What is your problem with the dual licensing? If you feel like it you can approach the authors of just about any GPL software and ask them to give you a copy under another license. They are free to tell you to get stuffed or name any price they wish. You are free to accept the GPL or just forget about that software. What makes you think you should be let use the Mysql client in a non-free way (they have a foss excemption for other free licenses)? Do you think you can use any GPL source in this way? If Mysql had wanted to allow such a use they could have simply licensed LGPL, I still don't understand why RMS/FSF has redclared this as a Lesser license when in fact I would personally believe it is the only sensible foss license for many types of software (I like forced source disclosure on distribution). For example why did ogg have to go BSD (and with the approval of the FSF) when surely the LGPL would have guaranteed freedom while allowing ubiquitous use.
Once upon a time there was one company called Palm. They split into two, a hardware company called PalmOne and a software company called PalmSource. Recently the hardware company bought the rights for the Palm name from the software company. Palm the hardware company seems to be bringing out a version of it's Treo palm/phone hybrid's running Windows. PalmSource on the other hand have declared that they are moving to a Linux kernel where the PalmOS as was will be implemented as a software stack on top of this. So the question is will Palm release any more hardware with the Palm software in the future or is this the start of them moving to being another windows oem?
Another dodgy flamebait/. story... while it does mean a website could be forced to serve source code, this is only if the original software distribution included such a feature. This doesn't seem any worse (or abusable) then the clause which basically states that a copyright message presented in the normal interactive running of the program cannot be removed (i.e. abusable but generally non-problematic in practice). The question is if either of them are really worth it as long as all other aspects of the GPL are enforced? Do they bring a real benfit without loss? KISS says these are both unneccessary complications.
The investment firm (Blum) has also called on Novell to increase its investment in Linux and open source software through partnerships and acquisitions to move "further up the stack".
Blum's proposal is broadly similar to CSFB analyst Jason Maynard's suggestion that Novell should focus on software services rather than consulting, increase its emphasis on open source software, and repurchase company stock
So at least the pressue isn't on for them to dump Suse/Linux which was my initial fear on reading the slashdot post. In fact if anything they aree being encouraged to place more focus on it showing even these (presumably) hardened business types can finally see the long term value in FOSS.
8 years ago I had a friend editing a TV Series made up of (12 I think) 5 minute programs in PAL. He had most of a terabyte in expensive fast scsi drives striped by a 5k video card in a dual Xeon (can't remember if 1M or 2M l2 cache). And yes, I really do mean the "video card" handled the drives, he had some more drives for software.
Uncompressed raw video takes a lot of bits.
If you want to produce broadcast quality material you need a machine capable of storing and processing lots of data. If you want it to not be painfully slow (and you plan on doing anything more then some straight cuts) you will want CPU power (preferably with 1M or more cache for standard PAL, too lazy to figure out what cache you would need to hold a small hdtv resolution frame let alone the largest.
If you just want to have a laugh making a few quick "home movies" you can sacrifice buckets of quality and wait for stuff to happen. If you are making something real you will need to be able to store and edit all your footage at least at the camera's raw uncompressed data rate and even now that is a significant drag to a cheap PC.
The bottom line is while Cinelerra is Free software, it is not a simple cheap video editor, it is a broadcast video production suite intended to be used by people who are doing real work with machines built for the job. I'm sure the system requirements help them to cut back on the number of support requests from people simply playing with the software for fun.
So you bought a brand new laptop and tried some Linux distros on it. You were aware your machine was not built for Linux and therefore may not work perfectly (and if not here is mistake number 1). You tried Suse and the installation failed. You tried messing around with the broken Suse installation and got nowhere as you had no idea what you were doing. You do not mention what version of Suse you tried and in the absence of that I am loathe to criticise Suse for a random version of their OS not working on a new laptop, also you don't mention how Suse support dealt with your issue (though I guess you could have gone with a "free" Suse version rather then buying one). Bottom line, some version of Suse doesn't install cleanly on your laptop, I bet I can find a copy of Windows which won't install cleanly either.
As for Freespire... I don't know the answer, but either you are incredibly stupid (or just a troll) or they have a serious problem. During any normal Linux installation you will be asked to supply and administrative password and also to create some more users. When you reach a login screen it is there details which you have supplied during the installation which you will use to access the system. In fact, this is remarkedly similar to what you should do with Windows, except windows has a long time history of making it easy for people to not bother and just have one all-powerful user on the machine. As I say, if you were asked for none of this, were presented with a login screen, and had not been bombarded with some sort of messages about this during the install the Freespire/Linspire (just what is it you installed, the lack of details for anything except the model of your new laptop is annoying) then they have a badly broken system.
