Unfortunately I'm in that age bracket that remembers the Unix wars. However, there's an enormous tangible differences between trying to prevent some poor hack from using his NDIS driver and some large proprietary vendor using a closed blob to fork Linux.
And Linux people should be a lot more confident in their economic model, because code-sharing between vendors seems to be beating forking.
Microsoft is saying "here are some specifications for a document format, and here is a vague 'promise'. You might be able to use these specifications, but if you do, we might sue you, but we won't tell you how we'll actually decide that, or what parts of the specification we think we could sue you over."
AFAIK Microsoft has never threatened to sue a developer or made any copyright claims for using their published APIs. So unless you're talking about patents (legally entirely different), this is way off in the FUD zone.
Not really. It's similar to the legal concept in DMCA/copyright of "significant non-infringing use.
The problem is that there's no stated technical or legal criteria for a GPLONLY symbol. It appears to exist mainly to appease certain developers that are angry about end users loading binary modules.
OK, if we're going to assume the GPL has a spirit, its a "copyleft" license that relies on copyright law for enforcement, and it says explicitly that is not a use license.
This bothers some people who would like to use the GPL to implement specific EULA restrictions, and those generally are the people who are citing "the spirit of the GPL".
IMHO, the GPL is a BAD license precisely because it causes fights like this to break out with regularity.
The thing to understand is that as soon as a GNU/Nut starts talking about "the spirit of the GPL", they are basically admitting that the GPL doesn't actually say what they want it to, and they're going into some zone of extra-legal fantasyland. The GPL is a legal license, nothing more, and it has no spirit
Linus understands full well that there's nothing in the GPL which permits developers to add special "GPLONLY" symbols based on their personal feelings. From a legal standpoint, either the linking is legal or it ain't; the flag has nothing to do with it. Nor does the GPLONLY flag do anything to actually enforce the GPL or prevent vendors from shipping NDIS-enabled distros -- its simply used for support issues among the kernel devs (as is their right).
So, its not really that the GPL is a bad license in itself, but the culture that has developed around it where everyone feels like they can play Pretend Lawyer and dictate "the spirit of the GPL" in whatever manner is available to them. This culture is pretty much directly the result of Richard Stallman playing a guru or moses figure where he inscrutably makes proclamations about "linking" and so on and has filtered down through Debian and the Linux Kernel and most other projects were people are too scared to piss off the ideologues doing the work. If the Free Software community were run by competent lawyers and not messiah complex figures, they wouldn't have any of these problems.
"Your" method (which is fairly widely used) is considered lacking because it requires a number of non-semantic DIV elements to be in your code, where ideally it could be done entirely from CSS.
(And also FYI if you use a circle-shaped PNG, you can use the same image for all 4 corners.)
My real world experience indicates that using an xml library is generally a lot nicer than trying to parse some random shithead's undocumented homebrew delimited format.
You probably got all your 'facts' from a UFO site. Anyway you're entirely wrong about everything you listed. Please punch yourself in the groin several times and vow never to vote.
Remember when Netscape put Communicator source on the internet, and everyone just whined how it didn't compile and how useless it was?
And that's when Netscape was the most popular browser, not some 12 year old abandonware desktop middleware that nobody used in the first place.
I don't think anyone active in the OSS desktop community wants a bunch of old unpopular OS2 crap. If anything, they have too many duplicate component models and they need to start standardizing, not add a new one.
1. If your experience with Notes does not include significant time spent with version 6.5 or later, your experience is as invalid as talking about Apple with your experience limited to using a Mac SE. Move on.
I've been using Notes since R3, and "The new version is really great!" is an oh so ancient refrain.
Unless they completely dumped their windowing model and overhauled their form display, it's still crap.
I'm not up on the latest and greatest Notes, but the older versions would only use (IE/Mozilla) for rendering web pages. HTML Email went through their internal "RTF" renderer and consequently were hacked to pieces (roughly Netscape 3 level rendering).
The issue was that old browsers weren't tied into search engines. If someone typed "meat" or "whitehouse", it just blindly added the ".com" and went to the site. When AOL bought Netscape, one of the first things they did was tie in their keyword/search system, which was the beginning of the end of this annoying behavior.
