Mac OS X comes with a complete gcc-based development environment, but you currently need to have a (paid) membership in the Apple Developer Program to get it. However, a public beta is due later this summer, and it should be very cheap or free to get the OS with development tools then.
How can this be? The GCC is GPL'd. Can you simply get a copy from a paying member of the Apple Developer Program (ADP herein)? If Apple required ADP members to sign an agreement disallowing them from distributed the GCC port, then Apple didn't have any legal right under copyright law to give those ADP members copies of it, per section 6 of the GPL.
Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "gcc-based".
Yes, the BSD license is a disadvantage compared to the GPL, which for the most part enjoys the benefits of a proprietary license. You yourself said it (I think) -- the Linux kernel can include source from BSD kernels, but not vice-versa.
However, Linux has lots of other disadvantages unrelated to its license, for instance that it's only existed for a decade, whereas *BSD has existed for three (also, it had/has some design flaws that have slowed/do slow development).
But this is not relevant to the original topic -- BSD licensed programs competing against commercial outfits -- which is why I didn't mention it.
Only stand-alones? That's not a fair comparison. Most people get XFree along with their OS, too.
And I'm not *complaining* about it, just *pointing it out* as a counter-example to the original poster's assertion.
You point out four examples: XFree, Apache, FreeBSD, and Kerberos. Well, three of those actually emphasize my point. XFree's proprietary competition is higher quality and very popular. FreeBSD is a niche product at best -- proprietary competition runs it into the ground. Around slashdot people come under the delusion that free software is a lot more popular than it is. Sun is still #1. And Kerberos! My god, the proprietary versions of that are undoubtedly more popular than the straight BSD code. Why did you even bring that one up??
You're right about the "free beer" being a powerful motivator... but then, the proprietary versions can also be free, if they are included in a product that the user needs anyway.
If you really believe this is true, you've never worked on any software project of a reasonable size. It's hard enough to in code originating across the hall. ..now let's integrate in some (oftentimes undocumented. ..usually "Worse is better" designed) code from across the pond.
That wasn't really all that well thought-out was it? It takes a lot less work to understand another person's code than to re-implement it yourself. At least most of the time;)
And of course, the proprietary vendors have the option to do either, whereas free software developers have only the option to re-implement. Even if re-implementation was *usually* easier, free software would still have the disadvantage.
Well, about those features, you're right in the case of XFree. It is good enough for most users, on most hardware... But it's not the best, and in a lot of areas people would rather have the best than good enough.
XF doesn't have any problem with their license, but it can't be said that their code isn't used in proprietary products that don't contribute back. Of course, they don't have a problem with that either, and I didn't mean to say they did. But it's still true, and the original poster suggested it was not.
And it's not whether the BSDs are behind Linux, it's whether they're behind commercial solutions. Linux the kernel is behind commercial kernels too (in spite of its popularity), but that is probably due to its lack of maturity, to single out one factor. It is undeniably true that the proprietary forks of the BSD code became far more popular -- and of higher quality in most areas important to users -- than the free ones. While I wouldn't think it fair to attribute this entirely to the license, it is also undeniable that the license was a disadvantage to the free forks vs the proprietary ones.
I think you overestimate the usage of XFree86. Perhaps it is being used more now because it is normally included with Linux, which is becoming popular, but proprietary versions that use its code are all over the place in unices, and they're better quality by most accounts. I don't have figures on usage, though... Perhaps you do?
There's even less in it for them if it's a BSD license, because then their commercial competitors can use it. If they only release it GPL, then they can still use it in their commercial products, but their competitors cannot (e.g. Alladin Ghostscript).
I'm not saying BSD-licensed stuff will always fall out of use, I'm saying it will fall out of use if it becomes too mainstream, i.e. if it makes it profitable for companies like Sun to completely proprietize the system. Well, assuming most users continue not to care about whether their software is free.