Finally, you mention Debian, how you were told you should stay away and that it wasn't for you. Then you make it sound like you proceeded to go and start reading the full Debian Install Guide (or something similar) rather then picking up the system and giving it a go as you claim you did with the others. To make it worse, you say how you were looking at Debian thanks to the fact you had been led to believe it was more flexible and configurable then most. Then you ruin it though be complaining that they document all this (having complained the Linspire didn't seem to document even the most obvious things for you).
In summary if you were not trolling and do want to see how Linux and your laptop should get along, give Kanotix a go, it's a free pre-configured Debian based system using the latest software from the Debian project. It's hardware detection is brilliant and laptops receive an awful lot of attention. If you have any problems with it on your hardware, a trip into it's irc channel will usually see you get very good help (from simple solutions to your problems to developers figuring out how to support your new hardware in future versions). The best bit though is you do not have to install it at all, just boot it from cd and see how you like it. If you like it you can install it in about as much time as it takes to copy 2 Gigabytes from cd onto your hard drive.
However I think you are a troll as anyone who really did behave as you did in the scenarios you outline is just stupid (installing an OS and then giving up because it presented a login screen, deciding to try an OS but giving up because the documentation was too extensive), and I'd rather call you a troll then stupid.
Here in Ireland anyway (afaiu) most of the taxation on petrol (alocohol and tobacco also) is duty. This means that for every litre of petrol sold, they get (say) 50c. So when the price of petrol is 1, the taxation is 50% so the pump is charging 50c and the government the same. Now if the cost of oil doubles and the pump wants to charge you 1, the government will still take 50c leaving you paying 1.50. The form of taxation has meant that while the cost of the good has doubled, the price hasn't. And the government only loses out on the revenue caused by less petrol being bought at the high price, and again you are less likely to lose as much to a 50% increase in price then a 100% increase. Don't expect to see the taxs cut over here and don't expect much of a drop in tax revenue either. Don't kid yourself, the US is feeling this far more then the rest of the world.
You know you may actually have something. Set up a major gaming contest with various suppliers of machines. Don't benchmark, but rotate the players around the machines (keep all ui hardware identical) and use statistics to see which supplier won.
Secondly you could do a rerun of the recent assisted chess competition (afair you couldn't cheat unless you managed to get away with an illegal move) except simply make it a software assisted competition. Bring whatever code you want, but you have to run it on the supplied machines. Again comparitive performance on different platforms amongst all the competitors should yield real results.
Basically set repeatable (but unique so it's a "special" definition of repeatable) challenges which require computer assistence, and see which machine/platform/vendor/os/whatever gives it's users the biggest competitive advantage.
Under most of the worlds system, if you have proof of your knowledge of the idea prior to the filing date then the patent is invalid. This is what prevents submarining, as letting knowledge out before the patent is filed nullifies the patent application. In the scenario you describe, the inventor must find the money required to file before anyone else discovers the idea or simply be happy knowing that nobody will be able to patent the idea. It is not that patents are granted to "first to file" or "first to invent", the patent is either granted to anyone who can establish they came up with the idea first (first to invent) or to anyone who can file a patent application before anyone else knows of the idea (first to file). Simply getting the application into the patent office first does not mean you now own the idea, but it does ensure under the first to file system that nobody else can subsequently patent the idea.
Don't forget the dos alternatives that came first, and which windows deliberately crippled. I wonder how many disgruntled DR.Dos customers ended up pirating msdos in protest but finally buying windows 9x+ after they had helped ms crush the competetion by install base.
So what sort of encryption would you place on a multicast stream? It is the job of the applications involved to determine if encryption is required, not the networks.
Large company/public company mandates the use of Firefox 1.5+ by all employees to ensure minimal descrimination against people requiring accessiblity features to do their work. If a web-app doesn't work on it, it must be fixed. If a supplier/customer site doesn't work with it, then the supplier customer is informed and dropped if they can't fix it (the alternative being that only people who don't need accessibility can work with that supplier/customer). A feature like this arriving in Firefox which is already present in IE is a non-issue, a feature IE does not have arriving though could be the trigger for more conversions. I imagine IE will soon have similar features though if any major customers look like moving, I just hope that all the people who need these features remember that MS will only add them when it will cost them not to, unlike a public monopoly (or Free Software) they have no reason to try and meet all needs, only those which are most economically viable to them.
