Modern IBM has more of a "Services vendor mind" than a hardware-oriented one. Traditionally, this means they prefer software products which are highly flexible and featureful, but difficult to "self-manage". And perhaps they're right, and Linux is a better fit for the outsourced IT model.
Plus, if you RTFA and decode the marketingisms about "Smart Work", this has less to do with Linux vs. Windows and more to do with IBM selling Lotus Notes to people.
"I know I'll be flamed, but in all honesty, is the Mac platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989, but 20 years later, is it really something all that different?"
If someone came out with a modern Mac Quadra that ran all your old System 7 programs, then yes, it would be safe to say it's irrelevant.
The impression I got is that the modern Amiga is a hobbyist machine for nostalgic users, they're not really attempting to be "relevant" in the modern PC market.
Somebody has to file a bug against FireFox that plugins/add-ons are even allowed to prevent user from disabling them.
This whole scandal brings up an interesting point. For "Plug-ins", Firefox has no obvious way to disable the feature. However, because MS's stuff was an "Add-on", people are angry there isn't a one-click UI. (The difference between the two is some technical nonsense which is of no interest to the end user.)
So the moral of the story is if you want to make it hard to uninstall, write a plug-in (like Apple/Adobe) and not an add-on.
Anyway, if anyone knows of an easy way to permanently disable Apple's crappy QuickTime plugin, please let me know. I'm sick of rooting it out every time iTunes has an update.
Just for the record, WfW contained a dialer program called "Terminal" (not Hypertermial) and the TCP/IP add on had a commandline telnet program.
However talking about TCP/IP overlooks the fact that vast majority of Windows 3.1 corporate installations were on Novell networks, and used client-server technology like ODBC.
Anyway, Perens seems to be implying that networks were strange new technology because of how kludgy Windows was, but I don't see how this applies to academic UNIX users like Stallman who would have been completely familiar with the idea.
That poses an interesting question. Should every GPL app switch to AGPL because someone might build a web service around it? Someone could be gluing OpenOffice into a web application *right now*!
Meanwhile the stuff actually intended for web services probably will never use AGPL because it would limit adoption.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, but the 'insidious secret plot' was to handwave around GPLv2 and derived works (see anything GNU has ever said about "linking").
If OSI's lawyers just discovered this issue, which people argued about on Usenet back in the 80s, they're not doing a very good job.
Which has nothing to do with "public performance" or whatever you were describing as a bug. (One could GPLv2 their 'web template' code even if it doesn't constitute a work based on the server side code.)
I can understand why developers would want to chose AGPL, however the GPLv2 was very explicit in it's intent and pretending otherwise seems intellectually dishonest.
Yeah, but small businesses do this kinda thing all the time to "get in the door" with a big customer. You can't disagree that it paid off for MS in the long term.
Except the derived works "loophole" in TFA wasn't just discovered, people have been arguing about this for decades.
This seems to be about changing the messaging point in the FOSS community - the new "party line" is apparently to stop handwaving around GPL2 issues and instead accept them and push people to GPL3.
...but what if I distribute, say, a dynamic linking executable which links to GPL code, but I don't distribute the GPL libraries themselves...
This argument has been around for years, and you're probably right. However, it seems to entirely academic -- nobody's ever done it (except to make a point), and there aren't that many GPL DLLs out there in the first place.
The only time I can think this "problem" has ever affected anyone in the real world was with MySQL database drivers.
What has gone wrong, is that GPL2 is using copyright-related terms.
Woah, this is hilarious. For years GPL advocates claimed that the strength of the licence was that it was based on "Copyleft", that is the normal enforcement of copyright laws. Now, all of a sudden, it dawns on people that this somehow a huge problem! I never thought I'd see the day that free software zealots were FUDding Copyleft.
Oh, there is no "GPL2 definition of derived works", except in the minds of people who wanted to extend the licence beyond what it plainly says.
The original deal with IBM was only worth $50,000 IIRC, so at the time it probably didn't seem like a screwjob. Microsoft also already had the sales and OEM customer base required to make a product like this successful.
SCP retained rights to MS-DOS, BTW, they just never did anything with it, and eventually sold them back to Microsoft.
This was thrown out in TNG, which is why it sucked monkies.
You know, the technobabble gimmick is what saved Star Trek. TNG premiered to lousy ratings among the younger male set, and they rescued the show by "nerding it up" and making Geordi and Weasly major characters and appealing to the technical manual crowd.
After so many interminable seasons of Voyager drek, the particle-of-the-week became cliched and obvious, but at the time it really worked.
Hey remember that popular TV show from the 90s? The one that limped along for years with lousy ratings before it was finally cancelled? I have just discovered the edgy opinion that it wasn't very good.
