen - I made you and I can break you just as easily - I'll pull your plug out"
Seriously: it's not Google's responsibility to give these people free marketing. In fact, maybe the thing Google should do is scramble their results slightly for commercial sites so that different businesses get a chance. A $3m/year jewelry business really shouldn't be anywhere near the top of Google searches anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
With the upcoming Cairo-based version of Gtk+, Gtk+ is turning into an excellent cross-platform toolkit.
I think it would do OpenOffice a world of good to adopt Gtk+ as the standard toolkit and gradually phase out its own internal toolkit. By sharing the cross-platform development with Gtk+, both OpenOffice and Gtk+ would benefit.
It is interesting to see that choice is good, unless someone may have the choice to install software from Microsoft.
Sometimes, offering choice is good, sometimes offering choice is bad. For example, offering kids the choice of chocolate or crack is a bad choice, and you don't want people offering them that choice. In the same way, we don't want people offering kids the choice between open source software and an overpriced product from a convicted monopolist.
And for a given set of choices, some of the choices are good and some choices are bad. For example, when Im thirsty, being given a choice between having a glass of beer and a glass of toxic sludge is not a useful choice because the option of a glass of toxic sludge isn't actually a practical one.
So, I'm glad you realize that choice isn't always good.
Given who the laptops are going to, my guess is that Microsoft would have to give away any version of windows that actually ran on the computer. It is not as if the owners a going to have spare money lying around to buy a license.
That's selling products below cost with the intent of establishing or maintaining a monopoly or other advantage. US trade representatives get quite upset when other nations and companies do it, and they are right. Microsoft should not be allowed to do this; no company should.
I do science in the real world. I can safely say that's a patently ridiculous assertion. We rely on any software we can get to work. Often that's commercial software, because people who develop good software in science frequently take it commercial.
...", but the exact procedure used by manufacturer Y to do that is proprietary, unpublished, and available only in vague generalities.
Yes, and that is a serious problem. In fact, many scientific results published today are simply not reproducible at all (and a large part of those that are, it turns out that they are wrong). A lot of scientific results boil down to "software X from manufacturer Y has determined that
The fact that you think that raising this point is "ridiculous" only shows how much science education has deteriorated: you don't even notice how bad it is.
Any decent software maker will have already done all the validity testing necessary and is glad to make that data available.
Your view of the use and effectiveness of software quality assurance is evidently as naive as your view of the scientific method.
I'm sure some people would like to casually have the software, but since they know they're only ever going to sell a very limited amount of copies to a subset of the people, it's probably the only way to cover their costs.
...
Except, of course, that a lot of the value of systems like Matlab and Mathematica has nothing to do with the companies that produce it, but with the users that produce stuff for it. You're not paying for the costs of producing Matlab or Mathematica, you're mostly paying for the contributions and value added by other users.
That's why you're better off using one of the excellent open source scientific computation and visualization packages: MayaVi, SciPy, Octave, R,
It seems to me that only 1 enterprising individual needs to make a free one for IE. (there might already be one. I didn't do a through search)
Yeah, but anybody who invests their time and effort to help improve a company's money-making commercial product is usually a real dope.
Microsoft is a rich company that believes in for-pay development. If their model is so great, let them develop their own extensions, and let people pay to get them.
Have a look around for various CLR and .Net concepts Microsoft has patented - and they apply specifically to stuff running in a CLR. They are not general patents.
Yes, and people know about them and they don't apply to Mono. If they did, Mono would have worked around them.
Confirmation you have no clue. Linux is not a technology invented by Microsoft whereby Microsoft has applied and received patents for concepts that apply absolutely specifically to anyone implementing their own CLR.
You're confusing patent and copyright. The fact that Linux wasn't written by Microsoft only protects Linux users against copyright claims, not patent claims. In fact, most of the concepts and ideas in Linux were invented by other people, some long ago, some more recently. It is likely that Microsoft does hold patents that "read on" Linux (both the kernel and user space). The only question is whether those are valid, not because of prior art from Linux, but because of prior art from third parties.
They're not general patents that apply to Java or Linux or anything else.