"BSD-licensed programs will have a hard time keeping up with proprietary ones."
As will GPL-licensed programs.
Uhh, I don't see what you mean. The advantages proprietary programs have over BSD-licensed programs that I listed above don't apply to GPL. Sure, GPL programs will have to compete by writing higher quality code, but BSD programs will not even have higher quality programs even if they do write higher quality code, provided some company is willing to hoard code.
Whistle (recently purchased by IBM) does this (there are probably others I don't know about). Of course, the FreeBSD team likes this. They especially like the netgraph functionality contributed by Whistle to the kernel.
Obviously if Whistle is releasing code, then it's NOT doing what I described. *SUN* did what I described, with SunOS, and they *DIDN'T* release the source back, and they *DID* corner the market, and *DID* run the free competition into the niche markets that Sun didn't think were profitable enough. Of course, Sun remains the #1 unix vendor to this day.
Just because it doesn't cost them money doesn't mean it doesn't hurt them. BSD-licensed programs will have a hard time keeping up with proprietary ones. If the proprietary programs get far enough ahead that they're worth paying for -- as they inevitably will -- the BSD-licensed stuff will fall out of use, and continue to fall behind, until they are of no use to very few people.
This is really the story of unix. The free BSDs are certainly quality OS, but they're not serious contenders against proprietary unices on the market that unix was meant for (servers). (Of course, they may frequently prove sufficient -- often the OS doesn't really matter. When it does, *BSD is rarely the better choice). If they ever became serious server contendors, I wouldn't be surprised to see their work ripped off by the commercial unices. Likewise, if unix ever became viable on the desktop, I wouldn't be surprised if some commercial company took FreeBSD and removed the source, made a few modifications, and slapped a "value added" sticker on the box.
That's the entire point. There are proprietary derivative versions of XFree out on the market. They have more features than XFree and are faster, and they support more hardware, and at least one of them advertises greater stability. XFree4 is supposed to be on par with the commercial XFree-based servers, but XFree3 is not, and was not even in its prime, because BSD/XFree-style licensed programs can never be ahead, at best they are in a race to close the gap. If they ever become ahead, the competitor need only copy their product exactly to close the gap. If free software developers are behind, they need to write code to close the gap.
So yeah, the entire point is that the XFree team's work has been used in proprietary products, which are considered by most to be higher quality.
It's not based on the derivative work clause, but it's still copyright. What is at issue is the right to copy GPL'd programs onto the Tivo and then distribute them. GPL currently draws *all* of its power from copyright.
I've seen plenty of people worrying that they don't want their code used by someone else to make money. To these people I suggest a)you're being a bit arrogant and stupid (I'll let you figure out why), and b)you're forgetting what makes open-source software "better".
Tell that to the XFree team! You're forgetting what makes Xfree-style licensed software at an incredible disadvantage against proprietary software. Proprietary software gets to use *all* the improvements to free software, but not vice-versa. So if XFree86 puts features x and y into their newest version, XProprietary86 can put features x and y into *their* newest version too, *without working*, *PLUS* they get to put features z, q and r. Then XFree has to rush to implement z, q and r too, but they have to write them from scratch. Meanwhile, XProprietary86 is writing features s, t, u and v. The purpose of the GPL is to prevent that, and it still needs to be prevented.
Sure, most hackers contribute their changes because they want to. But most corporations don't even bother with the GPL, because they *don't* want to contribute their changes. If those corporations had the advantage of the GPL codebase, they would run GPL software into the ground. Their code would simply be higher quality, not because they are better programmers, but because they have the free software community doing free work for them, *plus* their own programmers. They'd always have the upper hand. Their software would always be one step ahead.
Also, if that was legally possible, it would mean Microsoft too could dictate the conditions under which an application programmer would be allowed to write programs for Windows. They wouldn't even need all the unethical practices, if they had that power! They would be able to just tell Netscape that they wouldn't grant them a license to write Windows software for any less than 60% of their profits.
