Yeah that is a serious problem... and a big part of it is that "IBM Culture" is based around paying the inhouse operators like crap. Why would anyone spend a couple years of their life learning a bunch of commands which all look like WGFQZMTZ and PUFQWTM on systems which emulate punch cards, only to get paid less than a junior Windows admin?
One of my two hands-on experiences with an iSeries saw it crashing all the time -- mostly due to IBM Lotus Domino. I don't believe there's any exotic reliability magic about the things, just for the most part the software is old and stable and debugged. The AS/400 guys kept talking about their "DASD" stuff, but as far as I could tell it was just a standard SCSI RAID setup.
Other fun facts: + OS/400 doesn't come with a text editor, so IBM sold us one for $500 + Patches still come on "tapes". Well they look like CD-ROMs, but they are still "tapes" in the iSeries world. + The native software is very batch-oriented, CPU-wise, they're usually considerably slower than PC hardware.
Honestly, with the cost of IBM maintenance on these things, a company could probably hire two Windows reboot monkeys and still save a ton of money. I suspect Mangement knows exactly what it is doing.
Well, if I buy a "finished solution" and want to use MySQL with it, then I'm infected and have to pay. Oracle says I have to pay a per-seat charge for copying privileges, which I understand, but I've read the FSF website back to front and I don't get MySQL. That's really my point.
As for whether commerical library licences rely on "derived works" claims, I'd like to see you find one, because I can't. And I have seen "buy you own copy of library X" used by commercial vendors.. it's common for VB and Foxpro apps.
Whenever the Linux apologist resorts to the "Windows is just as bad" argument, he's essentially lost.
Even if Windows is fragmented as badly as Linux, it's across 95% of the desktop market and 40% of the server market, versus 25% of the server market and 0.5% of the desktop market for Linux.
Sure, like any investment it's would be necessary to pay up-front. but a switch could pay for Dell in the long term.
Dell is successful because they focus on shipping PCs and not making speculative investments. Look at IBM where they were bragging about the billions invested in Linux, all while taking a huge loss on each PC sold due to overhead.
M$ is currently taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago. I think most sensible software consumers would like to save that money.
Not if it would cost them $40,000,000,000,000 to convert.
The Linux conversion "value proposition" has always been shaky -- you spend a ton of money upfront, make a ton of assumptions about software features that will presumably magically appear in the future, and then when you are done, you end up paying the much more expensive "RedHat Tax" in place of the "M$ Tax". (Check dell.com where the RedHat workstations only come with only one year of patch support at the same price as Windows XP Pro.)
There's a reason there hasn't been any sort of mass-movement towards Linux despite all the optimistic predictions -- the numbers are bogus. Everyone is sitting around waiting for someone else to make Linux a full-fledged, drop-in replacement for Windows. And if that ever happens, Dell will be around to collect on their investment.
Plus your disagreement with MySQL defeats the claim that "If you make a 5 minute research at the FSF web page you'll know more than enogh"...
> many commercial library vendors and they absolutely claim rights over your finished product - many of them require royalties
Their legal principle is distribution rights of their software, not "derived works" rights over your software. Your are correct that the net-effect is the same, but the argument is quite different.
With Intel VIIV and MS Media Center, there's obviously an opportunity for PC OEMs like Dell to sell set-top box devices, which would compete indirectly with PS3 and other stand-alone players.
It wasn't just that. The clones cannibalized the Apple market. The goal, originally, was to have the clone vendors expand the Mac market.
It was a little more complicated than that. As a single source vendor, Apple had (and currently has) a very stratified product line up, where certain features are only found at certain price points.
Vendors like PowerComputing took the Dell approach of letting the customer mix-n-match. So a photoshop user could buy the cheapest 2-slot desktop chassis with the fastest CPU at a price considerably lower than Apple's fully loaded "pro tower". The people most likely to figure this out and pick up on the deals were obviously going to be Mac power-users and other existing customers. Meanwhile, Apple was using their brandname and advertising power to attract new customers at retail.
So, it's not true that the clones failed to expand the market. They did, but not in the way Apple expected, and Apple was unwilling to alter their model strategy to compete.
Not really. Job #1 for Microsoft is to have a successful console. Which disk format wins is way down their priority list.
HD-DVD is about 6 months late now. It probably won't really launch until next christmas, which would have meant that MS would have to just sit on the 360 for nearly a year, completely losing any time-to-market advantage against PS3. It's just not worth it.