Your so close to what I was going to say, and saying expressing it better then I was going to!
If I was Steve Jobs:-P I would start OpenOSX which would be a bit like OpenSolaris, i.e. where they feel they have to it would be binary only, but wherever they can it is Open. Now everyone can run an OSX on their cpu compatible box (you could keep pre-Intel mac owners happy this way also). To get the real OSX though, with support, you have to buy OSX hardware, which for now means Apple. I would expect that Apple would do deals as and when they felt it was in their best interests to provide an OSX-OEM version for manufacturers.
The sneeky way to get real revenues from those OpenOSX users would be to basically let buy and install a real OSX, but it is unsupported unless it's installed onto an Apple box! Don't cripple their experience in any way. How many people would still buy a copy of OSX to run on their Dell even if it came with no official support? Let OEMs sell their OSX discs to anyone, and let those discs also install anywhere... but without support:-) Still keep it locked in some way to one copy per machine. So if you want OSX, you can:
Get a pre-installed machine
Install OpenOSX (or a rebuild) and possibly work around limitations (say DVD playback)
Buy an OEM OSX and get the official OS, but unsupported
Buy a retail OSX and get the full OS, but unsupported
Without the OpenOSX, their probably wouldn't be the community support for the unsupported OSXs, but with it Apple could have a community dealing with the problems associated with running OSX on unofficial hardware.
The key is that Apple are extremely unlikely to lose many of their existing sales to this as very few Apple users will be interested in running unsupported. They would probably manage to create many hardware sales though from people who might have some access to a Mac (or even an ipod) and hence an inclination to try running it themslves and then... They would also likely create lots of software sales, which will have a near zero marginal cost (developing an OEM OSX) leading to money for nothing (support is the killer cost, offloading most of their support to OEMs is why MS has such massive profit margins, what does an OEM sale of Windows cost them).
Perhaps Apple is hoping and expecting that hardware manufacturers will start to support OSX with their hardware, but I doubt they are depending on it in any way.
You do realise that PalmSource is moving to Linux, and has basically said it got it wrong a few years ago when it didn't decide to move to Linux then? PalmSource's plan is to build a PalmOS layer on top of a Linux kernel. Timing is everything though so assuming Tapwave weren't happy to wait for this they didn't have alot of choices (assuming they wanted all the regular Palm software).
And to think I was going to suggest that the open source community should try and buy SGI to hang NVidia over a barrel (or at least find out what buying SGI would give as leverage) but I perfer your machiavellian approach:-P
if you want you can just binary edit (by whatever means) the iso to replace lang=de with lang=ie or lang=us or lang=uk or... then you can just hit enter and not worry that isolinux (the bootloader) has a german keymap, unless you have more cheatcodes to add.
Well if you really want to you can boot with the unionfs cheatcode, and then apt-get remove to your hearts content, and then install your now smaller system. As someone else has said though it historically hasn't been worth the effort. If you want something like Knoppix which is installable, try Kanotix!
I think the Big Brother model would be far more realistic. Get the telecoms and broadcast companies to pay the upfront costs and then recoup those costs through advertising (add some product placement) and phone/text polls to vote for the regular evictions?
More seriously, if you really think this wouldn't be the largest media event in the history of the planet (especially if it is devised as such) then I guess you already found your way off the planet. I wouldn't see much risk from an advertisers point of view. If the mission is a success you get massive coverage on landing and return. If the mission fails badly (i.e. craft failure killing all), you get massive coverage at failure time and continued significant coverage for a long time, if anyone survives it would go crazy. Finally if you have a trivial failure (aborted mission, crew safe) you just go again (and if you've any sense you have a whole backup plan ready, including craft as if you don't need them you've got some themepark attraction). Any company with the power to invest at the sort of levels required to make this work could certainly exploit it for a good return.
Read the judgement, the problem is not with a media player, but with a streaming media player, because of the implications Microsoft extending their existing monopoly into a control of media streaming. It is not about the threat that all the alternative players will cease to exist, but that all the alternative streaming servers will (though the two would most likely go hand in hand). When did Microsoft (the company which caught onto the internet real quick) first provide a streaming media player and server, that is the question.
