Usability is not a subjective experience, it's an objectively measurable quantity. Apple claims to be better on this quantity than everybody else, yet they don't give any evidence.
I challenged that, so you claimed
The point is that Apple has a long-standing pattern of misrepresenting their products. They are doing that against their commercial competitors just as they are doing it against open source.
What does "Bad licensing choices in the *BSD operating systems have supported both Apple and Microsoft in their efforts to hurt FOSS." mean then?
It means what it says: that Apple is hurting FOSS, not that they are opposed to it.
It's kind of analogous to food: you hurt (kill) what you eat, but you certainly aren't opposed to it; in fact, you're happy to get more of it if you can.
Basically, the bottom line is this... everyone talks up their own stuff, and tells us how it's better than the competition. Apple does it, the FSF does it,
I'm not aware of any unsubstantiated claims by the FSF about the performance or usability of GNU software. Furthermore, Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and manipulating public opinion every year, the FSF spends maybe a few thousand dollars on a few talks and presentations, making the two situations completely incomparable. Finally, the FSF and Apple have completely different goals and motivations: the FSF is a not-for-profit organization working for the public good, while Apple is a corporation working to maximize its profit.
Companies that want to hurt FOSS don't use much, either, because once you split from the community you have to duplicate the efforts of the community...
I'm glad you realize that splitting from the community is one indicator of companies abusing open source, and Apple has several big examples of that, including Mach, gcc, Objective-C, and WebKit.
Now, please give some examples of open source software released by Apple that is actually being used by a large user population not on Macintosh platforms.
I hardly think anyone in the open source community, myself not excluded, have any standing when it comes to comparing the usability of their products to Apple's.
Oh? Please show me any publications that demonstrate significantly better usability of Apple products relative to Linux or Windows.
"If IBM has wronged you, speak out about it." If you take my comment as evidence that I have a grudge against IBM, then it's no wonder that you're seeing conspiracies elsewhere.
I meant what I said: if IBM has wronged you, then speak out about it, nothing more and nothing less.
that you're upset with them for such a bizarre and unlikely reason as their being opposed to free and open source software. For all their faults (and there are many) that's perhaps the least convincing one I could imagine.
I never claimed that Apple is "opposed" to FOSS; in fact, they love it: they are using it all over the place. It has allowed them to keep one of the lowest R&D expenditures of any high tech company. It's a great deal for Apple, it's simply a bad deal for FOSS because Apple doesn't give back anywhere near what they take and also has marketing campaigns that perpetuate the myth of poor usability of FOSS (a myth that you obviously have fallen prey to).
In any event, this hardly counts as a "campaign against FOSS". If Apple was engaged in such a campaign it wouldn't be easily misinterpreted marketroid comments.
"Easily misinterpreted marketroid" comments is exactly what the problem is because Apple actually cannot substantiate their claims that their software is easier to develop for, has higher quality, or has better usability than FOSS. I predict that if anyone actually did the experiments, they'd find that on accepted formal criteria of usability, Gnome would score as well or better than OS X.
Yes, OS X is way overpriced at $129, given Apple's low R&D expenditures, that the bulk of the OS is based on FOSS, it's only usable with Apple hardware, and overall does a lot less than a Linux distro.
Apple's R&D expenditures are low compared to other high tech companies, both in absolute and relative terms (e.g., 3.7% of sales for Apple, vs 14.9% for Microsoft):
Apple essentially doesn't do any research at all. Much of their software is based on open source projects, and they rarely come up with their own technologies. Instead, they do some good engineering putting together other people's technologies. For example, almost all the iPhone and Leopard technologies were developed elsewhere (e.g., multitouch, spaces, quick look, time machine, animated interfaces, iChat background replacement, Finder sidebars, Cover Flow were all developed elsewhere).
They're a glimpse into how expensive the iPhone really is.
The iPhone is a big non-3G touch screen phone with mediocre battery life and screen. If Apple can't sell that at a tidy profit for $600, they are doing something wrong. The Neo1973 is 2/3 the price, with a better screen.
I guess letting go of someone's past is foreign to you?
Sure, once the person has repented and changed; I see no evidence of that in either the pope or the Church.