Microsoft Windows includes a "Media Player" but it doesn't play DVD movies as standard. (WTF?) Presumably such that Microsoft could penny pinch and avoid paying royalties to the MPEG LA. Talk about not seeing the forest from the trees. (MPEG actually offers a lifetime paid up fee for those who do huge volume. If Apple can afford to do this and ship DVD playback standard in their OS, Microsoft shouldn't loose sleep over it.
According to Microsoft, the MPEG royalties would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars if XP included DVD support. And a large portion of that would be wasted, because still to this day most business PCs don't ship with DVD drives.
The approach makes sense -- build the MPEG royalty into the OEM price of the PC hardware, not the OS. In fact this is exactly what Apple does... if they ever licensed their OS to third parties, it would certainly not include 'free' DVD support.
What Microsoft is doing is more nefarious than pushing one disk format over another. What they are trying to do is create a VHS-Beta type situation which confuses consumers, encouraging them to skip HD disks and go right to Internet distribution.
It is said that Amir Majidimehr, General Manager & Vice President of Microsoft's Digital Media Division, told to Disney top officials about denial of iHD adoption to the BD spec, "Microsoft would concentrate all resources to react to the threat of the BD. We don't mind to delay the format standardization process and mess up next generation optical disc market". That is, Microsoft's aim is crushing HD video package business itself unless its own technologies, vested interest are adopted in the next gen optical disc.
> Microsoft to promote a piece of hardware they DO NOT EVEN OWN
Microsoft has IP in both HD-DVD and BluRay (although more in HD-DVD).
Re:Interestingly...
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No, I can ship a closed-source software product designed to use the Microsoft or Oracle ODBC drivers without having to either distribute the ODBC drivers or pay a nickle to Oracle or MS. Sure, the enduser is paying them, but that's likely why they want to use my software in the first place.
However, if I understand the MySQL/FSF position correctly, I can't do the same thing with MySQL drivers because my application is considered to be a "derived work" of MySQL. Neither Oracle or MS claim any rights over my software program, but MySQL does. This may or may not be legally correct, but it is certainly a "gotcha" for folks used to commercial library licences.
This is totally false and you won't find any commercial library vendors saying that you don't owe them money because you only dynamically linked to thier library, or because you didn't distribute it.
Wrong. Microsoft says just that. Or actually they don't really say anything at all, they just offer you a distribution license and leave it at that.
The fact of the matter is that if you build an applicaiton that uses (say) the Oracle ODBC driver, you might owe Oracle some money to distribute it, but you don't have Oracle asserting intellectual property rights over the rest of your program. Which is exactly what MySQL is doing.
as far as I know there's never been a court case that really spelled out the limits
And there is no fine print! If you make a 5 minute research at the FSF web page you'll know more than enogh to know that you shouldn't use a GPL library on a proprietary program.
Well, that's the point right there -- The GPL implies that one can "use" the software without restrictions, and then relies on an extra-legal interpretation of copyright law to enforce the "viral-ness". Fine-print would be significantly preferable to reading their web site.
Not to mention that the FSF's take on the issue of libraries and derived works is entirely different than every commercial library vendor's!
Personal digital video players have been around for a few years now, you know.
I've made this point before, but with Apple's control over the market, it makes sense for them to slow "innovation" rather than accelerate it. Recall the gigantic flame wars here back in 2004 when the Apple crowd was parroting Steve Jobs and vehemently insisted that Apple would never, ever, *ever* introduce a Video iPod? Well, of course, Jobs was just stalling on video to maximize the upgrade revenue. So, something like a wide-screen video iPod is an obvious prediction, but only when the existing market becomes saturated.
Well, it might have been successful as an image machine, but Apple had to heavily discount the things to get rid of them, and they had numerous recalls.
Very informative post -- I recall the furor on Usenet when it was revealed that Copland was not going be a "modern OS" , but I don't think the details were widely known.
One thing to keep in mind is that Apple would have been targeting 8MB machines in the mid-90s and probably could not have afforded the overhead of a Classic VM. Which necessitated some sort of Win95ish approach.
> Did Jobs achieve this by threatening Gates? I don't think so.
Actually, yes. The deal was part of a broader settlement for a patent infringement lawsuit, started by Amelio I believe. Anyway, Apple was quite explicit about using the lawsuit as leverage to get MS to support their next generation OS.
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Yeah that is a serious problem ... and a big part of it is that "IBM Culture" is based around paying the inhouse operators like crap. Why would anyone spend a couple years of their life learning a bunch of commands which all look like WGFQZMTZ and PUFQWTM on systems which emulate punch cards, only to get paid less than a junior Windows admin?
