So... what's the solution. GPL code exists, regardless of what you, Microsoft or anybody else thinks of it. So you need to tell your developers not to copy it into your apps (unless it's LGPL, which is fine).
Are you suggesting the GPL should be outlawed or invalidated? If so, on what grounds? That it encourages people to stupidly use it where they're not allowed?
And by the way, when such mistakes are made, I think all you have to do is remove the offending code. I don't think anybody's ever been forced to GPL their code because of inadvertent addition of GPL'd stuff.
Monopolies in which the owner was convicted of illegal abuse/tying have some limits. Sure, FAT/VFAT weren't specifically addressed, but the DOJ was supposed to be keeping a watch over this kind of thing. Besides, there's no player in the auto industry with the kind of monopoly Microsoft has in the PC industry.
I think the EU acutally insisted that MS wasn't allowed to use the CIFS wire protocols to keep other file servers from working with Windows. Of course, they don't have software patents over there. Good thing, that. Or are you saying it's a good thing that Microsoft is able to charge TomTom for the privelege of connecting their device to a PC? If you think that, then we just disagree.
Lets take Microsoft's long filename feature for legacy FAT.. its the method of doing it that is patented and you are free to do it another way (better ways.. worse ways..) You are not prevented from providing long filename support by the patent.
The only argument is that those other ways that arent covered wont be compatible with Microsoft's method, but thats exactly what patents are meant to protect! It is the INTENTION of patents to prevent you from providing a knock-off for the term of the patent...
completely missing my point. The ONLY reason to use the FAT method is for compatibility. The ONLY reason to want compatibility is that Windows has a monopoly. Nobody's copying this method to improve their own filesystem. They need to copy Microsoft's crappy filesystem in order to remain in business. There was an antitrust ruling about that.
Apple's got a problem competing with commodity devices that do much the same thing that theirs do. So they go after Android. But then what? I imagine Microsoft has blanket access to all Apple patents left over from some old Windows vs Mac settlement that Apple had to take to fend off oblivion in the 90's. So if they kill off Android, it will be mostly to the benifit of WiMo. I don't get it. Apple and Google are more natural allies than enemies. The iPhone's loaded with Google goodies (maps, YouTube, gmail, etc). Sure, Google wants a (fairly big) piece of the pie. But Microsoft wants it all.
FF5 left me dead in the water already - hangs up withing minutes of starting (even with all extensions disabled). I could care less about the version number, but I'd really like the new version to work, especially since it downloaded and installed itself automatically on top of my working 4.0. I'd love to go back to 4.0, though I don't see a 4.0 download at mozilla.org.
So not only has Mozilla resorted to hyping their version numbers, they're also foisting beta-quality code on users who just might want to stick with what's already working. And FF4 was working fine for me (once I re-did all my UI customizations to work again after they were broken by the new tabs-on-top UI changes).
Software patents are a different kind of animal than other patents, and Microsoft's been on both ends of the evil spectrum in this regard.
Software patents are rarely used for simply collecting appropriate royalties on a software 'invention'. More commonly, they're either used to shake down rich companies (like Microsoft, who have been the victims of such trolls) or they're used in an anti-competitive manner (mainly by Microsoft) to punish companies that have the nerve to build successful products without using Microsoft (or Oracle, or...) software.
The VFAT patent is a case in point. Nobody uses VFAT because they think it's a great filesystem. No modern filesystem uses the patented VFAT 'dual-naming' system, but products have used VFAT because that's the easiest way to make products that need to connect to a computer work with 90+ percent of the computers out there. Royalties on VFAT should be struck down based on the non-innovative technology in question (basically a kludge to fix a broken filesystem). They should also be struck down based on their anti-competitive nature. VFAT royalties are a form of illegal tying to a monopoly product. As are any patents on CIFS, or other communications protocols built in to Windows.
