You'd need 20x the horsepower for the application code but 1x the horsepower for the library code because it wouldn't need to be emulated
Right. I think the WINE folks ought to rig up a hybrid 'emulate the app, execute the libraries' configuration - easy for me to say;). Then they could support WIN32 X86 code on any platform that can run WINE. That'd let you run your X86 code on those ARM laptops once Linux gets ported to them. Or on ARM-based Macs once they come out (and assuming they still bundle X-Darwin). Hell, even on ARM Windows boxes if Microsoft won't do it. There are already open source X86 emulators out there, right?
But the whole 'emulation will kill the battery' is also a bit of a red herring. On my Nexus One, the display accounts for 70-80% of the battery usage. That didn't change significantly when Android got a JIT compiler and started running native code.
And if Ubuntu wanted they could flog a codec pack on their store. It'd probably cost a few dollars.
I remember when Mandriva shunted you to Fluendo to get non-free codecs. They most certainly did not cost a few dollars. They cost more than an OEM copy of Windows.
Beyond the fact that most software patents are utter nonsense, the licensing terms for them relative to the purchase cost of an OS that contains those licenses (along with much, much more) is ridiculous. We're getting to the point where all software is 'free as in beer', but you need to pay a 'patent tax' to Microsoft or Apple in order to use it.
Which begs another question. If I can buy an OS/X license that gives me the right to use H264 (along with all Microsoft patents - due to MS/Apple non-agression pacts), why can't I pick who to pay for patent licenses? It's nuts that you can either buy an OS from Microsoft or Apple, or else be required to buy licenses from potentially thousands of patent holders. Maybe there should be some kind of ASCAP-like entity that collecs and distributes the royalties (small fixed fee per patent, adding up to, say, the cost of an OEM Windows license). Then everyone could be on a level playing field. And you wouldn't have to pay over and over (either in the form of OS upgrade fees or license renewals). Imagine if your computer, phone or tablet came with a patent license from such a royalty distributer (paid for by the hardware manufacturer). Then you'd get to load whatever software you want without worry. At least it would prevent one patent holder from getting stop orders on their competitors.
More to the point, does this implicitly acknowledge The Beatles and The Rolling Stones as the Micky Mouse's of their generation? And is that good or bad (I think Mickey Mouse was considered cool in the beginning)...
MAPI and TAPI are not the equivalent of QT vs GTK. KDE and GNOME have their own equivalents of MAPI and TAPI as well as their own GUI toolkits - and Apple probably does too.
I like Linux as much as the next guy, but this is akin to calling XP home vs XP Pro the equivalent of Ubuntu vs Fedora. Microsoft's API's may be a mess, but their binary compatibility between platforms is probably the best in the business - a very good thing for developers. Now if that makes Windows 8 a bloated monster that requires seriously pricey hardware to run (or gets horrible battery life), it won't do well as a tablet OS. And if Google can call off the patent dogs and continue to provide a good, free tablet OS with a big installed base, maybe Windows won't win 'just because it's Windows'.
The only similarity that makes me think they are trying to fool people (or at least to specifically copy Apple) is the bit about the launch bar at the bottom of their phone consisting of 4 icons on a gray background.
There was no reason to go with that configuration - especially since it differs so much from vanilla Android - other than to make their phone 'better' because it's more like an iPhone than all those other Android phones out there. It's pretty obvious that that's what they were doing. Whether it merits an injunction against selling their devices is another issue altogether. And that launch bar similarity doesn't carry over to the Galaxy Tab, which has a more Android-like launcher.
And what if you don't want to patent your software 'invention'? Like maybe you get that it's obvious, or don't believe in software patents, or just don't feel like it. But someone else can file for it and prevent you from using your own invention.
Why haven't you read it? I mean if you're going to take the time to post about it and express your opinions to others, you clearly seem invested and are investing time. Is it that forming an opinion from an educated perspective is just too hard so you punt and just take a guess and try to convince others you are correct?
Because one I knew that there was some need to 'hint' the next action depending on the previous when decoding gestures, I could implement the same thing without knowing how Apple did it. That's what's wrong with software patents, they are practically all obvious to implement. What's being patented is the idea, not the implementation. That could possibly be said of some physical patents as well, I suppose, but not in the kind of blanket way it can be said of most software patents.
There existed a very healthy, competitive marketplace around software development without software patents... and now we have chaos and lawyers and an environment fostered largely by the beneficiaries of a PC revolution in which it's hard to imagine that revolution ever having taken place.
They have a patent on a very specific function where "pinch to zoom" is applied multiple times sequentially on a touchscreen and the first one clues the OS into the fact that other gestures within a preset amount of time are likely to be the same UI input even if the normal algorithm for determining it is a "pinch to zoom" would not have detected it as such.