One of my two hands-on experiences with an iSeries saw it crashing all the time -- mostly due to IBM Lotus Domino. I don't believe there's any exotic reliability magic about the things, just for the most part the software is old and stable and debugged. The AS/400 guys kept talking about their "DASD" stuff, but as far as I could tell it was just a standard SCSI RAID setup.
Other fun facts:
+ OS/400 doesn't come with a text editor, so IBM sold us one for $500
+ Patches still come on "tapes". Well they look like CD-ROMs, but they are still "tapes" in the iSeries world.
+ The native software is very batch-oriented, CPU-wise, they're usually considerably slower than PC hardware.
Honestly, with the cost of IBM maintenance on these things, a company could probably hire two Windows reboot monkeys and still save a ton of money. I suspect Mangement knows exactly what it is doing.
Well, if I buy a "finished solution" and want to use MySQL with it, then I'm infected and have to pay. Oracle says I have to pay a per-seat charge for copying privileges, which I understand, but I've read the FSF website back to front and I don't get MySQL. That's really my point.
.. it's common for VB and Foxpro apps.
As for whether commerical library licences rely on "derived works" claims, I'd like to see you find one, because I can't. And I have seen "buy you own copy of library X" used by commercial vendors
Whenever the Linux apologist resorts to the "Windows is just as bad" argument, he's essentially lost.
Even if Windows is fragmented as badly as Linux, it's across 95% of the desktop market and 40% of the server market, versus 25% of the server market and 0.5% of the desktop market for Linux.
They already ship WordPerfect on all US machines, and as far as I can tell it hasn't lead to a WordPerfect revivial or anything.
Sure, like any investment it's would be necessary to pay up-front. but a switch could pay for Dell in the long term.
Dell is successful because they focus on shipping PCs and not making speculative investments. Look at IBM where they were bragging about the billions invested in Linux, all while taking a huge loss on each PC sold due to overhead.
M$ is currently taxing the world $40,000,000,000+ per year for a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago. I think most sensible software consumers would like to save that money.
Not if it would cost them $40,000,000,000,000 to convert.
The Linux conversion "value proposition" has always been shaky -- you spend a ton of money upfront, make a ton of assumptions about software features that will presumably magically appear in the future, and then when you are done, you end up paying the much more expensive "RedHat Tax" in place of the "M$ Tax". (Check dell.com where the RedHat workstations only come with only one year of patch support at the same price as Windows XP Pro.)
There's a reason there hasn't been any sort of mass-movement towards Linux despite all the optimistic predictions -- the numbers are bogus. Everyone is sitting around waiting for someone else to make Linux a full-fledged, drop-in replacement for Windows. And if that ever happens, Dell will be around to collect on their investment.
Note that writing to an ODBC interface, and your clients using MySQL via it's (GPL) ODBC driver, does *not* require you to abide by the GPL.
e rcial-license.html
MySQL disagrees and claims the "viral" nature crosses the system ODBC or JDBC boundry:
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/comm
Plus your disagreement with MySQL defeats the claim that "If you make a 5 minute research at the FSF web page you'll know more than enogh"...
> many commercial library vendors and they absolutely claim rights over your finished product - many of them require royalties
Their legal principle is distribution rights of their software, not "derived works" rights over your software. Your are correct that the net-effect is the same, but the argument is quite different.
With Intel VIIV and MS Media Center, there's obviously an opportunity for PC OEMs like Dell to sell set-top box devices, which would compete indirectly with PS3 and other stand-alone players.
It wasn't just that. The clones cannibalized the Apple market. The goal, originally, was to have the clone vendors expand the Mac market.
It was a little more complicated than that. As a single source vendor, Apple had (and currently has) a very stratified product line up, where certain features are only found at certain price points.
Vendors like PowerComputing took the Dell approach of letting the customer mix-n-match. So a photoshop user could buy the cheapest 2-slot desktop chassis with the fastest CPU at a price considerably lower than Apple's fully loaded "pro tower". The people most likely to figure this out and pick up on the deals were obviously going to be Mac power-users and other existing customers. Meanwhile, Apple was using their brandname and advertising power to attract new customers at retail.
So, it's not true that the clones failed to expand the market. They did, but not in the way Apple expected, and Apple was unwilling to alter their model strategy to compete.
Not really. Job #1 for Microsoft is to have a successful console. Which disk format wins is way down their priority list.