But how about a so-called 'legitimate' software patent? In the case of a piece of patented hardware, somebody who wants to use that hardware in their invention will buy the hardware, which would come with a license to use the patent. In fact, they might have to buy the hardware from the patent-holder. There would be a cost involved, but it wouldn't be much more than the cost of the part without the patent license. Now look at the Android patents. There's a patent on displaying text in a web page prior to downloading the embeddded graphics. Leaving aside whether Microsoft actually 'invented' that, in less time than it took to type that sentence, I know how to implement it, using no Microsoft code. And yet Microsoft is charging $5 per unit for phones incorporating this (and a few other similarly trivial) patented inventions. And for a few dollars more, they'll sell you WinMo7, a full-blown platform of which the patented ideas are a negligible part. How about I buy the patented stuff for an appropriate fraction of the full $15 WinMo, and you can keep the rest? The purpose of charging these royalties is to make a free OS cost essentially as much as the Microsoft offering. But setting prices this way is anti-competitive. The Windows (and Office) monopolies already give MS several competitive steps up in entering new arenas where interaction with those products is important. But they want more. They always want more.
Not all software inventions consist of simple UI tweaks or IsNot operators
...and yet software patents are being granted on simple UI tweaks as well as true innovations costing millions in R&D. Instead of using the rare cases of the truly novel to justify the stupid, obvious stuff, why don't you make the case for changing the patentability laws to weed out the junk? Perhaps by dictating how much of a license fee can be charged. How can the patent office or Congress be okay with allowing royalties of 30-100% of the cost of WinMo7 for 'innovations' that involve a few lines among hundreds of millions of lines of code? Seriously, some attempt should be made to guarantee that licensing costs for software patents reflect the importance of the feature to the overall software product that contains it.
Well, the problem I'm having is that FF5 doesn't work at all on my Windows system at work. The Linux version at home works fine, but the Windows install at work hangs constantly and is unusable (even with all extensions disabled), something that's never happened to me with a Firefox update (FF4 worked well on this box). So, despite the 'fact' that this is just a case of a trivial 4.1 update being called 5.0 for some marketing reason, it seems like *something* big has changed.
I guess I'll eventually try wiping my profile and reinstalling (really nasty to have to do for an official release), but in the meantime, I've become a (somewhat satisfied) Chrome user. Nice going, Mozilla.
The problem is that Android runs an emulator (or at least a JIT compiler), and doing that under an emulated ARM instruction set is hugely inefficient. Most emulators emulate the application instructions, but fall back to native code to perform all system operations.
As mentioned before, though, Google should definitely make their emulator native X86. The apps are going to be emulated or JIT'd anyway, but why on earth do processir emulation for the OS (both the Linux kernel and the native parts of Android)? Isn't the whole point of a byte-code based system its processor independence?
The internet didn't kill local news or newspapers, they killed themselves by deciding to stop reporting news and start shaping and creating news.
It's a combination. Most local newspapers these days are a mishmash of AP stories and the local school lunch menu. That's a pretty easy target for the internet, where all the same reporting is available online from other sources. That doesn't mean that the internet didn't strike the final blow, only that there wasn't much left to kill.
The other issue is the threat to serious news gathering that has nothing to do with the 'happy time' TV model. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. Those vital parts of the machinery of news gathering are threatened too. And we 'fair use' advocates might be part of the problem. When you can get the gist of the news at Huffington Post, and the actual source gets no revenue from that, you've got an unsustainable model. The fair use doctrine needs to be tailored for different situations. Just because we think satire deserves protection, doesn't mean news aggregation deserves to make profit off of other people's content. But news aggregation is useful too. So how about getting the laws in line with reality. Let HuffPo keep their front page and all the ad revenue it generates. But no posting the guts of the story without permission and a deal to share the ad revenue from those pates that's acceptable to both parties.
How about applying 'unreasonable seizure' to collecting royalties or removing a 'potential infringer' from the market prior to determination of infringement?
1. "A patent shall be presumed valid." and 2. "The burden of establishing invalidity of a patent or any claim thereof shall rest on the party asserting such invalidity."