If you can't use birth control for religious reasons, don't have sex. It's not hard.
Of course, it's hard: sex is a normal, healthy part of human nature, and lifelong monogamous relationships are unnatural. Catholic demonization of sex is a social control mechanism, nothing more.
My understanding of the position on divorce (which may well vary by denomination, too) isn't that you can't divorce,
Please, can somebody mod this guy down to Flamebait/Troll? I really find such mindless anti-religious prejudice very disturbing. And me with no mod points....
Are you sure you wouldn't just rather have him burned at the stake, in good old Catholic tradition?
I believe the Holy Father may actually deal with this, as with all ethical issues
Oh, don't worry, there are no ethical issues that selling a few indulgences can't fix.
Not only was it nothing more than a rant against the pope and religion, there was a good dose of profanity thrown in for good measure.
And why not? This is an organization that used to burn anybody at the stake that challenged their authority, an organization that has been responsible for numerous genocides, and an organization that has been supporting dictators and mass murderers even in the 20th century. And to this very day, they are advocating policies that condemn hundreds of millions to suffering and poverty.
I tolerate and defend the right of Catholics to worship as they please: experience has shown that coercion doesn't work in matters of religion in a democracy. But that does not mean that people can make such choices free of criticism or even flaming.
But why don't you tell us: how many innocent deaths does an organization have to be responsible for before you think it's appropriate to flame them and talk about them in an abrasive manner? One? A hundred? Ten thousand?
Well, that would be nice. And if we're lucky, Google will create more subsidiaries all over Europe.
But, for starters, Europeans are probably simply happy that Google is paying taxes anywhere in Europe, rather than just in the US.
The pope certainly has no business criticizing Google over this. In fact, the pope runs an organization that is largely tax exempt everywhere, despite having a strong political and social agenda and despite being extremely wealthy.
Friend, I already pointed out that they don't need to remove the BSD license to add another license to a derived work.
So did I. Some Linux developer made a formal mistake by removing the BSD license, and if they have to, they are going to fix it. The end result is the same: you will not be able to use the derived software under the BSD license, because you can use the derived software only if you satisfy every single applicable license simultaneously.
From Apple? Like what?
Like when Apple employees make unsubstantiated claims about OS X usability and performance relative to other systems, misrepresent FOSS inventions as their own, and misrepresent OS X as a "better Linux" and a superset of Linux when selling to universities and companies.
Not being a self-centered son-of-a-bitch I don't interpret that to mean "IBM's contributions are worthless" though.
You should, because your own needs are the only ones you can competently judge and talk about. If IBM has wronged you, speak out about it. But don't try to make arguments to me for why I should be grateful to Apple or BSD when it is quite clear that both organizations have been harmful to my interests.
So, tell us, are you an Apple developer? An Apple user? An Apple employee? An Apple stockholder? Which specific piece of software that Apple has open sourced has helped you and how? Come on, be specific, rather than telling me why I should like Apple.
Spare me the tirades about how supposedly nice Apple has been to open source. It's really simple: I have seen no FOSS contributions by Apple that I actually use, but I see plenty of attempts by them to badmouth FOSS operating systems and create proprietary standards.
Clearly. I'm not sure why you don't see this is a problem. [...] They removed the BSD license from files that *weren't* dual-licensed. That's not just unethical, it's illegal.
I was responding to two of Theo's points, both of which are bogus.
The only argument that holds any water is whether removal of the copyright notices is permitted by law; if it isn't, then it will get fixed--hopefully in a way that still imposes GPL-like restrictions on it, or it will get rewritten using the BSD code as a model.
I don't think this is an accident. I don't know whether Microsoft deliberately created this "bug", but you can bet that they deliberately didn't spend a whole lot of money on compatibility testing with Linux.
Furthermore, there's a good chance that many people will blame the Linux servers and the company that deployed them, rather than Windows Vista. And, in a sense, the company is responsible: they should have tested Vista clients long before the Vista release (that's why Microsoft has beta programs). And the resolution to this problem may well be that they switch to Vista servers, because they are, in the end, a business with customers.
So, people, you may be gleeful about this, but this sort of thing ends up hurting Linux, because the Vista clients are a given and they are not going away, and Linux will be remembered as the "OS that caused all the trouble".