Sounds an awful lot like the timer used to distinguish a doubleclick from a second click. Sure, it's a little different, since 'pinch to zoom' detection doesn't depend on hitting a specific screen element. And, not having read the description, I guess I can't speak definitively on its 'inventiveness'. Still, the bit about a 'preset amount of time' makes it sound none too inventive to me. "The user did a pinch to zoom, if it's still really close to when we detected that, assume they're still trying to zoom'. Brilliant. Execpt it's been done before - albeit not in the specific case of the precious pinch to zoom - because pinch to zoom is a new case. Essentially 'since we did pinch to zoom first, we own everything about it' - a good reason not to make it patentable.
You make some valid points. They'd be much more convincing if Apple wasn't out there suing everybody else as the 'creator' and 20-year owner of the 'pinch to zoom' gesture, 'slide to unlock', scroll bounce and others. These have become the de-facto language of touchscreen interaction, and yes, Apple coined many of the 'words'. But word-coiners don't get the right to sue - and for good reason. You can't have a healthy marketplace with lawyers lurking at every turn.
It's time for the patent office to issue a blanket statement that '...on a phone or tablet' does not turn common use practices into patent-worthy 'inventions'. A picture of a button is still functioning as a button. It's not some new kind of thing. That's precisely why it's so useful - it's an onscreen analog of a common real-world object (invented long ago), so it requires no training to use.
As a matter of fact, Google has managed to find a way to build a profitable ad-funded business in a way that is about as unobtrusive as we've seen. I'm a somewhat reluctant user of Adblock Plus - I hate the manipulativeness of most advertising, but understand that it funds most of the media I consume. But in the case of Google, I actually find their search ads useful. They are easy to ignore, but when I'm actually searching to buy something, they're right there (along with links to alternatives if I don't believe the hype).
I suspect the reason this all works is the fact that Google can charge enough for their targeting abilities (and their ability to attract an ad-resistant type like me) that they don't need to beat you over the head with traditional "you're a worthless piece of shit if you don't buy this fabulous product" advertising. And because this all works, and makes oodles for Google, I have no reason to suspect they're using my info for any other, more nefarious, purposes. They don't need to.
Of course, search ads are only part of Google's business, and Doubleclick is much more conventionally hideous. But that's what I use Adblock Plus for...
There seems to be a concerted effort to spew paranoia about Google lately. I recently listened to an interview with Scott Cleland about his book: 'Why You Can't Trust Google'. The whole thing reeked of a hit job. Mostly just imagining the worst possible implications of every 'questionable' thing Google does. But some out and out conspiracy theorizing too.
He describes how Google has 'copies of the entire web' as if there's any other way to provide the kind of search they provide. And somehow Bing (which, after all, is a direct clone of Google's business model) doesn't have such copies, or somehow has more benign plans for them.
He ranted on about how Android tracks your location. At least in this case, a caller noted that that's optional, but in any case, what about the iPhone?
He painted the 'wifi monitoring' scandal as if it were intended for sniffing your dirty laundry instead of to log wifi locations (as others have done) in order to build a triangulation system to augment GPS location.
Hell, there are folks right here ranting that Google's evil because they don't give away their core software - only millions of lines of other very useful stuff, but hey, evil is evil. And that kind of rant is nuts.
Make no mistake, Google's got lots of info. And they use it to sell targeted advertising. But, so far at least, they're not selling your identity to anyone (I'm not even sure they have your identity if all you use them for is search. And if they are building an identity service, there's still no indication that they plan to put it to evil purposes. I believe they're pretty clear about what they will and will not do with the info they have. But if they decided to go all evil one day, I guess that could be a problem. And never underestimate the potential for incompetence in maintaining all that info securely. So, start lobbying your govt stooges to get some privacy legislation. Still, no reason to act as if everything Google does has nefarious motives. More and more, I'm inclined to assign those motives to whoever is funding these backdoor attacks.
That assumes that the developer is writing drivers for somebody else's hardware. After all, traditionally, it's been the hardware manufacturers that write the drivers, and they give them away for free in order to sell hardware - not to distinguish their 'platform' from another. So the original poster has a point. What is it about phone hardware that would make it disadvantageous to have the driver source publicly available. He makes a case for video drivers, though it a 'semi-disposable' system like a phone, that should be less of an issue. I don't think nVidia is disabling Tegra features in software anyway (though I could be wrong).
Freedom to 'close' open source software is a pretty dicey concept. Besides, you seem to be approaching the GPL issue strictly from the point of view of a corporation that wants to use it. How about the point of view of, oh say, the writers of that software? Presumably the writers chose the GPL because they wanted it to remain open. They saw it as a personal advantage to be able to have others improve on their software and give the improvements back to them in a virtuous circle. I'd bet that same impluse drives BSD contributors too. They're just a little less adamant about controlling the process.
I say this as someone opposed to the 'anti-tivoization' language. As long as Tivo (or Google) makes their changes available, they're in keeping with the GPL virtuous circle. If some of those changes are DRM 'features' you don't like, don't use them. But along with those, you might get some nice bugfixes, or disk access improvements. I don't see why sharing software and encouraging a virtuous circle of sharing requires anybody to share hardware in the same way. The whole point of open source software is that, since software costs nothing to copy, why not share it? That does not apply to hardware, and it's silly to behave as though it did.