Hmmm. Maybe there is something unconstitutional. At the bottom of it all, this case is about the 'crime' of patent infringement, and if there's any question that the patent is not valid, then the violator should have the opportunity to 'establish invalidity' with the presumption of innocence. I.e. no collection of royalties or 'ceasing to infringe' until the validity of the patent has been established. Just because the court is supposed to presume the patent is valid when challenged, doesn't mean that a supposed infringer isn't also entitled to his presumption of innocence.
There's a reason why everybody's chasing the 'tablet experience'. It's because the desktop has been locked up in an (apparently) unbreakable monopoly. So the only place where there's a (relatively) level playing field is in phones and tablets. The problem all Linux distros face is lack of a desktop market to play in and, yes, lack of a common Linux API for developers to code to.
Android has proven that 'Linux' isn't the problem. Given a marketplace that doesn't 'require' MS applications and legacy 3rd party stuff, add on a standard GUI API the developers can target, and you have a huge success.
Microsoft, on the other hand is chasing the tablet interface, because in typical fashion, they feel they need to 'win' everything. But if only Microsoft doesn't manage to convince the world you need Word, Excel and Exchange on a tablet, iOs and Android can continue to be industry leaders. Presumably Windows 8 tablets will have some significant software charge - unless Microsoft decides to sell tablet hardware. The high price of Android tablets so far has not been an encouraging trend - my Nook Color, on the other hand, is quite encouraging.
Wine already has their own implementations of native Windows libraries, so they should be able to rebuild those native for ARM. No need to use Microsoft's libraries. In fact, depending on just how incompatible Windows 8 ends up being (.NET only?), Wine might be the only way to get native Win32 C/C++ code to run - assuming WINE itself can run in whatever sandboxed environment MS releases for ARM.
WINE native Windows libraries + X86 emulation for app logic should work for ARM Linux as well. And performance shouldn't be all that bad, assuming the app isn't doing crazy amounts of processing. Better than the old virtual PC pure emulation that people used to run on PPC Macs.
Cawley put on evidence that Google used Bedrock's Linux code on its servers (although Google got rid of the code before trial).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody used 'Bedrock's Linux code'. Bedrock doesn't have any Linux code. They have a patent on an idea that's implemented in Linux code written by Linux developers with no help from Bedrock. Whether that idea is worthy of patent protection is another story entirely. Ummmm.... NO!
Whatever you think of software patents, the anti-trust angle is a potent one here.
The main patent that Microsoft has repeatedly been able to use to extort money (and patent credibility) from makers of linux-based devices is the Fat32 'long/short' name trick. This 'innovation' is essentially a patch to a bad design that nobody would use if they didn't have to use it to be compatible with 90% of the computers out there. TomTom doesn't use FAT32 because it's technically elegant - they use it because their customers have Windows PC's and won't buy their product if it won't 'just work' with their PC.
Microsoft's not supposed to be using their monopoly in this way. They didn't write the offending code, so the only thing to 'license' is the inane patent - worth exactly $0. So even if the courts don't throw out all software patents, the DOJ ought to require 0 licensing for 'windows interoperability' patents.
It is really weird to think of touch gestures as 'inventions'. They're more akin to words in sign language. What's the purpose of language if it's not allowed to become universal. Apple has the best word for 'enlarge', Palm has the best word for 'delete', but nobody has a decent overall language, and patents will prevent any from emerging. It's nuts.
And how about this limitation: "there shall be no patents granted for simulations of existing real-world objects or inventions". It's the act of simulating something on a computer that's inventive - not the specific simulation. And computer simulations of the real world are old enough to be non-patentable. No more patents on 'tabbed folders', 'progress bars' and the like. Computer interfaces are just a way of mapping the world onto a 2D screen. Doing it in the first place was inventive, the specifics are uninteresting.
There is no whole idea of Linux, and if there were, it would certainly not be a vague idea like 'choice'. I'd say the best candidate for the whole idea would be freedom. And, yes, I suppose freedom includes freedom of choice. But choice of multiple, marginally compatible desktop layers is probably not what Linus (or Stallman, etc) had in mind. Sure it's good that it's possible. It's just not good that it's inevitable. Nor is it good that no 'choice' has been good enough for everybody to finally say - this works well enough for me that I'm willing to compromise so that I can eventually actually find and buy a linux desktop system.