I can see RedHat talking the traditional Server roles (database, web, application), Nose taking the Desktop + Workstation servers, Madriva taking the standalone machines and Debian et al being the true competition for all of them.
Note that I am not suggesting that everything else will dissappear, but that commercial entities will remain localised, be debian based, or be swallowed up (who will take TurboLinux or will it take one of the above). Non-commercial distributions will remain a plenty, but they will be hard pushed to find anything more then a small niche to work in, either hobbyists or specialists.
The bigger question is how big a market can they carve out between them, as long as people are running (at least predominently) free code, I'm not too pushed who gives it to them. Bad practice/business models/methods will fall naturally.
If you feel I've slighted your favourite distro here, I'm sorry, maybe it'll swallow one of the above, but I honestly think we will see the main major linux players collapse to 3 or 4 at most, though 6 of them could be very compatible versions of debian with (for practical purposes) trivial differences. If you must substitute in another distro for debian above go ahead, I just don't see it myself.
I also think this is all a good thing. By having a main few players it is far easier to squash out stupid recuring bugs and compatibility issues, but as it's free software (and I don't see debian going away) where needed any diversity can accomadate itself (the main requirement being self sufficiency either by code/docs/testing or cash in the right places). All I hope is that the consolidations remain friendly so everyone can focus on doing good work and not who they are working for today.
Sounds like a project. Create a gentoo ebuild for a package which will (when it's running) connect to a central server and distribute all your binaries (by package and relevant use flags) with some form of p2p. Use checksums to verify that binaries are good (or at worst it takes multiple matching injectors to get a malformed package to look good). Add a paranoia option to let you control how many packages are actually rebuilt locally anyway to check the files match. Finally add an installer option which lets it pull available packages from this system.
Perhaps Apple will allow/start/sponsor an open source project to bring OSX to all machines. If the communtiy can port the base, when it's in place they'll start producing binaries, when it's ready they will release it as an Apple product. Then never actually release OSX for regular x86 pcs (or even amd64 or intels equivalent) as there will always be too much variety to give the Apple seal of approval, while most people will be able to assemble or get a machine which will run it very well. It would improve very quickly and lots of people will run it, and many will go on to buy Apple (or licensed) hardware for their next purchase. In fact Apple could even arrange special supported editions for large manufacturers, supporting exact platforms, but only where it's worth their while (e.g. Sony want OSX for the PS4 or a Tivo-NG or a line of Tablets they could come in with the cash and money to make it worth Apple's while, the less expansion the easier/cheaper it is). If Apple go this route I could easily see the "Desktop" market becoming a 3 way race within 5 years with OSX and Linux combined matching Windows (and at that point the monopoly can be forgotten).
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What is your problem with the dual licensing? If you feel like it you can approach the authors of just about any GPL software and ask them to give you a copy under another license. They are free to tell you to get stuffed or name any price they wish. You are free to accept the GPL or just forget about that software. What makes you think you should be let use the Mysql client in a non-free way (they have a foss excemption for other free licenses)? Do you think you can use any GPL source in this way? If Mysql had wanted to allow such a use they could have simply licensed LGPL, I still don't understand why RMS/FSF has redclared this as a Lesser license when in fact I would personally believe it is the only sensible foss license for many types of software (I like forced source disclosure on distribution). For example why did ogg have to go BSD (and with the approval of the FSF) when surely the LGPL would have guaranteed freedom while allowing ubiquitous use.
Once upon a time there was one company called Palm. They split into two, a hardware company called PalmOne and a software company called PalmSource. Recently the hardware company bought the rights for the Palm name from the software company. Palm the hardware company seems to be bringing out a version of it's Treo palm/phone hybrid's running Windows. PalmSource on the other hand have declared that they are moving to a Linux kernel where the PalmOS as was will be implemented as a software stack on top of this. So the question is will Palm release any more hardware with the Palm software in the future or is this the start of them moving to being another windows oem?
Another dodgy flamebait /. story ... while it does mean a website could be forced to serve source code, this is only if the original software distribution included such a feature. This doesn't seem any worse (or abusable) then the clause which basically states that a copyright message presented in the normal interactive running of the program cannot be removed (i.e. abusable but generally non-problematic in practice). The question is if either of them are really worth it as long as all other aspects of the GPL are enforced? Do they bring a real benfit without loss? KISS says these are both unneccessary complications.
Yes, I'm sure that is what an investment firm with a 5% stake is after. Those jets are certainly one of the more profitable divisions.