The GPL3 anti-patent stuff makes more sense, but it functions as a poison pen, and does hurt OSS adoption. The whole issue of software patents is such a mess that it's hard to even discuss rationally - after all, prohibiting use of your GPL3 code by patent exercisers kind of accepts the validity of exercising software patents (maybe just the reality). It becomes a matter of 'I'm taking my ball and leaving', and it doesn't stop anybody from being sued anyway. The only way to do that is to get the laws changed and the patents thrown out. And I think it would do more to help get the laws changed were a patent-holding user of GPL software to go ahead and sue the writer. How insane does it have to get?
For what it's worth, I think more widespread use of the LGPL would mitigate any harm the licenses do. Again, with the LGPL, you do get all the advantages of sharing applied to your code - just not to everybody else's.
Face it, without the requirement to run WIN32 apps, Windows has no built-in market. Unless Microsoft wants to give it away for a pittance, Windows 8 won't be able to compete with Android tablets, let alone iPads. Who's gonna pay an extra hundred bucks for the MS OS on top of their hardware. I imagine Microsoft will somehow make it so you can't run the tablet version on any other hardware, so they're free to give it away without cannibalizing their desktop profits, but still...
Maybe if they can convince enough people that they want to run MSOffice on a tablet, and give Win8 tabs an exclusive...
It almost brings to mind the Linux desktop situation. Sure the underlying engine (linux kernel, drivers, etc) is the same across distros, like the basic ARM processor instruction set is the same for ARM. But all the glue that holds a system together is different. Choice of desktops, sound systems, desktop interprocess communications. Every distro puts together a Linux 'system' from the Linux kernel, X11 and various combinations of these other software components the way every ARM box generates a system from an ARM processor and various other hardware components.
At least it seems like Linus understands the advantages of standardization.
And all the 'cruft' required to run PC-DOS 1.0 doesn't seem to hurt the performance of all that PC hardware. The software analog would be the code required to maintain backward compatibility at least across a given set of tools.
Well then he may as well give up right now. If Gnome OS is on the same level as Android (i.e. a 'mobile' OS that runs apps specifically targeted to it), then it's gonna fail. Android has already won that battle, and for good reason. There are tens of thousands of developers who have chosen to target Android, and the network effects have already kicked in. Android ABI's are (mostly) backward compatible, so it's posible to actually release binaries that work on most Android devices. And speaking of Android devices, the hardware vendors make sure everything works.
Gnome (and KDE) still work on traditional PC's and netbooks - I still use them. If they understood why Android is successfull, and worked better together, they may have achieved that kind of success already in their hardware niches. Hell, this stuff's open source, how come there's no community building custom Gnome OS ROMs for, say, the Nook Color? Because it won't work well there. But, hey, they're all scratching their itches, and I guess I'll piggyback on top of them as long as I can still get a PC with drivers for my hardware. But they're not making it any easier for the Linux boosters inside nVidia, Adobe, etc to make their case to their management.
The problem is that people want (and need) to be able to run apps from these different 'OS's' simultaneously. And it can be done, of course - as you said, they're just toolkits on top of X11 on top of Linux. But all the aspects of apps that need to work together are out of sync. I don't care how your preferred launcher and window manager look (after all, that's all GNOME 3 is), but I do care that they at least attempt to conform to some 'linux desktop' standards so that all kinds of apps can behave as similarly as possible, regardless of your choice of launcher and window manager. That is, if you chose to run under KDE, you get a KDE file dialog in your GNOME apps, and your GNOME apps can embed previews in the KDE file manager (and vice versa). There's no technical reason that can't be done, if it were a high priority for all the players. But statements like "from an end-user perspective and a third-party-developer perspective GNOME and KDE are different operating systems." treat toolkit coexistence as unnecessary, and perhaps not even desirable. And that's why Linux will never get 3rd party apps.
I think you meant that as a joke, but seriously. Has there been a major management shake-up at Mozilla recently? Has their mission statement changed? Because it seems like somebody over there has decided that it's no longer enough to maintain a significant piece of the pie - significant enough to help guarantee that the web remains based on open standards.
They seem to be in full-on competition mode, now. Competition for what? If it's to remain relevant, so that their original goals remain relevant, I guess that's fine (though why do they think they're heading for irrelevance?). And copying the good bits of Chrome (and even IE or Safari) is fine too. But arbitrary changes in versioning? Mozilla's versioning scheme used to mean something. Minor updates (no API changes) vs major stuff (expect to wait a few weeks for all your extensions to become available again). The new scheme will doubtless have both kinds of updates, but no (easy) way to know which is which. Why would they want to do that? Aren't there better ways of encouraging users to update than hiding what the update does? Mozilla already can autoupdate within a major version. Do they really think it's safe to autoupdate between major versions? Mozilla's extensibility is it's greatest strength, but it does make major updates more difficult. That's no reason to force updates that are guaranteed to break things.