Fortunately, copyright doesn't consider a peice of software as a derivative work of the OS under which it runs.
The limit is wherever copyright law puts the limit. If the proprietary weather application is not, under copyright law, considered a derivative work, then the GPL can't touch it.
Remember, GPL's only power comes from copyright. Under copyright law, a program that links to a library is considered a derivative work from that library. A program using code from a copyrighted program is also a derivative work. But a program that merely accepts data through a pipe from a copyrighted program is *NOT* considered a derivative work. And of course, copyright law allows the author of the original work to dictate exactly under what situations the work can or cannot be copied -- or, as the GPL puts it, "distributed".
The real problem, though, is client/server based programs -- which I think the author was trying to describe, even though I don't think he did it well. As an (unrealistic) example that I find easier to understand than the weather thing, I can take a GPL X11 program, say Emacs, make some modifications to it without releasing them, and then type "DISPLAY=some.other.computer.com:0 emacs", and the person at some.other.computer.com using my modifications to Emacs doesn't have the source code to those modifications. I can even charge for this service.
And of course this problem would more realistically crop up with something like a part-GPL CGI backend to a web site. Web sites may eventually have the functionality of client-side programs, and unfortunately the more powerful HTML is, the less powerful the GPL is, because GPL code can be mixed with proprietary code in CGI's without giving any code back.
The only solution to this problem is to do what the GPL has of yet intentionally stayed away from doing -- restricting the ways in which a program can be used (rather than copied). The legality of this is questionable (or at least some people consider it questionable), but it is the basis of software click-through/shrink-wrap licenses, so it's already common practice.
Yeah, but it touches on a common slashdot theme -- the mad rush of daytraders and VC's investing in worthless tech companies and dot-coms that will never turn a profit, such as Amazon.com and slashdot.org (*ahem*). Also, this is not just-another-con-man... Most conmen (and criminals in general) are poor people who barely scrape by through stealing and don't have that much of an impact on their victims, or impact very many victims. This guy wasn't exactly a master criminal but he certainly stands out among the crowd. And so does his story.
You don't have to "un-compile" khttpd, you have to explicitly put it in in the first place or it won't be there. And the point is that if you're serving static images, you can reduce a LOT of overhead by doing it out of the kernel. Of course, it's a completely optional feature that most people won't have in their kernels. There are thousands of these optional features that most people don't need and won't use, but some do and will.
It is the service providers job to make bandwidth available to those it serves. [...] But nowhere in this does generousity play into this. It's Business.
That would make sense if we were talking about for-profit private ISPs, but we're talking about universities and colleges; their job is to educate people. I've never heard of a for-profit private ISP banning Napster (though I'm sure there are some). If this *was* about for-profits banning Napster, then I would agree with you.
Don't you guys understand? The Napster (ab)users are drowning out the ability of the rest of the people to share ideas with the world. Whatever you feel about copyright, hogging all the bandwidth -- whether by Napster, FTP, or whatever -- is to say the least rude, and entirely against the spirit of the internet. Everyone in the world is on a budget... Even if it does not cost you anything, bandwidth is not free, and using it without discretion hurts everybody else on the network. I was shocked at the poster who suggested that a university should "suck it up and get more bandwidth". Napster users should suck it up and buy their own bandwidth! Now, I don't mind paying for a little more bandwidth than I use, and in fact I love the idea of a system lacking quotas where people behave simply out of respect for fellow users, and when a person really feels they need to make that 2gig download the system trusts their judgment... But when it starts to saturate lines 16 hours out of the day when before it was 0, the leeching has to stop. Napster users are abusing the generosity of their service providers and hurting everyone else in the process. It's certainly unfortunate -- it would be nice to be able to trust them -- but the fact of the matter is, at some point they have to be cut off. If they want to trade these enourmous amounts of information, let them do it on tape backups or CDR. It's not a copyright issue. Bandwidth hogs destroy everyone else's ability to communicate. No one should find this acceptable.