Come on, if it were TNG-style technobabble, it would have been called "red tachyon transflux material" and had a five minute long exposition of how it was produced. I won't defend the plot point, but it's clear by picking a 'dumb' name they were explicitly avoiding that sort of thing.
Yes, I'm generalizing, flash devs like yourself certainly exist.
But the greater question is how successful Flash would have been if it were nothing but a plugin and a pile of API docs. My argument is 'not very', the backbone of the market is the design environment.
There is no technical reason that we can't have an open source, widely accepted standard for displaying animations and multimedia content over the web.
Good post, but the most important factor isn't even a "technical" issue.
Flash's real strength is on the content-creation side, and the fact that most Flash is generated by "designers" not "developers". All the HTML5 specs in the world won't displace Flash if they require a team of Javascript/SVG gurus to use. There needs to be designer software on the same level as Flash, and that's not a trivial problem.
Uh, the vast majority of businesses are just fine paying for MS licenses to run software. There are a few all Linux/Unix shops out there but they are by far in the minority.
That's almost entirely beside the point though. IBM will sell you $15K/seat licences for WebSphere for Linux, or you could fire up notepad and develop Windows stuff for free.
I agree this will be great for corporate/vertical projects where you generally have IT rollout support, and therefore ensure the plugin is installed. Free legacy browser support, yeah!
However, for a public-facing site, I think you will find that most of the IE6 losers are lunchbreak surfers in managed environments. So this is no magic bullet for IE.
It might help to convince management to bring things up to date, too: you can get incremental benefits from incremental improvement, rather than having to commit to overhauling the entire universe in one go.
I think this is an excellent point. GF will likely be deployed by enterprises as a way of migrating their intranet crap off IE6 (without having to incur the pain of hacking in IE6 support or training users to use multiple browsers).
As an enduser technology, Frame is worse than useless. (Sites shouldn't be encouraging users to install plugins because most of them are malware.)
Old Macs are another case where tons of RAM kills POST times. I have a Quadra 950 with 256MB and it takes forever to even chime after you push the switch.
Slashdot Mirror
Modern IBM has more of a "Services vendor mind" than a hardware-oriented one. Traditionally, this means they prefer software products which are highly flexible and featureful, but difficult to "self-manage". And perhaps they're right, and Linux is a better fit for the outsourced IT model.
Plus, if you RTFA and decode the marketingisms about "Smart Work", this has less to do with Linux vs. Windows and more to do with IBM selling Lotus Notes to people.
"I know I'll be flamed, but in all honesty, is the Mac platform even relevant any more? The hardware and OS were revolutionary in 1989, but 20 years later, is it really something all that different?"
If someone came out with a modern Mac Quadra that ran all your old System 7 programs, then yes, it would be safe to say it's irrelevant.
The impression I got is that the modern Amiga is a hobbyist machine for nostalgic users, they're not really attempting to be "relevant" in the modern PC market.
Somebody has to file a bug against FireFox that plugins/add-ons are even allowed to prevent user from disabling them.
This whole scandal brings up an interesting point. For "Plug-ins", Firefox has no obvious way to disable the feature. However, because MS's stuff was an "Add-on", people are angry there isn't a one-click UI. (The difference between the two is some technical nonsense which is of no interest to the end user.)
So the moral of the story is if you want to make it hard to uninstall, write a plug-in (like Apple/Adobe) and not an add-on.
Anyway, if anyone knows of an easy way to permanently disable Apple's crappy QuickTime plugin, please let me know. I'm sick of rooting it out every time iTunes has an update.
Just for the record, WfW contained a dialer program called "Terminal" (not Hypertermial) and the TCP/IP add on had a commandline telnet program.
However talking about TCP/IP overlooks the fact that vast majority of Windows 3.1 corporate installations were on Novell networks, and used client-server technology like ODBC.
Anyway, Perens seems to be implying that networks were strange new technology because of how kludgy Windows was, but I don't see how this applies to academic UNIX users like Stallman who would have been completely familiar with the idea.
That poses an interesting question. Should every GPL app switch to AGPL because someone might build a web service around it? Someone could be gluing OpenOffice into a web application *right now*!
Meanwhile the stuff actually intended for web services probably will never use AGPL because it would limit adoption.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, but the 'insidious secret plot' was to handwave around GPLv2 and derived works (see anything GNU has ever said about "linking").
If OSI's lawyers just discovered this issue, which people argued about on Usenet back in the 80s, they're not doing a very good job.
Which has nothing to do with "public performance" or whatever you were describing as a bug. (One could GPLv2 their 'web template' code even if it doesn't constitute a work based on the server side code.)
I can understand why developers would want to chose AGPL, however the GPLv2 was very explicit in it's intent and pretending otherwise seems intellectually dishonest.