They run 'without issue', as long as you don't think it's an issue that their widgets look different than the rest of your apps, or that their file/open dialogs have different functionality than your other apps, or, yes, that the order of the OK and Cancel buttons may be reversed from the rest of your apps. Silly little things, but there's no need for these little differences.
And yes, some Windows apps look a little different from others, but not in fundamental ways like how they interact with the filesystem, or deal with MIME mappings. These are real issues. Maybe ones you don't mind working around, but then again, don't you think toolkit interoperability (at all possible levels) is at least as important as competing redesigns of the desktop paradigm?
OK, so you don't want Quicken (or other proprietary stuff). Did you read the rest of my post? Do you use the nVidia or ATI drivers or Flash? Do you have any peripherals that you want to connect that will require hardware vendors to provide specs to get the open source support you want? Do you realize that vendors only do that when they think enough of their customers want it?
But feel free to tell them you don't want their drivers, etc. I guess you don't want anybody else to have them either.
Tab catalog (or anything that uses GL). Tabs on top (at least under KDE, can't hide the titlebar, though Chrome handles this fine). Multi-threading (UI becomes unresponsive while connecting to sites). Smooth scrolling. Integration with whatever desktop FF is running under (for themes, file-save dialog, etc).
A lot of this may be the fault of X or GTK or other libraries that FF builds on top of, but the point is that if there weren't competing Linux desktop platforms (or if those platform teams were at least as interested in having their apps integrate smoothly as they are in one-upping one another), Firefox on Linux could probably work as smoothly as it does on Windows.
But feel free to insert pithy comments about MS plugins and completely miss my point.
You assume that Linux is developing in a vacuum, and it magically got good enough to be on your desktop. But that's not how it happened.
Linux got good enough quickly enough that various critical players assumed it would soon (or at least eventually) be a viable desktop alternative. So they began to support it. You probably wouldn't be using Linux on your desktop (at least not exclusively) were there no nVidia drivers, various HP printer drivers, Broadcom (yes, a late comer) and, yes, Flash support available for it. But what you willfully refuse to see is that all of those things became available because their vendors assumed they'd get some advantage from providing them.
There's a whole rash of things that never became available (Quicken, games, etc), because their vendors didn't see the advantage of Linux support, or were holding back to wait for critical mass, or wanted to jump in, but were stymied by the need to choose a platform on top of Linux (GNOME, KDE, etc) to target.
If it becomes obvious that critical mass will never come, those last players may never jump in. And the first group may jump out (no nVidia drivers for new classes of cards, etc). Hell, even Firefox support on Linux is lagging Windows these days. So you can argue all you want that 'choice is good' and 'I can use Linux, so why should I care', but you can only use linux because other people have cared in the past. Wake up. World domination is not the goal - viability is, and that goal can slip through your fingers even though you are happy with your Linux setup today.
I'd be more concerned to find out that he still has large holdings of Microsoft stock.
I fully expect another Nokia situation, where an ex-Microsofter is brought in and sees that the 'obvious' solution is to discard whatever govt agencies are working on and replace them with all Microsoft solutions, regardless of cost. Please prove me wrong.
You have a half a point, and that's exactly what Microsoft was counting on when they built.NET. That enough people would think 'cross-platform within the Windows family' was essentially the same thing as cross-platform. Those types would adopt.NET, and the threat of Java would be blunted. While they're at it, they took some good ideas from Java and added some of their own (yes, they are capable of coming up with good ideas), and made a somewhat improved Windows-only platform that has some minor cross-platform benefits (like support for ARM Windows).
And that whole approach kind of flies if you assume the 'business desktop' of today.
But with the popularity of iPads and the like, even the business community is beginning to understand the freedom that real cross-platform code (which today is most apparent in browser-based apps) enables. Nobody that's not locked into Windows desktop software would ever stake their business on that kind of stuff today. As awful as web apps can be (and they're getting less and less awful all the time), the advantage of server-based apps is obvious to anybody that's ever had to support desktop apps. Especially for database centered apps where the data can't live on the desktop and a network connection is required. So even the cross-platform dream of Java has been mostly superseded by web apps.
.NET is a pretty good implementation of a dying paradigm. Won't be the first time. Meanwhile, the original promise of Java begins to shine when you look at the Android dev kit. To write iOS apps, you need a Mac. To write WinPhone apps, you need a Windows PC (arguably a lower hurdle). But you can write Android apps on a Mac, a PC or Linux, and the binaries work on ARM or X86 devices. Pretty neat. Maybe not as nice an implementation as Visual Studio, but again, the benefits of true cross-platform code become more and more obvious the more and more Comptuer != Windows PC.
Still, the whole shebang will eventually become irrelevant next to the coming web-only paradigm (and yes, ChromeOS is a little ahead of the curve on this). Sure, some things will always want to be desktop-native - traditional cross-platform tools will have an advantage there. But the new standard's gonna be the web, and not even Microsoft can stop that.
At one point, MS may have wanted Bing to be a successful division in its own right, but at this point, all they want is to blunt Google's success enough that Chrome and Google Docs won't eat into the Windows/Office cash cows.