The number of script-viruses is negligible. It is just as easy to write regular viruses -- the ones that make up the vast majority of viruses -- in MacOS as it is in Windows. Besides, it is not at all fair to compare a Windows *APPLICATION* to Mac*OS* in security. There are applications for MacOS with similar security problems, e.g. IRCII (which I assume has been ported. I mean, what OS can't run IRCII? If not, well then I don't know. But there are insecure apps on all platforms, and MacOS doesn't do anything to make it the exception). That Outlook is written by the same author as Windows does not make them the same OS. That Outlook is popular does not make it part of the OS. MacOS lacks the same security that Windows lacks, and while you claim that "no email client [for MacOS] can auto-run scripts", *any* email client can auto-run scripts, even if no popular ones do. MacOS doesn't prevent developers from writing email clients or IRC clients or office suites that automatically run scripts, and MacOS doesn't prevent viruses from destroying the system.
Also, your comment about floppy disks is really quite amusing. If people don't choose to use floppy disks, then they won't spread viruses that way. If people *do* choose to use floppy disks but are merely cannot because they cost $50 for USB ones, that is hardly a feature. If former floppy-users use another medium to transfer the files they would have transfered by floppy, then how would that be any more secure than using a floppy? That's like saying modems are a "major vector" for transmitting viruses, therefore we should replace them with ethernet connections. If instead former floppy-users fail altogether to transfer files they would like to transfer, that is hardly a feature. Cutting off the nose to spite the face, I believe they call that. As long as we're achieving security through removing communication functionality, why not make a black box that cannot receive files or communicate with the world in any way? Sounds pretty secure to me.
Indeed, I'm positive that more viruses are transmitted through modems than floppies (as nobody uses floppies on a regular basis anymore. That's why the iMac doesn't include one). Perhaps the better security strategy would be to keep the floppy drive and lose the modem?
There are fewer mac viruses than PC viruses, and the PC has a single-file philosophy. Oy!
Viruses are more prevalent in Windows because most virus developers write for Windows because most users use Windows. For the same reason, most applications are written for Windows. That doesn't mean Windows is easier to write viruses for, or that it's easier to write applications for, just that there's more motivation to do so.
has anyone notice their karma decreasing for no reason since the new/. code was put in place??
Uhh, I think maybe this has been happening since before the new code (but maybe I'm just remembering wrong). In any case, the same thing has happened to me. I didn't think of it as a problem, though... The slashdot docs say karma is "mostly the sum of moderation" which means something else is a factor in there, and that, I assume, is what decreases it.
Anybody who's read the moderation code will probably know whether this is intended behavior... anyone?
Actually C is a programming language, that can be compiled - transformed into a more useful format for computers.
XML is a markup language that can be parsed - transformed into a more useful format for developers.
Except that XML is *not* a markup language, it's a language for *writing* markup languages (a meta-markup language). I think that was the user's point. XML is not a common data format any more than ASCII is; it is the DTD's for XML document types (and likewise, the ISO C standard for ASCII.c files) that must provide the universal data standards. XML itself does not do this.
...but a lot of the comments here assumed that Rivyn was speaking officially on behalf of KDE. Indeed, that is what I thought too at first (I even made a few posts in this thread under that assumption before I saw the message from Duley).
I never said this isn't going to happen, even though I think it's realistic to presume it isn't (as they say, "where's the code?"), at least until the KParts and KDE-core teams have agreed to at least look into it. I know that KDE has looked at CORBA before and decided against it -- when I saw this, I thought that they had changed their minds. In reality, they haven't, and that fact should be recognized. We don't accept such early announcements from corporations, let alone from individual developers working for corporations who are not official spokespersons. There's no reason to accept this early announcement either.