It wasn't that simple. In 1998, Netscape still had a dominant marketshare (60-70%). It wasn't until they canned Netscape 5 in favor of the complete vaporware of Mozilla that they started to plummet, and even then it wasn't for 3-4 years before they dropped into the single digit range.
Many of the well-known CSS-P bugs in IE6, or more specifically the work-arounds for them fail spectacularly in IE7. You wouldn't probably wouldn't see this unless you used a complex CSS layout.
I had an extensive IE6.css hack file which I almost entirely eliminated for IE7. Plus things like transparent PNG javascripts etc.
I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks.
Well, that's the problem -- they already "broke the web" once with IE7. The key question is here why they need to create a special situation for IE8 when IE8 will likely be far more compatible with IE7 than IE7 was with IE6.
It doesn't make any sense, because webdevs already have to fix their pages for IE7, and likely means that the standards improvements in IE8 will just be ignored.
Furthermore, they already have a way of handing this, the IF IE comment tag.
Plus the government already spends tons of money doing security clearance background checks. Something like facebook saves them a bundle because the subjects have already done all the data entry.
To some extent is really the classic software racket -- hype the shit out of something and then people buy in until they find out they have to pull in the special "secret voodoo" consultants just to get all the undocumented piles of shit running.
If the RoR people weren't such punks you would expect them to be 20 year IBM vets.
Wow, you saw right through Microsoft's masterplan to persecute the remaining 12 Windows 3.1 users by eliminating Quattro Pro support. You truly have great industry insight.
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Unfortunately I'm in that age bracket that remembers the Unix wars. However, there's an enormous tangible differences between trying to prevent some poor hack from using his NDIS driver and some large proprietary vendor using a closed blob to fork Linux.
And Linux people should be a lot more confident in their economic model, because code-sharing between vendors seems to be beating forking.
OS X 10.5 is fully 64-bit on the appropriate hardware, but Safari is still a 32-bit program and therefore doesn't have plugin compatibility issues.
Microsoft is saying "here are some specifications for a document format, and here is a vague 'promise'. You might be able to use these specifications, but if you do, we might sue you, but we won't tell you how we'll actually decide that, or what parts of the specification we think we could sue you over."
AFAIK Microsoft has never threatened to sue a developer or made any copyright claims for using their published APIs. So unless you're talking about patents (legally entirely different), this is way off in the FUD zone.
Not really. It's similar to the legal concept in DMCA/copyright of "significant non-infringing use.
The problem is that there's no stated technical or legal criteria for a GPLONLY symbol. It appears to exist mainly to appease certain developers that are angry about end users loading binary modules.
OK, if we're going to assume the GPL has a spirit, its a "copyleft" license that relies on copyright law for enforcement, and it says explicitly that is not a use license.
This bothers some people who would like to use the GPL to implement specific EULA restrictions, and those generally are the people who are citing "the spirit of the GPL".
IMHO, the GPL is a BAD license precisely because it causes fights like this to break out with regularity.
The thing to understand is that as soon as a GNU/Nut starts talking about "the spirit of the GPL", they are basically admitting that the GPL doesn't actually say what they want it to, and they're going into some zone of extra-legal fantasyland. The GPL is a legal license, nothing more, and it has no spirit
Linus understands full well that there's nothing in the GPL which permits developers to add special "GPLONLY" symbols based on their personal feelings. From a legal standpoint, either the linking is legal or it ain't; the flag has nothing to do with it. Nor does the GPLONLY flag do anything to actually enforce the GPL or prevent vendors from shipping NDIS-enabled distros -- its simply used for support issues among the kernel devs (as is their right).
So, its not really that the GPL is a bad license in itself, but the culture that has developed around it where everyone feels like they can play Pretend Lawyer and dictate "the spirit of the GPL" in whatever manner is available to them. This culture is pretty much directly the result of Richard Stallman playing a guru or moses figure where he inscrutably makes proclamations about "linking" and so on and has filtered down through Debian and the Linux Kernel and most other projects were people are too scared to piss off the ideologues doing the work. If the Free Software community were run by competent lawyers and not messiah complex figures, they wouldn't have any of these problems.