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You'd need 20x the horsepower for the application code but 1x the horsepower for the library code because it wouldn't need to be emulated
Right. I think the WINE folks ought to rig up a hybrid 'emulate the app, execute the libraries' configuration - easy for me to say ;). Then they could support WIN32 X86 code on any platform that can run WINE. That'd let you run your X86 code on those ARM laptops once Linux gets ported to them. Or on ARM-based Macs once they come out (and assuming they still bundle X-Darwin). Hell, even on ARM Windows boxes if Microsoft won't do it. There are already open source X86 emulators out there, right?
But the whole 'emulation will kill the battery' is also a bit of a red herring. On my Nexus One, the display accounts for 70-80% of the battery usage. That didn't change significantly when Android got a JIT compiler and started running native code.
And if Ubuntu wanted they could flog a codec pack on their store. It'd probably cost a few dollars.
I remember when Mandriva shunted you to Fluendo to get non-free codecs. They most certainly did not cost a few dollars. They cost more than an OEM copy of Windows.
Beyond the fact that most software patents are utter nonsense, the licensing terms for them relative to the purchase cost of an OS that contains those licenses (along with much, much more) is ridiculous. We're getting to the point where all software is 'free as in beer', but you need to pay a 'patent tax' to Microsoft or Apple in order to use it.
Which begs another question. If I can buy an OS/X license that gives me the right to use H264 (along with all Microsoft patents - due to MS/Apple non-agression pacts), why can't I pick who to pay for patent licenses? It's nuts that you can either buy an OS from Microsoft or Apple, or else be required to buy licenses from potentially thousands of patent holders. Maybe there should be some kind of ASCAP-like entity that collecs and distributes the royalties (small fixed fee per patent, adding up to, say, the cost of an OEM Windows license). Then everyone could be on a level playing field. And you wouldn't have to pay over and over (either in the form of OS upgrade fees or license renewals). Imagine if your computer, phone or tablet came with a patent license from such a royalty distributer (paid for by the hardware manufacturer). Then you'd get to load whatever software you want without worry. At least it would prevent one patent holder from getting stop orders on their competitors.
More to the point, does this implicitly acknowledge The Beatles and The Rolling Stones as the Micky Mouse's of their generation? And is that good or bad (I think Mickey Mouse was considered cool in the beginning)...
MAPI and TAPI are not the equivalent of QT vs GTK. KDE and GNOME have their own equivalents of MAPI and TAPI as well as their own GUI toolkits - and Apple probably does too.
I like Linux as much as the next guy, but this is akin to calling XP home vs XP Pro the equivalent of Ubuntu vs Fedora. Microsoft's API's may be a mess, but their binary compatibility between platforms is probably the best in the business - a very good thing for developers. Now if that makes Windows 8 a bloated monster that requires seriously pricey hardware to run (or gets horrible battery life), it won't do well as a tablet OS. And if Google can call off the patent dogs and continue to provide a good, free tablet OS with a big installed base, maybe Windows won't win 'just because it's Windows'.
The only similarity that makes me think they are trying to fool people (or at least to specifically copy Apple) is the bit about the launch bar at the bottom of their phone consisting of 4 icons on a gray background.
There was no reason to go with that configuration - especially since it differs so much from vanilla Android - other than to make their phone 'better' because it's more like an iPhone than all those other Android phones out there. It's pretty obvious that that's what they were doing. Whether it merits an injunction against selling their devices is another issue altogether. And that launch bar similarity doesn't carry over to the Galaxy Tab, which has a more Android-like launcher.
And what if you don't want to patent your software 'invention'? Like maybe you get that it's obvious, or don't believe in software patents, or just don't feel like it. But someone else can file for it and prevent you from using your own invention.
Why haven't you read it? I mean if you're going to take the time to post about it and express your opinions to others, you clearly seem invested and are investing time. Is it that forming an opinion from an educated perspective is just too hard so you punt and just take a guess and try to convince others you are correct?
Because one I knew that there was some need to 'hint' the next action depending on the previous when decoding gestures, I could implement the same thing without knowing how Apple did it. That's what's wrong with software patents, they are practically all obvious to implement. What's being patented is the idea, not the implementation. That could possibly be said of some physical patents as well, I suppose, but not in the kind of blanket way it can be said of most software patents.
There existed a very healthy, competitive marketplace around software development without software patents... and now we have chaos and lawyers and an environment fostered largely by the beneficiaries of a PC revolution in which it's hard to imagine that revolution ever having taken place.
They have a patent on a very specific function where "pinch to zoom" is applied multiple times sequentially on a touchscreen and the first one clues the OS into the fact that other gestures within a preset amount of time are likely to be the same UI input even if the normal algorithm for determining it is a "pinch to zoom" would not have detected it as such.