That said, I certainly hope this happens, and I'm not saying it shouldn't or that it couldn't. I'm not "trying to kill it" and I don't think anybody else is either. Just trying to sort out the real facts and possibilities, and to avoid unrealistic expectations.
The reason that the national spelling bee winners are home-schooled is that their parents force them to study spelling at home specifically to compete in those stupid competitions. I personally consider that child-abuse, as much as forcing your kid to play tennis or golf from the time s/he's old enough to do so, or those horrific beauty pageants. Shit, little league can be torture to a kid, if the parents are laying on enough pressure.
Of course, the parents of the publically schooled kids are forcing them to study spelling too, they're just doing it in after-school time. It's a crime, I swear to God. Kids shouldn't be burdened by that bullshit just so their parents can get an ego trip. Did you hear about that 2nd grader who killed himself because he thought he was failing in school?
</rant>
Anyway, you're right that private education can often be of higher quality than public education, but the main reason for that is that academic private schools take only the kids with the best natural ability, giving them a host of advantages over schools legally required to take anyone, the most important of which is probably the better funding.
The problem with private schooling, though, is the religiously-motivated private schools. That is, the ones that exist primarily to promote religion, to prevent children from being exposed to evolution, etc. These often offer sub-par education, not just in religiously sensitive subjects but all-around (as they typically are not as well funded, and may only be able to attract religious fanatic teachers), and kids are powerless to defend against their parents' ignorance. (Not all religious schools are like this, of course; that's why I distinguish them as "religiously-motivated").
What we don't want is a curriculum dictated by parents -- most of whom believe in all sorts of nonsense and aren't nearly as educated as we should want their children to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "gcc-based".
But users still must choose between high quality and source availability.
However, Linux has lots of other disadvantages unrelated to its license, for instance that it's only existed for a decade, whereas *BSD has existed for three (also, it had/has some design flaws that have slowed/do slow development).
But this is not relevant to the original topic -- BSD licensed programs competing against commercial outfits -- which is why I didn't mention it.
And I'm not *complaining* about it, just *pointing it out* as a counter-example to the original poster's assertion.
You point out four examples: XFree, Apache, FreeBSD, and Kerberos. Well, three of those actually emphasize my point. XFree's proprietary competition is higher quality and very popular. FreeBSD is a niche product at best -- proprietary competition runs it into the ground. Around slashdot people come under the delusion that free software is a lot more popular than it is. Sun is still #1. And Kerberos! My god, the proprietary versions of that are undoubtedly more popular than the straight BSD code. Why did you even bring that one up??
You're right about the "free beer" being a powerful motivator... but then, the proprietary versions can also be free, if they are included in a product that the user needs anyway.
That wasn't really all that well thought-out was it? It takes a lot less work to understand another person's code than to re-implement it yourself. At least most of the timeAnd of course, the proprietary vendors have the option to do either, whereas free software developers have only the option to re-implement. Even if re-implementation was *usually* easier, free software would still have the disadvantage.
Well, about those features, you're right in the case of XFree. It is good enough for most users, on most hardware... But it's not the best, and in a lot of areas people would rather have the best than good enough.
XF doesn't have any problem with their license, but it can't be said that their code isn't used in proprietary products that don't contribute back. Of course, they don't have a problem with that either, and I didn't mean to say they did. But it's still true, and the original poster suggested it was not.
And it's not whether the BSDs are behind Linux, it's whether they're behind commercial solutions. Linux the kernel is behind commercial kernels too (in spite of its popularity), but that is probably due to its lack of maturity, to single out one factor. It is undeniably true that the proprietary forks of the BSD code became far more popular -- and of higher quality in most areas important to users -- than the free ones. While I wouldn't think it fair to attribute this entirely to the license, it is also undeniable that the license was a disadvantage to the free forks vs the proprietary ones.
I think you overestimate the usage of XFree86. Perhaps it is being used more now because it is normally included with Linux, which is becoming popular, but proprietary versions that use its code are all over the place in unices, and they're better quality by most accounts. I don't have figures on usage, though... Perhaps you do?