But that's okay too, I guess. Because the choice is being made for us by the marketplace. And that choice seems to be... Android. I was in Barnes & Noble today picking up a Nook Color, and the sales girl said to me "before you root it, you might want to wait a week or so for the Froyo update that's coming out". I was astonished that she knew what rooting and Froyo were. When I asked whether the update will prevent me from rooting it, she said "No, it's Android, you can do whatever you want with it". So the public is finally beginning to know something about software 'freedom' and 'choice'. But not once did she mention KDE, GNOME, or even Linux in that context.
And I say this as a longetime (and largely satisfied) KDE user.
Lucky for you, Google's model for maximizing profit depends on a free and open internet based on freely implemented standards. And they do that so they can keep making a bundle providing the best internet search tool around (with the least obtrusive advertising model). That means Google makes money by making Android exactly what you want it to be. A pretty good deal all around. No wonder nobody's screaming that they're against software freedom - they're not.
My company recently outsourced all development to an Indian firm that talks a great line about.NET. That sat well with the highly-placed idiots that undertook to do this, but the results have been a disaster. Why? Because none of the stuff being outsourced was written in.NET, duh? Much as the owners of this company want to sell their souls to Microsoft, they don't have a code base that lends itself to.NET'ification. The code works, and has strengths of its own, but square peg; round hole. And by the way, these outsourcers are not particularly good programmers in the first place. Nor are they good at (or even encouraged in) thinking creatively. And this is one of the biggest outsourcing outfits.
So, sure, if you've got VB code you want to 'modernize',.NET's probably the best route. If you have anything else,.NET expertise is mostly irrelevant, and to the extent that.NET promises management the ability to clone coding drones at will and move them among different projects as needed, the dynamic of buying into that 'promise' is IMO a recipe for failure. At our company, they're already talking about throwing away the existing code base and starting over in.NET. Not because it's a good idea, but because they've dug a hole with no other exit. Better to survive a few more years dangling the prospect of a shiny new.NET app in front of the investors. Never mind that the (huge, vertical market) app will never materialize in time to be relevant in the market.
Besides, that argument is not a real argument: if they take some then change it to the point it can no longer be merged in the original code base then it has no point in residing in that code base because it lacks interoperability! So what you're saying is: "I can't use this with my other stuff because it's not usable with that other stuff". That's a circular argument.
Well, since you deliberately mis-read the first part of my post, I guess I don't give a shit whether you read the rest...
By 'interoperable', I mean 'works with other code' - usually over the wire. I'm not talking about merging into a code base. The classic example is Kerberos, where Microsoft took open source security code (BSD or otherwise) that was intended to allow different systems to work with each other, and changed it by putting 'secret stuff' in there that nobody but Microsoft knew how to interpret. Because the code wasn't GPL, they could legally do this. But I seriously doubt the original authors intended for anybody to use their code in that way.
But you knew that. You just don't care - or are so pro-Microsoft that you think it's okay to hijack existing standards and, in effect, steal other people's work.
Not yet. But who's to say they might not be planning to add SMB or Active Directory support to the iPad?
Well, if they do, then that's the Tivo 'problem'. I don't think it's a problem (and neither does Linus), though Stallman has a different idea of what constitutes my freedom... But seriously, as long as any changes Apple makes to Samba are contributed back, the GPL2 would be fine with it. And that's where GPL3 goes too far IMO. Sure, you'd like your iPad to be unlocked. But it isn't - so don't buy one. Would you rather that iPad users not be able to access Windows shares - to the benefit of Windows tablets and a potential monoculture?
Of course that's easy for me to say... until B&N decides to prevent rooting the Nook color.
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So... what's the solution. GPL code exists, regardless of what you, Microsoft or anybody else thinks of it. So you need to tell your developers not to copy it into your apps (unless it's LGPL, which is fine).