Sounds an awful lot like the timer used to distinguish a doubleclick from a second click. Sure, it's a little different, since 'pinch to zoom' detection doesn't depend on hitting a specific screen element. And, not having read the description, I guess I can't speak definitively on its 'inventiveness'. Still, the bit about a 'preset amount of time' makes it sound none too inventive to me. "The user did a pinch to zoom, if it's still really close to when we detected that, assume they're still trying to zoom'. Brilliant. Execpt it's been done before - albeit not in the specific case of the precious pinch to zoom - because pinch to zoom is a new case. Essentially 'since we did pinch to zoom first, we own everything about it' - a good reason not to make it patentable.
You make some valid points. They'd be much more convincing if Apple wasn't out there suing everybody else as the 'creator' and 20-year owner of the 'pinch to zoom' gesture, 'slide to unlock', scroll bounce and others. These have become the de-facto language of touchscreen interaction, and yes, Apple coined many of the 'words'. But word-coiners don't get the right to sue - and for good reason. You can't have a healthy marketplace with lawyers lurking at every turn.
It's time for the patent office to issue a blanket statement that '...on a phone or tablet' does not turn common use practices into patent-worthy 'inventions'. A picture of a button is still functioning as a button. It's not some new kind of thing. That's precisely why it's so useful - it's an onscreen analog of a common real-world object (invented long ago), so it requires no training to use.
As a matter of fact, Google has managed to find a way to build a profitable ad-funded business in a way that is about as unobtrusive as we've seen. I'm a somewhat reluctant user of Adblock Plus - I hate the manipulativeness of most advertising, but understand that it funds most of the media I consume. But in the case of Google, I actually find their search ads useful. They are easy to ignore, but when I'm actually searching to buy something, they're right there (along with links to alternatives if I don't believe the hype).
I suspect the reason this all works is the fact that Google can charge enough for their targeting abilities (and their ability to attract an ad-resistant type like me) that they don't need to beat you over the head with traditional "you're a worthless piece of shit if you don't buy this fabulous product" advertising. And because this all works, and makes oodles for Google, I have no reason to suspect they're using my info for any other, more nefarious, purposes. They don't need to.
Of course, search ads are only part of Google's business, and Doubleclick is much more conventionally hideous. But that's what I use Adblock Plus for...
There seems to be a concerted effort to spew paranoia about Google lately. I recently listened to an interview with Scott Cleland about his book: 'Why You Can't Trust Google'. The whole thing reeked of a hit job. Mostly just imagining the worst possible implications of every 'questionable' thing Google does. But some out and out conspiracy theorizing too.
He describes how Google has 'copies of the entire web' as if there's any other way to provide the kind of search they provide. And somehow Bing (which, after all, is a direct clone of Google's business model) doesn't have such copies, or somehow has more benign plans for them.
He ranted on about how Android tracks your location. At least in this case, a caller noted that that's optional, but in any case, what about the iPhone?
He painted the 'wifi monitoring' scandal as if it were intended for sniffing your dirty laundry instead of to log wifi locations (as others have done) in order to build a triangulation system to augment GPS location.
Hell, there are folks right here ranting that Google's evil because they don't give away their core software - only millions of lines of other very useful stuff, but hey, evil is evil. And that kind of rant is nuts.
Make no mistake, Google's got lots of info. And they use it to sell targeted advertising. But, so far at least, they're not selling your identity to anyone (I'm not even sure they have your identity if all you use them for is search. And if they are building an identity service, there's still no indication that they plan to put it to evil purposes. I believe they're pretty clear about what they will and will not do with the info they have. But if they decided to go all evil one day, I guess that could be a problem. And never underestimate the potential for incompetence in maintaining all that info securely. So, start lobbying your govt stooges to get some privacy legislation. Still, no reason to act as if everything Google does has nefarious motives. More and more, I'm inclined to assign those motives to whoever is funding these backdoor attacks.
That assumes that the developer is writing drivers for somebody else's hardware. After all, traditionally, it's been the hardware manufacturers that write the drivers, and they give them away for free in order to sell hardware - not to distinguish their 'platform' from another. So the original poster has a point. What is it about phone hardware that would make it disadvantageous to have the driver source publicly available. He makes a case for video drivers, though it a 'semi-disposable' system like a phone, that should be less of an issue. I don't think nVidia is disabling Tegra features in software anyway (though I could be wrong).
Freedom to 'close' open source software is a pretty dicey concept. Besides, you seem to be approaching the GPL issue strictly from the point of view of a corporation that wants to use it. How about the point of view of, oh say, the writers of that software? Presumably the writers chose the GPL because they wanted it to remain open. They saw it as a personal advantage to be able to have others improve on their software and give the improvements back to them in a virtuous circle. I'd bet that same impluse drives BSD contributors too. They're just a little less adamant about controlling the process.
I say this as someone opposed to the 'anti-tivoization' language. As long as Tivo (or Google) makes their changes available, they're in keeping with the GPL virtuous circle. If some of those changes are DRM 'features' you don't like, don't use them. But along with those, you might get some nice bugfixes, or disk access improvements. I don't see why sharing software and encouraging a virtuous circle of sharing requires anybody to share hardware in the same way. The whole point of open source software is that, since software costs nothing to copy, why not share it? That does not apply to hardware, and it's silly to behave as though it did.