There's even less in it for them if it's a BSD license, because then their commercial competitors can use it. If they only release it GPL, then they can still use it in their commercial products, but their competitors cannot (e.g. Alladin Ghostscript).
This is really the story of unix. The free BSDs are certainly quality OS, but they're not serious contenders against proprietary unices on the market that unix was meant for (servers). (Of course, they may frequently prove sufficient -- often the OS doesn't really matter. When it does, *BSD is rarely the better choice). If they ever became serious server contendors, I wouldn't be surprised to see their work ripped off by the commercial unices. Likewise, if unix ever became viable on the desktop, I wouldn't be surprised if some commercial company took FreeBSD and removed the source, made a few modifications, and slapped a "value added" sticker on the box.
So yeah, the entire point is that the XFree team's work has been used in proprietary products, which are considered by most to be higher quality.
It's not based on the derivative work clause, but it's still copyright. What is at issue is the right to copy GPL'd programs onto the Tivo and then distribute them. GPL currently draws *all* of its power from copyright.
Sure, most hackers contribute their changes because they want to. But most corporations don't even bother with the GPL, because they *don't* want to contribute their changes. If those corporations had the advantage of the GPL codebase, they would run GPL software into the ground. Their code would simply be higher quality, not because they are better programmers, but because they have the free software community doing free work for them, *plus* their own programmers. They'd always have the upper hand. Their software would always be one step ahead.
Fortunately, copyright doesn't consider a peice of software as a derivative work of the OS under which it runs.
Remember, GPL's only power comes from copyright. Under copyright law, a program that links to a library is considered a derivative work from that library. A program using code from a copyrighted program is also a derivative work. But a program that merely accepts data through a pipe from a copyrighted program is *NOT* considered a derivative work. And of course, copyright law allows the author of the original work to dictate exactly under what situations the work can or cannot be copied -- or, as the GPL puts it, "distributed".
The real problem, though, is client/server based programs -- which I think the author was trying to describe, even though I don't think he did it well. As an (unrealistic) example that I find easier to understand than the weather thing, I can take a GPL X11 program, say Emacs, make some modifications to it without releasing them, and then type "DISPLAY=some.other.computer.com:0 emacs", and the person at some.other.computer.com using my modifications to Emacs doesn't have the source code to those modifications. I can even charge for this service.
And of course this problem would more realistically crop up with something like a part-GPL CGI backend to a web site. Web sites may eventually have the functionality of client-side programs, and unfortunately the more powerful HTML is, the less powerful the GPL is, because GPL code can be mixed with proprietary code in CGI's without giving any code back.
The only solution to this problem is to do what the GPL has of yet intentionally stayed away from doing -- restricting the ways in which a program can be used (rather than copied). The legality of this is questionable (or at least some people consider it questionable), but it is the basis of software click-through/shrink-wrap licenses, so it's already common practice.
Yeah, but it touches on a common slashdot theme -- the mad rush of daytraders and VC's investing in worthless tech companies and dot-coms that will never turn a profit, such as Amazon.com and slashdot.org (*ahem*). Also, this is not just-another-con-man... Most conmen (and criminals in general) are poor people who barely scrape by through stealing and don't have that much of an impact on their victims, or impact very many victims. This guy wasn't exactly a master criminal but he certainly stands out among the crowd. And so does his story.
You don't have to "un-compile" khttpd, you have to explicitly put it in in the first place or it won't be there. And the point is that if you're serving static images, you can reduce a LOT of overhead by doing it out of the kernel. Of course, it's a completely optional feature that most people won't have in their kernels. There are thousands of these optional features that most people don't need and won't use, but some do and will.
Apparently, slashdot made the same mistake with M16.