Funny you mention Java, since, Sun does hold patents on fundamental aspects of Java and the Java runtime. Unlike Mono, open source Java implementations do seem to violate them. Furthermore, this issue is not addressed by Sun's "open source" release.
Quite to the contrary. Apple can squeeze the Macbook Pro and the Mac Mini into those sexy, tiny boxes only because they protect them with styrofoam. Other manufacturers have to use big boxes because they use less material inside and instead rely on air and spacers to protect the product.
Do you have suggestions for better altneratives?
R eport.pdf
Sure: cellulose beans (dissolve in water), preformed recycled cellulose molds, cardboard spacers, thin foam strips, inflated plastic film (not good but a lot less waste), etc.
How do I know these work? Because every non-Apple computer product that I have bought over the last couple of years has come packed in styrofoam.
It's also not really that bad for the environment
You know, you Apple fanbois are really something. If Apple says "white is black", you defend that, too.
For practical purposes, it's not recyclable. See here for some of the other environmental problems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styrofoam
http://www.projectsurf.org/pdf/04-20-04-Agenda%20
Styrofoam is also a bloody nuisance.
Jobs is agreeing that Apple is still producing a lot of toxic waste, so I think it's unjustified to call Greenpeace's message "FUD". What Jobs is saying is that the company is aware of the problem and has already been trying to address it, and that they are actually ahead of the competition. He is also saying that Apple hasn't communicated very clearly about it in the past and that they will improve this.
It seems to me that both Greenpeace and Jobs are doing their jobs, and there really isn't any big disagreement.
I don't know about how Apple disposes of their waste, but I do know that their packaging is not environmentally friendly: Apple still uses lots of styrofoam and plastic bags. Those are not only bad for the environment, they're also a pain to get rid of.
If someone who has actually used Powershell beyond what cmd.exe can already do would like to rebut something I said, please do!
I think you're missing the point: more (data types, commands, options, features, etc.) are not necessarily an advantage in a shell. The UNIX shells hit a sweet spot between scripting and interactivity. Three decades of practical experience and evolution have gone into it. Along the line, people have tried all sorts of thing (object oriented shells, XML shells, etc.), and, given a choice, people always went back to the UNIX text shells.
Things like 3D acceleration are decades behind Windows.
Actually, 3D acceleration in Linux is technologically ahead of Windows. What's behind is driver support, although that's coming around.
People use Windows because most people are not looking for the same things in an OS that you are.
Well, nobody in my family uses Windows anymore: they have all switched to either Mac OS or Ubuntu, both of which are considerably less hassle and overall cheaper.
Wake me up when *nix gets an object-oriented (rather than text-oriented) shell.
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." (Douglas Adams)
C# is a nice language, Mono implements it on Linux and uses the Linux APIs that I like, and that's all I really care about. It makes no more difference to me whether my C# programs run on Windows (actually, they even do, thanks to Gtk#) than it did whether my C or C++ programs run on Windows.
This "cross platform" stuff and "truly portable" stuff was a Sun marketing gimmick for Java, and it is really old and tired by now. I've seen what Java "cross platform" support amounts to, and I don't want it, either as a programmer or as a user.
the (im)possibility of creating a cross-platform code and UI framework, years before the .NET project even started!
And Sun proved conclusively that it is, in fact, impossible.
No it hasn't, because the questions that need answered are conveniently side-stepped in the Mono FAQ. As an exercise, find yourself the extremely flimsy and amateurish patent grant
Patent grants on what? If there are no Microsoft patents that Mono violates, there is nothing to be granted.
Every open source project is at risk at being sued over patent infringement. For Mono, people have been unusually diligent to examine any potential threat from Microsoft and avoid it.
So, unless you can point out a specific patent problem with Mono, you're just spreading FUD.
And why does your criticism not apply to Linux? Unlike Mono, Microsoft has explicitly said that Linux is infringing lots of their patents and that they do intend to enforce them. So, what do you suggest? Should we all stop using Linux because Microsoft might sue for infringement?
I believe the Ms-PL is different from Apache in that it requires retention of attributions in the code. That seems reasonable and harmless. The license also seems compatible with just about everything other than GPLv2, but it's incompatible with GPLv2 in the same way Apache 2 is, something that will get fixed in GPLv3.