If you want to produce broadcast quality material you need a machine capable of storing and processing lots of data. If you want it to not be painfully slow (and you plan on doing anything more then some straight cuts) you will want CPU power (preferably with 1M or more cache for standard PAL, too lazy to figure out what cache you would need to hold a small hdtv resolution frame let alone the largest.
If you just want to have a laugh making a few quick "home movies" you can sacrifice buckets of quality and wait for stuff to happen. If you are making something real you will need to be able to store and edit all your footage at least at the camera's raw uncompressed data rate and even now that is a significant drag to a cheap PC.
The bottom line is while Cinelerra is Free software, it is not a simple cheap video editor, it is a broadcast video production suite intended to be used by people who are doing real work with machines built for the job. I'm sure the system requirements help them to cut back on the number of support requests from people simply playing with the software for fun.
So you bought a brand new laptop and tried some Linux distros on it. You were aware your machine was not built for Linux and therefore may not work perfectly (and if not here is mistake number 1). You tried Suse and the installation failed. You tried messing around with the broken Suse installation and got nowhere as you had no idea what you were doing. You do not mention what version of Suse you tried and in the absence of that I am loathe to criticise Suse for a random version of their OS not working on a new laptop, also you don't mention how Suse support dealt with your issue (though I guess you could have gone with a "free" Suse version rather then buying one). Bottom line, some version of Suse doesn't install cleanly on your laptop, I bet I can find a copy of Windows which won't install cleanly either. As for Freespire ... I don't know the answer, but either you are incredibly stupid (or just a troll) or they have a serious problem. During any normal Linux installation you will be asked to supply and administrative password and also to create some more users. When you reach a login screen it is there details which you have supplied during the installation which you will use to access the system. In fact, this is remarkedly similar to what you should do with Windows, except windows has a long time history of making it easy for people to not bother and just have one all-powerful user on the machine. As I say, if you were asked for none of this, were presented with a login screen, and had not been bombarded with some sort of messages about this during the install the Freespire/Linspire (just what is it you installed, the lack of details for anything except the model of your new laptop is annoying) then they have a badly broken system.
Finally, you mention Debian, how you were told you should stay away and that it wasn't for you. Then you make it sound like you proceeded to go and start reading the full Debian Install Guide (or something similar) rather then picking up the system and giving it a go as you claim you did with the others. To make it worse, you say how you were looking at Debian thanks to the fact you had been led to believe it was more flexible and configurable then most. Then you ruin it though be complaining that they document all this (having complained the Linspire didn't seem to document even the most obvious things for you).
In summary if you were not trolling and do want to see how Linux and your laptop should get along, give Kanotix a go, it's a free pre-configured Debian based system using the latest software from the Debian project. It's hardware detection is brilliant and laptops receive an awful lot of attention. If you have any problems with it on your hardware, a trip into it's irc channel will usually see you get very good help (from simple solutions to your problems to developers figuring out how to support your new hardware in future versions). The best bit though is you do not have to install it at all, just boot it from cd and see how you like it. If you like it you can install it in about as much time as it takes to copy 2 Gigabytes from cd onto your hard drive.
However I think you are a troll as anyone who really did behave as you did in the scenarios you outline is just stupid (installing an OS and then giving up because it presented a login screen, deciding to try an OS but giving up because the documentation was too extensive), and I'd rather call you a troll then stupid.
Here in Ireland anyway (afaiu) most of the taxation on petrol (alocohol and tobacco also) is duty. This means that for every litre of petrol sold, they get (say) 50c. So when the price of petrol is 1, the taxation is 50% so the pump is charging 50c and the government the same. Now if the cost of oil doubles and the pump wants to charge you 1, the government will still take 50c leaving you paying 1.50. The form of taxation has meant that while the cost of the good has doubled, the price hasn't. And the government only loses out on the revenue caused by less petrol being bought at the high price, and again you are less likely to lose as much to a 50% increase in price then a 100% increase. Don't expect to see the taxs cut over here and don't expect much of a drop in tax revenue either. Don't kid yourself, the US is feeling this far more then the rest of the world.
You know you may actually have something. Set up a major gaming contest with various suppliers of machines. Don't benchmark, but rotate the players around the machines (keep all ui hardware identical) and use statistics to see which supplier won.