Don't you guys understand? The Napster (ab)users are drowning out the ability of the rest of the people to share ideas with the world. Whatever you feel about copyright, hogging all the bandwidth -- whether by Napster, FTP, or whatever -- is to say the least rude, and entirely against the spirit of the internet. Everyone in the world is on a budget... Even if it does not cost you anything, bandwidth is not free, and using it without discretion hurts everybody else on the network. I was shocked at the poster who suggested that a university should "suck it up and get more bandwidth". Napster users should suck it up and buy their own bandwidth! Now, I don't mind paying for a little more bandwidth than I use, and in fact I love the idea of a system lacking quotas where people behave simply out of respect for fellow users, and when a person really feels they need to make that 2gig download the system trusts their judgment... But when it starts to saturate lines 16 hours out of the day when before it was 0, the leeching has to stop. Napster users are abusing the generosity of their service providers and hurting everyone else in the process. It's certainly unfortunate -- it would be nice to be able to trust them -- but the fact of the matter is, at some point they have to be cut off. If they want to trade these enourmous amounts of information, let them do it on tape backups or CDR. It's not a copyright issue. Bandwidth hogs destroy everyone else's ability to communicate. No one should find this acceptable.
Also, your comment about floppy disks is really quite amusing. If people don't choose to use floppy disks, then they won't spread viruses that way. If people *do* choose to use floppy disks but are merely cannot because they cost $50 for USB ones, that is hardly a feature. If former floppy-users use another medium to transfer the files they would have transfered by floppy, then how would that be any more secure than using a floppy? That's like saying modems are a "major vector" for transmitting viruses, therefore we should replace them with ethernet connections. If instead former floppy-users fail altogether to transfer files they would like to transfer, that is hardly a feature. Cutting off the nose to spite the face, I believe they call that. As long as we're achieving security through removing communication functionality, why not make a black box that cannot receive files or communicate with the world in any way? Sounds pretty secure to me.
Indeed, I'm positive that more viruses are transmitted through modems than floppies (as nobody uses floppies on a regular basis anymore. That's why the iMac doesn't include one). Perhaps the better security strategy would be to keep the floppy drive and lose the modem?
Anybody who's read the moderation code will probably know whether this is intended behavior... anyone?
I never said this isn't going to happen, even though I think it's realistic to presume it isn't (as they say, "where's the code?"), at least until the KParts and KDE-core teams have agreed to at least look into it. I know that KDE has looked at CORBA before and decided against it -- when I saw this, I thought that they had changed their minds. In reality, they haven't, and that fact should be recognized. We don't accept such early announcements from corporations, let alone from individual developers working for corporations who are not official spokespersons. There's no reason to accept this early announcement either.
That said, I certainly hope this happens, and I'm not saying it shouldn't or that it couldn't. I'm not "trying to kill it" and I don't think anybody else is either. Just trying to sort out the real facts and possibilities, and to avoid unrealistic expectations.
Of course, the parents of the publically schooled kids are forcing them to study spelling too, they're just doing it in after-school time. It's a crime, I swear to God. Kids shouldn't be burdened by that bullshit just so their parents can get an ego trip. Did you hear about that 2nd grader who killed himself because he thought he was failing in school?
</rant>
Anyway, you're right that private education can often be of higher quality than public education, but the main reason for that is that academic private schools take only the kids with the best natural ability, giving them a host of advantages over schools legally required to take anyone, the most important of which is probably the better funding.
The problem with private schooling, though, is the religiously-motivated private schools. That is, the ones that exist primarily to promote religion, to prevent children from being exposed to evolution, etc. These often offer sub-par education, not just in religiously sensitive subjects but all-around (as they typically are not as well funded, and may only be able to attract religious fanatic teachers), and kids are powerless to defend against their parents' ignorance. (Not all religious schools are like this, of course; that's why I distinguish them as "religiously-motivated").
What we don't want is a curriculum dictated by parents -- most of whom believe in all sorts of nonsense and aren't nearly as educated as we should want their children to be.