It distorts the market, giving GPLed technology an advantage [over BSD-licensed software] regardless of its technical merits.
Good, then it's working as intended. Bad licensing choices in the *BSD operating systems have supported both Apple and Microsoft in their efforts to hurt FOSS. Anything we can do to force a change in those licensing policies is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
FOSS is not one big, happy family, and many FOSS developers neither want to be friends of people on the *BSD project, nor do they give a damn about what Theo considers "ethical".
GPL software competes directly with non-GPL open source software, so when code goes under the GPL it doesn't vanish, like it would if it went commercial, it remains in competition with the original software.
Good. If the GPL software wins, evidently, its license and/or its technology were stronger.
As for the rest of your article... the history of the debate and the players aren't who you seem to think they are.
I really don't care about the history, and frankly, I don't particularly like either Theo or Linus.
GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back. Ironic.
I don't see anything "ironic" about it at all. The ability to take BSD code and use it without being forced to give it back is what BSD licenses are all about. If GPL'ed projects find it preferable to fork, lock out, and not give back, that's no worse than if commercial companies do it--the reasons of a GPL project to do this are just as valid as those of the many commercial companies who do this.
Apparently, Theo wants to have his cake and eat it, too: on the one hand, he considers "locking out" a bad thing, on the other hand, he refuses to adopt licenses that prevent others from locking people out. He is merely hoping that "locking out" doesn't happen. Well, looks like he is wrong.
As for Theo's implication that open source developers have special obligations to be nice to each other and cooperate, all I can say is that he should think about starting with that at home. The endless criticisms and allegations of virality by members of the BSD community of the GPL license, as well as his own strong language and flames hardly motivate GPL developers to go beyond the minimally legally necessary requirements when dealing with BSD or BSD code. If Theo wants GPL developers to take into account his wishes, rather than just BSD's legal requirements, he needs to become a whole lot nicer first (or, better yet, just step down and let someone else take over).
It is illegal to modify a license unless you are the owner/author, because it is a legal document.
It is not "illegal" if the license permits it. The license says:
Alternatively, this software may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License ("GPL") version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
Now, if someone makes the tiniest change to the code and only licenses their change under the GPLv2, then the entirety of the software can only be distributed under the GPLv2, which means that the portions of the BSD license simply are not applicable anymore.
The usual way of doing this would be not to alter the existing copyright notice, but to add a second copyright comment that says something like: "Portions of this code are copyrighted by John Smith and are licensed under the GPLv2. Please note that as a consequence, the entirety of this file may only be distributed under the terms of the GPLv2."
The effect is, however, the same: the file can only be distributed under the GPLv2, and the result is perhaps more confusing to users, which is why deleting the now inapplicable part of the original license is probably better.
The fundamental issue that this kind of dual-licensed BSD/GPLv2 code can be turned into GPLv2 code is unavoidable, however: that's the purpose and intent of dual licensing. Note that the reverse is also possible: someone can make additions to the code and only license those under the BSD license, killing the GPLv2 portion of the license.
(I won't even comment on Theo's use of terms like "illegal" and "breaking the law" other than to say that it's inflammatory bullshit.)
Basically, Matlab, Numpy, FORTRAN, and similar languages have the array processing features of APL with a more traditional syntax. So, interest in APL has never really disappeared.
I hope lots of people on Windows will use GPL'ed software. There's no need to sue right away. By the time the world wakes up to it, GPL will have become such an integral part of the Windows software infrastructure that Microsoft has no way of getting rid of it.
If Nokia comes out with an iPhone clone, I think that's great. There is no reason to let Apple monopolize this space.
Note that Apple's contribution with the iPhone isn't really technology (most of the technology was around long before), it's style and a commitment to ease-of-use. It's a good thing if other companies copy that.
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What, I have to prove my subjective experience?
Usability is not a subjective experience, it's an objectively measurable quantity. Apple claims to be better on this quantity than everybody else, yet they don't give any evidence.
I challenged that, so you claimed
The point is that Apple has a long-standing pattern of misrepresenting their products. They are doing that against their commercial competitors just as they are doing it against open source.