Secondly you could do a rerun of the recent assisted chess competition (afair you couldn't cheat unless you managed to get away with an illegal move) except simply make it a software assisted competition. Bring whatever code you want, but you have to run it on the supplied machines. Again comparitive performance on different platforms amongst all the competitors should yield real results.
Basically set repeatable (but unique so it's a "special" definition of repeatable) challenges which require computer assistence, and see which machine/platform/vendor/os/whatever gives it's users the biggest competitive advantage.
Under most of the worlds system, if you have proof of your knowledge of the idea prior to the filing date then the patent is invalid. This is what prevents submarining, as letting knowledge out before the patent is filed nullifies the patent application. In the scenario you describe, the inventor must find the money required to file before anyone else discovers the idea or simply be happy knowing that nobody will be able to patent the idea. It is not that patents are granted to "first to file" or "first to invent", the patent is either granted to anyone who can establish they came up with the idea first (first to invent) or to anyone who can file a patent application before anyone else knows of the idea (first to file). Simply getting the application into the patent office first does not mean you now own the idea, but it does ensure under the first to file system that nobody else can subsequently patent the idea.
It may run the leaked developer edition but you cannot assume it will run anything else like an official OSX for Intel release.
Don't forget the dos alternatives that came first, and which windows deliberately crippled. I wonder how many disgruntled DR.Dos customers ended up pirating msdos in protest but finally buying windows 9x+ after they had helped ms crush the competetion by install base.
So what sort of encryption would you place on a multicast stream? It is the job of the applications involved to determine if encryption is required, not the networks.
Large company/public company mandates the use of Firefox 1.5+ by all employees to ensure minimal descrimination against people requiring accessiblity features to do their work. If a web-app doesn't work on it, it must be fixed. If a supplier/customer site doesn't work with it, then the supplier customer is informed and dropped if they can't fix it (the alternative being that only people who don't need accessibility can work with that supplier/customer). A feature like this arriving in Firefox which is already present in IE is a non-issue, a feature IE does not have arriving though could be the trigger for more conversions. I imagine IE will soon have similar features though if any major customers look like moving, I just hope that all the people who need these features remember that MS will only add them when it will cost them not to, unlike a public monopoly (or Free Software) they have no reason to try and meet all needs, only those which are most economically viable to them.
Your so close to what I was going to say, and saying expressing it better then I was going to!
If I was Steve Jobs :-P I would start OpenOSX which would be a bit like OpenSolaris, i.e. where they feel they have to it would be binary only, but wherever they can it is Open. Now everyone can run an OSX on their cpu compatible box (you could keep pre-Intel mac owners happy this way also). To get the real OSX though, with support, you have to buy OSX hardware, which for now means Apple. I would expect that Apple would do deals as and when they felt it was in their best interests to provide an OSX-OEM version for manufacturers.
The sneeky way to get real revenues from those OpenOSX users would be to basically let buy and install a real OSX, but it is unsupported unless it's installed onto an Apple box! Don't cripple their experience in any way. How many people would still buy a copy of OSX to run on their Dell even if it came with no official support? Let OEMs sell their OSX discs to anyone, and let those discs also install anywhere ... but without support :-) Still keep it locked in some way to one copy per machine. So if you want OSX, you can:
Without the OpenOSX, their probably wouldn't be the community support for the unsupported OSXs, but with it Apple could have a community dealing with the problems associated with running OSX on unofficial hardware.
The key is that Apple are extremely unlikely to lose many of their existing sales to this as very few Apple users will be interested in running unsupported. They would probably manage to create many hardware sales though from people who might have some access to a Mac (or even an ipod) and hence an inclination to try running it themslves and then ... They would also likely create lots of software sales, which will have a near zero marginal cost (developing an OEM OSX) leading to money for nothing (support is the killer cost, offloading most of their support to OEMs is why MS has such massive profit margins, what does an OEM sale of Windows cost them).
Perhaps Apple is hoping and expecting that hardware manufacturers will start to support OSX with their hardware, but I doubt they are depending on it in any way.
You do realise that PalmSource is moving to Linux, and has basically said it got it wrong a few years ago when it didn't decide to move to Linux then? PalmSource's plan is to build a PalmOS layer on top of a Linux kernel. Timing is everything though so assuming Tapwave weren't happy to wait for this they didn't have alot of choices (assuming they wanted all the regular Palm software).