Yeah, but small businesses do this kinda thing all the time to "get in the door" with a big customer. You can't disagree that it paid off for MS in the long term.
Except the derived works "loophole" in TFA wasn't just discovered, people have been arguing about this for decades.
This seems to be about changing the messaging point in the FOSS community - the new "party line" is apparently to stop handwaving around GPL2 issues and instead accept them and push people to GPL3.
This is a work-around for the bug that copyright law
It's not a bug, it's a feature. ;)
The GPL2 states in black and white that output is not covered, I don't think anyone who selected that licence was confused or misled on this point.
...but what if I distribute, say, a dynamic linking executable which links to GPL code, but I don't distribute the GPL libraries themselves ...
This argument has been around for years, and you're probably right. However, it seems to entirely academic -- nobody's ever done it (except to make a point), and there aren't that many GPL DLLs out there in the first place.
The only time I can think this "problem" has ever affected anyone in the real world was with MySQL database drivers.
What has gone wrong, is that GPL2 is using copyright-related terms.
Woah, this is hilarious. For years GPL advocates claimed that the strength of the licence was that it was based on "Copyleft", that is the normal enforcement of copyright laws. Now, all of a sudden, it dawns on people that this somehow a huge problem! I never thought I'd see the day that free software zealots were FUDding Copyleft.
Oh, there is no "GPL2 definition of derived works", except in the minds of people who wanted to extend the licence beyond what it plainly says.
The original deal with IBM was only worth $50,000 IIRC, so at the time it probably didn't seem like a screwjob. Microsoft also already had the sales and OEM customer base required to make a product like this successful.
SCP retained rights to MS-DOS, BTW, they just never did anything with it, and eventually sold them back to Microsoft.
This was thrown out in TNG, which is why it sucked monkies.
You know, the technobabble gimmick is what saved Star Trek. TNG premiered to lousy ratings among the younger male set, and they rescued the show by "nerding it up" and making Geordi and Weasly major characters and appealing to the technical manual crowd.
After so many interminable seasons of Voyager drek, the particle-of-the-week became cliched and obvious, but at the time it really worked.
So.. is there anything to discuss here?
Hey remember that popular TV show from the 90s? The one that limped along for years with lousy ratings before it was finally cancelled? I have just discovered the edgy opinion that it wasn't very good.
Come on, if it were TNG-style technobabble, it would have been called "red tachyon transflux material" and had a five minute long exposition of how it was produced. I won't defend the plot point, but it's clear by picking a 'dumb' name they were explicitly avoiding that sort of thing.
Yes, I'm generalizing, flash devs like yourself certainly exist.
But the greater question is how successful Flash would have been if it were nothing but a plugin and a pile of API docs. My argument is 'not very', the backbone of the market is the design environment.
As if there aren't a huge number of "developers" who are completely ignorant of UI design? I think you're barking up the wrong tree.
There is no technical reason that we can't have an open source, widely accepted standard for displaying animations and multimedia content over the web.
Good post, but the most important factor isn't even a "technical" issue.
Flash's real strength is on the content-creation side, and the fact that most Flash is generated by "designers" not "developers". All the HTML5 specs in the world won't displace Flash if they require a team of Javascript/SVG gurus to use. There needs to be designer software on the same level as Flash, and that's not a trivial problem.
I wonder how much it would cost to simply buy 51% of Eolas?
Eolas is one guy (and his investors). Buying him out and settling the lawsuits would cost the same amount.
Uh, the vast majority of businesses are just fine paying for MS licenses to run software. There are a few all Linux/Unix shops out there but they are by far in the minority.
That's almost entirely beside the point though. IBM will sell you $15K/seat licences for WebSphere for Linux, or you could fire up notepad and develop Windows stuff for free.
I agree this will be great for corporate/vertical projects where you generally have IT rollout support, and therefore ensure the plugin is installed. Free legacy browser support, yeah!
However, for a public-facing site, I think you will find that most of the IE6 losers are lunchbreak surfers in managed environments. So this is no magic bullet for IE.
It might help to convince management to bring things up to date, too: you can get incremental benefits from incremental improvement, rather than having to commit to overhauling the entire universe in one go.
I think this is an excellent point. GF will likely be deployed by enterprises as a way of migrating their intranet crap off IE6 (without having to incur the pain of hacking in IE6 support or training users to use multiple browsers).
As an enduser technology, Frame is worse than useless. (Sites shouldn't be encouraging users to install plugins because most of them are malware.)
Actively collecting dust anyway. I keep it around to commemorate my 5 digit slashdot ID.
(For the record it's a Compaq Deskpro XL 5133 workstation, one of the better Pentium systems made. It was also my main desktop up until circa 2000.)
Old Macs are another case where tons of RAM kills POST times. I have a Quadra 950 with 256MB and it takes forever to even chime after you push the switch.