What does "Bad licensing choices in the *BSD operating systems have supported both Apple and Microsoft in their efforts to hurt FOSS." mean then?
It means what it says: that Apple is hurting FOSS, not that they are opposed to it.
It's kind of analogous to food: you hurt (kill) what you eat, but you certainly aren't opposed to it; in fact, you're happy to get more of it if you can.
Basically, the bottom line is this... everyone talks up their own stuff, and tells us how it's better than the competition. Apple does it, the FSF does it,
I'm not aware of any unsubstantiated claims by the FSF about the performance or usability of GNU software. Furthermore, Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and manipulating public opinion every year, the FSF spends maybe a few thousand dollars on a few talks and presentations, making the two situations completely incomparable. Finally, the FSF and Apple have completely different goals and motivations: the FSF is a not-for-profit organization working for the public good, while Apple is a corporation working to maximize its profit.
Companies that want to hurt FOSS don't use much, either, because once you split from the community you have to duplicate the efforts of the community...
I'm glad you realize that splitting from the community is one indicator of companies abusing open source, and Apple has several big examples of that, including Mach, gcc, Objective-C, and WebKit.
Now, please give some examples of open source software released by Apple that is actually being used by a large user population not on Macintosh platforms.
I hardly think anyone in the open source community, myself not excluded, have any standing when it comes to comparing the usability of their products to Apple's.
Oh? Please show me any publications that demonstrate significantly better usability of Apple products relative to Linux or Windows.
"If IBM has wronged you, speak out about it." If you take my comment as evidence that I have a grudge against IBM, then it's no wonder that you're seeing conspiracies elsewhere.
I meant what I said: if IBM has wronged you, then speak out about it, nothing more and nothing less.
that you're upset with them for such a bizarre and unlikely reason as their being opposed to free and open source software. For all their faults (and there are many) that's perhaps the least convincing one I could imagine.
I never claimed that Apple is "opposed" to FOSS; in fact, they love it: they are using it all over the place. It has allowed them to keep one of the lowest R&D expenditures of any high tech company. It's a great deal for Apple, it's simply a bad deal for FOSS because Apple doesn't give back anywhere near what they take and also has marketing campaigns that perpetuate the myth of poor usability of FOSS (a myth that you obviously have fallen prey to).
In any event, this hardly counts as a "campaign against FOSS". If Apple was engaged in such a campaign it wouldn't be easily misinterpreted marketroid comments.
"Easily misinterpreted marketroid" comments is exactly what the problem is because Apple actually cannot substantiate their claims that their software is easier to develop for, has higher quality, or has better usability than FOSS. I predict that if anyone actually did the experiments, they'd find that on accepted formal criteria of usability, Gnome would score as well or better than OS X.
Seems to me this has:
http://ipodlinux.org/
Yes, OS X is way overpriced at $129, given Apple's low R&D expenditures, that the bulk of the OS is based on FOSS, it's only usable with Apple hardware, and overall does a lot less than a Linux distro.
Apple's R&D expenditures are low compared to other high tech companies, both in absolute and relative terms (e.g., 3.7% of sales for Apple, vs 14.9% for Microsoft):
http://www.todaysengineer.org/2007/Jun/rand.asp
Apple essentially doesn't do any research at all. Much of their software is based on open source projects, and they rarely come up with their own technologies. Instead, they do some good engineering putting together other people's technologies. For example, almost all the iPhone and Leopard technologies were developed elsewhere (e.g., multitouch, spaces, quick look, time machine, animated interfaces, iChat background replacement, Finder sidebars, Cover Flow were all developed elsewhere).
They're a glimpse into how expensive the iPhone really is.
The iPhone is a big non-3G touch screen phone with mediocre battery life and screen. If Apple can't sell that at a tidy profit for $600, they are doing something wrong. The Neo1973 is 2/3 the price, with a better screen.
Both Eclipse and Visual Studio are a mess; programming doesn't need to be that complicated.
I guess letting go of someone's past is foreign to you?
Sure, once the person has repented and changed; I see no evidence of that in either the pope or the Church.
If you can't use birth control for religious reasons, don't have sex. It's not hard.