And to think I was going to suggest that the open source community should try and buy SGI to hang NVidia over a barrel (or at least find out what buying SGI would give as leverage) but I perfer your machiavellian approach :-P
if you want you can just binary edit (by whatever means) the iso to replace lang=de with lang=ie or lang=us or lang=uk or ... then you can just hit enter and not worry that isolinux (the bootloader) has a german keymap, unless you have more cheatcodes to add.
Well if you really want to you can boot with the unionfs cheatcode, and then apt-get remove to your hearts content, and then install your now smaller system. As someone else has said though it historically hasn't been worth the effort. If you want something like Knoppix which is installable, try Kanotix!
I think the Big Brother model would be far more realistic. Get the telecoms and broadcast companies to pay the upfront costs and then recoup those costs through advertising (add some product placement) and phone/text polls to vote for the regular evictions?
More seriously, if you really think this wouldn't be the largest media event in the history of the planet (especially if it is devised as such) then I guess you already found your way off the planet. I wouldn't see much risk from an advertisers point of view. If the mission is a success you get massive coverage on landing and return. If the mission fails badly (i.e. craft failure killing all), you get massive coverage at failure time and continued significant coverage for a long time, if anyone survives it would go crazy. Finally if you have a trivial failure (aborted mission, crew safe) you just go again (and if you've any sense you have a whole backup plan ready, including craft as if you don't need them you've got some themepark attraction). Any company with the power to invest at the sort of levels required to make this work could certainly exploit it for a good return.
Read the judgement, the problem is not with a media player, but with a streaming media player, because of the implications Microsoft extending their existing monopoly into a control of media streaming. It is not about the threat that all the alternative players will cease to exist, but that all the alternative streaming servers will (though the two would most likely go hand in hand). When did Microsoft (the company which caught onto the internet real quick) first provide a streaming media player and server, that is the question.
I can see RedHat talking the traditional Server roles (database, web, application), Nose taking the Desktop + Workstation servers, Madriva taking the standalone machines and Debian et al being the true competition for all of them.
Note that I am not suggesting that everything else will dissappear, but that commercial entities will remain localised, be debian based, or be swallowed up (who will take TurboLinux or will it take one of the above). Non-commercial distributions will remain a plenty, but they will be hard pushed to find anything more then a small niche to work in, either hobbyists or specialists.
The bigger question is how big a market can they carve out between them, as long as people are running (at least predominently) free code, I'm not too pushed who gives it to them. Bad practice/business models/methods will fall naturally.
If you feel I've slighted your favourite distro here, I'm sorry, maybe it'll swallow one of the above, but I honestly think we will see the main major linux players collapse to 3 or 4 at most, though 6 of them could be very compatible versions of debian with (for practical purposes) trivial differences. If you must substitute in another distro for debian above go ahead, I just don't see it myself.
I also think this is all a good thing. By having a main few players it is far easier to squash out stupid recuring bugs and compatibility issues, but as it's free software (and I don't see debian going away) where needed any diversity can accomadate itself (the main requirement being self sufficiency either by code/docs/testing or cash in the right places). All I hope is that the consolidations remain friendly so everyone can focus on doing good work and not who they are working for today.
Sounds like a project. Create a gentoo ebuild for a package which will (when it's running) connect to a central server and distribute all your binaries (by package and relevant use flags) with some form of p2p. Use checksums to verify that binaries are good (or at worst it takes multiple matching injectors to get a malformed package to look good). Add a paranoia option to let you control how many packages are actually rebuilt locally anyway to check the files match. Finally add an installer option which lets it pull available packages from this system.
Perhaps Apple will allow/start/sponsor an open source project to bring OSX to all machines. If the communtiy can port the base, when it's in place they'll start producing binaries, when it's ready they will release it as an Apple product. Then never actually release OSX for regular x86 pcs (or even amd64 or intels equivalent) as there will always be too much variety to give the Apple seal of approval, while most people will be able to assemble or get a machine which will run it very well. It would improve very quickly and lots of people will run it, and many will go on to buy Apple (or licensed) hardware for their next purchase. In fact Apple could even arrange special supported editions for large manufacturers, supporting exact platforms, but only where it's worth their while (e.g. Sony want OSX for the PS4 or a Tivo-NG or a line of Tablets they could come in with the cash and money to make it worth Apple's while, the less expansion the easier/cheaper it is). If Apple go this route I could easily see the "Desktop" market becoming a 3 way race within 5 years with OSX and Linux combined matching Windows (and at that point the monopoly can be forgotten).