Also, given that both Sun and IBM have created their own open source licenses, why should Microsoft not get one too?
Section D is the viral clause a-la GPL.
No, it isn't. Section D merely says that you must include a copy of the license with your distribution, not that you must place your all code under that license. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to require.
Section C is the advertisement clause a-la BSD before it was changed.
No, it isn't. The BSD advertising clause placed vague advertising requirements on the recipient. This clause simply says that whatever attributions are present in the software must remain there. It doesn't say anything about advertising.
This license limits your rights to re-license the code as you like which makes it very different then the BSD/MIT/X11 licenses.
That, too, is incorrect. You can't change the license on BSD, MIT, or X11 code either. What you can do is put your modifications under another license (say, the GPL), which means that the combined work is then subject to the new license and the original license. For the GPL, that just happens to work out as if the entire work was under the GPL. Well, you can do the same thing under the Ms-PL (except for the patent clause, but that will presumably be compatible with GPLv3).
Ms-PL is not OSI approved because OSI does not support license proliferation. Microsoft has not convinced them that there is a need for a different licence.
That's a pretty strong statement; do you have any pointers to official OSI statements or is that merely your guess? The OSI may not like license proliferation (who does), but in the past, they seem to have approved lots of similar licenses.
However, it could be read that the source code must be distributed under that license.
No, it couldn't be reasonably read that way. "Including a copy of a license" doesn't mean "placing your code under a license".
although the patent retaliation clause already make the license incompatible with the GNU GPL v2
Yeah, but it should be compatible with GPLv3.
pretty much every web-app has uploadable content. any time you fill out a form you're uploading content. every just by modifying the GET params, you could be uploading content that will display on the web page.
Yup, but banking apps only show you what you have uploaded.
but that's not XSS, that's just a browser vulnerability.
Well, if a bug in your browser permits third party to be uploaded onto your bank's site (something fairly harmless in itself), then you may have a dangerous XSS. Using a separate account also protects you against some forms of social engineering.
Well, except Mono is a small project
Mono is a big project as far as such projects go.
that Microsoft would rather see die.
I don't know. Who cares?
It will disappear when they are ready to drop litigation bombs.
The legal situation surrounding Mono has been more carefully analyzed than any other open source project I can think of. Unless you can point to a specific legal problem with Mono, you're just spreading FUD.
What disturbs me more is how the term "open source" has been co-opted and soiled by Microsoft when the license terms which will only be FSF approved when microsoft owns the FSF.
The Microsoft Permissive License looks like a perfectly good open source license to me; it's basically like Apache. In particular, it includes patent grants. The FSF probably doesn't like the Ms-PL because it's BSD/Apache-like.
If you can identify a specific problem with the Ms-PL, please point it out. Otherwise, please stop spreading FUD about it.
Probably not, since the Microsoft Permissive License has a GPL-like 'viral' clause, which means that if Mono used the code, Mono would probably have to be licensed under the Ms-PL.
.NET code.
I don't see a "viral" clause in the Ms-PL. All the Ms-PL requires is that you include its copyright notice with your distribution and that the Ms-PL licensed code itself remains under the Ms-PL.
"Is Mono still necessary?" Yes.
Yes, but not because of the license. It's because Mono does a lot more than run CLR and
If it's under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL), then it's being released under a BSD-like license with an explicit patent grant. I think that would really put to rest whatever remaining concerns people have have had about possible Microsoft patents on core CLR technologies.
More generally, I think Microsoft has really shown signs of change with the CLR, IronPython, and related technologies. Maybe they are starting to "get" it at least a little.
(However, Ms-PL isn't OSI-approved yet; what's up with that?)
Who cares what Ballmer thinks at this point (actually, who cares about Ballmer at all)? The iPhone is gonna ship in a couple of months and then we'll know.
I won't be buying one for $500, but if they subsidize it to under $200 and if it can do it synchronization over the air, I might.
"Listen - I made you and I can break you just as easily - I'll pull your plug out"
Seriously: it's not Google's responsibility to give these people free marketing. In fact, maybe the thing Google should do is scramble their results slightly for commercial sites so that different businesses get a chance. A $3m/year jewelry business really shouldn't be anywhere near the top of Google searches anyway.