Of course, it's hard: sex is a normal, healthy part of human nature, and lifelong monogamous relationships are unnatural. Catholic demonization of sex is a social control mechanism, nothing more.
My understanding of the position on divorce (which may well vary by denomination, too) isn't that you can't divorce,
In Catholicism, you can't divorce, period.
Please, can somebody mod this guy down to Flamebait/Troll? I really find such mindless anti-religious prejudice very disturbing. And me with no mod points....
Are you sure you wouldn't just rather have him burned at the stake, in good old Catholic tradition?
I believe the Holy Father may actually deal with this, as with all ethical issues
Oh, don't worry, there are no ethical issues that selling a few indulgences can't fix.
Not only was it nothing more than a rant against the pope and religion, there was a good dose of profanity thrown in for good measure.
And why not? This is an organization that used to burn anybody at the stake that challenged their authority, an organization that has been responsible for numerous genocides, and an organization that has been supporting dictators and mass murderers even in the 20th century. And to this very day, they are advocating policies that condemn hundreds of millions to suffering and poverty.
I tolerate and defend the right of Catholics to worship as they please: experience has shown that coercion doesn't work in matters of religion in a democracy. But that does not mean that people can make such choices free of criticism or even flaming.
But why don't you tell us: how many innocent deaths does an organization have to be responsible for before you think it's appropriate to flame them and talk about them in an abrasive manner? One? A hundred? Ten thousand?
Well, that would be nice. And if we're lucky, Google will create more subsidiaries all over Europe.
But, for starters, Europeans are probably simply happy that Google is paying taxes anywhere in Europe, rather than just in the US.
The pope certainly has no business criticizing Google over this. In fact, the pope runs an organization that is largely tax exempt everywhere, despite having a strong political and social agenda and despite being extremely wealthy.
Friend, I already pointed out that they don't need to remove the BSD license to add another license to a derived work.
So did I. Some Linux developer made a formal mistake by removing the BSD license, and if they have to, they are going to fix it. The end result is the same: you will not be able to use the derived software under the BSD license, because you can use the derived software only if you satisfy every single applicable license simultaneously.
From Apple? Like what?
Like when Apple employees make unsubstantiated claims about OS X usability and performance relative to other systems, misrepresent FOSS inventions as their own, and misrepresent OS X as a "better Linux" and a superset of Linux when selling to universities and companies.
Not being a self-centered son-of-a-bitch I don't interpret that to mean "IBM's contributions are worthless" though.
You should, because your own needs are the only ones you can competently judge and talk about. If IBM has wronged you, speak out about it. But don't try to make arguments to me for why I should be grateful to Apple or BSD when it is quite clear that both organizations have been harmful to my interests.
So, tell us, are you an Apple developer? An Apple user? An Apple employee? An Apple stockholder? Which specific piece of software that Apple has open sourced has helped you and how? Come on, be specific, rather than telling me why I should like Apple.
Spare me the tirades about how supposedly nice Apple has been to open source. It's really simple: I have seen no FOSS contributions by Apple that I actually use, but I see plenty of attempts by them to badmouth FOSS operating systems and create proprietary standards.
Clearly. I'm not sure why you don't see this is a problem. [...] They removed the BSD license from files that *weren't* dual-licensed. That's not just unethical, it's illegal.
I was responding to two of Theo's points, both of which are bogus.
The only argument that holds any water is whether removal of the copyright notices is permitted by law; if it isn't, then it will get fixed--hopefully in a way that still imposes GPL-like restrictions on it, or it will get rewritten using the BSD code as a model.
A large part of Google operations are in Europe, so is a big part of their R&D. Why should they tax all their income in the US?
I don't think this is an accident. I don't know whether Microsoft deliberately created this "bug", but you can bet that they deliberately didn't spend a whole lot of money on compatibility testing with Linux.
Furthermore, there's a good chance that many people will blame the Linux servers and the company that deployed them, rather than Windows Vista. And, in a sense, the company is responsible: they should have tested Vista clients long before the Vista release (that's why Microsoft has beta programs). And the resolution to this problem may well be that they switch to Vista servers, because they are, in the end, a business with customers.
So, people, you may be gleeful about this, but this sort of thing ends up hurting Linux, because the Vista clients are a given and they are not going away, and Linux will be remembered as the "OS that caused all the trouble".