"Your" method (which is fairly widely used) is considered lacking because it requires a number of non-semantic DIV elements to be in your code, where ideally it could be done entirely from CSS.
(And also FYI if you use a circle-shaped PNG, you can use the same image for all 4 corners.)
More accurately, IBM paid Microsoft to develop DOS. IBM co-owned the copyrights and there was no per-PC tax for IBM DOS.
Mac plists are one of the classic examples of XML for marketing reasons only. They certainly didn't come up with
<key></key>
<string></string>
<key></key>
<string></string>
to make data exchange easier.
My real world experience indicates that using an xml library is generally a lot nicer than trying to parse some random shithead's undocumented homebrew delimited format.
You probably got all your 'facts' from a UFO site. Anyway you're entirely wrong about everything you listed. Please punch yourself in the groin several times and vow never to vote.
Remember when Netscape put Communicator source on the internet, and everyone just whined how it didn't compile and how useless it was?
And that's when Netscape was the most popular browser, not some 12 year old abandonware desktop middleware that nobody used in the first place.
I don't think anyone active in the OSS desktop community wants a bunch of old unpopular OS2 crap. If anything, they have too many duplicate component models and they need to start standardizing, not add a new one.
1. If your experience with Notes does not include significant time spent with version 6.5 or later, your experience is as invalid as talking about Apple with your experience limited to using a Mac SE. Move on.
I've been using Notes since R3, and "The new version is really great!" is an oh so ancient refrain.
Unless they completely dumped their windowing model and overhauled their form display, it's still crap.
I'm not up on the latest and greatest Notes, but the older versions would only use (IE/Mozilla) for rendering web pages. HTML Email went through their internal "RTF" renderer and consequently were hacked to pieces (roughly Netscape 3 level rendering).
IBM has owned Notes for like 15 years now, they deserve all the blame.
The issue was that old browsers weren't tied into search engines. If someone typed "meat" or "whitehouse", it just blindly added the ".com" and went to the site. When AOL bought Netscape, one of the first things they did was tie in their keyword/search system, which was the beginning of the end of this annoying behavior.
Word 4/5 used the same format. I still have some 18-19 year old files around too (and they open fine in Office 2003).
It wasn't that simple. In 1998, Netscape still had a dominant marketshare (60-70%). It wasn't until they canned Netscape 5 in favor of the complete vaporware of Mozilla that they started to plummet, and even then it wasn't for 3-4 years before they dropped into the single digit range.
Many of the well-known CSS-P bugs in IE6, or more specifically the work-arounds for them fail spectacularly in IE7. You wouldn't probably wouldn't see this unless you used a complex CSS layout.
I had an extensive IE6.css hack file which I almost entirely eliminated for IE7. Plus things like transparent PNG javascripts etc.
I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks.
Well, that's the problem -- they already "broke the web" once with IE7. The key question is here why they need to create a special situation for IE8 when IE8 will likely be far more compatible with IE7 than IE7 was with IE6.
It doesn't make any sense, because webdevs already have to fix their pages for IE7, and likely means that the standards improvements in IE8 will just be ignored.
Furthermore, they already have a way of handing this, the IF IE comment tag.
You make a really good point, and should be modded up.
But you're kidding yourself if you think its any better anywhere else. If anything the tech churn has been worse on the Unix side.
Plus the government already spends tons of money doing security clearance background checks. Something like facebook saves them a bundle because the subjects have already done all the data entry.
To some extent is really the classic software racket -- hype the shit out of something and then people buy in until they find out they have to pull in the special "secret voodoo" consultants just to get all the undocumented piles of shit running.
If the RoR people weren't such punks you would expect them to be 20 year IBM vets.
I've read /. like twice in the last year, glad I caught the meltdown.
Wow, you saw right through Microsoft's masterplan to persecute the remaining 12 Windows 3.1 users by eliminating Quattro Pro support. You truly have great industry insight.