The GPL3 anti-patent stuff makes more sense, but it functions as a poison pen, and does hurt OSS adoption. The whole issue of software patents is such a mess that it's hard to even discuss rationally - after all, prohibiting use of your GPL3 code by patent exercisers kind of accepts the validity of exercising software patents (maybe just the reality). It becomes a matter of 'I'm taking my ball and leaving', and it doesn't stop anybody from being sued anyway. The only way to do that is to get the laws changed and the patents thrown out. And I think it would do more to help get the laws changed were a patent-holding user of GPL software to go ahead and sue the writer. How insane does it have to get?
For what it's worth, I think more widespread use of the LGPL would mitigate any harm the licenses do. Again, with the LGPL, you do get all the advantages of sharing applied to your code - just not to everybody else's.
Face it, without the requirement to run WIN32 apps, Windows has no built-in market. Unless Microsoft wants to give it away for a pittance, Windows 8 won't be able to compete with Android tablets, let alone iPads. Who's gonna pay an extra hundred bucks for the MS OS on top of their hardware. I imagine Microsoft will somehow make it so you can't run the tablet version on any other hardware, so they're free to give it away without cannibalizing their desktop profits, but still...
Maybe if they can convince enough people that they want to run MSOffice on a tablet, and give Win8 tabs an exclusive...
It almost brings to mind the Linux desktop situation. Sure the underlying engine (linux kernel, drivers, etc) is the same across distros, like the basic ARM processor instruction set is the same for ARM. But all the glue that holds a system together is different. Choice of desktops, sound systems, desktop interprocess communications. Every distro puts together a Linux 'system' from the Linux kernel, X11 and various combinations of these other software components the way every ARM box generates a system from an ARM processor and various other hardware components.
At least it seems like Linus understands the advantages of standardization.
And all the 'cruft' required to run PC-DOS 1.0 doesn't seem to hurt the performance of all that PC hardware. The software analog would be the code required to maintain backward compatibility at least across a given set of tools.
Well then he may as well give up right now. If Gnome OS is on the same level as Android (i.e. a 'mobile' OS that runs apps specifically targeted to it), then it's gonna fail. Android has already won that battle, and for good reason. There are tens of thousands of developers who have chosen to target Android, and the network effects have already kicked in. Android ABI's are (mostly) backward compatible, so it's posible to actually release binaries that work on most Android devices. And speaking of Android devices, the hardware vendors make sure everything works.
Gnome (and KDE) still work on traditional PC's and netbooks - I still use them. If they understood why Android is successfull, and worked better together, they may have achieved that kind of success already in their hardware niches. Hell, this stuff's open source, how come there's no community building custom Gnome OS ROMs for, say, the Nook Color? Because it won't work well there. But, hey, they're all scratching their itches, and I guess I'll piggyback on top of them as long as I can still get a PC with drivers for my hardware. But they're not making it any easier for the Linux boosters inside nVidia, Adobe, etc to make their case to their management.
The problem is that people want (and need) to be able to run apps from these different 'OS's' simultaneously. And it can be done, of course - as you said, they're just toolkits on top of X11 on top of Linux. But all the aspects of apps that need to work together are out of sync. I don't care how your preferred launcher and window manager look (after all, that's all GNOME 3 is), but I do care that they at least attempt to conform to some 'linux desktop' standards so that all kinds of apps can behave as similarly as possible, regardless of your choice of launcher and window manager. That is, if you chose to run under KDE, you get a KDE file dialog in your GNOME apps, and your GNOME apps can embed previews in the KDE file manager (and vice versa). There's no technical reason that can't be done, if it were a high priority for all the players. But statements like "from an end-user perspective and a third-party-developer perspective GNOME and KDE are different operating systems." treat toolkit coexistence as unnecessary, and perhaps not even desirable. And that's why Linux will never get 3rd party apps.
I think you meant that as a joke, but seriously. Has there been a major management shake-up at Mozilla recently? Has their mission statement changed? Because it seems like somebody over there has decided that it's no longer enough to maintain a significant piece of the pie - significant enough to help guarantee that the web remains based on open standards.
They seem to be in full-on competition mode, now. Competition for what? If it's to remain relevant, so that their original goals remain relevant, I guess that's fine (though why do they think they're heading for irrelevance?). And copying the good bits of Chrome (and even IE or Safari) is fine too. But arbitrary changes in versioning? Mozilla's versioning scheme used to mean something. Minor updates (no API changes) vs major stuff (expect to wait a few weeks for all your extensions to become available again). The new scheme will doubtless have both kinds of updates, but no (easy) way to know which is which. Why would they want to do that? Aren't there better ways of encouraging users to update than hiding what the update does? Mozilla already can autoupdate within a major version. Do they really think it's safe to autoupdate between major versions? Mozilla's extensibility is it's greatest strength, but it does make major updates more difficult. That's no reason to force updates that are guaranteed to break things.