Are you suggesting the GPL should be outlawed or invalidated? If so, on what grounds? That it encourages people to stupidly use it where they're not allowed?
And by the way, when such mistakes are made, I think all you have to do is remove the offending code. I don't think anybody's ever been forced to GPL their code because of inadvertent addition of GPL'd stuff.
Monopolies in which the owner was convicted of illegal abuse/tying have some limits. Sure, FAT/VFAT weren't specifically addressed, but the DOJ was supposed to be keeping a watch over this kind of thing. Besides, there's no player in the auto industry with the kind of monopoly Microsoft has in the PC industry.
I think the EU acutally insisted that MS wasn't allowed to use the CIFS wire protocols to keep other file servers from working with Windows. Of course, they don't have software patents over there. Good thing, that. Or are you saying it's a good thing that Microsoft is able to charge TomTom for the privelege of connecting their device to a PC? If you think that, then we just disagree.
Why not just stay in the hardware business and produce an android phone with their mail service as a value-add?
It's not that their hardware sucks. Its that they're trying to go it alone with a smartphone OS, and were too late to make that work.
Lets take Microsoft's long filename feature for legacy FAT .. its the method of doing it that is patented and you are free to do it another way (better ways.. worse ways..) You are not prevented from providing long filename support by the patent.
The only argument is that those other ways that arent covered wont be compatible with Microsoft's method, but thats exactly what patents are meant to protect! It is the INTENTION of patents to prevent you from providing a knock-off for the term of the patent...
completely missing my point. The ONLY reason to use the FAT method is for compatibility. The ONLY reason to want compatibility is that Windows has a monopoly. Nobody's copying this method to improve their own filesystem. They need to copy Microsoft's crappy filesystem in order to remain in business. There was an antitrust ruling about that.
Apple's got a problem competing with commodity devices that do much the same thing that theirs do. So they go after Android. But then what? I imagine Microsoft has blanket access to all Apple patents left over from some old Windows vs Mac settlement that Apple had to take to fend off oblivion in the 90's. So if they kill off Android, it will be mostly to the benifit of WiMo. I don't get it. Apple and Google are more natural allies than enemies. The iPhone's loaded with Google goodies (maps, YouTube, gmail, etc). Sure, Google wants a (fairly big) piece of the pie. But Microsoft wants it all.
FF5 left me dead in the water already - hangs up withing minutes of starting (even with all extensions disabled). I could care less about the version number, but I'd really like the new version to work, especially since it downloaded and installed itself automatically on top of my working 4.0. I'd love to go back to 4.0, though I don't see a 4.0 download at mozilla.org.
So not only has Mozilla resorted to hyping their version numbers, they're also foisting beta-quality code on users who just might want to stick with what's already working. And FF4 was working fine for me (once I re-did all my UI customizations to work again after they were broken by the new tabs-on-top UI changes).
Software patents are a different kind of animal than other patents, and Microsoft's been on both ends of the evil spectrum in this regard.
Software patents are rarely used for simply collecting appropriate royalties on a software 'invention'. More commonly, they're either used to shake down rich companies (like Microsoft, who have been the victims of such trolls) or they're used in an anti-competitive manner (mainly by Microsoft) to punish companies that have the nerve to build successful products without using Microsoft (or Oracle, or...) software.
The VFAT patent is a case in point. Nobody uses VFAT because they think it's a great filesystem. No modern filesystem uses the patented VFAT 'dual-naming' system, but products have used VFAT because that's the easiest way to make products that need to connect to a computer work with 90+ percent of the computers out there. Royalties on VFAT should be struck down based on the non-innovative technology in question (basically a kludge to fix a broken filesystem). They should also be struck down based on their anti-competitive nature. VFAT royalties are a form of illegal tying to a monopoly product. As are any patents on CIFS, or other communications protocols built in to Windows.