It distorts the market, giving GPLed technology an advantage [over BSD-licensed software] regardless of its technical merits.
Good, then it's working as intended. Bad licensing choices in the *BSD operating systems have supported both Apple and Microsoft in their efforts to hurt FOSS. Anything we can do to force a change in those licensing policies is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
FOSS is not one big, happy family, and many FOSS developers neither want to be friends of people on the *BSD project, nor do they give a damn about what Theo considers "ethical".
Perhaps just as important as the safe mode is the multi-monitor support; configuring multiple monitors is still a pain in Feisty Fawn.
GPL software competes directly with non-GPL open source software, so when code goes under the GPL it doesn't vanish, like it would if it went commercial, it remains in competition with the original software.
Good. If the GPL software wins, evidently, its license and/or its technology were stronger.
As for the rest of your article... the history of the debate and the players aren't who you seem to think they are.
I really don't care about the history, and frankly, I don't particularly like either Theo or Linus.
GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would
take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great
problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and
lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock
us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving
us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get
it back. Ironic.
I don't see anything "ironic" about it at all. The ability to take BSD code and use it without being forced to give it back is what BSD licenses are all about. If GPL'ed projects find it preferable to fork, lock out, and not give back, that's no worse than if commercial companies do it--the reasons of a GPL project to do this are just as valid as those of the many commercial companies who do this.
Apparently, Theo wants to have his cake and eat it, too: on the one hand, he considers "locking out" a bad thing, on the other hand, he refuses to adopt licenses that prevent others from locking people out. He is merely hoping that "locking out" doesn't happen. Well, looks like he is wrong.
As for Theo's implication that open source developers have special obligations to be nice to each other and cooperate, all I can say is that he should think about starting with that at home. The endless criticisms and allegations of virality by members of the BSD community of the GPL license, as well as his own strong language and flames hardly motivate GPL developers to go beyond the minimally legally necessary requirements when dealing with BSD or BSD code. If Theo wants GPL developers to take into account his wishes, rather than just BSD's legal requirements, he needs to become a whole lot nicer first (or, better yet, just step down and let someone else take over).
because it is a legal document.
It is not "illegal" if the license permits it. The license says:
Now, if someone makes the tiniest change to the code and only licenses their change under the GPLv2, then the entirety of the software can only be distributed under the GPLv2, which means that the portions of the BSD license simply are not applicable anymore.
The usual way of doing this would be not to alter the existing copyright notice, but to add a second copyright comment that says something like: "Portions of this code are copyrighted by John Smith and are licensed under the GPLv2. Please note that as a consequence, the entirety of this file may only be distributed under the terms of the GPLv2."
The effect is, however, the same: the file can only be distributed under the GPLv2, and the result is perhaps more confusing to users, which is why deleting the now inapplicable part of the original license is probably better.
The fundamental issue that this kind of dual-licensed BSD/GPLv2 code can be turned into GPLv2 code is unavoidable, however: that's the purpose and intent of dual licensing. Note that the reverse is also possible: someone can make additions to the code and only license those under the BSD license, killing the GPLv2 portion of the license.
(I won't even comment on Theo's use of terms like "illegal" and "breaking the law" other than to say that it's inflammatory bullshit.)
Basically, Matlab, Numpy, FORTRAN, and similar languages have the array processing features of APL with a more traditional syntax. So, interest in APL has never really disappeared.
Most flying vehicles can make a controlled descent even when the power fails. This one looks like it would drop like a rock...
I hope lots of people on Windows will use GPL'ed software. There's no need to sue right away. By the time the world wakes up to it, GPL will have become such an integral part of the Windows software infrastructure that Microsoft has no way of getting rid of it.
Sorry, that's not how fair use works.
Unless there are really unusual circumstances, if the clips are roughly the same length and their use is "fair use", then his use should be as well.
If Nokia comes out with an iPhone clone, I think that's great. There is no reason to let Apple monopolize this space.
Note that Apple's contribution with the iPhone isn't really technology (most of the technology was around long before), it's style and a commitment to ease-of-use. It's a good thing if other companies copy that.