They run 'without issue', as long as you don't think it's an issue that their widgets look different than the rest of your apps, or that their file/open dialogs have different functionality than your other apps, or, yes, that the order of the OK and Cancel buttons may be reversed from the rest of your apps. Silly little things, but there's no need for these little differences.
And yes, some Windows apps look a little different from others, but not in fundamental ways like how they interact with the filesystem, or deal with MIME mappings. These are real issues. Maybe ones you don't mind working around, but then again, don't you think toolkit interoperability (at all possible levels) is at least as important as competing redesigns of the desktop paradigm?
OK, so you don't want Quicken (or other proprietary stuff). Did you read the rest of my post? Do you use the nVidia or ATI drivers or Flash? Do you have any peripherals that you want to connect that will require hardware vendors to provide specs to get the open source support you want? Do you realize that vendors only do that when they think enough of their customers want it?
But feel free to tell them you don't want their drivers, etc. I guess you don't want anybody else to have them either.
Tab catalog (or anything that uses GL).
Tabs on top (at least under KDE, can't hide the titlebar, though Chrome handles this fine).
Multi-threading (UI becomes unresponsive while connecting to sites).
Smooth scrolling.
Integration with whatever desktop FF is running under (for themes, file-save dialog, etc).
A lot of this may be the fault of X or GTK or other libraries that FF builds on top of, but the point is that if there weren't competing Linux desktop platforms (or if those platform teams were at least as interested in having their apps integrate smoothly as they are in one-upping one another), Firefox on Linux could probably work as smoothly as it does on Windows.
But feel free to insert pithy comments about MS plugins and completely miss my point.
You assume that Linux is developing in a vacuum, and it magically got good enough to be on your desktop. But that's not how it happened.
Linux got good enough quickly enough that various critical players assumed it would soon (or at least eventually) be a viable desktop alternative. So they began to support it. You probably wouldn't be using Linux on your desktop (at least not exclusively) were there no nVidia drivers, various HP printer drivers, Broadcom (yes, a late comer) and, yes, Flash support available for it. But what you willfully refuse to see is that all of those things became available because their vendors assumed they'd get some advantage from providing them.
There's a whole rash of things that never became available (Quicken, games, etc), because their vendors didn't see the advantage of Linux support, or were holding back to wait for critical mass, or wanted to jump in, but were stymied by the need to choose a platform on top of Linux (GNOME, KDE, etc) to target.
If it becomes obvious that critical mass will never come, those last players may never jump in. And the first group may jump out (no nVidia drivers for new classes of cards, etc). Hell, even Firefox support on Linux is lagging Windows these days. So you can argue all you want that 'choice is good' and 'I can use Linux, so why should I care', but you can only use linux because other people have cared in the past. Wake up. World domination is not the goal - viability is, and that goal can slip through your fingers even though you are happy with your Linux setup today.
I'd be more concerned to find out that he still has large holdings of Microsoft stock.
I fully expect another Nokia situation, where an ex-Microsofter is brought in and sees that the 'obvious' solution is to discard whatever govt agencies are working on and replace them with all Microsoft solutions, regardless of cost. Please prove me wrong.
You have a half a point, and that's exactly what Microsoft was counting on when they built .NET. That enough people would think 'cross-platform within the Windows family' was essentially the same thing as cross-platform. Those types would adopt .NET, and the threat of Java would be blunted. While they're at it, they took some good ideas from Java and added some of their own (yes, they are capable of coming up with good ideas), and made a somewhat improved Windows-only platform that has some minor cross-platform benefits (like support for ARM Windows).
And that whole approach kind of flies if you assume the 'business desktop' of today.
But with the popularity of iPads and the like, even the business community is beginning to understand the freedom that real cross-platform code (which today is most apparent in browser-based apps) enables. Nobody that's not locked into Windows desktop software would ever stake their business on that kind of stuff today. As awful as web apps can be (and they're getting less and less awful all the time), the advantage of server-based apps is obvious to anybody that's ever had to support desktop apps. Especially for database centered apps where the data can't live on the desktop and a network connection is required. So even the cross-platform dream of Java has been mostly superseded by web apps.
.NET is a pretty good implementation of a dying paradigm. Won't be the first time. Meanwhile, the original promise of Java begins to shine when you look at the Android dev kit. To write iOS apps, you need a Mac. To write WinPhone apps, you need a Windows PC (arguably a lower hurdle). But you can write Android apps on a Mac, a PC or Linux, and the binaries work on ARM or X86 devices. Pretty neat. Maybe not as nice an implementation as Visual Studio, but again, the benefits of true cross-platform code become more and more obvious the more and more Comptuer != Windows PC.
Still, the whole shebang will eventually become irrelevant next to the coming web-only paradigm (and yes, ChromeOS is a little ahead of the curve on this). Sure, some things will always want to be desktop-native - traditional cross-platform tools will have an advantage there. But the new standard's gonna be the web, and not even Microsoft can stop that.
At one point, MS may have wanted Bing to be a successful division in its own right, but at this point, all they want is to blunt Google's success enough that Chrome and Google Docs won't eat into the Windows/Office cash cows.