But how about a so-called 'legitimate' software patent? In the case of a piece of patented hardware, somebody who wants to use that hardware in their invention will buy the hardware, which would come with a license to use the patent. In fact, they might have to buy the hardware from the patent-holder. There would be a cost involved, but it wouldn't be much more than the cost of the part without the patent license. Now look at the Android patents. There's a patent on displaying text in a web page prior to downloading the embeddded graphics. Leaving aside whether Microsoft actually 'invented' that, in less time than it took to type that sentence, I know how to implement it, using no Microsoft code. And yet Microsoft is charging $5 per unit for phones incorporating this (and a few other similarly trivial) patented inventions. And for a few dollars more, they'll sell you WinMo7, a full-blown platform of which the patented ideas are a negligible part. How about I buy the patented stuff for an appropriate fraction of the full $15 WinMo, and you can keep the rest? The purpose of charging these royalties is to make a free OS cost essentially as much as the Microsoft offering. But setting prices this way is anti-competitive. The Windows (and Office) monopolies already give MS several competitive steps up in entering new arenas where interaction with those products is important. But they want more. They always want more.
Not all software inventions consist of simple UI tweaks or IsNot operators
...and yet software patents are being granted on simple UI tweaks as well as true innovations costing millions in R&D. Instead of using the rare cases of the truly novel to justify the stupid, obvious stuff, why don't you make the case for changing the patentability laws to weed out the junk? Perhaps by dictating how much of a license fee can be charged. How can the patent office or Congress be okay with allowing royalties of 30-100% of the cost of WinMo7 for 'innovations' that involve a few lines among hundreds of millions of lines of code? Seriously, some attempt should be made to guarantee that licensing costs for software patents reflect the importance of the feature to the overall software product that contains it.
Well, the problem I'm having is that FF5 doesn't work at all on my Windows system at work. The Linux version at home works fine, but the Windows install at work hangs constantly and is unusable (even with all extensions disabled), something that's never happened to me with a Firefox update (FF4 worked well on this box). So, despite the 'fact' that this is just a case of a trivial 4.1 update being called 5.0 for some marketing reason, it seems like *something* big has changed.
I guess I'll eventually try wiping my profile and reinstalling (really nasty to have to do for an official release), but in the meantime, I've become a (somewhat satisfied) Chrome user. Nice going, Mozilla.
The problem is that Android runs an emulator (or at least a JIT compiler), and doing that under an emulated ARM instruction set is hugely inefficient. Most emulators emulate the application instructions, but fall back to native code to perform all system operations.
As mentioned before, though, Google should definitely make their emulator native X86. The apps are going to be emulated or JIT'd anyway, but why on earth do processir emulation for the OS (both the Linux kernel and the native parts of Android)? Isn't the whole point of a byte-code based system its processor independence?
The internet didn't kill local news or newspapers, they killed themselves by deciding to stop reporting news and start shaping and creating news.
It's a combination. Most local newspapers these days are a mishmash of AP stories and the local school lunch menu. That's a pretty easy target for the internet, where all the same reporting is available online from other sources. That doesn't mean that the internet didn't strike the final blow, only that there wasn't much left to kill.
The other issue is the threat to serious news gathering that has nothing to do with the 'happy time' TV model. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. Those vital parts of the machinery of news gathering are threatened too. And we 'fair use' advocates might be part of the problem. When you can get the gist of the news at Huffington Post, and the actual source gets no revenue from that, you've got an unsustainable model. The fair use doctrine needs to be tailored for different situations. Just because we think satire deserves protection, doesn't mean news aggregation deserves to make profit off of other people's content. But news aggregation is useful too. So how about getting the laws in line with reality. Let HuffPo keep their front page and all the ad revenue it generates. But no posting the guts of the story without permission and a deal to share the ad revenue from those pates that's acceptable to both parties.
Yeah, I was afraid of that.
How about applying 'unreasonable seizure' to collecting royalties or removing a 'potential infringer' from the market prior to determination of infringement?
1. "A patent shall be presumed valid."
and
2. "The burden of establishing invalidity of a patent or any claim thereof shall rest on the party asserting such invalidity."