HD-DVD is about 6 months late now. It probably won't really launch until next christmas, which would have meant that MS would have to just sit on the 360 for nearly a year, completely losing any time-to-market advantage against PS3. It's just not worth it.
Microsoft Windows includes a "Media Player" but it doesn't play DVD movies as standard. (WTF?) Presumably such that Microsoft could penny pinch and avoid paying royalties to the MPEG LA. Talk about not seeing the forest from the trees. (MPEG actually offers a lifetime paid up fee for those who do huge volume. If Apple can afford to do this and ship DVD playback standard in their OS, Microsoft shouldn't loose sleep over it.
... if they ever licensed their OS to third parties, it would certainly not include 'free' DVD support.
According to Microsoft, the MPEG royalties would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars if XP included DVD support. And a large portion of that would be wasted, because still to this day most business PCs don't ship with DVD drives.
The approach makes sense -- build the MPEG royalty into the OEM price of the PC hardware, not the OS. In fact this is exactly what Apple does
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6
> Microsoft to promote a piece of hardware they DO NOT EVEN OWN
Microsoft has IP in both HD-DVD and BluRay (although more in HD-DVD).
No, I can ship a closed-source software product designed to use the Microsoft or Oracle ODBC drivers without having to either distribute the ODBC drivers or pay a nickle to Oracle or MS. Sure, the enduser is paying them, but that's likely why they want to use my software in the first place.
However, if I understand the MySQL/FSF position correctly, I can't do the same thing with MySQL drivers because my application is considered to be a "derived work" of MySQL. Neither Oracle or MS claim any rights over my software program, but MySQL does. This may or may not be legally correct, but it is certainly a "gotcha" for folks used to commercial library licences.
quite curiously *exactly* the same that Oracle would do.
No it isn't.
This is totally false and you won't find any commercial library vendors saying that you don't owe them money because you only dynamically linked to thier library, or because you didn't distribute it.
:)
Wrong. Microsoft says just that. Or actually they don't really say anything at all, they just offer you a distribution license and leave it at that.
The fact of the matter is that if you build an applicaiton that uses (say) the Oracle ODBC driver, you might owe Oracle some money to distribute it, but you don't have Oracle asserting intellectual property rights over the rest of your program. Which is exactly what MySQL is doing.
as far as I know there's never been a court case that really spelled out the limits
There is a principle called Abstraction Filtration Comparison Test, but you won't read about it on the FSF's website
And there is no fine print! If you make a 5 minute research at the FSF web page you'll know more than enogh to know that you shouldn't use a GPL library on a proprietary program.
Well, that's the point right there -- The GPL implies that one can "use" the software without restrictions, and then relies on an extra-legal interpretation of copyright law to enforce the "viral-ness". Fine-print would be significantly preferable to reading their web site.
Not to mention that the FSF's take on the issue of libraries and derived works is entirely different than every commercial library vendor's!
Personal digital video players have been around for a few years now, you know.
I've made this point before, but with Apple's control over the market, it makes sense for them to slow "innovation" rather than accelerate it. Recall the gigantic flame wars here back in 2004 when the Apple crowd was parroting Steve Jobs and vehemently insisted that Apple would never, ever, *ever* introduce a Video iPod? Well, of course, Jobs was just stalling on video to maximize the upgrade revenue. So, something like a wide-screen video iPod is an obvious prediction, but only when the existing market becomes saturated.
Well, it might have been successful as an image machine, but Apple had to heavily discount the things to get rid of them, and they had numerous recalls.
True, but I ran AU/X on a 20MB machine in the early-90s, and it was horribly swappy compared to native MacOS.
Very informative post -- I recall the furor on Usenet when it was revealed that Copland was not going be a "modern OS" , but I don't think the details were widely known.
One thing to keep in mind is that Apple would have been targeting 8MB machines in the mid-90s and probably could not have afforded the overhead of a Classic VM. Which necessitated some sort of Win95ish approach.
> Did Jobs achieve this by threatening Gates? I don't think so.
Actually, yes. The deal was part of a broader settlement for a patent infringement lawsuit, started by Amelio I believe. Anyway, Apple was quite explicit about using the lawsuit as leverage to get MS to support their next generation OS.
True, but AMD better have something up their sleeve, because Intel's roadmap shows them way ahead of the game by the end of 2006.
[jobs]
Maximum RAM for a "64-bit" iMac is 2.5 GB. If you need more RAM, open your wallet for a PowerMac.
[/jobs]
Laptop batteries are consumables, ya know.
San Francisco, CA is a city and a county (with only one government for both).