Hmmm. Maybe there is something unconstitutional. At the bottom of it all, this case is about the 'crime' of patent infringement, and if there's any question that the patent is not valid, then the violator should have the opportunity to 'establish invalidity' with the presumption of innocence. I.e. no collection of royalties or 'ceasing to infringe' until the validity of the patent has been established. Just because the court is supposed to presume the patent is valid when challenged, doesn't mean that a supposed infringer isn't also entitled to his presumption of innocence.
True, we want to change the system, but could you please wait until we've sued that pesky Android system out of existence...
Thanks so much,
Microsoft
There's a reason why everybody's chasing the 'tablet experience'. It's because the desktop has been locked up in an (apparently) unbreakable monopoly. So the only place where there's a (relatively) level playing field is in phones and tablets. The problem all Linux distros face is lack of a desktop market to play in and, yes, lack of a common Linux API for developers to code to.
Android has proven that 'Linux' isn't the problem. Given a marketplace that doesn't 'require' MS applications and legacy 3rd party stuff, add on a standard GUI API the developers can target, and you have a huge success.
Microsoft, on the other hand is chasing the tablet interface, because in typical fashion, they feel they need to 'win' everything. But if only Microsoft doesn't manage to convince the world you need Word, Excel and Exchange on a tablet, iOs and Android can continue to be industry leaders. Presumably Windows 8 tablets will have some significant software charge - unless Microsoft decides to sell tablet hardware. The high price of Android tablets so far has not been an encouraging trend - my Nook Color, on the other hand, is quite encouraging.
Wine already has their own implementations of native Windows libraries, so they should be able to rebuild those native for ARM. No need to use Microsoft's libraries. In fact, depending on just how incompatible Windows 8 ends up being (.NET only?), Wine might be the only way to get native Win32 C/C++ code to run - assuming WINE itself can run in whatever sandboxed environment MS releases for ARM.
WINE native Windows libraries + X86 emulation for app logic should work for ARM Linux as well. And performance shouldn't be all that bad, assuming the app isn't doing crazy amounts of processing. Better than the old virtual PC pure emulation that people used to run on PPC Macs.
Cawley put on evidence that Google used Bedrock's Linux code on its servers (although Google got rid of the code before trial).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody used 'Bedrock's Linux code'. Bedrock doesn't have any Linux code. They have a patent on an idea that's implemented in Linux code written by Linux developers with no help from Bedrock. Whether that idea is worthy of patent protection is another story entirely. Ummmm.... NO!
They require silverlight to stream movies, but the rest of the site doesn't.
Whatever you think of software patents, the anti-trust angle is a potent one here.
The main patent that Microsoft has repeatedly been able to use to extort money (and patent credibility) from makers of linux-based devices is the Fat32 'long/short' name trick. This 'innovation' is essentially a patch to a bad design that nobody would use if they didn't have to use it to be compatible with 90% of the computers out there. TomTom doesn't use FAT32 because it's technically elegant - they use it because their customers have Windows PC's and won't buy their product if it won't 'just work' with their PC.
Microsoft's not supposed to be using their monopoly in this way. They didn't write the offending code, so the only thing to 'license' is the inane patent - worth exactly $0. So even if the courts don't throw out all software patents, the DOJ ought to require 0 licensing for 'windows interoperability' patents.
It is really weird to think of touch gestures as 'inventions'. They're more akin to words in sign language. What's the purpose of language if it's not allowed to become universal. Apple has the best word for 'enlarge', Palm has the best word for 'delete', but nobody has a decent overall language, and patents will prevent any from emerging. It's nuts.
And how about this limitation: "there shall be no patents granted for simulations of existing real-world objects or inventions". It's the act of simulating something on a computer that's inventive - not the specific simulation. And computer simulations of the real world are old enough to be non-patentable. No more patents on 'tabbed folders', 'progress bars' and the like. Computer interfaces are just a way of mapping the world onto a 2D screen. Doing it in the first place was inventive, the specifics are uninteresting.
There is no whole idea of Linux, and if there were, it would certainly not be a vague idea like 'choice'. I'd say the best candidate for the whole idea would be freedom. And, yes, I suppose freedom includes freedom of choice. But choice of multiple, marginally compatible desktop layers is probably not what Linus (or Stallman, etc) had in mind. Sure it's good that it's possible. It's just not good that it's inevitable. Nor is it good that no 'choice' has been good enough for everybody to finally say - this works well enough for me that I'm willing to compromise so that I can eventually actually find and buy a linux desktop system.
But that's okay too, I guess. Because the choice is being made for us by the marketplace. And that choice seems to be... Android. I was in Barnes & Noble today picking up a Nook Color, and the sales girl said to me "before you root it, you might want to wait a week or so for the Froyo update that's coming out". I was astonished that she knew what rooting and Froyo were. When I asked whether the update will prevent me from rooting it, she said "No, it's Android, you can do whatever you want with it". So the public is finally beginning to know something about software 'freedom' and 'choice'. But not once did she mention KDE, GNOME, or even Linux in that context.
And I say this as a longetime (and largely satisfied) KDE user.
Lucky for you, Google's model for maximizing profit depends on a free and open internet based on freely implemented standards. And they do that so they can keep making a bundle providing the best internet search tool around (with the least obtrusive advertising model). That means Google makes money by making Android exactly what you want it to be. A pretty good deal all around. No wonder nobody's screaming that they're against software freedom - they're not.
My company recently outsourced all development to an Indian firm that talks a great line about .NET. That sat well with the highly-placed idiots that undertook to do this, but the results have been a disaster. Why? Because none of the stuff being outsourced was written in .NET, duh? Much as the owners of this company want to sell their souls to Microsoft, they don't have a code base that lends itself to .NET'ification. The code works, and has strengths of its own, but square peg; round hole. And by the way, these outsourcers are not particularly good programmers in the first place. Nor are they good at (or even encouraged in) thinking creatively. And this is one of the biggest outsourcing outfits.
So, sure, if you've got VB code you want to 'modernize', .NET's probably the best route. If you have anything else, .NET expertise is mostly irrelevant, and to the extent that .NET promises management the ability to clone coding drones at will and move them among different projects as needed, the dynamic of buying into that 'promise' is IMO a recipe for failure. At our company, they're already talking about throwing away the existing code base and starting over in .NET. Not because it's a good idea, but because they've dug a hole with no other exit. Better to survive a few more years dangling the prospect of a shiny new .NET app in front of the investors. Never mind that the (huge, vertical market) app will never materialize in time to be relevant in the market.
Besides, that argument is not a real argument: if they take some then change it to the point it can no longer be merged in the original code base then it has no point in residing in that code base because it lacks interoperability! So what you're saying is: "I can't use this with my other stuff because it's not usable with that other stuff". That's a circular argument.
Well, since you deliberately mis-read the first part of my post, I guess I don't give a shit whether you read the rest...
By 'interoperable', I mean 'works with other code' - usually over the wire. I'm not talking about merging into a code base. The classic example is Kerberos, where Microsoft took open source security code (BSD or otherwise) that was intended to allow different systems to work with each other, and changed it by putting 'secret stuff' in there that nobody but Microsoft knew how to interpret. Because the code wasn't GPL, they could legally do this. But I seriously doubt the original authors intended for anybody to use their code in that way.
But you knew that. You just don't care - or are so pro-Microsoft that you think it's okay to hijack existing standards and, in effect, steal other people's work.
Not yet. But who's to say they might not be planning to add SMB or Active Directory support to the iPad?
Well, if they do, then that's the Tivo 'problem'. I don't think it's a problem (and neither does Linus), though Stallman has a different idea of what constitutes my freedom... But seriously, as long as any changes Apple makes to Samba are contributed back, the GPL2 would be fine with it. And that's where GPL3 goes too far IMO. Sure, you'd like your iPad to be unlocked. But it isn't - so don't buy one. Would you rather that iPad users not be able to access Windows shares - to the benefit of Windows tablets and a potential monoculture?
Of course that's easy for me to say... until B&N decides to prevent rooting the Nook color.